Teaching

I approach teaching as an intellectual practice grounded in the democratization of learning. I seek to help students develop the intellectual agency to understand the social world, learn from others, and chart paths of their own. This commitment shapes how I design learning environments, study and improve my teaching, and mentor emerging scholars.

I. Democratizing Learning

I see students as owners of their learning. As an instructor, my role is to create a learning environment in which students from different backgrounds and circumstances can engage meaningfully while taking genuine responsibility for their own learning. Drawing on my experience as a public engagement practitioner working in participatory and deliberative democracy, I approach teaching primarily through facilitation: I provide disciplinary expertise, course structure, and necessary support while creating space for students to ask questions, contribute their ideas, learn from one another, and engage directly in the intellectual work of learning. For me, democratizing learning does not mean sacrificing rigor; it means providing sufficient scaffolding while preserving the responsibility, effort, and challenge that meaningful learning requires.

II. Teaching in Practice

I translate this philosophy into course design by making expectations transparent, creating opportunities for students to learn with and from one another, and providing the support students need to engage in rigorous intellectual work.

Making Expectations Transparent

I make the structure and expectations of my courses explicit—including the time and effort students should expect to invest beyond the classroom—so that students understand what meaningful learning requires and can make informed decisions about how they engage with their learning.

Learning With and From Others

I design opportunities for students to contribute to one another’s learning, allowing their ideas to become resources for their peers. Through collaborative activities such as concept mapping, peer discussion, and deliberation, students articulate their own reasoning, encounter different perspectives, and build understanding together.

Creating Equitable Pathways to Rigor

I provide scaffolding that helps students with different levels of preparation and different life circumstances engage in rigorous intellectual work. Through thoughtful course design and policies that reduce barriers unrelated to learning, I seek to make demanding intellectual work more attainable without removing the effort and responsibility that meaningful learning requires.

III. Teaching as Intellectual Practice

I treat teaching itself as a site of inquiry. This means not only designing pedagogical interventions and examining how and why they work, but also keeping my own teaching open to observation, feedback, reflection, and revision.

Pedagogical Research

My pedagogical research grows directly out of problems I encounter in the classroom. In one project, I developed collaborative concept mapping to transform traditional Q&A-based review sessions into opportunities for students to construct, present, and discuss their understanding with one another. I first translated the technique into a teaching resource published in TRAILS and later systematically assessed it as a pedagogical intervention in Teaching Sociology. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative evidence, my colleague and I show how concept mapping can enhance student learning by bringing deep-reading strategies back into the process of reviewing and synthesizing course materials.

PUBLICATIONSTRAILS (2022)Concept mapping technique & implementation guideVIEW TEACHING RESOURCE →Teaching Sociology (2025)With Ana López-Ricoy · Mixed-method assessment READ ARTICLE →
RECOGNITIONGraduate Student Contribution to the Sociological Scholarship of Teaching & Learning AwardAmerican Sociological Association · 2024SAGE Publishing Keith Roberts Teaching Innovations AwardAmerican Sociological Association · 2024

Continuing to Learn as a Teacher

I approach my own teaching with the same commitment to inquiry and revision. Through pedagogical training and teaching observation at UC San Diego, I have learned how to observe and review other instructors’ teaching and provide constructive feedback, while also inviting peers and teaching professionals into my own classroom to observe and offer feedback. These experiences reinforce my view that good teaching is never a finished practice: it develops through continued observation, experimentation, reflection, and revision.

PEDAGOGICAL TRAININGEngaged Teaching Scholar in Student-Centered College TeachingUC San Diego Teaching and Learning Commons · 2025Advanced College Teaching: Equitable Course Design and InstructionUC San Diego Teaching and Learning Commons · 2024Introduction to College TeachingUC San Diego Department of Sociology · 2021
TEACHING OBSERVATION & REVIEW TRAININGLeadership in Teaching: Graduate Peer Review of Instruction Program UC San Diego Teaching and Learning Commons · 2024

IV. Mentoring Emerging Scholars

My commitment to democratizing learning extends to research mentoring. I see mentoring not as shaping students into the scholars I think they should become, but as helping them develop the skills, judgment, and confidence to take ownership of their own intellectual development.

Research Apprenticeship

At UC San Diego, I mentored undergraduate research apprentices through a year-long curriculum in mixed-method social research, guiding them from analytical memo writing and qualitative coding to dataset construction and quantitative analysis. I treated research decisions as opportunities for intellectual deliberation: when disagreements arose, we worked through competing interpretations by articulating and evaluating our reasoning rather than resolving them through hierarchy alone. My goal was not simply to teach students how to conduct research, but to help them develop and trust their own reasoned scholarly judgment.

University-Wide Teaching Recognition

My commitment to teaching and mentoring was recognized with the Barbara J. and Paul D. Saltman Excellent Teaching Award for Graduate Students, a university-wide honor presented annually to three graduate students at UC San Diego. The award reflects a broader commitment that connects my classroom teaching and research mentoring: creating rigorous and equitable learning environments in which students can develop greater ownership of their learning and intellectual growth.

Barbara J. and Paul D. Saltman Excellent Teaching Award for Graduate Students

UC San Diego Academic Senate · 2025VIEW ANNOUNCEMENT →

V. Courses

My courses invite students to use sociological ideas and evidence to better understand the institutions, places, and social worlds around them.

Urban Sociology

This course is an introduction to urban sociology with an emphasis on urban (re)development and urban governance. Why does our city look the way it does? Who gets to decide the city’s future? These questions are important because we live, study, work, and engage in leisure activities in the city. The way our urban environment is built affects our daily lives, as it can promote equity or reinforce inequity in our well-being and life opportunities.

VIEW SYLLABUS →

Political Sociology

Political sociology is a field of study that aims to investigate how members of a society collectively make decisions about the organization and governance of public life. It recognizes that different social groups often hold conflicting interests, leading politics to emerge as a natural struggle for wielding the state power to shape the social world according to their policy preferences. In other words, what lies at the core of the field are the power dynamics among social groups and the state-society relationship. To uncover the linkages between policy outcomes and the influence of specific social groups, political sociologists often ask these questions: Whose voices are heard in the state’s decision-making process? Who wins, or who loses, in political competition? In this course, we will examine these fundamental questions through the lens of political sociology, building our understanding step by step.

VIEW SYLLABUS →

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse