State­ment of Teach­ing Philosophy

If then a prac­ti­cal end must be assigned to a Uni­ver­sity course, I say it is that of train­ing good mem­bers of soci­ety.
—John Henry New­man, The Idea of a University

Since most peo­ple change careers sev­eral times in their work­ing life, attempts to define good edu­ca­tion in nar­rowly voca­tional terms are fun­da­men­tally flawed. An alter­na­tive model can be found in the lib­eral arts tra­di­tion and its view of edu­ca­tion as the for­ma­tion of stu­dents who are well pre­pared to act in the pub­lic realm. Though the social sci­ences do not appear in clas­si­cal lists of the “arts of free­dom,” our dis­ci­plines have a great deal to con­tribute to lib­eral learn­ing (McK­in­ney et al. 2004). I am com­mit­ted to these ideals, and every­thing I do in the class­room flows from that com­mit­ment. I care about teach­ing because I believe help­ing stu­dents to under­stand the social world enables them to make bet­ter choices as cit­i­zens and in their pri­vate lives.

Because I believe that the for­ma­tion of the stu­dent, rather than the sim­ple con­veyance of infor­ma­tion, is the ulti­mate goal of uni­ver­sity teach­ing, I try to cre­ate oppor­tu­ni­ties to engage with my stu­dents as indi­vid­ual per­sons. For exam­ple, when work­ing as an instruc­tor in the School of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion at SFU, I vis­ited every tuto­r­ial sec­tion mid­way through the semes­ter, I graded at least one assign­ment by each stu­dent (despite a depart­men­tal cul­ture where instruc­tors did lit­tle to no grad­ing), and I learned everyone’s name. I often assign short, ungraded writ­ing assign­ments in class or weekly dis­cus­sion ques­tions, which are not only good mech­a­nisms for get­ting feed­back on the course but also help me get to know each stu­dent a lit­tle bet­ter. Given con­tem­po­rary class sizes, stu­dents have expressed sur­prise that I’ve been able to address them by name and dis­cuss their work.

The philoso­pher Alas­dair Mac­In­tyre has argued that teach­ing is not a sub­stan­tive social prac­tice in itself but rather a means for ini­ti­at­ing peo­ple into some other prac­tice (Mac­In­tyre and Dunne 2002). I take this argu­ment very seri­ously: Our task is not sim­ply to teach stu­dents about soci­ol­ogy but to get them doing soci­ol­ogy, at how­ever lim­ited a scale. That is to say, the “soci­o­log­i­cal imag­i­na­tion” must be bal­anced by the “craft of soci­ol­ogy,” to bor­row the titles of two well known books (Mills 1959/2000; Bour­dieu, Cham­bore­don and Passeron 1991). So, for exam­ple, I assign orig­i­nal scholarship—both canon­i­cal and contemporary—wherever pos­si­ble. While this can be chal­leng­ing for some lower-division stu­dents, it helps them learn to think with and through the­ory, intro­duces dis­ci­pli­nary con­ven­tions of writ­ing and argu­men­ta­tion, and may demys­tify acad­e­mia (par­tic­u­larly for senior stu­dents who are con­sid­er­ing grad­u­ate school). Sim­i­larly, when­ever prac­ti­ca­ble, I try to struc­ture assign­ments around mak­ing some orig­i­nal, if mod­est, con­tri­bu­tion through pri­mary research. My hope is that at the end of a course—and cer­tainly of a degree programme—students will be able to eval­u­ate truth claims about soci­ety and under­stand what they might need to do to find or pro­duce evi­dence for one account or another.

So, although teach­ing is not an autotelic prac­tice, it can be done more or less well, and I think it’s impor­tant enough to demand our best efforts. In the midst of the every­day demands of course deliv­ery and all of my other respon­si­bil­i­ties, I strive always to approach teach­ing as a voca­tion. I have under­taken some pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment activ­i­ties, and fre­quently dis­cuss ped­a­gogy infor­mally with my peers. But, while I intend to con­tinue devel­op­ing as a teacher, I remain deeply com­mit­ted to the lib­eral arts con­cep­tion of edu­ca­tion that I have out­lined here. Teach­ing the social sci­ences as lib­eral arts has a trans­for­ma­tive poten­tial: In cul­ti­vat­ing reflex­ive, crit­i­cal thinkers it can trans­form lives and may thus play some small role in trans­form­ing our soci­ety for the better.

Ref­er­ences

Bour­dieu, Pierre, Jean-Claude Cham­bore­don, and Jean-Claude Passeron. 1991. The Craft of Soci­ol­ogy: Epis­te­mo­log­i­cal Pre­lim­i­nar­ies. Berlin: Wal­ter de Gruyter.

Mac­In­tyre, Alas­dair and Joseph Dunne. 2002. “Alas­dair Mac­In­tyre on Edu­ca­tion: In Dia­logue with Joseph Dunne.” Jour­nal of Phi­los­o­phy of Edu­ca­tion 36(1): 1–19.

McK­in­ney, Kath­leen, Carla B. How­ery, Kerry J. Strand, Edward L. Kain, and Cather­ine White Berheide . 2004. Lib­eral Learn­ing and the Soci­ol­ogy Major Updated: Meet­ing the Chal­lenge of Teach­ing Soci­ol­ogy in the Twenty-First Cen­tury. A Report of the ASA Task Force on the Under­grad­u­ate Major. New York: Amer­i­can Soci­o­log­i­cal Association.

Mills, C. Wright. 1959/2000 The Soci­o­log­i­cal Imag­i­na­tion. Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press