Meet CETL's 2026-27 Graduate Teaching Fellows

One of our most important jobs at CETL is helping to prepare graduate students for their roles as educators, both at the University of Mississippi and beyond. Our Graduate Teaching Fellows Program has been instrumental in fulfilling that goal. 

Graduate Teaching Fellows collaborate with CETL staff on our offerings for graduate students and benefit from extensive professional development in teaching. They not only serve as mentors to their fellow graduate TAs and instructors but also explore pedagogical research and organize their own teaching development offerings.

This year, we’re excited to be joined by three Graduate Teaching Fellows:

Alejandro Garcia is a doctoral student in Experimental Psychology. His teaching interests center on inclusive, student-centered pedagogy, first-generation student support, and creating classroom environments where students feel both challenged and supported. He has experience teaching and assisting with psychology courses, including research methods and introductory psychology, and is especially interested in helping students connect psychological science to their lived experiences. As a first-generation scholar, Alejandro is committed to making higher education feel more accessible, transparent, and empowering for students from historically underrepresented backgrounds.

Samuel Junior Osei-Nketiah is proud to be part of the physics department, where he works to make physics accessible to students of all backgrounds. Some of his main goals as a teacher are to help students overcome the feeling that physics is out of reach for them and find the joy in understanding how the world around them physically operates. His extensive teaching background, which spans from kindergarten to college, gives him a holistic perspective on how to approach lessons. The most fulfilling part of teaching for Samuel is seeing a student make progress, no matter how much, and drawing on his own background as a student to provide empathetic support.

Anna Platt is joining the Graduate Teaching Fellows from the English department where she is completing her M.A. in English Literature with an emphasis on modern and contemporary Southern American ecopoetics. Before enrolling at UM she was an eighth grade English Language Arts teacher in central Mississippi. On campus, she has served as a TA for several literature survey courses. She is interested in building empathetic and accessible classroom communities and loves to see her students get excited about the literature they encounter in their coursework and beyond.

If you’re a graduate student with a TA or instructor role this year, you may have already met Alejandro, Samuel, and Anna at Graduate Teaching Orientation. You’ll also hear from them in our Fundamentals of Teaching Learning Community, the Graduate Reading Group, and here on the blog. We look forward to seeing all the great ways they enhance graduate teaching at UM this year!