Teaching

My approach to teaching fosters inclusive excellence for tomorrow’s planning leaders with diverse theoretical perspectives and emerging planning techniques. I orient classwork toward pragmatic sustainability and justice, and value learning new perspectives from students and graduate advisees.

At UT-San Antonio, I advised students pursuing a Dwight David Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship through USDOT. The nationally competitive Graduate Fellowship is typically due in March. The Local Competition is typically due in June. My Graduate Fellowship materials from 2017 are available for students to review (Personal Statement and Research Plan, Resume).

Transportation Planning

Syllabus, Spring 2022 - This course included field assessments, serious thinking about justice, exploration of the latest analysis methods, envisioning likely (and good) transport futures, and introducing design skills necessary in the workplace.

Syllabus, Fall 2019 - Students created a New Mobility Study: Considerations for the UTSA Downtown Campus and Community. The study recommends prioritizing existing public transit services, rapidly building bicycle infrastructure, reconsidering curb utilization for a more shared, autonomous future, and urgent e-scooter and pedestrian improvements.

Planning Workshop

Syllabus, Spring 2023 - This class developed a grant application for a multiple-use trail for the city of Weslaco, Texas.

Syllabus, Summer 2021 - I co-led an Online Workshop on Sustainable Tourism in The Gambia, to support partners at the University of the Gambia to co-produce an update and guide for sustainable tourism planning.

Planning Practice and Ethics

Syllabus, Fall 2020 - We collaborated with the City of San Antonio Planning Department to coordinate engagement for SA Tomorrow Sub-Area Planning.

Public Participation and Qualitative Analysis

I developed this as a new course for UT-San Antonio, adding to the 2023-25 Graduate Catalog.

Syllabus, Fall 2023 - This course involves methods of facilitating public input and analyzing textual data. Topics include: Online and in-person involvement, integrating input to plans, co-production, and evaluation with case study, observational, and content analysis techniques.

Examples of final projects include:

History and Theory of Urban and Regional Planning

Fall 2022: Indigenous and Latino/a perspectives formed a basis for critically applying history and theory to address systemic inequalities through the case study
method. StoryMap link

Fall 2021: What can cities learn about infill development policies from others? History and Theory of Urban and Regional Planning students in fall 2021 build nearly 20 great cases informed by history and theory.

Fall 2020: This semester emphasized the interrelationship between urban and regional planning processes and resulting urban forms, including Latino Urbanism.

Intro to Health Planning

Syllabus, Spring 2020 - My Plan Evaluation for Health assignment (free download in Word format) is available for free use by others. Basically, it requires students to analyze health-related content of comprehensive plans. The exercise requires students to explore a real plan in some depth, getting to know the good, bad, and ugly, pertaining to how a city is (or not) planning for health. The assignment also results in a dataset that may ultimately be useful as a study on its own. If this is something you incorporate in class to produce data, perhaps you might be interested in publishing results with me too. The first step is validating the instrument, however. Let me know if you want more info on this, including a random selection of cities to review.