Education should enhance the capacity of all students to engage in the democratic process and critically evaluate and change the world toward justice. Therefore, I see teaching as a collaborative process in which I strive to empower students with tools, skills, and imagination to understand social systems, their interactions with environments, and sources of injustice. I am committed to creating inclusive spaces that enable students’ diverse lived experience to enrich learning for everyone. I teach so that, as Marx urged, students can not only interpret the world, but also change it.
In 2022, I won the two top teaching awards at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University: the Mary Grell Robert L. Spaeth Teacher of Distinction Award and the Sister Linda Kulzer Gender Educator Award.
In 2018, I co-lead the workshop Teaching Climate Justice in Sociology at the American Sociological Association annual meeting. I created this resources document for the workshop. It has a wealth of readings, activities, films, and websites that I hope teachers, learners, and activists will find useful. Please share widely.
In 2017, I was honored to be one of four recipients of the 2016-2017 UCSB Academic Senate Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award.
Many students and colleagues wrote letters of support on my behalf for all my awards. Thank you!
Please email me for any teaching materials related to the courses below.
Assistant and Associate Professor, Department of Environmental Studies, CSB and SJU
Energy and Society (Syllabus)
Gender and Environment (Syllabus )
United Nations Climate Change Conference (Syllabus). Thanks to our institutions’ UNFCCC observer status, students travel to the annual UN climate negotiations (COPs) to conduct original research.
Global Climate Policy (Syllabus) – a role play of the UN Conference
Climate Action Workshop (Syllabus) – a hands on course on climate and racial justice organizing
Research Colloquium: Climate Crisis Solutions (Syllabus)
Introduction to Environmental Studies (Syllabus)
Environmental Methods and Analysis (Syllabus)
Independent Instructor, Department of Sociology, UCSB
Feminist Climate Justice, Spring 2015 (Syllabus)
Teaching Assistant, Department of Sociology, UCSB
The World in 2050: Sustainable Development and Its Alternatives (3 sections), 2017 – students participated in a student initiated final project doing community based development in Isla Vista (IV). Sections went on field trips to a Biko housing cooperative, IV Community Bike Center, the IV Food Co-op, and the UCSB Associated Students’ Department of Public Worms (compost facility).
Sociology of the Family, 2016
Social Movements, 2016
Climate Justice (3 sections), 2016 – students participated in a UCSB Fossil Free Divestment march.
Consumption, Waste, and the Environment, 2016
Activism: focus on environmental activism (3 sections), 2014 – students participated in 4 local environmental campaigns, including a ballot measure to ban fracking (Measure P).
Sociological Research Methods (2 sections), 2014
Women, Culture, Development: focus on sustainable development, 2013
Introduction to Sociology (3 sections), 2012
Independent Instructor, Graduate Level Mini-Course, UCSB
Qualitative Data Analysis: Introductory ATLAS.ti Mini-Course, 2016
Gender-and-Environment-Syllabus-S-2019Syllabus-Energy-and-Society-Spring-2018
Syllabus-Feminist-Climate-Justice