A classroom where students can take intellectual risks—and are challenged to learn.
I want students to feel able to ask for help, admit confusion, disagree, and try an uncertain answer. I encourage preparation, engagement with evidence, and a willingness to reconsider a position. My aim is to help students develop the judgment to understand employment relationships and make consequential decisions about work.
Industrial relations is a changing field. I bring current events into the classroom to connect research with changes in workplaces, public policy, and the institutions that govern employment. Students must learn to evaluate evidence, question assumptions, and make reasoned decisions when the rules are contested and outcomes are uncertain.
Read selected public commentary and media contributions
I want students to be able to say “I don’t understand” and to question an argument without embarrassment. Industrial relations brings real differences of experience and perspective into the room. Those differences give us material to examine together.
Cases and simulations ask students to weigh competing interests, work through uncertainty, and explain their decisions. I ask them to connect their arguments to research and consider how a decision looks from the perspectives of workers, managers, and other affected people.
Feedback should identify what a student understands, what needs work, and what to try next. I also use students’ feedback to revise assignments and activities. Learning involves practice and adjustment on both sides of the classroom.
Cases connect research to decisions about organizing work. These examples from earlier teaching materials illustrate enduring questions; current events bring new circumstances and competing interpretations into the discussion.
An earlier set of psychological-safety materials examined asking for help, admitting errors, and seeking feedback as part of learning at work. The learning question also applies to the conditions we create in the classroom.
The question: How can a group maintain demanding standards while making it possible for people to surface mistakes and challenge assumptions?
The NUMMI case brings together employment relations, teamwork, production systems, and organizational change. It gives students a concrete setting in which to consider explanations centered on individual workers alongside explanations centered on management practices and working relationships.
The question: What would you change in the organization of work, and what evidence would persuade you that the change helped?
Earlier platform-work materials examined how ratings, monitoring, pricing, and access to work organize relationships between platforms and workers. Students consider efficiency alongside questions of control, fairness, and worker voice.
The question: Who can influence the rules, who bears the consequences, and how should we evaluate the arrangement?
I create paid research opportunities for students and mentor them in collecting, organizing, and analyzing data. Research projects give students experience with questions that do not arrive with a known answer, and with the judgment required to turn documents into defensible evidence.
My mentoring has included undergraduate and graduate research assistants, independent studies, internship advising, and service on a doctoral dissertation committee in social work.