Her teaching methods leave students feeling a bit disoriented.

“What I love about teaching is making the students at first feel uncomfortable – and that’s a good thing,” she says. “They come into my classroom with one view of the world and it’s my job to shift their focus so they start looking at things in a different way.”

One way she takes students in her Sustainable Tourism classes out of their comfort zones is through trips that provide an opportunity living the concepts of sustainability and responsible tourism. Sustainable tourism monitors a destination’s long-term preservation of cultural, environmental and economic assets. Student trips have included stops in Guatemala, Costa Rica and Peru and a Carnival Cruise Line journey during which students evaluated the sustainability of the cruise industry and the positive and negative effects on the destinations visited.

“One of the things I enjoy most about my SNHU experience is that I get to teach freshmen and seniors,” Monk says. “I get to see students when they first come into our programs and when they are ready to leave. You are eyewitness to their growth and get to see what phenomenal human beings they turn into.”