Teaching

Following recent pedagogical research, my teaching employs a skills-based, scaffolding approach. My students repeatedly practice the kinds of assignments that will contribute to their overall grade, be they papers, problem sets, or short-answer exam questions. Practice assignments have low stakes (usually graded pass/fail), but students receive prompt feedback and chances to revise. Students thus gain and build upon skills as assignments become progressively longer or more involved throughout the term: for example, students learn initially to reconstruct an argument from a text, then to evaluate their arguments, then to argue for their evaluations, then to construct original arguments for and against claims and positions.

I most especially enjoy teaching intro logic and "great works" in the history of philosophy. However, for the sake of both wider access to philosophy and, frankly, better philosophy, I also strive to incorporate diverse viewpoints into my classes by including plenty of non-male, non-Western, and non-white authors when possible. And as I consider matters of social justice to be the most pressing ethical issues of our day, I try to equip my students in ethics courses with critical concepts with which to better navigate their social worlds and to better understand others--concepts like structural injustice, epistemic injustice, double consciousness, and intersectionality.

PEDAGOGICAL TRAINING

Philosophy for Children (P4C) SAPERE Online INSET Level 1 (June 2022)

Training for philosophy outreach and facilitation with minors (K-12).

Teaching Transcript, McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning, Princeton (August 2019)

Participated in multiple pedagogy programs, completed a classroom observation and feedback session, wrote teaching statements and syllabi.

Scholarly Approaches to Teaching Seminar (CTL 501), Princeton University (Fall 2018)

12-week course on current scholarship in learning and pedagogy.

INSTRUCTOR OF RECORD

Fall 2024: Philosophy & Ethical Reasoning (PY201), U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

Logic and critical thinking, normative ethical theory, applied ethics, and just war theory.

Summer 2024: Tutorial in General Philosophy & Aesthetics, University of Oxford

Survey of the philosophy of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, de Beauvoir, Sartre, and Wittgenstein, with emphasis on aesthetics and art.

Winter 2024 (Hilary Term): Tutorial in Western Legal Philosophy, University of Oxford

Legal (anti-)positivism and restorative justice. 

Fall 2022: Introduction to Moral Philosophy (PHI 202), Princeton University

Survey of historical normative ethical theories and contemporary practical issues of social justice, with particular emphasis on feminist and Black philosophies.

Spring 2022: Explaining Value (PHI 380), Princeton University

Writing-intensive, seminar-style survey of historical and contemporary metaethical explanations of value and normativity. 

Spring 2019: Introduction to Logic (PHL 120), The College of New Jersey

Propositional and predicate logic.

Fall 2018: Introduction to Ethics (PHIL 102), Montclair State University

Normative ethics, metaethics, and applied ethics.

TEAM TEACHING 

Spring 2020*: Introduction to Philosophy (PHI 102), Federal Correctional Institution, Fort Dix

With Thomas Lambert. Voluntary teaching for Princeton’s Prison Teaching Initiative.

*Course abbreviated due to COVID-19.

ASSISTANT IN INSTRUCTION (PRINCETON UNIVERSITY)

Fall 2017: Practical Ethics (CHV 310/PHI 385) for Peter Singer

Spring 2017: Introduction to Moral Philosophy (PHI 202) for Elizabeth Harman & Sarah McGrath

Fall 2016: Introduction to Ancient Philosophy (PHI 205) for Simon Shogry