I teach an introductory course on social research methods (quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods), an intermediate course on statistics, and upper undergraduate courses on the more-than-human environment, the city and mobilities. For intermediate statistics, I use a textbook and teaching resources co-authored by Professor Steven Prus at Carleton University, who taught me advanced statistics during graduate school. For both research methods and statistics, I take great pleasure in empowering students to undertake their own, self-directed inquiries using multiple tools for analyzing and creating data.

For seminars on environments, urban sociology and mobilities, I use the city as a classroom and laboratory for learning and doing social research ‘on-the-move’.

For example, I ask students to analyze census data on income, housing, transport and other variables to contextualize Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and surrounding neighbourhoods to quantify one of urban Canada’s sharpest socioeconomic edges. Then, I orchestrate in-depth field investigations to elaborate and qualify the experience of living on such an edge. Sometimes I team up with City of Vancouver planners (through the inter-university City Studio partnership program), who help direct student research projects towards problems for which the City needs solutions. Our collaborations have explored such issues as gentrification and cultural preservation Chinatown and Vancouver’s rewilding plan (i.e. how to live with beavers, coyotes and geese in the city).