Overview of the Certificate in College Teaching
The Certificate in College Teaching at Michigan State University is an opportunity to develop one's university teaching skills through coursework, workshops, and a mentored teaching project. The final eportfolio consolidates evidence of the above teaching experiences and skill development. Consider using the buttons below to jump across the four elements of the Certificate and their associated core competencies.
Part 1: Coursework
Core Competency 1: Developing Discipline-Related Teaching Strategies
In teaching sociology, instructors work to foster C. Wright Mills' concept of the sociological imagination in their students, wherein individuals see and understand the connections between the self and wider social forces. Thus, the core challenge in this endeavor is combatting the United States' culture of individualism and meritocracy. Teaching strategies that are common in sociology courses to enable this practice are crafting social research projects, investigating case studies, and applying sociological theories and concepts to popular culture and media.
Description
EAD 866: Teaching in Postsecondary Education supports students in becoming more reflective and effective teachers in postsecondary education contexts. Topics addressed in the course include the philosophy of teaching, the learning process and environment, instructional design and planning, active learning strategies, and techniques of assessment. This course was unique in that it offered a global approach to teaching and learning through the incorporation of Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) methodology and usage of the Beliefs, Events, and Values Inventory (BEVI) with students at International Christian University in Tokyo, Japan. This interaction of teachers and students abroad through a mixed learning environment emphasized multicultural online learning and collaboration. COIL, as a learner-centered method, focused on experiential learning and collaborative participation among us, while celebrating cross-cultural engagement and promoting intercultural understanding of different postsecondary teaching contexts.
Artifacts and Rationale
Five artifacts from this course include the syllabus, course schedule, Scholarly Identity Snapshot assignments, and my group's final COIL research paper. The syllabus for the course includes the course's purpose, objectives, structure, and methods of assessment. The course schedule provides a detailed outline of weekly topics, readings, and assignments. The pre- and post-course Scholarly Identity Snapshots offered the opportunity for students to reflect on their pedagogical values and research trajectories. The first short essay was used to create diverse student groups for the COIL projects. The final Scholarly Identity Snapshot captures the ways in which students in the course altered their scholarly identity, beliefs, commitments, or values throughout the semester. Finally, as a result of the course's incorporation of COIL methodology and the BEVI, students in the course completed a research project that included scholarship in teaching and learning from both the United States and Japan. I chose to include these artifacts as they broadly encompass the overall course goal in fostering successful teachers who integrate reflection as part of their teaching practice.
Interpretation and Reflection
I chose to enroll in this course as, beyond time spent in the New Graduate Teaching Assistant Institute each fall, I had no prior formal teaching training. I did have some experience with being an Undergraduate Learning Assistant (ULA) for a few courses at Michigan State University during my undergraduate years though my leadership was limited to weekly course review sessions which regularly saw low attendance from my peers. Most of the time it was up to me to determine effective teaching strategies for Sociology (SOC) and Integrative Social Science (ISS) courses.
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The course design of EAD 866: Teaching in Postsecondary Education incorporated a variety of perspectives on teaching adults, which includes emerging adults of the "traditional" college-going age (18-25) and older adults (25+) who may be attending college for the first time or returning to finish a degree. I found the addition of teaching older adults, who tend to juggle more responsibilities outside of courses and be more self-directed in their learning, helpful as I am considering teaching at a community college level in the future. Well known in college access literature is that because community colleges are more affordable and flexible in their course schedules, they tend to serve larger numbers of older adults.
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One teaching strategy that EAD 866 focused on was backwards design. Backwards design in postsecondary education is a method of course creation where instructors consider the learning outcomes at the end of the course before choosing content materials and methods of assessment. I found the attention in EAD 866 to the strategy of backwards design particularly useful as it's easy for me to get bogged down with the minute details - which reading will I reference this week? when will the midterm occur? - which can easily distract from focusing on the larger purpose of the course.
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The Scholarly Identity Snapshots, one completed at the beginning of the course ("Initial") and the other at the end ("Final") allowed me to longitudinally track the change in my beliefs, attitudes, and values around teaching and learning. Quite a bit of my teaching philosophy is drawn from my own sociological imagination that I continue to develop, where that "aha!" moment is priceless. As I wrote in my "Final" Scholarly Identity Snapshot, my foundational beliefs continue to ring true, while the practical teaching skills are much more refined thanks to the time spent in EAD 866.
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A unique element of EAD 866 was the inclusion of COIL, where groups of MSU and ICU students in the course worked together on a research-teaching project. My group's project linked participation methods to learner-centered teaching (LCT) and culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP). Additionally, our project includes the technology acceptance model (TAM) to suggest that technology can facilitate participation to achieve better learning outcomes during emergency remote teaching as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic during Fall 2020. While the COVID-19 pandemic has eased up when it comes to its effects on postsecondary teaching, the lessons learned regarding the incorporation of active learning and participation methods in my teaching methods has remained.
Part 2: Foundations for Professional Development
Core Competency 2: Creating Effective Learning Environments
Description
The workshop on November 6th, 2023 called “Equitable and Culturally Responsive Teaching Practices” led by Dr. Kirstin Parkin offered a detailed framework for recognizing and implementing equity-focused instructional strategies. We examined how culturally responsive teaching requires intentionality, from incorporating diverse perspectives in curriculum design to respecting students’ communication styles and cultural knowledge bases. The session emphasized actional practices, including using introductory surveys to understand student backgrounds, creating inclusive syllabi, designing assessments with transparency and flexibility, and reflecting on our own positionality as educators .We also explored how traditional grading practices can perpetuate bias and discussed more equitable alternatives. This workshop challenged participants to shift from static notions of inclusion to more dynamic, responsive teaching that centers student agency and structural awareness.
Artifact and Rationale
The attached artifact, an expansion upon the workshop’s Introductory Survey example, demonstrates my ability to design classroom environments where students feel seen, respected, and supported. The workshop emphasized the value of starting the semester with meaningful opportunities for students to share their identities, needs, and prior learning experiences. Instead of beginning with rules or rigid expectations, this tool invites students to shape the tone and structure of the course alongside me.
Interpretation and Reflection
Each question is designed with intentionality. Asking about names and pronunciation signals care and attention from the start. Inviting students to share something unique about themselves fosters connection and helps me understand who they are beyond students in my classroom. Questions about past learning experiences and current responsibilities allow me to anticipate barriers and respond proactively with flexibility.
What this artifact demonstrates is more than thoughtful course preparation as it reflects my pedagogical stance that learning environments should be relational and adaptive. The classroom isn’t a blank slate as it is shaped by who’s in it, what they carry, and how power flows. This survey helps me begin that process of relationship-building with structure, humility, and care, all core skills I rely on to create equitable and effective learning spaces.
Core Competency 3: Incorporating Technology in your Teaching
Description
The workshop on April 15th, 2025 called “Navigating GenAI as a Graduate Student Instructor” provided timely insight into the evolving role of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in college settings. As AI tools like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Google Gemini increasingly shape academic work, the session highlighted a key challenge for future faculty: creating clear, pedagogically aligned policies that guide ethical and effective AI use in the classroom. The workshop emphasized that instructors must balance transparency, fairness, and flexibility. These skills not only require policy literacy but also critical engagement with the affordances and limitations of GenAI tools.
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​Through case studies, a policy drafting exercise, and strategy discussion, we explored how to align GenAI policies with learning objectives, scaffold ethical use through discussion and reflection, and respond thoughtfully to unanticipated uses. This competency involves more than just rule-making, however, it requires a nuanced understanding of how students learn, and why they may rely on GenAI. As instructors, we must also model reflective engagement, helping students evaluate when and how these tools add value versus when they interfere with learning goals. In doing so we support both academic integrity and digital agency.
Artifact and Rationale
This artifact, a GenAI Course Policy I expanded on for my own course use as guided by workshop points, demonstrates my competency in ethical course design, digital pedagogy, and thoughtful incorporation of emerging technologies in postsecondary teaching. I created it in response to a key challenge facing educators today: how to navigate GenAI in ways that are responsible and pedagogically sound. The process required careful reading of institutional guidance, reflection on my own course goals, and consideration of how students might encounter or misuse these tools.
Interpretation and Reflection
Rather than issuing rigid rules or offering unchecked freedom, I expanded on MSU’s GenAI policy that is clear and invites conversation. It clarifies when and how GenAI can support learning, such as in brainstorming, revision, and self-assessment, but draws clear lines around authorship, assessment, and data privacy. The goal isn’t just to regulate use but to model critical, mature engagement.
This artifact also reflects my commitment to using technology in service of deeper learning. I’m not just allowing GenAI, I’m teaching students how to interact with it thoughtfully with an awareness of its limits and biases. That practice is a skill I see as essential for effective postsecondary teaching now and in the future.
Core Competency 4: Understanding the University Context
Description
The workshop held during the 2021 Certificate in College Teaching Institute titled “Understanding the University Context: Aligning Teaching with Different Institutional Types & Missions” helped me identify a central challenge for faculty: navigating the implicit expectations that different institutions carry around teaching. As discussed in the session, aligning ones’ teaching practices and materials with institutional statements is not just about including them in a syllabus, it’s a skill that requires institutiona literacy, strategic reflection, and adaptability. This workshop clarifies that these shape hiring, onboarding, and classroom norms, and thus should inform how we craft syllabi, write teaching philosophies, and engage with students. Developing this competency means learning how to read institutional cultures critically, how to show that one’s pedagogical values align with them, and reflect on the power structures that inform both.
Artifact and Rationale
This artifact, a reflection worksheet from the 2021 Certificate in College Teaching three-day workshop, represents my engagement with contextualizing my teaching practices within the. Broader institutional environment. It demonstrates a growing ability to reflect critically on how my teaching aligns with institutional values, missions, and types. This is an essential skill for both navigating the academic job market and my ongoing professional growth as an educator.
The worksheet captures three competencies I’m developing. First, it captures my awareness that teaching is never an isolated act, but something shaped by institutional context. The workshop emphasized how understanding an institution’s mission can hone both pedagogical design and self-presentation in academic job materials. Second, the artifact highlights an area of ongoing growth: integrating my research and teaching in writing. I’m confident that these two areas inform each other in practice, but articulating that connection for a variety of audiences is still challenging for me. Recognizing this gap is a competency in and of itself, one that pushes me to seek models, mentorship, and writing strategies that will allow me to express the interdisciplinarity of my work more effectively.
Interpretation and Reflection
Understanding how to align my teaching with institutional context is a competency that resonates deeply with my sociological approach to higher education. Institutions are never neutral, they are structured by histories, values, and ideologies that shape what kinds of knowledge are legitimized, which pedagogies are rewarded, and how students experience learning. To teach effectively on college campuses requires not only disciplinary knowledge and teaching skill, but an ability to read the institutional landscape and reflect on one’s position within it.
This workshop offered a space to consider how macro-level structures (public institutional ideologies) shape the micro-level practices of the classroom and lecture hall. It emphasized that teaching is context-sensitive, not only in terms of disciplinary matter or student populations, but in relation to broader institutional narratives. I began to see my teaching statements and materials not just as personal declarations, but as sociological documents. They both reflect and perform alignment with institutional norms, both explicitly and implicitly.
Through this lens, I recognized that my teaching already embodies many institutional Spartan values, advancing knowledge, accountability, and collaboration, but I hadn’t named them yet. This absence is itself telling. As a sociologist, I know that the ability to navigate institutions is not evenly distributed. Learning to articulate this alignment between my teaching and MSU’s values is not just a strategic move for my upcoming applications, but a form of institutional literacy.
Since this workshop, I’ve brought this structural awareness into my teaching and professional materials. I’ve made space for students across my courses to reflect on the institutional forces that shape their education, the “where”, “for whom”, and “about what” of their learning. In my own practice, I remember that these institutional statements are texts to be engaged with sociologically. I can look for the kinds of labor and identities that they privilege or marginalize and use that assessment to situate my pedagogy authentically and critically.
Part 3: Mentored Teaching Project
Core Competency 5: Assessing Student Learning
Description and Assessment
The RCAH Graduate Fellowship Program in Undergraduate Teaching and Learning supports graduate students interested in innovative, interdisciplinary approaches to undergraduate education. Its main goal is to provide teaching experience and professional development beyond the typical classroom setting, helping Fellows contribute meaningfully to teaching and curriculum design in the arts and humanities.
As part of the program (Fellow my first year, Senior Fellow my second year), I worked closely with faculty and other graduate students to engage in workshops, seminars, and dialogue that deepened our understanding of teaching in the arts and humanities. The Program is focused on helping Fellows develop their pedagogy in collaborative and responsive ways. All aspects of the Fellowship are grounded in facing current educational challenges.
My project with Kyle Chong, another RCAH Fellow, and Dr Sitara Thobani titled “Addressing students' experience of liminal engagement with social justice discourse” asked two questions:
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What can instructors do to support students to stay committed to criticality, justice, and equity?
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What do instructors need to do bring (and keep) students in the work?
These questions grew out of conversations tied to how students learn these topics vis-à-vis RCAH curriculum that emphasizes the arts, community engagement, humanities, and language and culture. To explore these questions, we analyzed final papers written by fifteen students in an RCAH undergraduate course on language and culture. We used tools from critical discourse analysis, focusing on how students talked about identity, literacy, and power, particularly in relation to race and whiteness. This approach allowed us to see how students used language to express who they are and to make sense of their relationship to broader systems of institutional power.
The course itself encouraged students to think critically about language and culture using a range of theoretical frameworks (cite). It asks them to question how dominant ideas are formed and reproduced, and how they might be challenged.
Artifacts and Rationale
Artifact 1: Assignment Directions
The artifact includes the assignment prompt used in the undergraduate course we analyzed for the Fellowship. It serves as a foundation for understanding the context in which student writing was produced and offers insight into how course design can support both conceptual learning and critical reflection.
The assignment asked students to engage with course concepts by applying them to media they consume during their lives. This scaffolded task was not just about content recall, rather, it encouraged students to connect theory to their own experiences and critically reflect on the cultural and ideological messages embedded in media. The assignment also asked students to consider what actions they might take in response to what they noticed.
I include this artifact to show how pedagogy can intentionally support students in developing a critical literacy that goes beyond an academic interpretation. While the course paper may be viewed as a conventional format, we approached it as a site where students could perform and refine their commitments to justice, equity, and social awareness.
Although explicit assessment and grades were not included as part of the project, we did obtain consent to analyze these final papers because we believe student writing, especially when thoughtfully prompted, can offer a meaningful window into how learners are interpreting complex concepts and imagining their roles as socially responsible actors. Rather than treating the paper as a final product, we understood it as a space of growth, where students experiment with new language, testing out ideas and deepening their awareness of power and positionality.
Artifact 2: Teaching Cohort Fellows & RCAH Showcase Poster
Our research poster serves as both a visual synthesis of our study and a representation of our key findings regarding how undergraduate students engage with critical pedagogy. It brings together our research questions, methodological approach, student data, and instructional implications from our analysis. The artifact was designed for both the 2024 RCAH Annual Student Showcase and the Teaching Cohort Fellows Showcase. It supported conversations about the role of assessing student writing as places of growth, not final products.
The poster features two student excerpts, one from Adeline and one from Rosanna. Adeline’s exemplifies how students can articulate their position within systems of power even as they critique them. Her writing reflects a layered understanding of her role within the university institution as shaped by white supremacy. As she navigates the positionality of both writer and reader within this context, she demonstrates what it means to step back, reflect, and speak to power from within the very system she critiques. The grammatical ambiguity she uses, particularly around who is “author” and “audience”, suggests an awareness of complicity and an effort to subvert dominant discourse. This kind of rhetorical and ideological positioning is exactly the type of performance that critical pedagogy seeks to cultivate.
On the other hand, Rosanna’s excerpt shows a different but equally instructive pattern. Her writing aims toward systemic inequities but does so at a distance, using more abstract language and broad appeals to collective responsibility. She identifies problems such as cultural erasure and the difficulty of fostering equity, but holds herself slightly outside of them. The shift between “they” and “we” in her rhetoric points to a learner still negotiating how to locate herself within structures of power. This positioning demonstrates a key challenges for instructors: supporting students as they navigate discomfort, develop agency, and grow in their awareness of both the structures they critique and their own place within them.
Together, these excerpts illustrate the diversity of student engagement with critical questions. While some learners begin to “speak back” to system of oppression, others are still developing the language and confidence to do so. The poster allowed us to capture and communicate this range of student writing. I chose to include this poster as an artifact as it encapsulates both our research process as Fellows, highlighting the link between theory and pedagogical practice.
Part 4: Teaching Philosophy
I came to teaching through the privilege of sitting in the classrooms of wonderful educators, teachers whose philosophies, strategies, and ways of making meaning shapes not only what I learned but how I came to learn. I watched instructors across disciplines make visible the invisible structures of social life, often through the smallest gestures, whether it be the questions they asked, the readings they selected, or the ways they made space for students to engage. These experiences taught me that effective teaching does not only begin with context. It begins with intentionality, presence, and a sense of purpose.
I teach sociology because I want students to challenge the world around them and to see that the tools to do so are already within reach. My goal is to help students develop a sociological imagination: the capacity to connect personal experience with broader social structures, and in doing so, imagine more just futures. As I design learning environments, I am guided by three core commitments: interactivity, relevance, and enthusiasm. These are not surface level qualities. When embedded meaningfully, they create the conditions for deep engagement and transformative learning.
Interactivity allows students to grapple with sociological questions through small group discussion, reflective writing, and active participation. In my Social Research Methods lab course, for example, students completed a paired observation activity where they practiced identifying and interpreting everyday social phenomena. Students then reflected on their observations and worked together to connect them to course material and shared insights with one another. I wrote these reflections on the board to visualize emerging themes and then we revisited the original questions together and asked how their perspectives shifted in the process. These small but structured interactions create space for students to develop critical habits of thought and deepen their understanding of sociological concepts and theories.
Relevance means connecting sociological theory to students’ lived experiences, career goals, and social worlds. In my Youth and Society course, we trace the life course of youth from childhood through young adulthood, anchoring readings in media, policy, and student-driven interests. Students with majors in education and social work take particular interest in this course. Materials in Youth and Society include empirical research monographs, memoir, and other scholarship on race, gender, and education. All are selected to reflect multiple voices and to invite students to see themselves in the material. When students can see both their communities and their futures reflected in the curriculum, their investment in the work changes.
And finally, enthusiasm matters. I bring energy to each session not just because I love sociology, but because I believe joy and curiosity are part of rigorous learning. When students sense that their thinking is valued and that their presence makes a difference, they are more likely to take intellectual risks and fully engage. This is especially important in sociology, where our discussions often ask students to sit with discomfort, recognize structural injustice, or reconsider deeply held assumptions. While enthusiasm doesn’t eliminate that discomfort, it helps students stay with it, ask more questions, and trust the learning process.
To support these learning environments, I use a variety of assessments that reflect both disciplinary priorities and student development over time. Weekly quizzes help establish a foundation of key concepts, while short reflective journal writing encourages students to connect course materials to their everyday lives. These low-stakes assessments allow me to check comprehension and adjust pacing, but more important, they help students practice applying sociological thinking. The best part is when it occurs before they even realize they are doing it.
Major projects deepen this process. In my Family Interview Project, students conduct a qualitative interview, analyze the data, and craft a final report that weaves their findings with sociological theory. Similarly, in the Childhood Autoethnography assignment, students reflect on their own early socialization and explore how institutions shaped their life growing up. These assignments are rigorous while maintaining connection to their own lives, iterative, and intentionally scaffolded to promote growth. Exams, hosted a few times throughout the semester, serve as cumulative opportunity to revisit and synthesize core ideas. Across all assessments, my primary aim is to still foster the development of the sociological imagination.
It is both the goal and the measure of learning in my classroom.