Teaching

My teaching success rests on co-creating meaningful and accessible learning experiences that impact and enrich students and simultaneously transform society. I deliver inclusive and accessible education that is part of a building accessible, antiracist and decolonizing institutions.

What this means in practice is that I meet students where they are at, understanding that university may not typically provide education in forms that allow all students to thrive; I offer the scaffolding and support they need to develop their full capacity. My student-centered approach is especially effective given students are often overwhelmed with information, anxiety, and pressures that complicate the post-secondary educational experience.

Currently my approach is focused on three key areas 1) learning as a process not just an outcome, 2) the role of the whole self in learning and 3) recognizing barriers and co-producing accessible and equitable learning. 

Image by photographer Hannah Mittelstaet: Depicts some of her experience of living with a disability

Description of courses designed and taught

Graduate courses

PLA 1108 Communication in the Face of Power (Fall 2021, Winter 2022, 2023)

  • A core planning course for 30 students in the Masters program at the University of Toronto St. George. This course focuses on key skills for working with communities in the face of structural inequality and oppression including community engagement, community-based research, participatory action research, political strategy, participatory planning, indigenous planning, working with Indigenous rights holders, anti-oppression and decolonial practice.

 

PLA 1101 Planning History, Thought and Practice (Fall 2019, 2020)

  • This core planning course is taken by all 30 students in the first year of the Masters program at the University of Toronto St. George. It introduces these students to key ideas in planning history, thought and practice and aims to prepare them to build their planning practice on a foundation informed by planning’s rich history and theory.

 

PLA 1107 Current Issues Paper (Full Year 2012, 2013, 2016-present)

  • The graduate masters’ capstone research project course. This course involves lecturing, advising and coordinating 30 Urban Planning Masters students and their committees towards the completion of their final “Current Issues Papers”. Topics range across four sub-disciplines of social, economic, environmental and urban planning.

 

JPG 2150 Special topics – Qualitative Research Methods (Winter 2016)

  • A graduate level qualitative methods class for approximately 10 Masters and PhD students in Geography and Planning. The class focuses both on the complex philosophical questions that are embedded in research methods and practical skills for conducting research.

 

PLA 1106 Workshop in Planning Practice (Co-instructor)(Fall 2013)

  • This is the capstone group project for the Planning Masters Program. For this course I developed and supervised in-the-field group projects for 30 graduate students in the second year of the Masters Program. This position involved advising students, supervising their research, and grading final projects.

 

Undergraduate courses

GGR 271 Social Research Methods (Winter 2011, 2021)

  • A second-year undergraduate course for approximately 200 students. Topics covered include ontology and epistemology for different social research, research design and ethics, sampling theory, questionnaire design, interviewing, observational research, focus groups and participatory methods, content analysis and basic data coding.

 

GGR 452 Space, Power, Geography: Understanding Spatiality (Winter 2020)

  • A fourth year undergraduate seminar style course for up to 20 students. This course explores how understanding of space and power have shifted radically in the past half century using close readings of the texts of Foucault and Deleuze.

 

GGR C31 Qualitative Geographic Methods: Place and Ethnography (Winter 2013, 2017-2019)

  • A third year undergraduate course for up to 60 students. This course explored the practice of ethnography within and outside the discipline of geography, and situates this within current debates on methods and theory.

 

GGR B13 Social Geography (Summer, Fall 2012, 2013, 2015-2018)

  • A second year undergraduate course for approximately 100 students. This course examined the role of social divisions such as class, race, gender and sexuality in shaping the social geographies of cities and regions.

 

GGR C45 Local Geographies of Globalization (Fall 2016 -2018)

  • A third year undergraduate course for approximately 60 students. This course introduces the histories, politics, economics, values and ideas that underlie processes of globalization, explores the intersection between the global and the local and encourages the evaluation of specific globalization processes in relation to questions of equity, resources, and justice.

 

CIT B03 Social Planning and Community Development (Winter 2014)

  • A second year undergraduate course for approximately 110 students. This course provides an overview of the history, theory, and politics of community development and social planning.

 

GGR 328 Labour Geography (Winter 2012)

  • A third year undergraduate course for approximately 80 students. Topics included theories of labour; post-Fordism; precarious work, flexibility, and risk; worker agency and unionization; race and gender; globalization and the movement of labour; emotional labour; and alternatives to dominant economic paradigms.