Political psychologists study people. We want to know how people think, act, and understand the social and political universe. It is this curiosity about human understanding of politics that fundamentally drives my experience as an educator. Just as great teachers cultivated my interests in politics, I see it as my responsibility to mentor others in developing an understanding for themselves of political questions and the happenings of politics. My research typically explores how people think and feel about politics and often grapples with meta-scientific questions about how researchers might come to know individuals' political cognitions, the causes of those beliefs and attitudes, and the implications thereof for politics more broadly. Teaching is a natural transition from this exploration of human psychology and behavior in which the objective is not for me to transmit information and formulate students' understanding but to guide them as they seek answers to their own political questions.
To be a teacher is not to assign oneself to a profession, but to be identified by others as one who has aided them in their studies. I do not see it as my task to simply transmit knowledge or my perspectives, but to explicate the world as I see it and complicate politics as my students perceive it while also encouraging rigorous, systematic, and critical analysis of political and social phenomena. In teaching political science - fundamentally a merger of politics and science - it is my objective in every class that I instruct to leave students not only with a richer understanding of politics but also with conceptual and analytic tools they can apply to critically receive information about the social world more broadly. I believe it is critical to offer students something more than mere exposure to academic Political Science; what they are taught and what they learn from my courses must be applicable in their future lives regardless of their chosen careers. Toward this end, I see the encouragement of individual choice in topical exploration, the cultivation of useful methodological, analytic, and communication skillsets, and persistent return to everyday social and political examples as vital elements of undergraduate education.
Most important of all, however, I see the integration of pedagogy and research as a core means of actively engaging students in the analytic thinking and professional development that are critical to their future professional success. I hope to share my research with future students and involve them in my own discovery of new knowledge, like the faculty that inspired me during my undergraduate and graduate experiences, as well as mentor and guide future students' own explorations into the political and social questions that motivate and excite them. This reciprocal transmission of assistance seems to me an underappreciated opportunity to provide students with opportunities for professional development as well as fully embed advanced students in research activities, professional networking, and technical skill development that will differentiate them in later employment.
It is students' abilities to ask provocative questions, address those questions analytically, and effectively communicate their conclusions to an array of audiences through a variety of means that must ultimately be developed over the course of an undergraduate education. Politics is, therefore, a means to motivate thinking and a context in which students can develop competence in these skill areas. I see my role in these aspects of learning as simultaneously a benevolent critic with high expectations and as a resource with expertise on the political and methodological matters that students and I can explore together. The route I see to great teaching is the same political curiosity that drives my own research matched with a passionate concern that students enter their postgraduate careers with a richer, more nuanced understanding of their social and political world and the analytic tools necessary to perpetuate lifelong learning.
Teaching Assistant for Jay Seawright, Statistical Research Methods (Undergraduate level, Northwestern University, 2011)
Teaching Assistant for Jim Mahoney, Methods of Political Inference (Undergraduate level, Northwestern University, 2011)
Teaching Assistant for Chris Galdieri, Political Psychology of Mass Behavior (Undergraduate level, University of Minnesota, 2007)
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