Below are some resources for my teaching.

Recent Achievements

Below are some recent achievements and activities in the area of teaching.

• I worked with colleagues to bring the Bioethics MS program from the UTRGV Medical School into our Department of Philosophy. This included redesigning the entire degree program and writing or rewriting many courses.
• I interviewed food studies scholars for the class Philosophy 4318: Philosophy of Food, and have now turned these interviews into an ongoing podcast on food studies, “Thought About Food”, as an Open Educational Resource for my students and others learning about food studies. Learn more at https://thoughtaboutfood.podbean.com/
• I had students in the class Philosophy 4318: Philosophy of Food create videos about the personal meaning food has for them, and have now turned these presentations into an ongoing YouTube series as an Open Educational Resource for my students and others learning about food studies (this OER only features presentations of students who agreed to share their work publicly). Learn more at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBGveu4rqupfTVRViQPpGTPsIoRz3_ogj
• I created an international academic workshop on emerging technology in conjunction with the online Philosophy 4302: Special Topics in Applied Ethics: Digital Worlds class. Students were able to read works-in-progress by scholars working on these topics, and then attend the workshop to see how professional scholars debate and help one-another develop these papers. Students were also encouraged to participate, and many of them did. That workshop is now an annual event, and this semester I am going to incorporate it into the online Philosophy 2326: Ethics, Technology, and Society class. Learn more at https://digitalworldsworkshop.wordpress.com/
• I invited several workshop participants from the Digital Worlds conference to virtually guest-lecture my online Philosophy 4302: Special Topics in Applied Ethics: Digital Worlds class. They explained their papers in more detail in a recorded conversation with me (because the course is asynchronous), and then conversed with students through the discussion board and email.
• I received and completed a grant to create, implement, and assess Open Educational Resources for online classes, the “Affordable Textbook Adoption Grant,” Sponsored by University of Texas Rio Grande Valley Library. The Open Educational Resources I identified and created for Philosophy 2326: Ethics, Technology, and Society are now used by many of my colleagues in their own versions of the course.
• I co-created and taught with my colleague Dr. Capdevila Werning a brown bag seminar on “Strategies for Active Online Teaching” to teach and collaboratively discuss how to make online classes more engaging and participatory for students using the medium of online instruction rather than fighting against it.
• I created and taught a seminar on collaborative annotations entitled “Collaborative Annotations: Developing Students’ Critical Reading, Thinking, Writing, and Teamwork Skills” for UTRGV faculty through the Center for Teaching Excellence, focusing on how to use collaborative annotation programs (e.g. Perusall, but others as well) to turn the course into a shared learning space engaging with a text, particularly for online classes.
• I have taken and am continuing to take many professional development courses to grow as a teacher. In those webinars I have received several certifications, including emergency certification to teach and create online classes, and then formal certification in independently applying the Quality Matters (QM) rubric.
• I “Blueprinted” my Philosophy 2326 class to be used as a template for other instructors.
• I am mentoring incoming adjunct and lecture faculty in how to create classes for UTRGV.

Reports

A sample of letters of recommendation and review for teaching I have received from faculty and former students (students were only asked to write letters after they had graduated were no longer going to take any philosophy classes). More letters are available upon request.

During the pandemic I adapted my courses to teach online. I used that emergency as an opportunity to redesign my classes to maximize the unique benefits of the online medium and mitigate the unique problems. I created Open Educational Resources that are available to other teachers, I got certified in various online course design programs, and more. This short document highlights some of the things I did and their outcomes.

Courses

Email me for syllabi for any of these courses

• Graduate Courses in Bioethics As part of bringing the MS in Bioethics from the UTRGV Medical School into our Department of Philosophy, I have created and taught a number of courses, including “Human Rights, Justice, and Health”, “Philosophical and Theoretical Thought in Bioethics”, “Environmental Ethics”, “Narrative Bioethics”, and “Methods of Inquiry in Bioethics”.
• Philosophy of Food I created a Philosophy of Food course which is now ongoing and in addition to being a philosophy course is also part of the Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems major. The course engages a variety of philosophical areas and how they pertain to food, including aesthetics, ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics.
• Applied Ethics in Digital Worlds I created an experimental Applied Ethics course looking at ethics issues in emerging Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality/Mixed Reality technologies. The course was tied to a conference I organized as part of the Digital Worlds Workshop. Students read background readings on philosophy of technology and ethics, and then read works in progress by scholars currently working on this nascent area of philosophy. This culminated in them attending a virtual conference on the topic, where they could see how philosophers work to challenge and help one-another on developing a paper. Because they had read the papers beforehand, they were also in a good position to provide feedback. This was quite popular, and I am looking into ways to make the course permanent.
• Self, Society, and Technology I worked with colleagues in Philosophy and the College of Engineering to develop a class which satisfied the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology’s requirements for humanities and ethics education for engineering students. This has become quite a popular course for engineering majors, philosophy majors, and other students interested in technology. I have designed several versions of the course which other professors can teach, including an online course and a service-learning based course in addition to a traditional version. I have mentored new instructors as they teach this course, and have worked with colleagues to develop a learning assessment to track what the students learn in the course. That feedback has led to multiple iterations as we improve the class.
• Medical Ethics I created a course on Medical Ethics which is now taught regularly and will be a central part of a degree specialization in Philosophy and Bioethics which I am currently working with colleagues to develop. The course uses the unique tools in philosophy to look at ethics in medicine, including common Bioethics issues, Professional Ethics issues for various medical professions, and Social and Political Philosophy issues about healthcare.
• Medical Humanities Capstone In my role as the Director of the Medical Humanities program at UTRGV, I created an ongoing course in medical humanities. the course uses an interdisciplinary approach to develop an understanding of the cultural, economic, gender, and historical factors that influence health and healing.
• Introduction to Environmental Studies as a faculty affiliate of the Environmental Studies program at UTRGV, I have designed my own philosophy-based version of this course. I am quite proud of the ways the course incorporated the local environment, place-based education with multiple field trips, and service learning components as we looked at environmental philosophy, environmental justice, and insights into these questions from other disciplines.
• Philosophy for Children I created an experimental course on the topic of Philosophy for Children. Students learned about the current and ongoing discourse about teaching philosophy to children, and then designed a philosophy lesson which they delivered to students in various places in the Valley (high schools, elementary schools, after-school programs, and libraries).
• Philosophy of Education I created an experimental course on the topic of Philosophy of Education. Students engaged in critical discussions about the purpose of education, the purpose of various pedagogical tools (grades, tests, etc.), and other philosophical topics in the area. This was a very popular course for both philosophy majors and education majors, and I may develop it into a standing course in the future.
• Women, Food, and the Environment While a graduate student, worked with Dr. Lisa Schwartzman to develop a course looking at the ways issues in food justice and environmental justice play out through gender-based oppression and margianlization.

Programs

• Masters Degree in Bioethics As mentioned above, I worked with colleagues to bring the Bioethics MA program from the UTRGV Medical School into our Department of Philosophy. This included redesigning the entire degree program and writing or rewriting many courses.
• Medical Humanities Minor As Director of the Medical Humanities Minor, I extensively revised graduation requirements and designed a new course (described above). The program has placed many students in medical school and other medical professions, and has been so successful that it is now being expanded into a major.
• Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems I served on the committee to create a new major, minor, and MA program is SAFS. These programs use interdisciplinary tools to help students who want to work in the food system in a number of different capacities: in farming, distribution, regulation, nutrition, and more. This has become a successful program with high enrollment, and I am particularly proud that it incorporates grounded experience on farms with abstract courses on philosophy and other humanities fields.
• Online Certification Program in Environmental Justice While a graduate student, I worked with faculty and fellow graduate students to develop an online program for graduate students in other universities, practitioners, and activists who wanted to learn more about environmental justice and how it applied to their work.