Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning

Courses you Teach

n Honors, I’ve taught every course in the curriculum: Civilizations 1-4, as well as tutorials on designing boardgames, creating a podcast about the scientific study of religion, and a Calderwood Seminar on writing for the public about religion and spirituality, along with supervising Honors Theses.

In Psychology, I teach general psychology (PSY100), direct and teach our Research Methods course (PSY245), and teach a capstone course in the Psychology of Religion.

Tell us a bit about you

What’s a surprising fact most people don’t know about you? 
For about 5 years I was a roller derby referee for Central Maine Roller Derby here in Bangor. My nickname was “Oso Loco” and I had the chance to referee more than 100 games in at least 9 states and 3 countries. It’s an incredible community, and I learned so much about teaching during my time as a ref!

What’s the most surprising thing a student has ever taught you?
That is so hard! There’s not a week that goes by that I don’t learn something fascinating from students. It’s genuinely my favorite part of teaching. One thing I am regularly learning from and with them is that there is power and beauty in allowing yourself to be open and vulnerable. If we approach anything thinking we have the answer, or with jaded cynicism at the world’s horrors, then we’re closing ourselves off to growth and missing the beauty of the world. A recent graduate Alex Morgan was kind enough to gift me John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed, and I feel like one of its chapters captures that idea I’m continually learning from students like her. You can listen to the author read it here. I particularly love the second half – Sunsets.
“I don’t know exactly how to describe this, but there’s something deep within me, something intensely fragile, that is terrified of turning itself to the world. Maybe it feels like loving the beauty that surrounds us somehow disrespects the many horrors that also surround us. Or maybe I’m just scared that if I show the world my belly, it will devour me. And so I wear the armor of cynicism, and hide behind the great walls of irony, and only glimpse beauty with my back turned to it, through the Claude Glass.
But I want to be earnest, even if it’s embarrassing. The photographer Alec Soth has said, ‘To me, the most beautiful thing is vulnerability,’ and I would go a step further and argue that you cannot see the beauty which is enough unless you make yourself vulnerable to it.”

What’s something you would secretly love to teach, even if it has nothing to do with your field? 
I’m getting to! So perhaps that makes it not a secret. I am SO excited to get to teach a course focused on Tabletop Roleplaying Games starting this Fall. I think we can learn so much from examining how we engage in play – and I also think that adults don’t get to play enough! Our society sometimes thinks of imaginative play as childish, but the data suggest it is so valuable for so many things – building confidence and skills, developing identity and relationships, constructing friendships and social support, and even just reducing stress. I can’t wait to see what our first group of students through this course come up with and how they choose to learn and play together.

Tell us a bit about your approach to teaching

How would you describe what you feel to be meaningful changes to your course design or approaches to teaching that have emerged as you have grown as an instructor?  
Don’t get me wrong – content matters. But I am increasingly convinced that learning how to learn is the most important thing that we can do. When I was first starting out as a teacher, I wanted to make sure that students got exposed to all the amazing facts we’ve learned in psychological science, or to every part of the great texts we were reviewing in the Honors College. But as I’ve evolved I’ve learned that it’s so much more important to help students develop the curiosity and skills to approach their own questions with confidence and support. My courses are now much less focused on what students can come to know, and much more focused on what students can learn to do.

How would you describe the impact of these changes on the students in your classes?  
Honestly, I find the beginning of classes a little more challenging in this way. Some students are hesitant about approaching their learning with more autonomy. Many of them have grown up, academically, in environments that encourage strict adherence to set curricula, memorization of facts, and demonstrating knowledge in exams that ask them to regurgitate those facts. And many of them have become very good at that! So shifting towards an academic world where they are invited to develop their own questions, build their own ways of both asking and addressing those questions, and where they are invited, indeed encouraged to make mistakes in the process can be challenging. But when students take on these challenges I have had the pleasure of seeing so much growth – both in their knowledge (data tells us we’re much better at retaining things we care about and that we generate ourselves) but also in their abilities and confidence.

As a result of this work, what has changed for you as an instructor and/or colleague in terms of your own teaching. 
The process of my teaching is always evolving, and it is far from perfect…or even smooth! This kind of orientation towards teaching has encouraged me to practice what I preach. By that, I mean that each term I try something new and try to allow myself the opportunity and grace to mess it up a bit and not get things perfectly right. It means I am simultaneously planning more and less for classes – it takes me much more time and energy to design the overall outcomes, assessments, and framework to get to those outcomes now because the outcomes are more complex and based on skills. But my individual class sessions are often planned by a simple list of objectives, discussion prompts, and potential activities – then all of us together in the class build our learning together. I’d also say it has moved me towards developing tools thanks to the experts at CITL – things like course working agreements help students feel comfortable taking academic risks, specific practices to increase inclusion in the classroom, and approaches to developing diverse writing skills have been so helpful. 

What would be a piece of advice you might give a new instructor at UMaine? 
One of the great things about teaching at UMaine is that we have the opportunity to dream big when it comes to our courses. If there’s something you’ve always wanted to try, you can almost certainly do it in a classroom here and get support from colleagues and experts in pedagogy to do so. I’d also encourage them to welcome undergraduates into every phase of their research process. I have been regularly stunned by the contributions those students have made in my own scholarship in social psychology – they have taken me in directions I never would have seen otherwise, and that I’m extremely grateful for.