Teaching Philosophy

My desire to teach at the university level comes from my experience at a small liberal arts college, SUNY Geneseo. There I had an instructor who said his job was to “cultivate the life of the mind.” My undergraduate instructors at Geneseo did just that: With their guidance I came to appreciate college as a place of intense intellectual and personal growth where enthusiasm, creativity, and a diversity of opinions are celebrated. As an instructor, I see my role in this growth as a guide; neither dictator nor observer. Most importantly, I am a storyteller of place.

Like most students, I was introduced to geography in an introductory course, by an instructor with photographs and stories of foreign lands. His stories piqued my interest in his accompanying questions about the whys of place and the wheres of human activity. I followed this interest to work for three years as a reporter, first at National Geographic’s online news division, then as a reporter for a small daily newspaper. In returning to academia I see an opportunity to similarly use both exceptional events and day-to-day experiences to encourage students to ask questions about the social implications of place and space. For more advanced students, I encourage them to seek these answers themselves: what are the spatial aspects of their research, and why is their topic of interest not only "interesting," but also important to telling a broader story of people and place.