Teaching Philosophy Statement
As a teacher, I am committed to the ideals of a liberal education, and everything I do in the classroom flows from that commitment. The liberal arts tradition conceptualizes education as the formation of students who are well prepared to act in the public realm as men and women with both rights and responsibilities. Though the social and cultural sciences do not appear in classical or medieval lists of the “arts of freedom,” I believe these disciplines have a great deal to contribute to a contemporary expression of this pedagogical tradition. Thus, my primary objective as a teacher is to cultivate ethical consciousness, by which I mean the mental habits that enable students to make good judgements about ethical dilemmas.
If most people change careers several times in their working life, then attempts to define a good education in vocational terms are fundamentally flawed. Rather, let us follow John Henry Newman in The Idea of a University: “If then a practical end must be assigned to a University course, I say it is that of training good members of society.” Good members of society are thoughtful, well informed, and capable of making judgements about the issues of the day. Because this is a practical end, I try to make social-scientific theories and debates relevant to contemporary concerns. For example, in my course on advertising and consumerism, an analysis of capitalism as a historical phenomenon with morally significant consequences is grounded in students’ own experiences of shopping for and consuming goods. My aim is not to impose my positions on students but to put before them a problem, the means to analyze it, and the need that they themselves to take a position. In doing so, I hope to promote the set of intellectual habits that I have called ethical consciousness.
That being said, ethical judgement requires a firm foundation of knowledge in order to rise above mere opinion, and so I always strive for a high level of academic rigour in my classes. For example, rather than using textbooks, I assign readings from original scholarship—canonical and contemporary—wherever possible. While this can be challenging for lower-division students, it helps them learn to think with and through theory, introduces disciplinary conventions of writing and argumentation, and may demystify the Academy for those considering graduate school. Accumulating knowledge is not, in my view, an end in itself but rather a means to ethical agency. I care about teaching because I believe helping students understand our society enables them to make better choices as citizens and in their private lives.
This philosophy has translated into a fairly consistent method, though my approach is dependent on the level and size of the course in question:
- Lectures are the primary mode of instruction in large classes, and I try to model my expectations of student work in lecture. After a brief recapitulation of relevant material, the week’s lesson is presented as an unfolding argument and is placed in the course’s overall trajectory. While my classroom is quite formal and lessons are highly structured, I pause frequently to ask and solicit questions and try to maintain a pace at which students can comfortably take notes. Slides are distributed in advance as an aid to note-taking; however, I gradually decrease the level of detail over the course of the semester in order to encourage students actively to select and process the information presented to them. I often support my lecture with multimedia, using short video clips to introduce or illustrate points. By the end of the lecture, I will have provided some orientation to the coming week’s topic and readings.
- By contrast, I view small classes as environments in which students teach one another under the guidance of the instructor. In seminars, I stress that students are responsible to one another for the quality of their experience. I also emphasize collegiality, encouraging students to learn one another’s names and often including group work in the structure of assignments. With lower-division students, I plan exercises to aid in their assimilation of course material and to model necessary skills. For example, I often conduct a group close reading in the first week to demonstrate the practice of active reading necessary for engaging with theoretical texts. Over time, however, I shift to more open discussions of issues arising from the week’s material. In upper-division classes, I usually require students to prepare some form of written work every week, such as a critical discussion question or reading journal. This prepared material is then used as the basis for group discussion.
I believe that the formation of the student, rather than the conveyance of information, is the ultimate goal of university teaching. This position entails a concern for the students themselves, a concern that I hope I am able to express in my courses. Despite contemporary class sizes, I seek to engage with my students as individual persons—I attempt to learn all of my students’ names and visit every tutorial section in order to meet them in a more personable setting. In lecture classes, I assign a short, ungraded writing assignment at the conclusion of each class. Reading these “one-minute papers” is not only a useful diagnostic tool but also helps me to get to know each student a little better. I comment on these assignments as seems fitting, often posing questions to prompt further reasoning and reflection. Students have expressed surprise and appreciation when I have been able to address them by name and discuss their work, and undergraduates who approach me to request reference letters explicitly state that they believe I know them better than any other instructor, which is very gratifying.
While I intend to continue improving and refining my pedagogical methods, I am deeply committed to the liberal-arts conception of the substantive point of education that I have outlined here. Teaching the social and cultural sciences as a liberal art has a transformative potential—in cultivating ethical consciousness it transforms lives and may thus play a role in transforming our society—a potential that I aspire to realize in my teaching.