Biography Information

I got my PhD in human geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I enjoyed the interdisciplinary training, as well as the supportive environment. I got my Master in the Department of Geography of the Universidade Nova, Lisbon, and my BA in Economics in the University of Cagliari, Italy. I developed my teaching and research experience in Europe, Southern Africa, and the United States. I deeply value the life experiences that living and working in different countries allowed me to acquire. I taught different course within the realm of human geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Portland State University, and the University of Massachusetts at Boston. In these universities I also had the opportunity to mentor undergraduate students, and tutor graduate and undergraduate students in the preparation of their theses. Tsunesaburo Makiguchi, an educator and a human geographer, stressed how much humans depend on the world where they live, and how this interdependence is an inevitable and desirable course for all of us. He also encouraged his students to start the journey of understanding geography in their own community. This is definitely the approach that brought me to embrace this discipline, and that influenced my understanding of it.

Teaching Philosophy

My goal is to help students to examine the geographical issues within an interdisciplinary approach and an international perspective. In order to reach such goal I use different techniques and, among them, place based and project based activities. I organize and monitor in class activities, encouraging students to think of the classroom and their campus as a laboratory, and to consider the interrelation between their campus, the community where they live, and the international arena. The diversity of students that I encountered in the countries where I lived, represented a great opportunity for developing diverse teaching techniques and class management approaches aimed at enhancing students' peculiar background, and to teach them concepts and elements useful for their further development and that could be applied outside of the classroom. My overall goal is to apply what Tusunesaburo Makiguchi called a 'value creating education'. A process in which students improve their understanding of the interrelation between them and the world where they live, of their unique role in it, and of the ways in which they can contribute meaningfully to their communities and to society at large.