Teaching Statement

Through reflective assignments and with the diverse academic backgrounds and interests of students in mind, I facilitate students’ learning to effectively break down and master skills that they can use throughout their academic careers, according to their own strengths and learning styles.

I approach pedagogy through the theoretical lens of mastery learning; advanced knowledge and skills cannot be built without mastering the foundational knowledge and individual components that comprise them. The teaching roles I have held throughout my professional life, in which I have served culturally, economically, and intellectually diverse student populations, have provided me with a variety of tools to draw on when I enter a classroom. I mobilize these experiences, along with my doctoral research on music education structures, to consider how my teaching interfaces with larger issues of content diversity, economic access, and neurodiverse learning. In practice: I scaffold assignments to ensure that all students can access advanced skills; I engage students in metacognitive practices that allow them to transfer the skills learned in my class across their academic careers; and I guide students towards connecting their academic experiences to their wider worlds.

I create an inclusive learning environment by breaking down disciplinary expectations in order to allow students from all academic and cultural backgrounds to access the content of the course. For example, early in introductory music classes, I teach the distinction between meter and rhythm, difficult concepts for many of the students coming from diverse academic and cultural backgrounds. I employ tango to guide students as they listen for meter in the steady beat offered by the bass notes and for rhythm in the stylized, repetitive melody in the treble notes. As I play the piano in class, I isolate each voice, adjust the tempo, or emphasize particular notes. Students clap, hum, or march along, stop me to ask questions, and help their peers identify each component. Once students have grasped these concepts through the flexibility of live piano, we transition to collectively listening for meter and rhythm in recorded popular songs with which students are familiar. Finally, we listen to pieces and genres that are unfamiliar to students, exploring the nuance of terms that are relevant to each genre. Building a common, specific, and culturally responsive vocabulary through careful examples allows my students to explore diverse modes of listening in greater depth.

I teach my students to apply the skills they learn in my classroom to work across their academic careers through metacognitive exercises. For example, I teach students the skills necessary to formulate and follow scaffolded plans for approaching academic research and writing assignments. As students approach their final assignment, they reflect on the experiences they have had throughout the semester practicing various planning techniques: freewriting, outlining, drafting, restructuring, and clarifying their essays. Students then decide which approaches were most effective at various points of their writing processes and design their own writing assignments to pace themselves as they complete the final assignment. By focusing on their learning processes in the contexts of individual strengths, interests, and timing, students of diverse academic backgrounds become equally able to break down and master skills that they can use throughout their academic careers.

I expand student experiences in the classroom to transition academic thought to the public sphere using an assignment in which students apply their developing writing skills to individually meaningful contexts. As my freshman-writing students reach the end of the semester, they write an op-ed that they submit for publication. They choose between revisiting a subject they researched earlier in the semester for a more traditional term paper or writing about a topic of personal importance to them, adding further meaningful context to their writing practices. To prepare, students analyze op-eds drawn from a variety of publications and viewpoints, some chosen by me and others chosen by themselves and their peers, considering differences in structure and tone between academic and public writing. They explore the concept of publics and construct a public appropriate to their subject and message. They research the standards and expectations of publications that relate to their topics and learn how to craft emails to the editors. Through this process, students apply course knowledge and skills as they construct a researched opinion piece that is structured around a specific, surprising yet supported argument. This practical connection of course material to matters that hold personal importance to my students and that have real-world application helps my students internalize course skills and concepts and retain them beyond the boundaries of the university. Furthermore, because the topics of this assignment are chosen by my students, and because students share their writing with each other, the op-ed writing process diversifies the ideas to which students are exposed in a way that is directly responsive to the student population.

Through scaffolded learning and reflective assignments, and with the diverse academic backgrounds and interests of students in mind, I teach students to effectively break down and master skills that they can use throughout their academic careers, according to their own strengths and learning preferences. To extend all students’ abilities to retain and apply the knowledge and skills they learn in my classroom, I teach students to modify and mobilize their academic learning as they connect the content of the classroom to public life. The more tools students master to approach the study of music and the process of academic research and writing in and beyond the classroom, the more nuanced yet expansive their engagement with academic disciplines can be.