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Teaching

My philosophy of teaching and learning is grounded in learner-centered experiences and expressed through five pedagogical innovations: research-integrated teaching, accommodation-by-design, relationship-based assessment, moral imagination, and the WISE case study method.

Teaching Philosophy

I am passionate about integrating anti-oppression pedagogies while advancing my primary teaching objective: to enhance students’ intellectual and moral development. My assignments are rigorous, and my temperament is playful. I am a practitioner of positive psychology and am known for creating learner-centered classrooms that challenge students to think critically, write effectively, and lead responsibly.

As a multidisciplinary educator, I emphasize the intersection of theory and practice, equipping students with the intellectual and professional competencies needed to succeed at Rutgers and beyond. All my courses are rooted in anti-racist, anti-oppression, and multicultural pedagogies.

Research-Integrated Teaching

I am also deeply committed to integrating research and teaching in ways that contribute to Rutgers’ intellectual ecosystem. My research appointments at Oxford and Harvard universities, as well as engagements with OpenAI, Google, Handshake AI, and Adobe, directly inform my courses. I bring current legal developments, emerging technologies, and ethical deliberations into the classroom, ensuring that the curriculum is timely and relevant.

Accommodation-by-Design

During graduate school, I was diagnosed with three learning disabilities, which I now understand as central to my identity as a learning minority and educator. This helps explain why I began my career as a certified K–12 public schoolteacher and have since spent my professional life studying how people learn. My master’s degree from Teachers College Columbia University focused on how the effective use of technology can enhance the moral and intellectual development of adult learners.

As a result of this lifelong curiosity about teaching and learning, I design courses using what I call accommodation-by-design pedagogy. Rather than structuring assignments around a singular way of learning, I build learning experiences that incorporate a variety of strategies and technologies to ensure students’ success. I care not only about what students learn but also how they learn. I view inclusion not as an act of compliance but as an act of emancipation, freeing students to express their multiple intelligences.

Relationship-Based Assessment

In practice, my teaching philosophy led me to offer individual coaching sessions. For instance, in my writing-heavy courses, I invest 20 minutes with each student in a one-on-one Zoom Coaching Session. This is time-intensive, resulting in 40 to 60 meetings in the first month of the semester.

I do not grade students on how well they learned to write before taking my class. Students are shocked when I tell them that. I grade their progress from the first draft they shared with me to their final draft. I explain that I am ultimately grading the effectiveness of my teaching and seeking a return on the investment I make in them.

My individualized coaching sessions are grounded in these principles:

  • evaluate each student based on their starting point
  • assess the effectiveness of my teaching
  • measure the learners’ growth over time
  • cultivate a genuine collegial relationship

I have found this relationship-based assessment method to be disarming and empowering. After a successful coaching session, I notice that all their subsequent written assignments reflect a new standard of excellence. They are motivated to work hard for me because they know I am committed to their academic success and personal well-being. Students appreciate this genuine support and apply what we learned in the coaching sessions to their other classes.

Moral Imagination

After the November 2016 presidential election, Publishers Weekly listed my book Cultivating Empathy as one of “six books for a post-election spiritual detox.” In that book, I develop the everyday practice of moral imagination. This is the ability to:

  • step into an ethical dilemma
  • understand multiple perspectives
  • recognize that understanding need not require agreement

Moral imagination is a civic virtue that cultivates empathy across disagreement and disrupts narratives that magnify our divisions.

The throughline across my courses is the application of moral imagination as a pedagogical innovation. Drawing on evidence-based research in character education and virtue development, I design case studies that immerse students in moral dilemmas involving issues of public concern. I carefully construct these cases to ensure that each stakeholder’s viewpoints are accurately represented. Students are then invited to engage the conflict through the perspective of a specific character. Their task is not to defend their own views, but to understand and articulate the reasoning, values, and tactics used by their chosen character.

This approach has proven particularly impactful when teaching AI ethics courses that enroll students from multiple degree programs. By practicing moral imagination and embodying perspectives other than their own, students demonstrate not only empathy but analytic mastery. Through narrative engagement, they synthesize complex issues in law, ethics, and technology with greater depth and accuracy.

WISE Case Studies

I extended this pedagogy further by developing the WISE method during my service as a Public Humanities Fellow at Rutgers–Camden. I use the WISE method in many of my online courses that take students through four integrated stages for each lesson:

  • Watch—Compelling multimedia content, including interactive lectures, news analysis, documentaries, and guest presentations;
  • Interact—Gamified exercises and structured activities that reinforce key concepts;
  • Study—Curated academic sources delivered through interactive course packs, podcasts, and primary documents; and
  • Engage—Peer discussion within the social learning community and mobile app I founded during the pandemic at ReligionAndPublicLife.org.

The WISE method engages learners’ multiple learning styles to create a sense of play through social interaction, building a supportive learning community while cultivating their moral imagination.

It also functions as a strong retention strategy. Students develop a weekly habit of completing the WISE exercises, which leads to sustained engagement and higher rates of online course completion.

Together, these approaches reflect my commitment to cultivating a relationship-based learning environment that is rigorous yet playful and enriches students’ intellectual and moral development.

My Teaching in Practice