Teaching Philosophy
I have acquired a breadth of environmental knowledge, grounded in an academic foundation in environmental education and policy, and supported by professional and field-based research and teaching experiences in both the United States and Latin America. My educational endeavors are designed to be interdisciplinary in nature as I seek to acquire a broader understanding of how scholarship, pedagogy, field-based research, and policy can effectively intersect. This set of competencies has provided me with the tools and perspectives to instruct and mentor students, and engage them in evidenced based, inspirational, meaningful, and experiential environmental learning. My students report that they value this approach, as it contributes to both their environmental understandings and guides them toward changes in their affective and behavioral domains.

I am interested in working with students, faculty, and public and private stakeholders in assessing and designing solutions to local, national, and international environmental issues. I have a dedicated interest in working with students in the field, internationally, and on travel assignments throughout Latin America.

My instruction includes advancing an understanding of the value of dedication to service to the community as well as educating for eco-justice and community. This approach is perhaps most compatible with C.A. Bowers’ position that community-centered traditions provide an alternative to efforts “that are now overshooting the long-term sustaining capacity of the environment.” Bower’s recommendations for the promotion of an eco-justice curriculum imply that we, as instructors, have a greater set of responsibilities as professionals and thus must work more intensively and thoughtfully to act as mediators who affect and incorporate the learner, the community, and the environment. This teaching philosophy first requires reflection and acknowledgment of the dominant social paradigm that promotes hyperindividuality and a hyperconsumer culture. It is important therefore to understand where in the curriculum education reproduces language and practice that facilitates the culturally and environmentally destructive patterns of the dominant social paradigm, and to address these issues accordingly.