My teaching is grounded in relational accountability, critical inquiry, and the creation of accessible, values-aligned learning spaces that support graduate and professional learners to engage complex sociocultural questions with rigour and care.

In The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life, Parker Palmer writes:

Good teachers possess a capacity for connectedness. They are able to weave a complex web of connections among themselves, their subjects, and their students so that students can learn to weave a world for themselves.

I return to this passage often because it names something essential about the kind of teaching I aspire to: teaching as an invitation to harmony.

But not, as Aaron Mills writes, “harmony in the romantic sense of non-conflict.” Rather, “harmony understood as the ceaselessly changing but grounded state of interdependent selves engaged with each other in personal practices of mutual aid, which we may call living in right relation. And that necessitates conflict” (Mills, 2017, p.236, emphasis in original).

In every learning environment, I try to facilitate conditions where students can encounter ideas not as abstractions but as living relations – beings we approach with curiosity, responsibility, and care. I work to cultivate spaces that make room for students’ lived experiences, cultural knowledges, and hoped-for futures, while also honouring a range of epistemological traditions and inviting critical engagement with the structures that shape how knowledge is produced and valued.

This means teaching in ways that foreground embodied practice, shared inquiry, and generative tension; offering frameworks without foreclosure; and supporting students as they clarify their own commitments, questions, and orientations. At its heart, my approach is guided by the belief that learning becomes possible when students feel both connected to the material and sovereign within it: able to discern what speaks to them, what troubles them, and what possibilities they want to carry forward.

I’m not yet the teacher I hope to become, but in that aim, connectedness and sovereignty are the trajectory. I hope my students feel seen, valued, and honoured during our time together. If what Dr. Shawn Wilson (2021) says about ideas is true – that they have agency and sovereignty, too – I hope the ideas that students and I convene around in order to learn likewise feel seen, valued, and honoured through our shared holding.

For more related to my approach to teaching and learning:

• Statement of Teaching Philosophy
• Student & Peer Evaluations
• Sample Course Materials