Teaching Philosophy

In 2024, my peers honored my commitment to education with the SPSP SAGE Early Career Trajectory Award for teaching. Across all facets of my teaching, I strive to foster an environment where trust, mutual respect, and intellectual curiosity flourish. I may be empowered to teach, but I teach to empower.

Empowerment Through the Syllabus as Collectively Bargained

“Professor Carriere gives students a lot of freedom in terms of grading and exams, which is a lot less stressful and, in my opinion, helps us learn better.”

The syllabus and the learning management system are the first impressions of the course culture and, potentially, the scholars’ first impressions of the instructor. As such, I treat the syllabus as a social contract that emphasizes mutual trust and flexibility. That is why I spend the first day of my upper-level courses bargaining over the syllabus collectively. Grounded in research on trust and negotiation, scholars propose assignment grade weights within a range that management (myself) would accommodate, ensuring academic rigor while granting students agency. Similarly, before each exam, students provide input on the format, question types, and point allocations, fostering ownership of their assessments.

Empowerment Through Application

“This class was absolutely incredible! I learned soooo much. I feel like I don’t get a lot of hands on classes, and this one was. Loved the group work.”

Empowerment is applying knowledge beyond the classroom. Most of my students will not pursue advanced research-focused degrees in psychological science. Yet, all will continue to be global citizens and active consumers of research. As such, I want my scholars to leave my classroom with skills they can use to compete more effectively in the workforce, earn higher salaries, and contribute to society. I want my scholars to be empowered to become informed leaders.

In my Psychology and Public Policy course, scholars lobby their congressional representative to co-sponsor a bill based on published psychological science that they spent the semester researching. These projects also enable scholars to champion issues that are often personally relevant to them, leading to a greater sense of ownership in their work. At W&J, a scholar’s mother had recently been sentenced to jail, leaving her to take care of her younger siblings and navigate the criminal justice system. Her lobbying efforts encouraged sharing information about resources for family members of incarcerated individuals through the development of advocacy centers and informational packets, all supported by psychological research. Scholars lobbied the District Office of our local Congressman in Pennsylvania during the first offering of this course. In Fall 2022, I won the Action Teaching Grant from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. I brought scholars to Washington, D.C., to lobby congressional staffers. When I taught the course again at Stonehill in Spring 2024, students lobbied local district staff of Representative Stephen Lynch, continuing this high-impact experiential learning model.

“I loved this course! SO interesting and informative, I learned a lot and truly feel like I grew as a student and personally as well.” (S24-PSY-332, p. 18). 

Empowerment Through Experiencing the Science Themselves

Beyond policy applications, I also emphasize psychological experimentation and data analysis in Social Psychology. To make course concepts more immediate and relevant, I have developed a series of small experimental paradigms and surveys that scholars complete before class. I then coded a ShinyApp to upload, analyze, and visualize the data in real time, allowing students to see their responses, investigate group differences, analyze graphs, and see how they fall victim to the concepts we are learning about. For example, scholars completed the Ascent of Man Scale for eight target groups, and in class, we examined the visual and statistical output to see how their responses differed based on their own identities and the target groups. I have a variety of these ShinyApps, including for deservingness and just world beliefs, the minimal group paradigm, and third variable problems within the moral foundations questionnaire. These small activities bring these classic studies into students' lived experiences and make the science feel real.

Empowerment Through Skill Mastery

In my experience, psychology undergraduates tend to fear statistics. And, to be sure, the classroom and the students in front of us have changed, and it is up to us to adapt to the new students and empower them to see challenges as achievable goals rather than an overwhelming puzzle. Students need to tackle the material on their own time, and in their own way, at their own pace. Yet mastering a concept requires practice and application. As a result, I decided to create a flipped classroom for my Statistics course, having students come to class having watched videos that cover the statistical concept of the day. Class time itself is spent on practice problems, active learning demonstrations, and jamovi labs, working through the material with a partner or with me rather than encountering it cold. Students set their own pace with the material; shared classroom time is reserved for the harder work of application. I have also created a variety of ShinyApps to give students unlimited practice problems.

Second, I grade the course by skill rather than by exam. Students demonstrate a set of Core Skills everyone must reach and choose from a set of Additional Skills based on what they find most compelling or want to push further. On each Competency Check, students choose which skills to attempt and when, and each attempt is scored on a simple three-tier scale until they reach mastery. Students can reattempt unmastered skills in the future, encouraging a growth mindset toward learning.

This hands-on style of empowering is central even in tools I build that I do not use in my classroom. To support scholars seeking deeper engagement with quantitative research, I have developed an R-based learning module called PSYCH: Psychological Statistics You Can Handle. PSYCH is a set of interactive learning modules designed to help scholars build their R programming skills, provide real-time feedback, and strengthen undergraduate-level statistical knowledge. It also tracks submissions to ensure scholars keep up with homework, should a professor choose to assign it for a course. With my collaborator, Jason Kilgore, we were awarded a Grants-In-Aid to Reduce Barriers to Improving Psychological Science from the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science. This grant enabled us to continue developing these modules and support our undergraduate research assistant in finding published datasets in psychology articles that we could use in the course. While I do not use it in my classes, I frequently offer students the chance to work through the module (and beyond) with me for a Directed Study, should they feel interested to do so. My two most recent summer SURE students worked through the course and found it much more approachable than they expected.

Empowerment Through Different Perspectives

“Most students at Stonehill are taught quantitative research methods. Qualitative research is not something that's taught at Stonehill, and learning how the process of qualitative research was very informative and showed that research doesn't happen overnight.”

As a critical, mixed-methods scholar, I see tremendous value of teaching qualitative methods as an elective course, particularly for scholars interested in clinical and counseling psychology. In my small, 8-student Advanced Research in Social Psychology course, scholars had full autonomy to collaborate on two large qualitative research projects. While the scope of the projects may have been overly ambitious in hindsight, the experience taught the scholars valuable skills in team-based research, communication, and problem-solving. My Qualitative Inquiry course has been accepted through the Curriculum Committee here at Stonehill, but we have been unable to afford it due to staffing.

One of the course outcomes has always been planned to be scaffolded, individualized projects inspired by short-form qualitative interviews to StoryCorps, which I hope to use with community partners to tell the stories of the campus community. I am also a colleague at Brigham Young University-Hawaii, where I gave guest lectures in January 2025 on cultural-political psychology, and I would love to find institutional support to travel over Spring Break and collaborate with students there who are studying the fight to preserve the natural beauty of Hawai’i.

Empowerment Through Uplifting the Voices of Others

Empowering scholars requires modeling self-advocacy, so I have taken an active role in faculty governance. My colleagues have elected me twice to serve on governance committees: first on the Faculty Executive Committee at W&J and now as an At-Large Senator in the Faculty Senate at Stonehill. In both roles, I have come to take on projects surveying, reporting, and even proposing to redesign the topics of service for faculty members, as minoritized groups do immense, critically important invisible labor that is rarely acknowledged and rarely appreciated. At Stonehill, I was named Co-Chair of the Faculty Service Model Working Group, and our proposal to redesign service reporting passed in Spring 2026, with a two-year pilot beginning this year. I take this passion for ensuring all voices are heard, appreciated, and valued seriously throughout all my work, and was trained as a SafeSpace Facilitator at Washington & Jefferson College.