Education & Literacy

Most people are never explicitly taught how information works. They are expected to absorb it, trust it, and navigate systems built on assumptions nobody bothered to explain. That is not an accident. It is a design choice, and it is one I have spent my career pushing back against.

I teach people to think critically with information: to ask not just what a system says, but what it assumes, what it buries, and whose interests it quietly protects. That has happened in university classrooms, digital humanities workshops, and public-facing contexts. The venue changes. The question doesn’t.

Nobody Taught You This. That's the Point: Education Focus & Approach

The problem is not that people lack access to information. The problem is that nobody taught them what to do with it.

Across formal teaching, public workshops, and community contexts, my approach is the same: help people develop the analytical tools to work with information rather than simply absorb it. That means teaching people to identify arguments, evaluate evidence, recognize how knowledge gets produced and legitimized, and ask whose interests a given system quietly serves.

The emphasis is always on reasoning over recall, synthesis over surface familiarity, and ethical judgment over procedural compliance. These are not academic skills. They are survival skills for anyone navigating institutions, technologies, and information systems that were not designed with their interests in mind.

If They Can Explain Their Reasoning, Then They're Learning: Education Design

The real test of a learning experience is not whether people can repeat information back. It is whether they can do something with it when the context changes.

That principle shapes how I design every educational engagement, whether that engagement is a semester-long course, a single workshop, or a public seminar. The goal is never rote familiarity. It is the ability to evaluate, contextualize, and apply: to take an idea out of the room where you learned it and use it somewhere that actually matters.

In practice, this means structuring sessions around problems rather than content delivery, rewarding interpretation over memorization, and building in space for people to test their reasoning rather than just receive conclusions. Access to information is not the bottleneck anymore. Knowing what to do with it is.

Accessibility Is Not an Accommodation; It's a Design Principle: Accessibility & Inclusive Design

Accessibility is not something you bolt on at the end because someone asked for it. It is a design decision you make at the beginning, and one that invariably makes the experience better for everyone, not just the people it was nominally built for.

Every educational context I design is built around multiple modes of engagement from the outset. Verbal participation is one option, not the default. Written reflection, applied tasks, and structured discussion are equally valid ways of demonstrating understanding, because meaningful engagement does not look the same for everyone, and pretending otherwise does not raise the bar. It just changes who can clear it.

The goal is not to lower standards. It is to ensure that standards measure what they claim to measure: understanding, preparation, and the ability to think critically with complex material.

What I've Taught & How I've Taught It: Teaching Experience (Selected)

I have served as instructor of record for undergraduate courses that use historical and cultural materials to develop critical information skills, including media analysis, argumentation, and ethical reasoning. These include courses on historical representation, gender and power, and the social construction of authority.

In addition, I have extensive experience leading seminars and assessing coursework across interdisciplinary offerings, as well as working as a Graduate Writing Instructor supporting students with research design, argumentation, and academic writing across disciplines.

I have also taught and led digital humanities workshops and seminars through DH@Guelph, focusing on computational approaches to text analysis, the ethical use of digital methods, and critical AI literacy and pedagogy. These sessions emphasized methodological reflexivity, helping students and participants understand not only how to use digital tools, but how to interrogate their assumptions, limitations, and consequences.

Where This Is Going: Education & Literacy Work

The questions I am most interested in are not confined to any single venue. How do ethical categories like harm, risk, and fairness get defined — and by whom? How do those definitions move from language into policy, and from policy into the systems that govern people’s lives? How do people learn to recognize that process well enough to push back on it?

These are questions for classrooms, yes. But they are equally questions for public workshops, community organizations, civic technology spaces, and anyone trying to navigate a world increasingly shaped by systems they were never invited to understand.

That is where my education and literacy work is headed: toward the people who need these tools most and are least likely to encounter them in formal academic settings. Good teaching, like good governance, makes its assumptions visible and its stakes clear.