My teaching interests and experience have both shaped and been shaped by my research interests. My central teaching interests include Criminological Theory, Victimology, Child Maltreatment, Intimate Partner Violence, Juvenile Delinquency, and Research Methods, but I welcome and enjoy opportunities to develop and instruct new courses in a variety of areas. I am most excited about developing and instructing a special topics course on poly-victimization-my specific area of research.
I have had the pleasure of working with extraordinary professors. Under their guidance, I was able to gain teaching experience in a variety of courses including, Urban Sociology, Intimate Partner Violence, and Statistics. As a guest lecturer, I have had the opportunity to engage students in discussions on a wide range of topics including poverty, domestic violence, juvenile prostitution, and statistical analysis.
These experiences have allowed me to develop a wide range of courses, in a variety of contexts, which in turn have afforded me the opportunity to gain valuable perspectives on student-teacher interactions with students with different background knowledge, experiences, and abilities.
I am committed to running my courses in ways that cultivate independent thinkers, educated consumers of information, and engaged members of society that are aware of the fact (1) that context matters, (2) that social processes influence how we think, feel and behave, (3) that choices are shaped by social structures and institutions, and (4) that simplistic explanations to complex social issues rarely suffice. I am particularly keen on helping students understand that crime, conflict and our responses to them are not just a matter of opinion, but rather a data-based science.
I study the criminogenic effects of exposure to violence in childhood. I focus on children who are exposed to multiple types of criminal and non-criminal offenses and specifically those that engage in deviance and delinquency. I am particularly interested (1) in understanding how different types of victimizations interact and co-vary and (2) on identifying the dynamic protective factors that prevent violence-exposed children from engaging in delinquency. The goal is to better inform policies related to both juvenile justice and child well-being.
I am motivated by several practical issues identified in the field:
Research results are expected to contribute in three significant ways: First, they will allow us to determine if a narrow focus on acute and extra-ordinary victimizations or a wide focus on the full spectrum of childhood violence exposure is the more effective strategy to reduce violence perpetrated by and against children. Second, they will allow us to more efficiently distribute limited resources by prioritizing the children who have been empirically determined to be at the greatest risk of harm and deviant behavior. Third, they will allow us to identify the types of skills, conditions, and relationships that need to be emphasized in primary, secondary, and tertiary intervention programs.
My focus in broadly assessing social conditions (in this case victimization); my commitment to making evidence informed recommendations; and my awareness of the social conditions that surround our formal response systems are the elements of my personal research interests that I strive to incorporate into my class discussions, assignments and projects. The assignments I develop are often geared to get students to explore their own areas of interest in practical ways, but from an empirically based perspective.