Teaching Philosophy: Engagement and awareness
I adopt a Socratic method in the lecture hall, encouraging debate and challenging students to engage with material through conversation and personal experience. This method allows student to recognize that political ideas are fundamentally contentious and constructed through daily experiences. These conversations capitalize on classroom diversity encouraging students to engage with other perspectives and recognize how lived experiences impact an individuals’ perspective on politics. By fostering individual political awareness, I hope to encourage students to participate directly in politics and develop a sense of political agency.
Current and Past Course
Congress and the Presidency |
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Congress and the Presidency operates on a flipped classroom with students engaging in lecture content through videos outside of class, freeing in-class time to conduct a full semester Senate simulation that I independently developed. The simulation tasks students with representing a particular state/senator and forming a governing body based on the working rules of the U.S. Senate itself. They confront the same collective action problems in any governing body including questions of committee formation, legislative cooperation, and collective effort. Throughout the process, I act as the President, House, and regularly as a political advisor, using these three positions to guide students into understanding core course concepts while still pushing them to engage with current events through actual House legislation, including bills like the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and D.C. statehood legislation. Further, students are randomly placed among Senators and frequently confront the challenge of understanding Senators with whom they fundamentally disagree. Students are required to submit regular reflection papers connecting academic course content with their own personal experiences. The benefits of this simulation style are not lost on students, with one evaluator commenting: “The way this course is set up as a "mock senate" that connects to our readings and lectures is amazing. This is by far the most engaging and interesting course I have ever taken, and I have learned a lot from it. I have also been able to make really meaningful connections with people in my class due to its structure, which is something I have not been able to do in any other class.”
Federalism and Intergovernmental Relations |
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Like most systems within American Constitutional government, the structure of American federalism is not only core to understanding American policy but also constantly dynamic and contested. This course will explore the contest for power between the American states and the federal government in DC. Students will explore the history and development of American federalism from the principal of Dual Federalism and the Nullification debates, through the growth of cooperative, competitive and partisan federalism that pervades the modern system. The final weeks will be dedicated to dissecting current issues in American federalism including education, healthcare, environmental politics, and issues with race.
State Government |
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This course is a survey on state governments across the United States. We will explore the variation in state political opinion and priorities, institutions, and policy implementation, focusing on distinctions across states and between the state and national governments. In addition, we will take advantage of our proximity to the Capitol to explore the dynamics of state politics here in the state of South Carolina by inviting speakers from the state legislature, the Governor’s office, the executive branch, the courts as well as local lobbying groups and news agencies.
American Chief Executive |
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Over the course of American history, and particularly during the past several decades, the presidency has become the focal point of our national government. Not surprisingly, the presidency has also become a prime concern of political scientists. As we will see this semester, political scientists focus on a variety of substantive questions when studying the presidency. This variety of topics is driven by, and mirrors, the many different dimensions of the modern presidency, including the president as commander in chief, party leader, and public spokesperson, and differences between the president as an individual actor and the executive branch as a bureaucratic institution. In this course, we will examine these many different dimensions of the presidency. We will begin where all presidencies begin: with the election of the president and the role presidents play in shaping and responding to public opinion. Next, we will examine how the president interacts with the various institutions of government, including previous presidents, the bureaucracy, political parties, Congress, and the courts. Finally, we will cover some of the scope of the president’s extensive policy powers looking at both domestic policy and foreign policy.
American Political Parties and Polarization |
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A course on the nature, characteristics, and history of American political parties; party organization; political campaigns and finance; nominations, elections, and electoral problems. While this course will provide students with a broad overview of the role of parties as institutions in the American system, it will specifically focus on the recent problem of partisan polarization, examining its sources and engaging students in conversations about potential solutions.
American National Politics (Intro Course) |
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This is an introductory course in American politics. In this course, we will examine how American citizens and institutions interact in the formation of public policy. One of the goals of this course is to teach you theories that can be used to explain politics and political outcomes. In order to provide a series of practical examples for our discussions, we will examine the politics surrounding immigration issues.
Introduction to Research Methods |
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This course teaches basic statistical techniques that are useful for making inferences from data and understanding research design and methodology within political science and the social sciences more broadly. By coupling training in basic statical techniques with lab time dedicated to familiarizing students with programming in R, this course aims to provide students with the tools needed to both critique and conduct research within political science. These skills are applied to replicating and critiquing articles from major journals in political science to prepare students to engage with material in upper level courses.
Politics in Whoville: Politics in Children's Literature |
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Since the industrial revolution, children’s literature has played a prominent role in shaping notions of citizenship and ideology. This course examines how children’s literature shaped and responded to major shifts in American political history in the 20th century, including industrialization, New Deal legislation, and the Civil Rights, Anti-War, Feminist and Environmental movements. Readings include children’s literary classics ranging from “The Little Engine that Could” to works by Dr. Seuss and corresponding academic sources pulled from diverse fields including political science, sociology, history and literary criticism. Writing assignments require students to expand their awareness of the political context of cultural materials by exploring the relationship between literary themes and shifts in conceptions of citizenship.
Marx, Nietzsche, Freud |
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This course examines the thinking of these three critical scholars and its impact on western scholarship through an in depth look at their writings. Through classroom discussions, students are required to examine their personal experiences with culture and civilization with an eye to how the critiques of these scholar still apply to their lives today. Within their writing, students are asked to examine and criticize the arguments and solutions to the problems of society as advocated by Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.