My Teaching Philosophy

In the classroom, I strive to achieve several things. I work to create a climate in which students can grow intellectually without feeling intimidated. I encourage dialogue and debate, making sure I do not let students fall through the cracks, both those students who are behind and those who need more challenges. I believe this type of classroom climate enables students to be more engaged in the material and the learning experience. Furthermore, it is my mission to help students develop their historical imagination and analytical skills to understand the past, and to connect, compare, and draw meaningful parallels between past and present. I encourage my students to think outside the box, be critical of sources, compare different perspectives, check facts, and use information critically. Most of all, I want them to be critical of everyday assumptions and public discourses and leave my class with more questions than answers.

Teaching a diverse classroom during a pandemic has shaped my teaching philosophy in more ways than I anticipated. While the COVID-19-necessitated switch to remote learning was difficult for students across the board, it has been especially trying for my students at KCC, many of whom are low income. Prior to the pandemic, students’ needs were largely accommodated through extensive services provided by the college. For example, students who lack resources such as reliable internet and personal computers were able to use computer rooms in our library. Without these services, however, it was primarily up to professors like me to meet their needs.

I completed the Online Teaching Essentials (OTE) workshop at the City University of New York (CUNY) in 2020 and based on the knowledge I gained during this workshop, I designed inclusive online lesson plans tailored to my students’ circumstances. I opted for an asynchronous approach and used tools such as online journals, blogs, and discussion boards to create an online student community. These tools, which are easily accessible from smartphones, give students a space where they can have private conversations with me, interact with their peers, ask questions about the materials, share concerns, and submit assignments.

While COVID remains a lurking concern, much of school life has returned to pre-pandemic normal and I am now teaching hybrid, remote, and in-person classes. While extremely challenging, teaching during COVID has made me a better and more versatile educator. I am more aware of students’ needs and feel better equipped to accommodate these needs. I’ve also learned to use Blackboard to its fullest potential to create an engaging educational online environment.  

However, excellent online teaching is not just based on the ability to navigate Blackboard or create power points with audio or video lectures, it is also based on decision-making—how teachers decide to respond to and engage with students, select curriculum materials, organize learning, and use communication strategies. All this holds true in both in physical and virtual spaces.

Kingsborough is one of the most diverse community colleges in the United States and students have shown a lack of understanding of each other’s culture, customs, and histories. It is my job as an educator to instill mutual respect and acceptance. That’s why my courses include the diverse experiences and perspectives of people of color and other minorities and marginalized people. You cannot understand our country’s history without addressing race, ethnicity, and ability but also class, religion, gender, and sexuality.

Similarly, in my history of the Holocaust class, I’ve designed assignments that intend to bring together students from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds and discuss antisemitism and racism (but also the Nazi persecution of members of the LGBTQ+ community and those deemed disabled) to understand how prejudice and hate speech can contribute to violence, mass persecution, and genocide in Germany, the United States and beyond. My exhibit Within and Beyond Exclusionary Communities – White Supremacy and Racism in the United States shines a light on neo-Nazi groups and KKK Klaverns in the United States and hopes to galvanize Jewish students and students of color to recognize and fight racism and antisemitism.

Aside from ethnically and racially diverse, my students are also neurodiverse. Community colleges serve a much larger percentage of students with special needs than four-year colleges and this was something I had to get used to. Designing courses that appeal to students with learning disabilities, students who are delayed, and students who excel and will go on to four-year colleges is no easy task. Presenting information in multiple ways and incorporating different learning styles, I’ve created multilayered assignments that challenge all students regardless of their abilities. I also search for texts that are written in accessible language yet deal with complex ideas. A non-native English speaker myself, I have a trained eye for finding such sources. Furthermore, I always make my lecture slides (with embedded audio) and transcripts available online.

I also promote inclusion in other ways. Instead of waiting for midterm and final exam results, my students engage in biweekly discussion assignments that relate to the weekly materials (lectures, popular and academic texts, artworks, podcasts, images, and documentaries) and test students’ understanding of these materials and encourage critical thinking and collaborative learning. Biweekly deadlines help them navigate their study load and reduce anxiety associated with work piling up at the end of a semester. Regardless of the course’s modality, we always use the online discussion forum for these assignments as I’ve noticed that this approach allows all voices to be heard, not just the loudest. In my in-person classes, we discuss students’ contributions on the forum, and students tend to feel more comfortable speaking their minds if they’ve had the opportunity to collect their thoughts and write down their opinions beforehand. I lived in the Netherlands until I was in my mid-twenties, and I know from experience that it takes non-native English speakers a little longer to phrase their thoughts. The same is true for students with learning disabilities and mental health issues such as anxiety. This ‘hybrid’ approach is therefore more inclusive and accommodates the needs and abilities of all learners.

I am an oral historian and share my passion for this method with my students and, aside from lectures about the value of life history, my courses usually have an oral history component. For example, students in my History of New York City course conduct a structured interview with an older New Yorker of a different generation who grew up in their neighborhood. Students compare their experiences to their respondent’s, to map change and continuity in their community. They focus on themes including housing and public space, community life and activism, education and job opportunities, crime, and law enforcement, etc. In this scaffolded writing assignment, students do research and locate credible sources, compile a list of interview questions, conduct and record a 45-to-60-minute interview, and write a biographical essay based on all the collected materials. This assignment equips students with practical skills—i.e., holding a conversation and asking pertinent follow-up questions—that assist them in obtaining employment, finding secure housing, and pursuing further education. It also encourages students to analyze issues that affect their own lives and communities and empowers them to understand that their voice and their personal experiences are important.

To me, history and writing are intertwined, as all historians are first and foremost storytellers. However, writing essays and research papers can be a very daunting task for many students. I noticed the following issues when I first started teaching undergraduate students and mentoring graduate students at the University of Sussex; verbose writing, incompetent sentences, difficulty with research, difficulty with synthesizing a range of information, vagueness, and a lack of overall structure. Aside from these issues, students at Kingsborough also struggle with basic grammar, spelling, and capitalization. As writing is an important component of all my courses, I closely guide my students through their writing assignments. They write prospectuses/abstracts, first drafts, and final drafts, all of which are graded and provided feedback on. When it comes to writing instructions, I’ve learned a lot from the Writing Across the Curriculum Program at CUNY which I completed in 2020. Since becoming certified, I’ve designed and taught several writing-intensive sections of courses within my discipline. In these writing-intensive courses, students engage with informal writing assignments—such as blog posts, journal entries, and discussion board assignments—as well as formal writing assignments, including opinion essays, documentary/book reviews, historical fiction essays, art analyses, biographies, and research papers.  

As someone who specializes in working-class history, teaching at a community college has been incredibly useful. My students have taught me a great deal by confiding in me, providing feedback during lectures and discussions, and by writing powerful essays based on their own experiences. For this reason, teaching has improved my research and writing, as I review and present topics in different ways, with broad perspectives, and to new audiences.