Teaching

Fall 2018

To access course materials, you need to be signed in with your Mount Royal University account with Google Apps.

• MGMT-4402 Corporate Social Responsibility | Section 001
• MGMT-4407 Governance & Ethical Issues | Section 001
• MGMT-4431 Leadership Development | Section 001

Teaching Philosophy

My role as a “progressive” teacher is not only that of teaching mathematics or biology but also of helping the students to recognize themselves as the architects of their own cognition process.

-Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom

The shaping of my teaching philosophy started to evolve during the time that I was a student at the University of São Paulo. I had, then, the privilege of attending a seminar with Prof. Paulo Freire. He is arguably one of the most influential academics in the area of pedagogy; he was a prolific writer on how to approach pedagogy as a mechanism for social change. Freire’s work of 1998, Pedagogy of Freedom; Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage proposes an insightful approach of the critical perspective of the pedagogical activity.

There is No Teaching without Learning

The first idea in Freire’s framework is that teaching and learning should happen concurrently. As such, students should be allowed autonomy and ownership over the learning experience. In addition, I adhere to the perspective that different learning styles and preferences demand different teaching techniques and tools. Variety in delivery methods and assessment techniques are examples of approaches that I use, which may allow students to succeed based on their individualized conditions.

In addition to that, some recent academic work on the neurobiology of learning (e.g., the extensive work of Prof. Ivan Izquierdo) shows that the ability of students to learn is influenced by their emotional states. In other words, motivated students, who enjoy an emotional connection to the learning context (e. g., subject matter, classroom environment, and etc) will apprehend more information. Not only that, emotional states help form more elaborated and retrievable cognitive processes in one’s brain.

These understandings of the neurobiology of learning are reflected in my teaching in a few different ways. The first one is the motivational framework that I employ, known as the expectancy theory of motivation. That approach suggests that students need to understand how to connect their effort to the expected level of performance; next, students need to value what would be the benefits (personal and societal) of attaining such level of performance. Accordingly, I work towards, having the students instilled with self-confidence, providing them with the tools to succeed, and in dialoguing about the benefits of them attaining the objectives of their courses.

In addition, I bring much enthusiasm and emotion to the teaching environment. As I introduced above, when one faces new information, emotions will generate deeper levels of learning; on the other hand, apathy and distractions prevent students from acquiring new information, and transforming that into new learning. The alternative is surface learning, based on memorization, repetition and quick forgetting, as explained by the neurobiology of learning.

Freire also suggests that learning is the most important activity of the teacher. In other words, teaching does not happen without the teacher’s own learnings. The classroom is the primary teachers’ learning environment about the educational process. Constant improvement and questioning of my own approaches is the most important avenue for my learning. Second, my research activities become one with my teaching efforts, that is, the main ability of a researcher and a teacher is to be a student. Different than sometimes proclaimed, I see teaching and research as one phenomena altogether. I believe that good teaching leads to better research and vice versa. In summary, before being a professor I see myself as a student of the educational phenomena and the subject area of my discipline, the studies of organizations.