Teaching
Teaching philosophy & recognition
My teaching philosophy is grounded in equity, empathy, and ensuring that every student who enters my classroom is welcomed and supported. I make ongoing professional development focused on equitable teaching practice a priotity, with past work including:
Completing a five-month program on fostering diversity and inclusion in the classroom ("Identity in the Classroom") organized by Vice Provost of Teaching and Learning, Stanford University
Serving as a Preparing Future Professors Fellow, shadowing and learning from a history professor at a local community college, Foothill College, Los Altos Hills, California
My teaching practice has been recognized by Stanford's university-wide Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching, with my citation emphasizing “his innovation in deploying a range of techniques to engage many learning styles beyond text and photos, including virtual reality exhibits and landscape and environmental data,” “generously sharing his models and approaches with other graduate students and faculty,” and “his sensitivity in communicating with students, ensuring students felt heard and respected.”
I have also received the Excellence in First-Time Teaching Award from the Department of History at Stanford and have earned consistently high teaching reviews from students in each course I've taught.
Teaching examples
My teaching has engaged topics in modern American, Asia, and global history as well as the interdisciplinary approaches to war and environmental change in the modern world. In selecting sources, planning classroom activities, and designing assements, I emphasize a range of learning styles, making history accessible regardless of previous level of historical study, making interdisciplinary connections, and emphasizing how skills developed in history courses help students pursue many career paths.
Entitled The Vietnam War / the American War, this course asked students to consider one of the most complex conflicts of the twentieth century from a range of diverse, often divergent, perspectives of different subject-positions of gender, race, nationality, class, religion, and political orientation.
As a capstone project, students completed their own original archival or oral history research.
I designed this course in 2020. I have taught versions of it at Stanford and Eastern Oregon University.
Survey course of modern Japanese history: section syllabus
I was the teaching assistant for this course, led by Jun Uchida, in 2017. I prepared this syllabus for the weekly sections I facilitated to structure learning activities, assignment expectations, the norms of the learning community.
I received the Excellence in First-Time Teaching Award for my work in this course.
Survey course of modern American history: syllabus
This is a sample syllabus I have prepared to demonstrate how I would ground a future course U.S. history from 1877 to the present in a diverse range of perspectives, source types, and connections to Californian and global history.
I have taught modern U.S. history as a teaching assistant in 2018. I was invited the following year back as a research coach in the same course and as a guest speaker on the Vietnam War.
Global climate justice classroom activity toolkit: everything you need to run a United Nations Climate Change Conference simulation
This is a toolkit for simulating negotiations at a United Nations Climate Change Conference with key twists that invite students to think critically about justice and power. The exercise engages challenges of coordinating a global response to the climate crisis on a planet defined by deep inequalities. While debating policies among nation-states of varying levels of wealth and historical contributions to climate change, students respond to protesters at the conference, an unfolding global financial crisis, a delegation of non-human nature, and more.
You can find all toolkit materials in this Google Drive folder. You do not need to request access to view. Read the instructions in the lesson plan document first for best practices on adapting and using the materials
This toolkit adapts materials I developed with Mikael Wolfe for a classroom activity while working as a teaching assistant in his climate change ethics course in 2019. For details on how to attribute and terms of the license, check out the first paragraph in each of the documents.
For any questions or feedback, email me. Looking forward to hearing how you adapt these materials!
(Photo by Oliver Kornblihtt / Mídia Ninjia, CC BY-NC 2.0)