Teaching

This year at NYU I am teaching two undergraduate philosophy courses: The Nature of Values, and Life and Death.
Current students should see the course website for up-to-date materials.

I have a special interest in ethics pedagogy, especially for STEM students. During graduate school, I was an Ethics Pedagogy Fellow at Harvard's Edmund & Lily Safra Center for Ethics, a SERC Scholar at MIT, a co-director of the Experiential Ethics course at MIT, and a graduate teaching fellow for the Embedded EthiCS program at Harvard.

Ethics Pedagogy Fellowship:

Harvard's Safra Center brings together academics from a variety of disciplines to work on research and teaching initiatives related to ethics, civics, and democracy. The Ethics Pedagogy Fellowship Program is for graduate students who want to examine and advance how ethics is taught within colleges and universities.

As an Ethics Pedagogy Fellow, I collaborated with a small research team to develop a framework for conceptualizing the goals of ethics education. The framework serves multiple functions: to help university leaders and administrators evaluate and design ethics curricula, to guide educators in devising courses and other pedagogical initiatives, and to structure debates about the proper role of universities in influencing students' values. In addition, I worked with Christopher Robichaud on a new general education course in character development.

Embedded EthiCS:

Embedded EthiCS is a collaboration between philosophers and computer scientists that integrates ethics education directly into the computer science curriculum. As a graduate teaching fellow, I designed and taught ethics “modules," or self-contained class sessions, for six computer science courses at Harvard. These modules were tailored to the specific technical content covered in each course. Write-ups are linked below:

Algorithmic (Un)Fairness (for CS 109A, an introductory data science course taught by Pavlos Protopapas and Natesh Pillai)
Data Privacy (for CS 165, an undergraduate data systems course taught by Stratos Idreos)
The Ethics of Hacking Back (for CS 263, a graduate course in systems security taught by James Mickens)
Differential Privacy in Context (for CS 208, a graduate course in applied privacy for data science taught by Salil Vadhan)
- Slides are available on the course website here; activity worksheet is available here
Justice in Design (for CS 179, an upper-level undergraduate course in human-computer interaction taught by Krzysztof Gajos)
Ethical Tradeoffs in Systems Design: A Look at Cost-Benefit Analysis (for CS 161, an upper-level operating systems course taught by James Mickens)

SERC Scholar Program:

The Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing group (SERC) is housed within MIT's Schwarzman College of Computing. With branches in teaching, research, and policy, SERC's mission is to instill ethically sound habits of thought and action, and to encourage the development of socially valuable technology.

As a graduate student scholar, I served on a faculty action group, whose purpose was to craft original course content (e.g., readings, lesson plans, activities, and assignments). I worked with professors Bradford Skow (philosophy) and Manish Raghavan (computer science, business) to create teaching materials on free speech and content moderation. Our materials are currently being pilot-tested with MIT undergraduate students and will be available soon.

Experiential Ethics:

Experiential Ethics is a 10-week course that introduces MIT undergraduates to the social and ethical implications of science and technology. The course is designed to be taken alongside summer experiential learning activities, such as research, internships, and service programs. Our students engage in weekly small-group discussions facilitated by graduate teaching fellows and develop a substantial project examining an ethical issue related to their research or work.

During the first iteration of Experiential Ethics in 2020, I served as a teaching fellow for two discussion groups. During the second, I was Assistant Director, and last year, I co-directed the program (with Marion Boulicault). In these roles, I recruited students from across MIT, hired and trained a team of interdisciplinary teaching fellows, designed lesson plans, ran course evaluations, and hosted virtual and on-campus events. In order to train our teaching fellows, most of whom have not taught ethics previously, I articulated the course’s teaching philosophy and pedagogical mission, which sees ethics as a set of skills (including habits of thought, concepts, and decision frameworks) rather than as a specialized body of knowledge to be applied.

Other Teaching Experience

Teaching Assistantships at MIT:

Moral Problems (for Sam Berstler)
Philosophy of Religion (for Jack Spencer)
Ethics of Technology (for Kevin Mills)

Guest lecture: "The Learning Healthcare System"

Minds and Machines (for EJ Green)

Guest lecture: "The Extended Mind"

Introduction to Political Philosophy (for Bernardo Zacka)
Problems of Philosophy (for Miriam Schoenfield)

Guest lecture: "The Non-Identity Problem"

Other Training:

I earned a Kaufman Teaching Certificate from the MIT Teaching + Learning Lab in 2021.