Statement of Teaching Philosophy

I love philosophy. I love to teach. For me, teaching is both a career and a vocation. My ambition is to communicate the stimulation and joy that I find in philosophical thought to my students. With that in mind I have three main goals: (1) to present the material in a way that is not only clear, but accessible and inviting to students; (2) to give students an opportunity to develop argumentation skills that they can take to their other classes and to the rest of their lives; and (3) to provide a role model of a scholar.

As a teacher one of my basic jobs is to connect the students with the material; this means presenting the material with clarity, making it accessible to Iowa State students and inviting students to participate in their own education. I begin each course and each class session with an explicit set of goals or objectives. This gives the students a framework on which to hang the material, and, more importantly, it gives them a set of success criteria by which they can judge their own progress in the class. I post sets of reading questions on the course web page to guide students through what are sometimes very challenging readings and to prepare them for upcoming lectures and class discussions. I have the students write response papers to the readings before we discuss them in class. This ensures that they come to class ready to engage the material and helps them to pinpoint areas where I can be of most help. I often have students explain key concepts to one another during review sessions. It is a measure of my success as a teacher and of theirs as students if they can explain the material clearly to their peers.

Presenting material in terms that are accessible to Iowa State students is also important. Some say that effective teachers are first anthropologists because it is necessary to understand the culture of the students in your classes. I use cases that relate to college life and to choices that students are in the process of making. For example, Aristotle’s concept of what makes a life good hits home when students consider it in the context of choosing a career. Students have different needs and learning styles. I use a variety of presentation methods to make philosophy accessible to the widest possible range of students: I lecture, sometimes in a formal way using overheads and sometimes as a storyteller; I lead class discussions; I have students lead class discussions; I post assignments on the web and I maintain frequent email contact with students. I regularly ask students for written feedback. I want to know what they find effective and how to change the class to make it a better learning opportunity. I post their feedback on my web page along with a summary of the changes I will be making, and a justification of the elements I have decided to retain.

One of my greatest strengths as a teacher is my ability to engage a wide diversity of students in class discussions. The assumptions that almost all professors make about race, gender, and sexuality have the effect of alienating some students. In many cases male and female students have different communication styles, the result of which is that men tend to take up more of the class’s time and energy. Both male and female instructors have difficulty noticing this because we come to expect those very gendered communications styles that often do not serve the women students well. I consciously extend an invitation to the wide range of ISU students to come and learn in my classroom. This entails work over the entire semester and not just a week-long section on African American feminists tacked onto the end of a course. For example, I use examples of both straight and lesbian relationships, I use examples of female doctors and male nurses, and I give students an idea of the racial diversity that exists in Iowa and the rest of the country that they often do not see in their classmates. In one class, after I used an example of a gay couple to illustrate a philosophical problem, a student wrote me an email in which he said that this was the first class that he had taken at ISU where he didn’t feel like an outsider. A professor must make a conscious effort to say to women and minorities “You are welcome in this classroom and this is a safe place for you to be.”

My goals in teaching philosophy go beyond connecting students with the material and extend to helping students learn both spoken and written argumentation skills. In order to develop these skills I have students take philosophy out of the classroom and into the rest of their lives. Therefore I assign projects such as the Practical Ethics Component in my Moral Theory and Practice course (Phil 230). Here students perform a volunteer effort in the community and analyze that effort in light of one of the moral theories that we study in class. Bertrand Russell described philosophy as a tool that can ‘liberate us from prejudice’ and allow us to escape dogmatism. I hope to give students the tools they need to analyze their beliefs and accept them not just because they happened to inherit them from their family, church or our culture in general, but, because they choose to affirm them.

I look at grading as an opportunity to help students develop both understanding and skills. I focus on different skills at different levels of courses. In my Introduction to Philosophy class (Phil 201) I have the students write a short paper every week. This teaches them to engage with what they read, as opposed to just observing it. Further, it gives students the preparation that many of them need to feel comfortable speaking up in class. In my Feminist Philosophy class (Phil 338) I give the students several essay questions one week before their midterm examination. These essays generally ask students to relate theory to examples from popular film, music and television. Preparing for these exams helps students understand the material in a deep way because they must apply it to our everyday culture. In my upper level Philosophy of Biology class (483X) the bulk of the grade is based on a paper that I help the students write. The paper is broken down into small sections so that I can give students written feedback on the argument that they are developing. They write and rewrite these small sections of the paper throughout the semester. This helps students to overcome writer’s block, it shows them how to break down large tasks, how to build on work that they already done and how the development of an idea actually progresses. As a result, the students end up honing their understanding and the expression of their arguments and they are generally very proud of the paper that they produce.

My final goal is to be an intellectual role model. As a young female philosophy professor, I present students with a picture of a non-traditional scholar. It is good for both male and female students alike to be exposed to a diversity of teachers. But I hope that my presence in the classroom makes it easier for young women to imagine themselves as intellectuals. I try to model intellectual integrity by engaging with the difficult questions and challenges that students raise. Upon arriving at ISU, students have the perspective of only one person, themselves. I hope that through studying philosophy they can come to some understanding of the variety of ways that people engage the world and to see that smart people often disagree.

I am particularly proud to have developed and to administrate the Feminist Pedagogy Discussion Group in the Women’s Studies Program. The first time that I taught feminist philosophy I realized that being a young woman professor and teaching gender related issues raised a set of very particular pedagogical challenges, such as maintaining authority in the classroom, being inclusive of students of different races, class backgrounds and sexual orientations, and ensuring that male students don’t feel marginalized in the feminist classroom. Seeing that these challenges were not uniquely mine I have been developing a community of professors who are interested in gender and pedagogy.

My students often like the way that I use humor. This always surprises me because I don’t sit at home thinking up jokes, but I think it is indicative of the comfortable and fun environment that I foster in my classes. My enthusiasm for teaching supplies an energy and positive atmosphere that is fundamental in running a good philosophy course and in effectively reaching students.