Teaching

Philosophy

As an educator, I believe it is important to remember what it was like to be a student (and to be sensitive to how much things have changed!). While coursework is and should be the primary focus for undergraduate students, it is hardly the only demand on their time, nor is it the only way for students to mature and grow during their time in school.

With this in mind, I design my courses with an eye towards engaging as many of our senses, experiences, and backgrounds as possible. Especially in the age of GAI, this helps not only to spur participation and maximize retention, but also to illustrate the relevance and applicability of the skills and knowledge we build together. If an instructor tells us something, we may or may not remember, and simply asking students to write ensures at least some will choose the path of least resistance. But if we are challenged to apply that knowledge, we have a chance to practice empathy and gain a deeper, more intuitive understanding of the types of decisions facing political actors each and every day.

Experiential Learning

Two Approaches, One Instinct

Nearly everything I teach runs through one of two modes of experiential learning. In my substantive courses the format is simulation; in the research methods course it is the lab. From the doorway they look almost nothing alike, and a visitor who walked past a plenary session of the Congress of Vienna on Wednesday and a room full of students staring at regression output on Thursday would be forgiven for concluding that the two courses had been designed by different people, but they rest on the same conviction: a student should have to operate a concept rather than restate it, and be judged on how they operate it rather than on whether it happened to work out.

Operating a concept is not the same thing as mastering it, of course, but I’ve found it’s a necessary precondition. Mastery, as I mean it here, is closer to intuition than to knowledge – not just knowing that a coalition is fragile, or that a small sample inflates uncertainty, but sensing it, the way you’d sense a coalition wobble before you could say exactly why. That kind of understanding isn’t primarily verbal, and I don’t think it can be read into being; it accumulates in the body, through the actual doing of things: standing to speak when you’d rather not, watching an argument you built come apart in real time, handling data that resists the story you wanted it to tell. Both simulation and lab, in their own ways, are my attempt to give students enough of that kind of doing in a semester that some of it starts to become instinct.

Simulations

It is easy for a student to judge a leader for running out of time, out of allies, and out of good options. It tends to land rather differently when it happens to the student themselves on a Thursday afternoon.

Because so much of the work in these courses happens out loud and in front of other people, I have tried to build an assessment scheme that measures it where it actually occurs. Drawing on the Reacting to the Past pedagogy, students are graded on formal speeches delivered in class, on writing produced in role (e.g. position papers; treaties; edicts; the occasional furious petition), and on reflective writings in which they step outside their character in order to make sense of what they and their classmates actually did. I define participation in advance and in writing, rather than leaving it to whatever impression I happen to have formed by the end of the term. Students who are not naturally inclined to speak first deserve to know what is being asked of them and when it is coming.

Alongside the multi-week games, shorter simulations run throughout the semester, including those illustrating the dynamics of two-level games, coalition formation, and crisis negotiation against a deadline. In my World Politics course, there are five of these before the Congress of Vienna begins, and they carry a quarter of the grade on their own, which is deliberate – a student who has never had to improvise under time pressure in a low-stakes room will not suddenly manage it in a plenary session with a significant percent of the course riding on it. The aim throughout is that a concept introduced in Monday’s reading is something students have to attempt to implement themselves by Friday. Thus the reading is not a prelude to the work of the course; it is equipment for it.

Labs

Analyzing Politics covers case studies, ethnography, archival research, content analysis, surveys, experiments, statistical modeling, and how to use R, which is a great deal of ground for a single required sophomore course. Each method we discuss is paired with a guided lab in which students work through it themselves rather than watch me present it on a slide (though goodness knows there is plenty of that too). I focus on helping students understand the intuitions behind the approach before the mechanics themselves, and the ordering is deliberate rather than incidental: a student who can execute code without knowing what the code is doing has learned something, but not the thing the course exists to teach. In the hypothesis testing portion of the course we run most of our work through a single question – is this result actually weird? – which carries students a good deal further than the formal vocabulary does, at least until they have enough intuition to hang the formal vocabulary on.

The labs themselves vary with the method. When we discuss ethnography, two thirds of the class become research subjects competing at some deliberately absurd task – building the tallest structure they can manage out of drinking straws, say – while the remaining third take on the role of budding ethnographers and record what they observe. When I teach archival work, students are handed a mini-archive on the Falcon Lake incident, a 1967 UFO sighting in Manitoba whose documentary record is fragmentary, mutually contradictory, and entirely earnest in tone, which is precisely what recommends it. Other sessions run interviews, or a survey experiment in which the students are themselves the respondents, so that the framing effects they will later encounter in published work are ones they have already been subjected to without noticing.

Labs are graded entirely on participation, in parallel to my approach to simulations: a student who conducts a clumsy interview and can explain afterward what went wrong has done the assignment, while a student who produces a clean transcript without noticing that they led their respondent has not. In this way the cost of attempting a method and failing at it is held at zero, which is the only condition under which a sophomore will attempt eight of them in a single semester.

The cumulative work sits elsewhere. Each student carries one research question from the beginning of the term to the end, and the requirement is that they attempt to answer it twice, once with a qualitative method and once with a quantitative one. The aim is not that anyone should leave with a favorite. It is that they should leave having actually done political science in several of its modes, and knowing from the inside, rather than from a textbook’s summary of the methodological debate, what each of those modes can and cannot tell you about a question they have chosen and care about.

Courses Taught

St. Olaf College

Visiting Assistant Professor

  • PSCI 220 Analyzing Politics — Fall 2025, Spring 2026 (two sections), Fall 2026LAB
  • PSCI 258 World Politics — Fall 2025, Fall 2026SIM
  • PSCI 299 Blood Runs Thicker: Descent-Based Identities in Global Perspective — January Term 2026
  • PSCI 299A Tyrants, Demagogues, and Democrats: Athens & India at Critical Junctures — Spring 2026SIM

George Washington University

Instructor of Record

  • PSC 3500 Maladroit Monarchs: Tradition vs Reform in China and England — Spring 2025, CapstoneSIM
  • PSC 2101 Scope and Methods of Political Science — Summer 2023, Summer 2024, Summer 2025LAB
  • PSC 1000 Tyrants, Demagogues, and Democrats: Athens & India at Critical Junctures — Fall 2023, Dean’s First-Year SeminarSIM

Teaching Assistant

  • PSC 1001 Introduction to Comparative Politics — with Dr. Eric Kramon, Fall 2022; three weekly sections
  • IAFF 1005 Introduction to International Affairs — with Dr. Alexander Downes (Fall 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2021, Spring 2022) and Dr. Michael Brown (Spring 2023), Elliott School of International Affairs; two weekly sections

Guangxi Normal University

Instructor

  • The Threshold of Democracy: Athens in 403 B.C. — Spring 2015SIM
  • Women’s Choir — Spring 2015
  • English Speaking 4 — Spring 2015
  • English Speaking 3 — Fall 2013, Fall 2014
  • English Writing 1 — Spring 2014
  • Western Culture — Fall 2013

Drake University

Teaching Assistant

  • Henry VIII and the Reformation Parliament — with Prof. Elizabeth Robertson, Fall 2012, First-Year SeminarSIM
  • The Threshold of Democracy: Athens in 403 B.C. — with Prof. Elizabeth Robertson, Fall 2012, First-Year SeminarSIM
  • Defining a Nation: India on the Eve of Independence, 1945 — with Prof. Elizabeth Robertson, Fall 2010, Fall 2011, First-Year SeminarSIM
  • Confucianism and the Succession Crisis of the Wanli Emperor, 1587 — with Prof. Elizabeth Robertson, Fall 2010, Fall 2011, First-Year SeminarSIM

Recognition

  • Best Instructor of Record, Department of Political Science, George Washington University — Spring 2025
  • Best Teaching Assistant for an Introductory Course, George Washington University — Fall 2022
  • Dean’s Graduate Instructorship, George Washington University — Fall 2023

Sample Materials

Sample Syllabus (PDF)