Teaching

Teaching Philosophy 

Education, ideally, is a process of liberation and hope. It instills in the learner the skills and practices that allow them to more effectively pursue their own personal and professional goals and the freedom to grow and develop as they see fit. Education does not dictate the truth but reveals to the student what is hidden and obscured in the world that they will not may their way in ignorance. Education is not bound by the walls of the classroom or the university but extends to the home and the workplace and to all corners of life. 

My courses do not assess learners’ “knowledge” in the traditional sense, which is to say memorization or comprehension of facts and concepts, but, rather, their ability to apply concepts and tools in their own lives. Drawn from sociocultural learning theories, “knowledge” in my classes is a set of practices or skills that allow students to effectively achieve their own personal and professional goals. If "knowledge" is one's ability to take efficacious actions towards goals, or participate meaningfully within a particular community, then "learning" is the process by which this action becomes more central to the community and/or more able to advance the individual's goals. This kind of learning is, importantly, a contextualized process that must take into account the individual students’ history and background, current cultural environment, and aspirations for the future. 

This complex context is operationalized through action within a community. Within any given community certain actions, habits, terms, skills, etc. mark a member as more masterful, important, or ‘central’ to the identity and actions that community; e.g., more central participation in the community of carpenters requires more than being able to build a high-quality chair, it might be marked by an ability to converse about dado or dovetails, being able to give insightful opinions on what wood is most suited for a given project, or being able to instruct less-central members effectively. Following this idea, all of my courses are directed towards helping students apply the concepts and tools of logic and philosophy as they pursue their own life goals. If you wish to be a nurse, then what is important is not that you know who proposed the categorical imperative, but that you can use the tools of philosophy to advance your goals in the nursing profession by, say, making an informed and well-supported argument about the morality of race as a proxy in medicine.

As an educator, I teach in the tradition of liberatory, sustaining pedagogy. Sustaining pedagogy is a movement towards practices and curriculum that 1) expose and counteract the histories of oppression and current institutions of power they have systematically built up debts of education and trauma with people belonging to non-dominant groups and 2) create an environment where learners of minoritized and nondominant groups can not just survive but thrive. In my philosophy courses, I keep (more or less) to Western history of ideas, as awareness of this narrative is expected for participation in professional communities but also because this narrative must first be known in order to be critiqued. While examining these ideas, I endeavor to reveal and challenge the dominant narrative by centering students’ voices and valuing non-Western epistemologies.