About My Teaching
I am constantly learning more from my teaching experiences at Iona college and changing aspects of my teaching as a result. For example, I recently decided to share with my students more of my own thoughts and feelings about the arguments and topics we cover in class. At the start of my teaching career, I was convinced that sharing too much would make me biased or give students the impression that they had to agree with me. So, I made every effort to present different possible objections to arguments we discussed without revealing to the students that I had any stake in the debates we were having in class. But this practice of (effectively) checking myself at the classroom door was emotionally draining—and it meant that philosophical discussions in the classroom could never be as engaging for me as they were when I was in lively conversation with my colleagues. I changed this strategy for my own sake. I have found, though, that sharing more of myself (while also being explicit that I am indeed sharing my perspective: “Here’s what I think about this argument,”) is beneficial to my students, too. I model for them that it really is OK to share their own thoughts and experiences in class. I had worried this change would silence my students, but it has instead had the effect of making me more obviously human and individual, so that we can have more genuine philosophical conversations in the classroom. In effect, I am now able to really share more deeply with my students the interpersonal exchange of thought and point of view that made me love philosophy in the first place.
As I was making this change, I was also learning more, through the Anti-Racism Teaching and Learning Circle that I’m part of at Iona College, about how efforts to maintain perfect objectivity in the classroom in effect confine classroom conversation to topics set up as important by a specifically white tradition of thinking. When I would make an effort to direct conversation toward “one possible objection” or “one possible reply,” I was accidentally reinforcing the idea for my students that I had all possibilities laid before me and was sharing with them the ones that were objectively worthwhile—when in fact the possibilities I was focusing on were often quite simply the ones that had been taught to me as a undergraduate, and the ones that had already been given the most attention in the real and contingent philosophical tradition in which I operate. I was not, in fact, presenting my students with information that was objective in the sense of being detached from all points of view, but rather was presenting them with information attached to specific dominant points of view (given philosophy’s history and typical canon, mostly the points of view of white men) while performatively withholding my own. In effect, I implicitly suggested that they should also withhold their own points of view in service of the ones presented predominantly in class. As such, I now also see my efforts to be frank about my own thinking as an effort to model this behavior for my students, so that they also feel genuinely invited to bring their own diverse thoughts and experiences into the classroom. This is one example of a more general principle that I am coming to believe over time: that many of the changes teachers can make to be more merciful to themselves are also changes that benefit students. Another example of this principle in action is my use of writing workshop days at Iona. When a colleague and I co-taught at Auburn Correctional Facilities, we built into our syllabus some days that we designated as workshop days. On these days, the lecture portion was very short, consisting only of tips about writing or demonstrations of brain-storming/argument-developing exercises, and most of the class was left open for students to work on upcoming papers as we moved around the room to answer questions, discuss outlines, and the like. This strategy was vital in the Correctional Facilities setting, in which “office hours” were impossible due to our restricted contact with students. These days, though, I include a couple workshop days in my introductory-level classes at Iona as well. Even in a setting where office hours are available to students, the reality is that not all students have very much time outside of the time they have committed to class (some work part-time jobs or care for family members or have other commitments that take up all but a little precious remaining free time)—and early in my teaching I got feedback from students explaining that it was difficult for them to find time to work on their papers outside of class. I find that my students benefit from having a little breathing room, just to take account of where we are and work in a quiet setting with other students. I would have been hesitant to give students this kind of time a few years ago, mainly because I would be worried that I was not putting in enough work on any day when I did not have a fully planned-out argument to present to my students. But the workshops are genuinely helpful: by walking around the room and asking groups of students how their work is going, I am often able to have conversations about paper development with students who would not have taken the initiative to approach me on their own. I also continue to work on more standard ways of increasing diversity in my courses—seeking to add more readings by philosophers of color and by women philosophers, as well as to be open to the ways that the topics I teach change shape if I stop limiting them by (what might seem like a priori but are actually culturally laden) assumptions about what ought to be included in a philosophy class or under the umbrella of a specific topic. For example, at one point this past semester, my students and I were discussing freedom of expression at work, and how when we are at work there are specific power dynamics in place that make it more complicated for a worker to simply respond to, say, their employer’s, offensive speech with more speech (since there is the threat that their employer could use their power in the workplace setting to retaliate). Our course reading suggested that this is a good reason for the government to pre-emptively restrict the speech of everyone in the workplace (including the employer). A student objected to the idea that this is a good reason to restrict freedom of expression at work because, she pointed out, there is an advantage—even a necessity—for workers to learn how to respond for themselves even in situations in which there are complicated power dynamics present (instead of using these dynamics as a reason to remain silent). In discussion of this point, I offered an example that seemed to me to support her point—some of the power dynamics present in American workplaces are power dynamics present throughout American society: even when I leave my workplace, I am still a white woman moving through a racist society, and the associated power dynamics of that do not go away. I was using this opportunity to do a couple things: 1. I was modeling that it is not taboo to bring up race in classroom discussion, even if we are discussing a specific topic which is not straight-forwardly the literal topic of “race,” and 2. I was letting my students know that I am aware that I am a white woman—i.e. they have at least the beginnings of reassurance that I will not be shocked or offended if they bring to my attention the fact that I am a white woman and that my race can be relevant to my experiences and to the meanings of what I do and say in classroom. I would like to close by to sharing one particularly important thing I learned from my experience teaching at Auburn Correctional Facilities. When I taught there, I had only previously had experience with Cornell-campus students. Surrounded by the miniature world of the university and presented with the obvious thought that I used to be in my student’s shoes, I was subject to a particular illusion. There seemed to be an obvious direction for students to progress in the classroom, from where they were to where I was. The most valuable part of my experience at Auburn was the break-down of that illusion. Many of my students at Auburn were older than me, some of them had long sentences ahead of them, and all of them were facing challenges unfamiliar to me. This experience brought more vividly to my attention the fact that whenever I teach, I am really just an adult working with other adults to teach them a specific set of skills in which I have received special training. That experience has made me more determined to be open to criticism and to experimentation in the ways I teach and learn from my students, and it is that attitude more than anything that makes me confident I bring something of value to any teaching faculty. A Sample of Syllabi for Courses I Have Taught: Introductory Level Classes Core Humanities Freshman Seminar Markets and Morals Ethics and Entrepreneurial Leadership Philosophy of Prophecy/Religious Authority (writing-intensive) Upper Level Classes Ethics and Business Respect and Self-Respect |
(My younger sister and one of my younger brothers, on a dock in northern Wisconsin.)