Teaching and Mentoring Philosophy

In teaching and mentoring, I emphasize interpersonal student-teacher, and peer relationships. This mentorship-centered learning allows me to work directly with students through a dialogical process. Whether as a mentee or in class sections, I assess students’ interests, strengths, and apprehensions. I attend, not just to immediate issues arising from a certain research project, paper, or exam, but to the future of the student as a person.

Through goal-oriented learning I de-emphasize what can unfortunately be the monotony of university coursework schedules. Therefore, a strong component of my courses and mentoring is for students to present their work as intellectual products, accentuating authorship. This has taken various forms, ranging from research posters presented to an audience of peers, to rigorous essays and articles that have been submitted to peer-reviewed journals. For example, in 2022, one of my students, Ege Onal, published his first article in the peer-reviewed journal McGill Journal of Medicine, based on his interests in medical sociology and psychology (a profile on Ege and the mentorship experience can be viewed here). In so doing, I find students become ambitious without giving primacy to metrics. Additionally, this helps students interface with peers, gain a sense of what academic or professional life may look like, and begin finding their own voice.