TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
My goal as an educator is to spark enthusiasm for agriculture, and specifically how plant pathogens impact agricultural production. In the classroom, I strive to make the learning process and concepts interesting and engaging and ultimately help all my students apply the concepts learned in the classroom to real-life situations. In my teaching, I make significant efforts to create a learning environment that is challenging yet supportive, stimulating analysis, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills. I strive to help students improve their ability to think critically and analytically and to connect key course concepts with the world outside, facilitating in this way, the application of the acquired knowledge to new settings. This requires presenting new information in a clear, organized, and meaningful way to the learner’s interests and prior experiences, providing an opportunity to reflect on the relationships between the course material and their educational and professional objectives. In my courses, posing questions, solving problems, collaborating, and engaging in reflective dialogues are encouraged and at the center of learning. For each of my courses, I develop active learning instructional materials (case studies, citizen science projects, and hands-on science activities) which advance conceptual understanding and scientific reasoning, while increasing student’s appreciation of the relevance of the complex topics being taught, and promoting their engagement in the learning process. These approaches give students opportunities to develop and hone their understanding by working both individually and with others, which also promotes teamwork and collaborative skills, and emphasizes multidisciplinary and multicultural perspectives. I strongly support establishing clear learning goals and objectives, as well as formative and summative assessment items, which allows both instructor and learner to gauge instruction methodologies and student progress, respectively. I have witnessed how the alignment of the main course components–learning objectives, goals and outcomes, instructional strategies, and assessments– improves students’ understanding of what is expected, and provides a guideline for them to efficiently direct their learning efforts and monitor their own progress. I am committed to continuing to explore new opportunities to utilize and develop formative assessment tools that effectively provide information and constructive feedback during the instructional and learning process. Moreover, I am interested in developing accessible and adaptable training opportunities in plant pathology and microbiome research, including Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs), with the goal to increase undergraduate exposure to research, by democratizing access to students who would not otherwise be able to participate.