Faculty Profile: Erin Miller
Reflective, engaging, and collaborative, these are the words that describe Erin Miller’s approach to teaching and scholarship. Miller is a finalist in the 2021 Bank of America Award for Teaching Excellence competition.
She creates opportunities for students to reflect upon the knowledge they are obtaining, but she also learns from those she works with and continues to seek new knowledge that will enable her to become a more effective educator.
Miller said: “My main pedagogical approach is to create spaces that lead to learning by building a classroom community strong enough for students to feel comfortable sharing their lives with one another. Students consistently share that this makes the biggest impact on their learning. This is not surprising – teaching is humanitarian work. For it to be liberating, it must first be relational.”
Her teaching philosophy incorporates various modalities to address different learning styles as well as to demonstrate for her students the responsive pedagogies they can use in their own classrooms. She further helps the future teachers in her classes to capitalize on their strengths as learners just as they will eventually encourage their own students to do. Instruction in her online graduate courses is as varied and multimodal as her face-to-face courses.
“Dr. Miller is so passionate and knowledgeable about the subjects she teaches and it shows in every single Zoom Class. She pushes all of her students to be the best version of themselves through writing. She inspires me and others to write, and to grow through what we are writing and to encourage the next generation of students to do the same,” said student Ashley Harrison.
Miller’s work addresses anti-racist pedagogy, racial identity construction, and early literacy. She co-led a faculty group focused on enacting anti-racist pedagogy throughout the undergraduate curriculum, led the development of a junior-level course that provides foundational information about social justice and diversity to teacher candidates, and helped the department to develop a sequence of instruction to prepare future teachers for an increasingly diverse P-12 population. She participated in an Instructional Innovation Program for online teaching that coincided with her co-development of a four-course graduate certificate in Anti-Racism in Urban Education and developed two courses for Quality Matters certification.
Department Chair Michael Putman said: “She is a reflective practitioner who seeks to grow, regardless of her high level of expertise, as she engages in teaching and research. Her teaching is characterized by collaboration with colleagues as they have sought to improve the educational experiences of students.”
She has served on 12 doctoral committees, co-chairing three of them, and has provided professional development on anti-racist pedagogy through the Charlotte Teachers’ Institute. She is the recipient of the Early Childhood Education Assembly Social Justice in Education Award by National Council of Teachers of English, and is an affiliate member of University of South Carolina’s Center for Achievement of African American Students.
Miller is one of three finalists for the Bank of America Award for Teaching Excellence, which is open to full-time, tenured faculty members with at least seven years of service to UNC Charlotte.