Adjunct Teaching at the Graduate Level

I teach at the intersection of qualitative research methodology, ecological approaches to perception and learning, embodied practice, and cross-cultural inquiry. My teaching is grounded in doctoral-level training, interdisciplinary research, and sustained embodied practice. I work primarily with PhD and other graduate students, contributing to programs that value conceptual rigor while remaining open to practice-based and transdisciplinary approaches.

I am available for adjunct teaching appointments, invited lectures, conference presentations, and research-oriented workshops for the 2026–2027 academic year and beyond.

Currently Teaching

PSY 791: Research Colloquium — California Institute for Human Sciences, Spring 2026 (PhD)

TSD 6135: Martial Arts as Transformation — California Institute of Integral Studies, Fall 2026 (PhD)

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Featured Course: TSD 6135 Martial Arts as Transformation

This course treats martial arts as a serious site of scholarly inquiry: an embodied discipline through which practitioners develop perceptual sensitivity, adaptive expertise, and ethical attunement under conditions of uncertainty, risk, and asymmetric encounter.

Rather than positioning martial arts as either pure combat or pure self-cultivation, the course examines how these practices integrate the two — how the technical demands of skilled physical interaction become a context in which perception, attention, judgment, and ethical responsiveness are reorganized. Students engage with both theoretical study and embodied reflection, working across phenomenology, ecological psychology, learning theory, and critical cultural studies.

Traditions discussed include Japanese budo (with primary depth in ninpo taijutsu and ninjutsu), Chinese internal and external arts (with attention to wing chun and taijiquan), and selected readings on Korean, Southeast Asian, and Brazilian forms, and African diasporic systems of movement, rhythm, and resistance. Each tradition is engaged with appropriate epistemological humility about what can be known from outside, and the course treats cross-cultural transmission as a substantive scholarly problem rather than a logistical detail.

Students bring their own embodied practices — martial, somatic, meditative, athletic, or artistic — into dialogue with course materials. The classroom becomes, in a sense, a dojo of inquiry: a structured space for investigating how disciplined practice reorganizes one’s sense of agency, identity, and relational presence.

Designed for adaptation. TSD 6135 can be adapted for graduate programs in transformative studies, transpersonal and integral psychology, somatic studies, performance studies, sports and exercise studies, and interdisciplinary doctoral programs. I welcome conversations with programs interested in offering a version of this course.

Recent and Past Teaching

  • Adjunct Faculty, California Institute of Integral Studies
    Research Methods I: Foundations of Qualitative Research (PhD level)
  • Adjunct Faculty, California Institute for Human Sciences
    Communication Skills for Scholars (PhD level)
  • Fellow & Senior Fellow, Center for Writing and Scholarship, CIIS
    Graduate-level writing mentorship and research workshops

My teaching emphasizes conceptual clarity, methodological precision, and the integration of theory with lived inquiry. Students are encouraged to articulate creative research designs, refine scholarly voice, and engage complexity without sacrificing rigor.

Teaching Philosophy

I approach graduate teaching as a structured practice of scholarly formation, not as content delivery. Students at the PhD level are not learning facts — they are learning to think, write, design research, and engage critique like scholars. My role is to make that work both rigorous and possible: to model the kind of careful, generous, demanding engagement that doctoral inquiry requires, and to scaffold students through the iterative work of becoming someone who can produce that engagement themselves.

In practice, this means structured peer feedback as a centerpiece of learning, APA rigor treated as a craft skill rather than a chore, recursive cycles of writing and revision in dialogue with reading, and explicit attention to the contemplative and embodied dimensions of scholarly inquiry alongside its technical demands. I draw on experiential learning principles (Kolb, 1984), scholarly writing pedagogy (Caffarella & Barnett, 2000), and my own background as a doctoral student in a conceptually complex transdisciplinary program.

Teaching three concurrent sections of qualitative research methods to PhD students in Fall 2025 made one thing clear: even with the same syllabus, cohort dynamics and disciplinary backgrounds substantially shape the classroom experience. I am continuing to refine how I design facilitation to meet a wider range of learning preferences and student backgrounds, while preserving the depth of feedback and structural clarity that students consistently identify as strengths of the course.

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Teaching Evaluations

Fall 2025 EWP 7035 Research Methods I, California Institute of Integral Studies (three sections, 33 students total, response rates 46–90 percent):

  • Average instructor scores across sections: 4.65–4.91 (5-point scale)
  • Course content and organization: 4.71–5.00
  • Instructor feedback quality: 4.83–5.00

I am working to strengthen facilitation across diverse learning styles and to widen the range of disciplinary entry points into qualitative methodology — areas where the Fall 2025 evaluations identified room for growth and where the next iteration of the course will pilot specific changes.

Full evaluation reports available on request.

 

Selected Student Feedback

“I had a special dislike for research methods before this course. You did a wonderful job opening up the mystery of research methods in a gentle, clear, supportive, challenging, and empowering way. I have never been more grateful for a course at CIIS, because I dreaded it and ended up truly enjoying it.”

— PhD student, CIIS, Fall 2025

“David always went above and beyond to offer help in areas where I felt I was struggling, offering his time, expertise, potential solutions, and practical suggestions to get me back on track. Despite his own concerns about teaching this class for the first time, David displayed a great deal of knowledge and depth of understanding on the subject of research.”

— PhD student, CIIS, Fall 2025

“Encouraging, constructive, and positive feedback! I really appreciated David’s emphasis on attention to detail regarding APA citation formats. It really caused me to hone in on those and be aware of the formatting, all of which enabled me to intuitively improve through practice.”

— PhD student, CIIS, Fall 2025 

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Courses Available

I design courses that integrate conceptual depth with experiential exercises and practice-informed insight. Courses may be offered as semester-long classes, intensives, or modular workshops.

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Foundations of Qualitative Research
  • Research design and epistemology
  • (Auto)ethnography, case study, phenomenology, grounded theories
  • Analytic strategies, including bricolage and thematic analysis
  • Writing for publication and peer review
Ecological Approaches to Perception and Learning
  • Affordances (action possibilities in an environment) and perception–action coupling
  • Ecological dynamics and nonlinear pedagogy
  • Perceptual refinement in movement and performance contexts
  • Applications to complex and asymmetrical environments
Technologies of the Self: Discipline, Practice, and Transformation
  • Michel Foucault and self-cultivation through intentional practice
  • Embodied disciplines as structured learning environments
  • Transformation as process rather than outcome
  • Practice as inquiry
Practice as Research and Technique as Knowledge
  • Practice-based research methodologies (including Ben Spatz’s theory of embodied technique as knowledge)
  • Integrating practitioner expertise into scholarship
  • Cross-cultural transmission and learning of embodied disciplines
  • Ethical and epistemological (what constitutes knowledge) considerations

Invite or Inquire

If you would like to discuss adjunct teaching or curriculum development, please contact me.