Teaching Statement
29 November 2025
I believe the primary responsibility of an instructor in higher education is to help students through transitions: from adolescence to early adulthood, or from one life path to another. From this student-centered perspective, higher education has three fundamental foci: instruction, socialization and credentialing.
- Instruction is based around curriculum and has a primary focus in helping students develop the skills needed to become productive, well-informed members of society. These skills include career-specific capabilities like GIS, as well as general skills like writing and oral communication that are applicable to a wide variety of life experiences.
- Socialization involves the development of the skills and understanding that students need to become successful members of local, national and global communities. This includes the legacy of classical liberal arts education embodied in general education requirements, as well as extracurricular opportunities for building social networks and social skills.
- Credentialing involves the broad social sorting of people into specific life paths. Assessment, feedback, and advising guides students in discerning their own strengths and weaknesses as they seek to find their personal definition of success and then find the life path that presents the best opportunity for achieving that success.
Toward those ends, I see my classroom responsibilities encompassing three groups of tasks:
- Curating course content and objectives
- Providing practical, timely feedback to students on how they can better achieve those objectives
- Assessing, evaluating and scoring achievement of the course objectives
With the definition of clear objectives, I tightly integrate assessment into the curriculum, offering students clear guidance on how they are doing and what they need to focus on to improve. The value of in-person instruction is most richly realized in the provision of feedback. While highly-motivated individuals can (and do) learn autodidactically, the value of learning in a residential university setting is the editorial direction provided by instructors, as well as the direct feedback provided to individual students on what they need to do to more effectively follow that direction.
I use active learning and flipped learning techniques in all my classes, with a foundation in constructivist learning theory. GISystems and GIScience are comprised of things that we do, and students learn to do by doing. I have been a leader in our department in offering all my courses in hybrid-flexible (hyflex) modality, which provides students with much-needed flexibility in scheduling and accommodation of unexpected events, while incentivizing regular active participation compared to unidirectional modalities. My experience with hyflex was documented in my 2024 paper in the Journal of Geoscience Education.
My classes are based around weekly assignments based on content provided in open online tutorials. These tutorials are visualization-rich and often contain short videos when students need demonstration on how to perform tasks using software with a web interface or graphical user interface. Classroom discussions are then based around reinforcement and interactive assessment of concepts covered in tutorials. GIS II and Enterprise GIS also incorporate incremental, semester-length projects that integrate and reinforce skills covered in weekly assignments.
All of my classes are based around industry-standard GIS cloud, desktop, and server software from ESRI. Skill with the ESRI platform has significant professional value for students seeking GISystems employment with bachelor's degrees, while also providing an environment for learning basic geospatial skills and research methodologies that can be applied in undergraduate and graduate level GIScience research.