Teaching
I have taught international relations and European Union politics at the University of Otago, designed and launched a course in argumentation, rhetoric, and persuasion, and teach public speaking to adults in community education. I teach communication as a civic and professional capacity: the ability to frame a claim and support it with evidence for a particular audience, while engaging fairly with people who disagree. In an age of generative AI that capacity matters more rather than less, because students need a voice of their own and the judgement to weigh the arguments that machines and people put in front of them. My work as a learning designer shapes how I build every course.
How I teach
Six commitments run through every course on this page, whatever the subject and whoever is in the room.
- I begin with the outcomes and write the activities and the assessment to them, so that what students practise is what they are later assessed on.
- Students work on arguments from the world they live in, whether a public controversy or a case from their own work, so that theory meets a problem they recognise.
- Universal Design for Learning belongs in the first draft rather than in a retrofit: more than one way into the material, more than one way to show what has been learned, and support built into the activity itself.
- Each unit moves through reading, reflection, and practice, and the practice is done with other people, because communication is learned in company.
- Assessment is authentic and attends to process, so that a student’s reasoning is visible and not only the finished product.
- I revise after every delivery, using what students said and, more usefully, what they did.
Higher education
University courses
- Levels
- Second and third-year undergraduate papers, and a new course
- Subjects
- International relations, the politics of the European Union, and argumentation and rhetoric
- My roles
- Course designer and lecturer, teaching fellow, and tutor
Argumentation, Rhetoric, and Persuasion in International Politics
At the Department of Political Science and Law of the Free University (Svobodny Universitet), an independent online university that operates outside Russia, I designed this course, pitched it, and launched it, and taught it between September 2025 and March 2026. A cohort of thirty students practised constructing and evaluating arguments through lectures and facilitated workshops, and examined where persuasion ends and manipulation begins. I also designed and facilitated the assessment.
International Relations, University of Otago
As Teaching Fellow on POLS325 from February to June 2024 I lectured, led tutorials, contributed to the development of the curriculum and the course materials, and set, marked, and gave feedback on assessment.
From the student evaluation, June 2024
Dmitry is great, wish I had a lecturer like him for every class.
I came into this class expecting the theory aspects to be boring but this class really exceeded my expectations and it was so fun!
I really liked the interactive elements of the course and the group discussion.
Dmitry knew what he was talking about, enjoyed his enthusiasm.
88% of responding students placed my overall effectiveness in the top two of five categories, and every respondent did so for stimulating their interest in the subject and for my attitude towards students.
Simulating European Union decision-making
As a tutor on POLS216 Politics of the European Union in 2021 and 2022, I co-organised a simulation of EU decision-making, which put students inside the negotiations they were studying, alongside tutorials and feedback on their essays.
Teaching interests
The subjects my teaching returns to
The areas in which my research and my teaching meet, and the principles I bring to students’ longer pieces of work.
Areas of interest
- Political communication, including how political actors frame issues, answer criticism, and argue in public and in international forums.
- Rhetoric, argumentation, and persuasion, from the classical appeals to the analysis of contemporary political speech, and the line between persuasion and manipulation.
- Public deliberation and facilitated dialogue, drawing on the forums I run as working examples.
- Leadership communication, including accountability, presentation and negotiation, and leading teams and programmes across cultures and languages.
- Cross-cultural and intercultural communication, and public speaking for diverse cohorts.
- Research methods for communication, including qualitative coding, interviews, and computational approaches to text.
Working with students on longer projects
In October 2026 I accepted an invitation from Otago Business School, at the University of Otago, to supervise candidates in its Doctor of Business Administration programme. That supervision has not yet begun.
The principles I bring to an essay, a dissertation, or a research project come from my own doctorate, which combined hand coding, interviews, and a machine learning model, and from what tutoring and learning design have taught me about where students get stuck: agreeing the question and the milestones early, keeping a short written record of what was decided, commenting on the argument of a draft before its prose, and treating a student’s choice of method as theirs to defend rather than mine to impose.
Adult and community education, 2026 to present
Speak. Lead. Connect.
- Where
- Onehunga High School Adult Learning Centre, Auckland
- Learners
- Adults from a wide range of backgrounds, in a mixed-ability cohort
- My role
- Proposed the course to the centre, designed it, and teach it
- Recognition
- ACE Teaching Standards Certificate of Achievement, ACE Aotearoa (2026)
The course teaches public speaking, rhetoric, and persuasive communication to adult learners whose starting points differ widely, in experience and in confidence. It runs as a series of workshops in which learners practise one technique at a time and receive individual feedback on the structure, delivery, and engagement of what they said.
Because the cohort is mixed in ability, the materials are adapted for each group rather than delivered as written, and the room is run so that speaking in front of other people becomes ordinary rather than an ordeal. The confidence the learners describe below is the intended outcome of that design, not a by-product of it.
From learners’ written feedback
What Dmitry taught us was not only the theoretical frameworks of how to communicate more effectively, but he also gave us the safe space to fully explore ourselves and our potential. His personality is so infectious, memorable, and inspiring.
This course will help you to come out of the bubble and connect with people confidently. Being an immigrant, this class gives us the space to connect with people and gain confidence and understand that people want to collaborate.
Three learners, in their own words
Filmed when the course had finished, unscripted, on a phone in the room.
Guest teaching, 2026
Command the Room
A session on rhetorical strategies for law students, given to the Auckland University of Technology Law Students' Society in 2026, in which the room worked through a practical advocacy exercise, The Advocate’s Challenge.
Scholarship of teaching and learning
Walking-based methods
Walk & Talk Auckland, which I founded in 2024 and which now has more than 5,000 members, is where I test movement-based methods for discussion quality, participation equity, and wellbeing. A duoethnography of walking-based methods in tertiary education, written with L. Halcomb-Smith, is under review with Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology, and a Walk & Talk project developed with Mithila Kamaraj and Austin Fu took third place at the academyEX AI Hackathon in 2025.
Professional practice
Learning design and digital teaching
My learning design work is described in outline only, because the materials belong to the organisations I built them for. It is also where my digital teaching practice comes from: I build in Moodle, Canvas, and Blackboard, author in Articulate 360, Rise, and H5P, and use Python for data analysis.
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Skills Institute
Learning Designer, July 2025 to present
Learning design and LMS development for work-integrated degree programmes, integrating academic content with workplace-based learning, authored in Articulate 360, Rise, and H5P, with Universal Design for Learning and assistive technology considered from the start.
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Whitecliffe College
Learning Designer, February 2023 to March 2025
Curriculum content for a range of information technology programmes, delivered online, in hybrid form, and face to face, developed with academic staff and industry stakeholders so that the materials met both the educational objectives and the standards of the industry.
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Institute for War and Peace Reporting
Programme Coordinator, then Regional Programme Manager, 2018 to 2021
Designed and led summer schools, training workshops, and conferences for local communities, independent media, and think tanks across five Central Asian countries, and managed a regional team of more than twenty-five.
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Danish Institute for Human Rights
Analyst, Eurasia Department, 2017
Edited and translated human rights education toolkits, and facilitated a study tour in Denmark for government officials from Kyrgyzstan.