In addition to maintaining an active research agenda, I am committed to and enthusiastic about teaching. At both the University of Minnesota as an undergraduate and Indiana University as a graduate student, I have had the opportunity to be a teaching assistant in the courses Sociology of the Family, Introduction to Sociology, Sexual Diversity, and Sociology of Religion. Additionally, at Indiana University, I have had the opportunity to design, develop, and teach my own courses on Sexual Diversity and Introduction to Sociology. I have also completed a certification in higher education and pedagogy through the Preparing Future Faculty Program. My goals as a teacher are to (1) encourage my students to question commonly held beliefs about social issues and problems, (2) teach my students to think critically about the social worlds around them, and (3) inspire excitement in my students about sociology. Because many of my students are not sociology majors, I seek to instill in them the sociological imagination that they can take with them beyond my classroom into their other classrooms and own lives.
I'll be teaching Introduction to Sociology again this fall. As the semester gets closer, I'll put up a pdf file with the course syllabus.
The text I'll be using this fall, and have used in the past, is Mapping the Social Landscape edited by Susan J. Ferguson.