Teaching
Teaching Experience
Approach
"The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world more habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as our culture has defined it" (Orr, 1994). As a course instructor at the University of Toronto, I am committed to creating inclusive, engaging learning environments. My teaching draws on my interdisciplinary background across the sciences and social sciences, and I like to be creative in my pedagogical approach, teaching students through games, simulations, and discussion. While I believe teaching content is important, I put an equal emphasis on fostering growth, care, and critical thinking in my students.
Courses
Sessional Instructor · University of Toronto
ENV435: Governing the Commons
Common-pool resources (CPRs) include pastures, forests, watersheds, ocean fisheries, traffic, the Internet, and the Earth’s climate. CPRs present a variety of social dilemmas because it is difficult to exclude and prevent resources users from accessing, using, and polluting a resource. Individual self-interest may put CPRs at risk of overuse, overconsumption, and exploitation to result in a “tragedy of the commons” scenario. However resource users across the world, have devised rules and strategies to avoid such tragedies to sustain CPRs over centuries. In this course, through playing games in the classroom, we will learn whether and how theories of collective action, cooperation, and institutions provide insight into achieving conservation of CPRs that delivers on the twin goals of social and environmental justice.
If you would like to receive a copy of a course syllabus, please get in touch.
Areas of teaching expertise
Human Geography
Place, space, environment, and society
Environmental Studies
Conservation, climate change, sustainability
Rural Geography
Rural communities, land use, governance
Qualitative Methods
Interview, fieldwork, participatory approaches
Policy Analysis
Housing, homelessness, environmental policy
Sciences & Social Sciences
Bridging natural and social worlds