As a teacher and mentor, she aims to:

1. Relate course material to students’ lives and aspirations.

When teaching psychology and statistics courses, Amanda selects learning objectives that reflect the diversity of student experiences and topics most central to their interests. She also enhances her course design by identifying and incorporating students’ own learning goals. Because students enroll in psychology and statistics courses with varying degrees of prior subject knowledge, she sets reasonable benchmarks for success that are based on what they already know and align with their own motivations for taking the class.

2. Promote critical thinking and academic inquiry.

When mentoring students in classes and in research, Amanda takes a scaffolding approach to help build the necessary knowledge and abilities for students’ academic and professional goals. She designs activities and assignments that move past rote memorization and challenge students to reason about solutions to complex problems, ask probing questions, and further intellectual curiosity. She does this by engaging students with assignments that scaffold critical thinking skills to target increasingly complex forms of reasoning.

3. Amplify historically underrepresented perspectives.

Including historically underrepresented voices creates a richer learning environment for all students. Amanda works with a population of students from diverse cultures, races, ethnicities, religions, sexual orientations, and genders and creates frequent opportunities for students to hear differing perspectives, including psychological concepts and theories that challenge traditional narratives.