Teaching
I have designed and taught three of my own courses, served as the sole instructor for four courses, trained new teaching fellows, redesigned the Harvard Government Department’s program for writing instruction, and conducted experimental research on strategies for teaching field-specific writing skills. In 2020 I was awarded the Sidney Verba Prize for Excellence in Teaching.
You can find a statement of my teaching philosophy that focuses on effectiveness here. You can find a statement about how I build an equitable and inclusive classroom here. You can find a full list of courses I have taught here.
Original Curricula
How Science Happens: The Practice of Scientific Inquiry Across Disciplines
In this course, students explore the practice of science across multiple disciplines. Across the social and natural sciences, students in this course will focus on how the researchers we read arrived at the findings that they publish, with a particular emphasis on commonality and difference across disciplines. Standards for inquiry in the scientific method, developed over the centuries since the enlightenment, provide a set of core principles that we hope to see in common from sociology to cell biology. Yet researchers in different fields face different challenges to data collection, enjoy different histories of accumulated knowledge, and even experience different workplace practices and day-to-day workdays; all of these factors shape these fields in divergent ways that we will explore as a group. In the first part of the course, students focus on the broad philosophical principles that underpin scientific inquiry; in the second part of the course, students focus on the practices involved in individual studies; in the third and final part of the course, students focus on the social and political side of scientific professions, including peer review, publication, and the representation of scientific knowledge in the public sphere.
National Identity in Comparative Perspective
National identity represents an unsolved puzzle for social scientists. Great theorists claim that national identities originated in the modern era, yet peoples around the world feel that their own national identities are deeply rooted and ancient. In some places, national identities are violently contested; in others, they are unquestioned facts of life. In this small seminar, students explore theories from comparative politics, sociology, and social psychology about how people form beliefs about national identity and about how those beliefs drive politics and even violence. Students also, by closely examining real cases and primary sources, become intimately familiar with how people in a chosen part of the world think about nationality, and use that knowledge to interrogate the existing scholarship. We will pay heavy attention to Europe and Eurasia but will also visit East, South, and Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The course is especially pertinent for students new to comparative politics and to the small seminar format; freshmen and sophomores should feel comfortable in this course.
Democracy, Development, & Violence: An Introduction to Comparative Politics
This course engages students with major theories and foundational ideas from political science that seek to answer three “big comparative” questions: Why are some countries democratic and others authoritarian? Why are some countries wealthy and others poor? Why do some countries have strong states, while others are fragile or collapse into civil violence? In doing so, the course introduces students to the field of comparative politics and to the practice of social scientific inquiry. The course also provides foundational instruction in three skills: reading, writing, and scientific inquiry. By the end of this course, students should feel prepared to choose and enroll in any introductory-level lecture course in a university political science department with confidence.
Anatomy of a Clinical Trial
[ Workshop ]
In this small workshop, students explore a workhorse tool of modern scientific practice: the clinical study. Students learn why randomized control trials are considered the “gold standard” for scientific evidence through an in-class simulation of a clinical trial with human subjects, including recruitment via random sampling, random assignment, compliance, dropouts, and missing data. Students learn the life cycle of a clinical study in the real world, from case study to pilot to RCT to implementation study, and about the many hands make an RCT work, from principle investigators, to project coordinators, to research assistants, to recruiters, to statisticians, to grant writers, to peer reviewers.
How to Write in the Social Sciences
[ Workshop ]
This series of two workshops teaches students discipline-specific writing skills, conventions, and style for the social sciences. The workshop focuses on writing falsifiable arguments, writing clear introductions, interpreting prompts, connecting evidence to argument, building a purposeful essay structure, and using effective syntax. Students perform two practice exercises – one that asks them to paraphrase and evaluate a partner’s introduction, and one that asks them to write an essay outline based on a partner’s introduction. A corollary workshop focuses on reading in the social sciences, and includes an exercise focused on the anatomy of a published social science article.
The ARtist & The Autocrat
[ workshop ]
This small workshop exposes students to art, literature, music, and other forms of cultural production from authoritarian settings, and teaches about the regulatory administration that governed this work. Using the Soviet Union as an animating case study, but with comparisons around the world, we consider post-revolutionary artistic pluralism and the avant-garde, state-promoted tastes under totalitarianism, and the emergence of apathy and anti-politics in mature authoritarian regimes. Students are asked to respond to a range of primary sources, from manifestos, to architectural plans, to clothing design, to films, to folk ballads.
Department-wide Programming
GovWrites: Institutionalizing Departmental Writing Instruction Online
Writing is a core skill expected of undergraduates in the Harvard department of government, but as my research on pedagogy has shown, university-wide writing programs do not teach the skills, values, and conventions specific to the social science discipline, and writing instruction in the government department has historically been decentralized and ad-hoc.
To solve these problems, I built a website (“GovWrites”) and created four distinct writing curricula intended to systematize and institutionalize writing instruction in the department of government. You can visit the GovWrites website here.
Departmental Pedagogy: Teaching How to Teach Social Science
I served for one year as Harvard Department of Government’s Pedagogy Fellow, where I was responsible for training graduate students during their first year of teaching. I taught a course designed to help new teaching fellows learn the skills necessary to communicate political science knowledge, expectations, and ways of thinking and to become more purposeful, effective, efficient, and inclusive teachers. The content of the course is informed by evidence-based findings in the education research literature. The syllabus covers the fundamentals of effective instruction, cultivating an inclusive classroom, teaching reading and writing, setting clear criteria for evaluation, syllabus design, teaching quantitative methods, and teaching as an international TF.
