Teaching

I knew that I wanted to be a professor within two weeks of my first year in college. At the time I admired the lifestyle — being able to read interesting texts, write about them, and discuss my ideas about them and the world with a captive audience appealed to me quite a lot at that time. I knew, too, that approaching a classroom as a field for my own entertainment would not be an effective way of being a teacher. As an undergraduate, a teacher of English in Japan, a graduate student, all the way down to now I have developed an understanding of the incredible importance and weight of responsibility an educator possesses.

At the heart of my teaching philosophy lies a twofold desire: 1) to decenter what students think they know about the relationships between themselves and others; and 2) to teach students to effectively read, analyze, and interpret difficult texts both orally and in writing. This twofold desire springs from the notion that my time as an instructor can and does make people better: my students learn new information, to be sure, but they also have the ability to learn to become holistically engaged with their communities.

I seek to place philosophical texts and ideas within social, historical, and cultural landscapes so that the ideas of these texts can have greater meaning to my students. I seek to create a learning environment which calls into question what counts as self, other, and community.

I believe that experimentation with new kinds of courses which focus on student learning is important. Our students today are some of the most literate of any generation before them — they spend their lives writing, although not in the traditional academic sense. For this reason, I find it important to engage in relevant pop-culture and social media platforms in my classes. For example, in my Logic and Critical Reasoning courses I have shifted the focus from critiquing the mass media to what I call the Philosophy of Social Media—I have a series of assignments (in-class and online) that involve students critiquing and analyzing both their own use of social media as well as the kinds of information they gather there. A popular activity I employ is “scroll time,” in which students search with their social media platform of choice for two minutes, at the end of which they break into groups of three or four and discuss the arguments given in the posts at their top of their feeds. By utilizing trends in popular culture, I am able to foster an atmosphere of inquisitiveness in my classroom. Ultimately, my goal is to encourage students to care about the world they live in as well as their impact on it

I seek to continuously engage in new pedagogical activities which may lead to student personal success by increasing their curiosity and depth of thought and, perhaps, leading others to discover their own interests in pursuing an academic life.