TEACHING
My Philosophy
It’s my belief that a well-crafted chemistry course starts by welcoming each and every student by meeting them where they are. This means recognizing students’ preexisting understandings, their own lived experiences, histories, contexts, biases, and anxieties. It means showing empathy and getting to know my students as people. In practice, this requires striking a careful balance between trust, emotional connection to the content, constructive inquiry, mindfulness, rigor, and modelling the innovative spirit of experimentation. Beyond the practical, I hope to convey the elegance and flow that merits teaching chemistry simply as a creative process. As a scientist, this process is metacognitive, relying on thoughtful questions, careful experiment, analysis, reflection, and continual revision of understanding. My teaching philosophy is not so different. It changes with each course I teach, each student story I learn, and each new set of evaluations, assessments, and published literature I review
Pedagogical Interests
My pedagogical interests focus on creating chemistry learning platforms that are rooted in lived experiences. One approach for humanizing abstraction is to contextualize the chemistry within the actual social and societal framework in which it’s operative. I do this by developing case studies and through community engaged learning. I’m also interested in probing the intersections of creativity and design within nontraditional chemistry curricula.
Case Studies to Introduce Concepts of Power and Equity
Engaging STEM students in concepts of diversity, power, and equity directly within courses is of paramount importance for realizing inclusive classrooms and for supporting diversity within these disciplines. One manifestation of this project developed the Flint, Michigan water crisis as a modular case study for teaching traditional analytical chemistry concepts through the medium of environmental justice, power, and equity. We used an interdisciplinary framework to design, implement, and assess the case study in an effort to understand how the deliberate presence of emotional and human-centered content can impact student perceptions of learning analytical chemistry concepts. The six complementary modules of the case study included: (1) a guided discussion of water, power, and privilege in Flint, (2) an in-class guided inquiry exercise introducing chemical concepts key to the water crisis, (3) a hypothesis-driven laboratory analysis of real Flint waters, (4) a statistical data validation exercise, (5) an introduction to software-based chemical equilibrium modelling, and (6) multiple modes of scientific translation to non-scientists. By framing the chemistry in a real-world setting, the case study exemplified both the challenge and importance of chemical measurement and error analysis in scientific translation and communication to real people. See this full case study published in J. Chem. Ed. in 2020 here.
Community Engaged Research in the Classroom
This project reimagines the Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE) through the lens of a local community-engaged experiential learning project. The theme of the course is centered on a water contamination issue that currently plagues several communities in El Paso County, Colorado. For context, neighboring Petersen Airforce Base (AFB) used a class of chemical compounds called poly- and perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) to put out jet fuel fires on base for the last several decades. After drills, the chemicals were allowed to wash into neighboring streams and ultimately into the groundwater drinking supply that serviced 70,000 people. Guiding questions came directly from the community members affected: “Where are these chemicals now, how are they moving through this particular basin, and who/what is at greatest risk?” Students were asked to engage with these questions from several perspectives. We started by screening the documentary film “The Devil We Know” which details the national, political, historical, and economic contexts for PFAS contamination followed by a discussion led by my colleague, Dr. Tyler Cornelius. Students then engaged with sense of place by having discussions with several community members affected by the drinking water crisis. This included community members suffering health conditions, community advocates from the Sierra Club and Fountain Valley Clean Water Coalition, as well as other community agriculture stakeholders. By centering the initial portion of the course on affected community members, it provides students with opportunities to explore how this socioscientific issue relates specifically to this community and this place. At the same time, it attempted to examine how scientific ways of knowing complement place based, cultural and community ways of knowing. As a result, it made the science relevant in the eyes of the learners. And in turn, it led to an equity driven practice in which the knowledge being mobilized was less focused on inculcation, but rather socially constructed and tied locally to the community. .
Teaching Creativity and Design with Lab-on-a-Chip
I like to construct laboratory experiences to incorporate some component of design, engineering, and creation. And I center this creation as a significant and unique contribution to the project that students can take ownership of. Through this process, students often engage CC’s Innovation Institute, the student machine shop, the 3D art studio, the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Lab, the Mac visualization lab, and the library’s Tech Sandbox.
As one example, students in my Instrumental Analysis course (CH342) work in concert with the Colorado College Innovation Institute to design, construct, and test their own lab-on-a-chip devices for separating and measuring several model catecholamine neurotransmitters in cerebrospinal fluid. Students design their chips in AutoCAD and Adobe Illustrator before fabricating them using a 40 W CNC laser. Each team constructs a series of chip designs and separations are conducted via micro-capillary electrophoresis with on-chip electrochemical detection. Each group uses a formal two-level, three factor experimental design to optimize their chip design and separation efficiency. The project engages students in fundamental concepts of separations (i.e. van Deemter analysis, miniaturization, optimization) through a creative and discovery-driven question.
Some of this work was published in 2021 in the Journal of Chemical Education, see it here.