Teaching
Below, you'll find a description of the courses that I've taught in the past. In Fall 2019, I'll be teaching DEMS 6070 (Disasters & Ethics) and DEMS 3706 (Disasters & Humans). In Winter 2020, I'll be teaching DEMS 3702 (Comprehensive Emergency Management) and DEMS/ADMS 4421 (Qualitative Methods).
Undergraduate Course, York University, School of Administrative Studies, 2019
Methods matter. Throughout your life, you are going to need to make all sorts of empirical claims. Your boss might ask you to figure out if a particular program is working. You might get told to evaluate whether your efforts to educate the public about emergency preparedness are actually effective. You might need to write a thesis, or term paper, or dissertation, or white paper about some real-world phenomenon. Or, you might be trying to figure out how to reduce risk to your responders during an emergency.
Undergraduate Course, York University, School of Administrative Studies, 2019
How do people deal with the stress and anxiety induced by experiencing an emergency? What determines which disasters we’re afraid of and which ones we couldn’t care less about? Why do so many people choose not to evacuate, even when they’re given warning? How do emergency managers make high-stakes decisions when everything is confusing and uncertain? And, how do you actually motivate people to prepare for disasters?
Undergraduate Course, York University, School of Administrative Studies, 2019
If you were responsible for protecting a city from future emergencies, what steps would you need to take and what plans would you need to create? If you were suddenly pulled onto an incident management team for a catastrophic flood, what would you need to know? If your boss told you to figure out why so many people were injured in a disaster and how to prevent it next time – would you know what to do? These aren’t silly class assignments made up to give you a grade… these are life-and-death decisions that you might be responsible for making after you graduate from the BDEM program.
Undergraduate course, York University, School of Administrative Studies, 2018
Disasters and emergencies are full of ethical dilemmas. If you can’t save everyone, for instance, who should you save? Is it okay to break laws or normal moral codes during moments of emergency? What obligations do you have to respond to a disaster in front of you – or halfway around the world? Should we prioritize protecting people from asteroids, car accidents, or heart attacks? These aren’t abstract questions of Plato and Aristotle: these are real, life-and-death decisions that force us to think about what we hold to be ethically correct and morally admirable.
