I teach because I love to share my passion for the natural world and its history. I have had the privilege to act as an instructor and mentor to high school, undergraduates, graduate students, and K-12 teachers. I have also been very fortunate to have the opportunity to share knowledge with community members from my Indigenous research partners, both in the laboratory and out on the landscape within their traditional territories.

I believe that generating enthusiasm for subject material forms the core of any pedagogical initiative aimed at helping learners accomplish their objectives. This decreases the need to obligate learners to complete tasks and facilitates a more flexible and enjoyable learning environment, promoting transfer of content beyond the classroom and into a wider context. With this dynamic and motivating approach, I am able to teach to various audiences about a wide range of geoscience content.

Promoting active learning in diverse ways is essential for motivating teachers and learners alike. Although recall of information is important scaffolding for higher-order learning, helping students actually apply the content they learn helps them retain more information and inspires students to become more passionate and involved with course material. Through this process, I have shown that students retain information in a more useable, contextual framework.

I always teach with a learner-centered approach, regardless of class size. I aim to avoid extended periods of ‘sage on the stage’ traditional lecturing and focus instead on facilitating group work/discussions or identify other learning pathways that benefit as many members of a diverse classroom as possible.

Delivering assignments and activities that promote diverse learning pathways, particularly peer-to-peer, also reduces classroom monotony and ensures that students are more active participants in the learning experience. These interactions can be catalysed by prompts, whether it be written assignments submitted by the students, oral presentations, group assignments, iClicker questions, or hands-on activities.

I also believe that such learning activities and experiences should not always be evaluated as ‘right or wrong’, but based on effort, participation, and the enthusiasm shown by the student. This is especially the case for the content I teach, where specialists are indeed still unsure of what is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. In such a framework, students are more likely to explore and experiment with the subject content than in situations where they expect strict evaluation. This approach encourages students to ‘take risks’ and test hypotheses and approaches to solving disciplinary challenges in a safe environment. Approaches that help foster such experimentation include having learners establish their own opinions and make judgements on the course material, synthesize information into a larger picture, create something they have not seen before using what they have learned, come to conclusions about what the data means and what data are relevant for making interpretations, and using the information provided to predict the outcomes of scenarios or events. This is not to suggest that all evaluation should be conducted in this manner; rather this is an opportunity to allow students to demonstrate what they can do with data sets and information. However, I believe that a successful classroom environment exhibits a blend of the two approaches, both graded and evaluated for participation only, to create a more dynamic and exploratory learning experience.

Similar non-evaluated learning activities and experiences also function as pre- and post-assessments and can be delivered in both anonymous and group settings. These activities, especially if they are ‘low stakes’ as described above, allow me to evaluate if my learners have truly met the learning objectives I have given them for the lesson or not. To further evaluate the effectiveness of my teaching style and content delivery, I try to solicit as much verbal and written feedback as possible from my learners. I find this type of feedback most useful for increasing student engagement and thus success, and it allows me to adapt and cater my lessons to the needs of my learners when necessary.

I am also keen to make people aware of my research (geoscience techniques applied to archaeological challenges and Indigenous rights and title) that forms an interface between geology and archeology. This involves teaching about who we are, where we come from, and what it might mean to be human within the vastness of the natural world. More specifically, in this context, I specialize in communicating the ways we can access information from the belongings, artifacts, and animal/human remains we discover in the archaeological record and the contexts they are found within. This requires providing a portal through which my learners can interface with aspects of geology, chemistry, anthropology/archaeology, and Indigenous research preferably from a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary perspective.

We live in a beautiful world, full of all kinds of fascinating phenomena that cannot be fully explored or understood through memorization and regurgitation alone. My primary objective as a teacher is to inspire students to not only learn about what we know of the world around us but to fall in love with it and continue exploring beyond their interactions with me.