Teaching
Statement of Teaching Philosophy
My first graduate advisor, and eventual committee chair, greatly affected my career aspirations. An elderly woman nearly 60 years my senior by the time I entered graduate school at 21, I now realize she embodied the professor I hope to become. Students often complained about her teaching - she was too difficult, she expected too much, she was too boring. In hindsight, I see why they held those opinions. There were no powerpoints. Each courses’ BlackBoard shell was empty. The videos she showed, year after year, were on VHS or, once, on LaserDisc. Somehow other students missed that she was not concerned with those trivial details or minute remembrances the like of exact half-lives, but with the process of thinking and of knowing. The blue books were not there to be filled with the minutia of class - they were to be filled with the process of thought. The plethora of details were not there to be memorized - they were there to be digested - to be toyed with - to be pondered and expanded upon, dissected and reconstructed.
Inclusive Excellence (IE) has become a buzzword in higher education. At its core, the concept is just as well-intentioned as all other drives for diversity and inclusion. Rather than attempt to recapitulate the chorus of voices calling for inclusion, I instead would like to explain the impact of IE on my personal life and my professional career, in terms of race, equity, gender, and diversity writ large.
The issue of race, as a lived experience rather than a biological reality, is also central in my classroom. Students are not tokenized and asked to speak for all members of their identity, but rather, that I take steps to make students comfortable voicing their thoughts and ideas from their own positionality. This approach evolved out of my work in South Africa, where racial categorization is simultaneously more widespread than in the US and takes on a very different form. Racial categories in South Africa include Afrikaans, English, Mixed, Colored, Indian, Sotho, and Zulu, among others. In the US, we would broadly group these as “White”, “Black”, and “South Asian”. Such broad brushstrokes ignore the individual identities and discrete groups that students may, or may not, feel a part of. I acknowledge the experience of race within the US, while teaching the biological reality - that we are a single species and there is more variation within one “race” than between the “races”.
My classroom, my teaching, and my philosophical approach to education are reflections of who I am. Inclusion of LGBTQIA+ issues, both as examples in my lessons and in service to the profession, is vital. I could not teach without touching on the experiences of the LGBTQIA+ community, as those experiences reflect aspects of my own life. Hailing from Indiana, I have been made aware of the often violent opposition to the existence of LGBTQIA+ students. Within my own educational experience, I have been excluded, assaulted, and even subject to attempted arson within my childhood home. I own these experiences so that I can authentically interact with students, but especially to engage with those who have been marginalized by the dominant culture.
My pedagogical approach is to value diversity in the classroom in all its forms. Principally, this means carefully planning my content and activities around the students in my course. Sometimes this means altering an activity to accommodate diversity in visual abilities - color blindness can necessitate modifications so a student can access the same information in a graphic or presentation. Other times, this means including subtitles and pre-recording lectures or presentations so that students from linguistically diverse backgrounds have the same opportunity to come to class prepared. This may mean holding office hours more frequently than required to accommodate students who need the time and help. I do these tasks, among others, happily, knowing that I am helping to provide an equitable environment for all students.