Sanjana Kadyan

Teaching

Teaching experience

Teaching statement

Preliminary Teaching Statement

Under construction as part of Duke's Certificate in College Teaching

A1 — Designing and Planning Learning Activities

My first job was teaching macroeconomics at an evening college in Delhi. Most of my students were the first in their families to reach university, and many had done their schooling in Hindi. I had been trained entirely in English, and it did not take many lectures to see the problem: students who could reason sharply about prices and shortages in Hindi went quiet when the same idea arrived with an English label. That year taught me the lesson I now design every course around. The syllabus is not the course. The course is what happens between a particular set of students and the material, and design means planning for the students who are actually in the room, not the ones the textbook imagines (K1, V1).

So I start from the end. What should a student be able to do when this is over, and what stands between them and that? In Delhi the answer was language, so I built an English–Hindi glossary of core terms, let graphs carry more of the argument than text, and replaced English-only exams with bilingual presentations, because an assessment should test economics, not English (A1, A3, V2). A decade later, co-designing PUBPOL 890, a new graduate course at Duke on the political economy of climate and environment, the question was different but the method was the same. With the syllabus, readings and sequence all open, I worked through the literature with the instructor, helped choose and order the readings, and shaped each session as a short lecture to prime the room followed by student-led presentations prepared in pre-class discussions, so that students did the work of making the literature their own (A1, V3, V5, K2). The same instinct shows up at smaller scale: a standalone lecture on the economics of social media for PUBPOL 811, closed with cases and a worked answer key in the course's own exam format so students could check themselves before it counted, and review sessions built around what students had actually got wrong rather than an even pass over the syllabus (A1, A3, K1, K3).

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A2 — Teaching and Supporting Student Learning

Between Delhi and Duke I spent five years as an economist in India's Ministry of Finance, helping to write the Economic Survey and feeding numbers into the budget. It sharpened something I had first felt in that evening classroom: nobody learns economics because it is elegant. They learn it because they want to decide something well. So I teach economics as a tool for making decisions, and I take seriously that the tool has to fit the hand (V4, K2).

At Duke, the master's students in my PUBPOL 811 sections come from policy, law, journalism and engineering. In a single room, mathematical preparation runs from someone who last saw calculus a decade ago to someone with a quantitative degree. I have learned that the student who struggles with the algebra is usually not struggling with the economics. Often they already have the intuition and are blocked only by notation (K1). So I work in both directions: from policy intuition towards the algebra for those who need it, and from the algebra towards interpretation and assumptions for those who do not (K2, V1). I run low-stakes review sessions before each exam where confusions can surface while they are still cheap, shaped by where students went wrong the last time (V2, K3). And I meet the newer teaching assistants on my team every week to talk through how the class is really landing, because teaching, like policy, works better when someone is watching the implementation (A2, V5). What I carry from that first evening college is simple. The constraint is rarely ability. It is language, notation or confidence, and the job is to treat where a student starts as a resource rather than a deficit (V1, V2).