Pedagogy is a central part of my academic work.

A stepped approach to learning

I organize courses around the progressive development of fundamental academic skills. Selective undergraduate education often treats these fundamentals as things students should already possess. I instead make them visible, rigorous, and intellectually alive, so that students with different kinds of preparation can build confidence and use them deliberately.

Students work first on reading, note-taking, and understanding different kinds of sources; then on citation, quotation, paraphrase, summary, comparison, and the use of concepts. Later assignments bring those practices together in literature reviews and intellectual histories. Each stage gives students a manageable set of skills to practice, receive feedback on, and carry into more demanding work. This approach gives students more agency in introductory and advanced courses alike: it does not reduce expectations, but gives them the tools and practice to meet those expectations.

The literature review as a form of thinking

In RELI 235, I have made the literature review a sustained form of scholarly orientation. Students map a field before making an argument within it: they identify recurring problems, trace relationships among sources, and learn how a research question emerges from an existing conversation. The aim is to make research a process of discovery rather than a search for evidence to support a claim formed in advance.

My paper, “Mapping Before Argument: Teaching the Literature Review as Scholarly Orientation,” develops this work for the Fall 2026 workshop I am organizing with Russell McCutcheon. The workshop takes its point of departure from the argument he develops in Our Primary Expertise: A Future for the Study of Religion. A publication growing from the workshop is planned.