Teaching

Succeeding at teaching

The decision to pursue a tenure-track position is strongly influenced by my teaching experience. Having taught 16 courses in two countries, teaching more than 560 students, and investing more than 900 hours in direct class instruction, I have confirmed that teaching is a core dimension of my professional plan. Have I succeeded as a teacher? The statistics of the 16 courses I have taught indicate an average course rating of 3.62/4.00 (90.5%), with my role as a teacher obtaining an average rate of 3.74/4.00 (93.6%). Based solely on these metrics, I would incorrectly establish that I have.

The success of an educator should not be assessed exclusively on one-dimensional metrics like course ratings but acknowledge the different components of the learning process and how they are integrated into innovative teaching. My commitment to educating includes researching, internalizing, and applying state-of-the-art pedagogical practices. As Linda Nilson titles one of her books, I am devoted to “Teaching at its best.”

My professional journey has allowed me to walk in the appropriate direction. At Universidad de los Andes, a top-ten university in Latin America [1], while teaching engineering courses (e.g., Environmental Thermochemistry, Solid Mechanics), I had firsthand exposure to the fundamentals of teaching and course design. At Duke University, as part of the Certificate in College Teaching, I learned about tools and techniques that facilitate learning and pursued extensive training in digital pedagogy. This decade-long experience defined my teaching philosophy.

The two tenets of my teaching philosophy

My teaching philosophy rests on two tenets: a) enabling engagement through authentic assessments and b) using integrative global learning to develop critical thinking.

In my most recent teaching experience, I worked as an Instructor of the Record at the Nicholas School of the Environment & the Trinity College of Arts and Science at Duke University for four years. In the Voices in the Environment course, an environmental sciences course open to students from all levels, participants develop Spanish proficiency while exploring fundamental concepts of environmental sciences. In 2017, I was named the course lead instructor. Building on my experience traveling through most of Latin America, I started a course redesign introducing a new regional focus, examining unique environmental challenges faced by members of countries in this region.

The following sections contain evidence of how I applied my two-tenet teaching philosophy to redesign the Voices in the Environment course.

a) Enabling engagement through authentic assessments

The first step in the course redesign was to modify the learning objectives. Grounded on the first two levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy, a framework for categorizing educational goals, I reformulated the learning objectives around knowledge and comprehension of sustainability concepts. By exploring how a unique ecosystem in South America’s mountain range, paramos, enhances the water distribution system in urban cities or how local tribes in the Amazon Jungle contributed to the preservation of endemic species, students learned about environmental issues unique to the Global South. Guided discussions on how all these challenges affected the local communities allowed participants to develop language fluency on these topics while exploring the value of cultural wealth from the local communities [2].

This revamped version of the course called for a non-traditional assessment. Rather than continuing the traditional final evaluation where students recited concepts, I introduced an authentic assessment as the course’s final project. Partnering with a Colombian NGO, Fundacion Ayuda por Colombia, I recruited their members as our project audience (foster kids between the ages of 5 and 10), asking them to enunciate environmental topics they were curious about. Their inquiries range from why Colombia was considered a biodiversity hotspot to why they could drink tap water in the NGO but not in their houses. The task for my students was to generate five-minute audiovisuals answering their questions. In alignment with the redesigned course objectives, participants needed to demonstrate comprehension of the concepts we visited throughout the course while integrating a multilingual and intercultural approach [3].

With the help of digital experts at Duke, we created audiovisuals that offered simple answers with adequate language levels. Some students decided to record themselves using the library’s multimedia studio with greenscreen backgrounds replaced by images of them traveling to Colombia; others developed dynamic audiovisuals using editing software that described the water cycle and narrated each of the steps. Given the nature of the project, we assessed it using the Intercultural Knowledge and Oral Communication rubrics from the Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education (VALUE) system of the American Association of Colleges & Universities (AAC&U).

By exploring the unique environmental challenges faced by Latin Americans and introducing an authentic assessment as the final project, course participants engaged with members with lived experiences in the Global South while fulfilling the course objectives.

b) Using integrative global learning to develop critical thinking

The rapid and highly dynamic changes occurring globally, particularly in the Global South, require us to train the next generation of geographers and scientists who embrace critical thinking. As educators, we are called to promote classroom environments where students reconceive their worldview perspective by questioning their assumptions and identifying their biases. Integrative global learning allows us to advance critical thinking in our students and ourselves.

Integrative global learning is anchored in cross-cultural understanding and multidisciplinary engagement of global issues. As part of the course redesign, I introduced active learning exercises that helped students internalize the importance of both elements. For example, before finishing one of the course sections, I asked a group of students to formulate a solution to the environmental challenge that we analyzed, but assuming they would be operating in the US. I asked a second group of students to explore the same problem, but this time, considering they would be operating in a local Latin American context. We then contrasted the two proposed solutions and identified how culturally-specific solutions could be significantly different. This exercise helped us to introduce a discussion on the value of cross-cultural understanding and identifying the assumptions that we used when generating solutions (self-bias).

In other sessions, I asked students to cluster around their majors and generate solutions based exclusively on their field of study. Participants majoring in environmental sciences examined how they could help workers of automotive friction products in Colombias to lower asbestos exposure via protective devices; those pursuing a public policy major explored how the contract renegotiation for the third largest hydroelectric dam in the world, the Itaipu Dam, could help Paraguay to generate the necessary revenue to provide clean fuels to the half of the country that relied on wood and coal for cooking. For each of these cases, we came together as a group and identified how the complexity of the environmental challenges required much more than a disciplinary perspective. Working together, we identified synergies between different areas of expertise and proposed holistic solutions. This contributed to recognizing the importance of multidisciplinary engagement for global issues like environmental challenges.

By contrasting potential solutions to regional-specific environmental challenges, course participants increased their awareness of the value of cross-cultural understanding and multidisciplinary engagement, developing critical thinking skills.

The impact of innovative teaching

The experience of researching, analyzing, and incorporating new pedagogical practices in the course yielded positive results. For my commitment to innovative teaching, I was appointed an inaugural fellow of a first-of-its-kind Bass Digital Education Fellowship at Duke University, where I received year-long support in designing digital activities that improved the course redesign. The last semester I taught the course, I was rated as one of the best teachers in undergraduate programs at Duke University (top 5%), and two new sections of the Voices in the Environment course were launched with an additional regional focus on France and China. In recognition of the iterative process to improve the course and the mastery of pedagogical practices that I demonstrated during the course redesign, I received Duke University’s most distinguished teaching award for graduate students, the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching (awarded to less than <0.1% of Duke’s Ph.D. students).

That same year, I was recognized by the American Association of Colleges & Universities (AAC&U) as a winner of the prestigious K. Patricia Cross Award, selected as one of the seven recipients of 2020 from a pool of >200 nominees from 118 institutions in the United States. During the national ceremony of the organization in Washington DC, I was identified as a rising educator with exemplary promise as a future leader of higher education. I was celebrated for demonstrating a commitment to developing academic and civic responsibility.

However, I consider that the course’s most significant impact was on the professional life of my former students. Exploring environmental challenges in Latin America allowed some of them to discover an interest in the region. In some cases, this interest was so profound that they went into immersive experiences in countries like Paraguay. A couple of them decided to pursue careers in Latin American countries. There is no better gift to an educator than receiving an email from a former student expressing deepest thanks for the inspiration to pursue a “previously unexplored professional path which allowed [them]to find their life passion.”

References

[1] QS World University Rankings: Latin America & The Caribbean 2025. (2025). Recovered on October 5^th, 2024 from: https://www.topuniversities.com/latin-america-caribbean-overall

[2] Virguez, E. (2021). Embracing the value of cultural wealth from underrepresented groups. In K.L. Armstrong, L.A. Genova, J.W. Greenlee, & D.S. Samuel (Eds.). Teaching Gradually: Practical Pedagogy and Classroom Strategies for Graduate Students by Graduate Students (pp 190-196). Sterling, Virginia: Stylus Publishing LLC ISBN: 978-1-64267-160-5. Book Chapter.

[3] Reisinger, D., Liu, Y., Valnes, S., & Virguez, E. (2021). Sustainability across the curriculum: A multilingual and intercultural approach. In M. J. De la Fuente (Ed.). Education for Sustainable Development in Foreign Language Learning: Content-Based Instruction in College Level Curricula (pp 197-214). New York: Routledge Research in Language Education. ISBN: 978-0-36753-032-7. Book Chapter.

[4] Suresh, M., Wagnon, J., Hall, T., Campos, R., Wakio, S., Virguez, E. & Sperling, J. (2024). Reframing international students’ success: Institutional responsibility for international student wellbeing and belongingness. In S. Blake, & G. Pagliarulo (Eds.). Supporting College Students of Immigrant Origin: New Insights from Research, Policy, and Practice (pp 332-351). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN: 978-1-00940-824-0.