I consider myself to be a teacher-scholar and view the principal raison d’être of studying and creating knowledge about a subject at a high level to be passing that knowledge on to others. The traditionally understood dual burdens upon graduate students and professors of research and teaching are inseparable—without teaching the next generation, research dies. Especially in social science, where we do not, for example, cure cancers or capture atmospheric carbon, the substantive output of much social science research is the creation of a more complete view on how people relate to each other. I do not view this output as necessarily less important than the outputs of other fields, however, because of the nature of this output, much social science research only becomes impactful if it is readily disseminated and understood by the body politic of our society. Put more simply, most social science research becomes useless if its conclusions are not taught to others, especially the youth. Furthermore, as mentioned before, if knowledge about the tools of knowledge-creation and the yearning for the creation of knowledge in any field are not passed on to subsequent generations, the study of that field becomes increasingly untenable. The students, without which the university becomes meaningless, are the principal foci of any classroom, not myself or any instructor.
My personal philosophy towards teaching styles is principally advised by two teaching experiences: teaching English conversation to Cuban and Venezuelan refugees in elementary school, and teaching applied statistics and programming in R to college students at the University of Texas. In both of these cases, my students have come from varied backgrounds in society and I am very comfortable teaching any students who come to me regardless of where they come from. From these experiences, I have learned that different tools of teaching may be necessary for different subjects and students. With advanced natural sciences undergraduates, I mainly advised my students on broad ideas and helped fix R errors, while supporting students achieve their own goals in independent projects, both in lab sessions and frequent office hours. With elementary school-aged students, I taught through games that helped build vocabulary and by incorporating more English speech in Spanish conversation over time as students became more comfortable with the language. The subject of the discussions were meant to engage the kids’ imagination, by asking them about their dreams and futures, and asking what they loved about the previous places where they lived. During my undergraduate education, I have also experienced both discussion-based and instruction-based teaching and have also preferred different styles depending on the subject matter. Generally, when teaching more technical subjects, I use more direct instruction methods while making sure students gain hands-on experience in the subject matter, especially with coding. When teaching less technical subjects, I use discussion, dialogue, and debate to ignite the minds of students so that they more closely engage with the course material. Throughout both teaching experiences, I learned that fostering the innate inquisitiveness of students is a very important aspect of teaching.
To conclude, I center the inquisitiveness of students in my classroom instruction and allow students the freedom to explore subjects broadly. I try to engage their imaginations with discussion while also more directly overseeing technical subjects. As much as possible, I try to engage that hunger for knowledge that exists within all students and manipulate it to make students want to learn. I love teaching, and want to help people learn, especially about social science, for the rest of my life.
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