Teaching Philosophy
Having sketched my framework, let me offer a few details about my teaching and advising. Again, rather than list a set of beliefs and practices, I will speak about three tensions within my pedagogical experience. The first tension rests between regarding students as historical creations versus emphasizing each student's uniqueness. I believe that historical forces create each of us as their product. From birth we carry with us the mark of our family, our cultures, and our times in ways few of us effectively understand. Typically, the student's emphasis on individual uniqueness initially impairs the student's ability to gain an historical self-consciousness. However, it must be said that being historical products does not deny individuality. This becomes apparent if I can illustrate that the historical process also constructs us as unique individuals - each from a different configuration of family, culture, and time. In this way, I propose that a belief in uniqueness can promote recognition of our historical construction as individuals as well as our commonalty with others. Following from this tension, my pedagogy begins with the needs and interests of the individual student. By mutually exploring how politics and history constitute their most private beliefs and intuitions, I aim to feed their motivational fires, draw out their analytic potential, and ground their critical self-consciousness.
My second tension concerns the appropriate use of authority within the classroom. I refer to the tension between the necessary use of the teacher's authority on the one hand and fostering an open process in the classroom as a means toward student self-understanding on the other. Ensuring that course-specific learning objectives occur while cultivating a love for the overall learning process remains a challenge for me. If I emphasize my authority, pressing students into learning something I consider important, I risk not teaching them how to initiate and sustain learning as a process pivotal to their lives. Inversely, if, in order to nurture an internal learning process, I minimize the use of my authority, I abdicate my responsibility to help them locate unrecognized obstacles to their learning. Expressing the appropriate posture requires continuous adjustment. While in the last few years I have been experimenting with process-oriented formats, recently I find myself reclaiming the use of my authority.
The third tension centers on the purpose of education and learning. Should learning serve the short-term needs of technical and social competence within the demands of a labor market? Or should it evoke the broader values of self-knowledge and wisdom? This tension leaves me, so far, unable to secure a middle ground. Instead, I have invited students to take a detour from the "fast-lane" of immediate self-interest by giving their natural curiosity a chance to enrapture them. I have sometimes added that, in any case, sophisticated forms of self-interest often strive for wisdom.
While these three tensions pervade the student-teacher relationship, their creative friction becomes concentrated at three specific moments: in informal every day contact, in the classroom and advising hours, and in the evaluation process. Even the most informal contact, I believe, reveals to students the teacher's pedagogy, social theory, and practical ethics. The pedagogical relationship starts, therefore, as everyday etiquette. Whether I like it or not, students relate to me foremost as a living example of how to think and act. Of course, students immediately note and appreciate choice of texts, care taken in preparation of lectures and discussion, and attention to the mechanics of class operation. Nevertheless, over the years, they remember not so much the exchange of words and ideas but rather the teacher's practicing attitudes and actions within the learning and teaching process.
The ethical relevance of everyday action as pedagogy shapes my behavior on campus and during class. It means that, while not losing track of the structure and processes of active teaching, demonstrating how I relate to learning remains pivotal. This implies that I sometimes need to learn in front of them. However, demonstrating my learning often requires both a sense of spontaneity and an inversion of the usual expectation about the one way flow of knowledge from teacher to student. My challenge remains to demonstrate how I learn (often from them) while not irresponsibly toppling their expectations about "normality" in the classroom.
Finally, the most focused point of contact between student and teacher lies in the evaluation process. In my view, there are few substitutes for written comments on student work. I find it difficult to imagine how students might be learning or I teaching unless we engage in written conversation. Thus, every class I teach also becomes a writing course. The written evaluation is the sharpest tool on the pedagogical shelf and carries with it a due responsibility. We know from our own experience that our writing constitutes a significant portion of our identity. This is why the tone of commentary is as important as the content of the criticism. My challenge has been to make sound criticisms that students welcome. Such complex challenges make teaching a humbling but a continuously exhilarating experience.