Teaching

Past and future seminars facilitated for the following modules:

• Understanding Politics
  ‘This is an introductory course designed to familiarise students with a broad spectrum of theories, approaches and issues related to the concept of power and contemporary political ideas. The aim is to provide students with a solid foundation of key skills and knowledge upon which they can build their own perspectives on a number of themes and issues which they are likely to encounter over the course of their degree programme. The course is divided into two main parts – the first part looks at different conceptions of politics and power, whilst the second half of the course examines a number of contemporary ideas and political issues’.
• Pathways to Research I (academic skills)
  Through this module, students ‘develop a range of skills that are valued in academia and by employers, such as engaging in productive group work, reviewing and critically evaluating literature, referencing, producing a bibliography, presenting, debating, identifying problems and creating solutions, and conducting a research project’.
• Pathways to Research II (research methods)
  Through this module, students ‘learn about the process of political research, and how academic research advances political knowledge. [Students] examine key theoretical and methodological debates in social science, explore and evaluate different approaches and methods, try out (elements of) these approaches and methods, examine different kinds of data or evidence, and design [their] own research proposal’.
• Political Theory
  ‘Political theory tackles the fundamental questions that underlie our political systems. It examines concepts like freedom, equality, rights, and social justice and looks at how these and other concepts have been framed, and what this means for how real world politics should be understood. This module introduces [students] to political theory through considering these and other key concepts and ideas. [Students] explore different ways in which they have been framed. [Students] use them to examine [their] own understandings of real-world challenges. [Students should] finish the course ready to look more deeply into political questions and with new conceptual tools to help [them] in [their] studies of Politics’.

I have also worked as an Academic Skills Advisor and held dozens of one-to-one appointments with undergraduate and postgraduate students on academic and research skills.

In July 2022, I became an Associate Fellow to the Higher Education Academy, and over previous years, I completed all the modules that the University’s Higher Education Futures Institute offered.

My approach to teaching is inspired by the work and praxis of bell hooks, Paulo Freire, Jacques Rancière, and Stephen Brookes.