Teaching and mentorship have always held special importance to me. Growing up, I faced personal and systemic barriers to achieving my educational goals. My success to this point is only due to the many mentors and teachers I have had throughout my life who have held the door open for me as I finished grade school, then college, and now a Master's and a PhD. Currently, higher education is closed off to many due to their own personal and systemic barriers: I believe this is a true enemy of our progress as a society. When I began my PhD, of course I came to learn, study, and advance the body of human knowledge; but my first and most important goal has always been to hold the door open a little wider for others. My teaching and mentorship philosophy rests on five pillars:
- "Errors are the pedagogy". I first heard a name for this concept while completing my Carpentries instructor training. As someone who formerly was utterly terrified of math, I felt that a good mathematician would be someone who makes no "small"/"stupid" mistakes. When I began learning math and statistics, I learned that the errors I made in my computations were the norm, not the exception. When I began teaching, I continued to make those same errors and typos in front of my students. Embarrassing! But, to show my students how to debug a function or re-do a problem is to show them an authentic process which I do every single time I sit down to "do" research. Also, I hope it helps them feel more confident when they make their own mistakes so they don't suffer from the same self-doubt I did.
- Diversity, accessibility, inclusion, and equity do not simply enhance learning - they are required for it. I often see diversity, accessibility, inclusion, and equity shoved in as a sort of add-on to the academic environment. We must shift our perspective and understand that without building these concepts into our pedagogy, syllabi, lectures, and interactions with students that no matter how good the other content is, it will never do the job it is designed to do. All students require and deserve a safe, supportive, accessible space where their unique identities and perspectives are held in esteem and centered in the content. For me, this means sharing my experiences as a disabled person in the classroom and highlighting resources; sharing work done by women scientists, scientists of color, and scientists from diverse backgrounds; using examples which are not culturally located and which include a diversity of names and pronouns; having a classroom/working group code of conduct, and many other "little" things not listed here.
- Teach what is useful. Some students come for the pure love of learning; some students come to gain a skill to help them get a job. Both of these are equally important and good. I believe that we must show our students how all concepts they learn relate back to their own lives. In this way, we not only increase our student's motivation but help them connect more deeply to the material.
- Practice authentically. Similarly to teaching what is useful, our methods of practice and assessment must align with our practical goals for the course. Instead of every assessment or homework having multiple choice or short answer, I think it is important to build in "real-world" problems such as running a statistical analysis on data, writing a report, or critiquing a paper. Of course we cannot do these things all the time, but by having students engage in authentic assessments they can better hone the higher-level skills we are often try to teach, such as problem solving, resilience in research, and collaborative communication.
- Communicate with compassion and curiosity. One of the most apparent things to me when I first started teaching was how each student truly is coming from a place you can never fully observe. We have no idea what their home lives, personal lives, or inner world is truly like. Therefore, when we meet with students who are struggling, we must greet them with compassion for their situation and curiosity as to how we can help them be successful. Our only real job is to help them succeed, and so little of that has to do with our own feelings about the situation. By putting judgement aside, we can be at our best to help serve our students so that they can meet their academic goals.