Pedagogy
Background
I take pride in my educational history at public elementary, secondary, and tertiary educational institutions. My approach to teaching is the product of dozens of public educators from whom I have learned pedagogy and so much more. As the result of many such privileges, a comprehensive and strong liberal-arts education has become both personally and professionally important to me. With all its faults, I stand by our educational system's ability to properly prepare our future global citizens, critical thinkers, and creative problem-solvers.
Teaching Philosophy
A Czech proverb nicely summarizes my general approach to language acquisition: “You live a new life for every language you speak; if you know only one language, you live only once.” Inside and outside of the classroom I endeavor to offer students another intellectual life by providing a learning process that is personally relevant and intellectually stimulating. The principles driving my pedagogy emphasize inclusion and belonging in a community of learning that facilitate achievement for the individual and group. In day-to-day practice, this attention on students’ full selves inspires me to celebrate all perspectives and achievement based on individuals' improvement on past performance rather than that of others. I view both language and cultural education as an informal but nonetheless highly important form of diplomacy between nations, and it is a privilege to speak about firsthand experiences with cultures outside of my own.
Interactive Materials for First-Year Russian, an Open Educational Resource
Members of UVA's Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures have created a set of natively digital resources for first-year university students in Russian-language courses. The other co-PI of the project is Anna Borovskaya-Ellis. The resources, including traditional textbook explanatory content as well as digitally internative exercises made with the H5P tool suite, are hosted on PressBooks and are currently being tested in UVA Russian-language classrooms. After a trial run, the resource will be available within the Open Educational Resource (OER) Commons network.
This work has been funded by UVA's Learning, Design, and Technology; Library; and Center for Russian, Eurasian, Eastern European, and Russian Studies.
More information about my OER work
Last modified: Mon Nov 27 2023