Teaching

In my teaching, my guiding principle is to make philosophy relevant to my students’ lives and cultivate the skills unique to philosophical thinking. 

For my lower-level courses, I do this by way of the material I assign as well as by using a public philosophy method of inquiry, called the "plain-vanilla method of inquiry." In my upper-level courses, I follow this principle by using focused, contemporary case-studies to illustrate philosophical concepts, partly so that they can trace the origins of arguments (e.g., how was human-trafficking defended in 1700s and what does human-trafficking look like today) and partly so that they can identify questionable, philosophical assumptions (e.g., how sexist values might underlie modeling theories of reproduction). I also use iterative and scaffolded writing assignments. With a series of prompts and my feedback, they practice various conceptual and evaluative abilities that are specific to philosophy: what kinds of ideas, descriptive or normative, a concept picks out, what would be evidence for choosing between a claim and its negation, and eventually how to defend a robust thesis, such as evaluating what errors in reasoning are for Bacon and whether they contribute to knowledge. 

I have taught and mentored students from different institutions (GVSU, Wesleyan, and UIC), and I believe in recruiting and retaining students to become successful and happy post-bacc philosophy majors in whatever occupation they end up pursuing. 

Pictures:

1. A slide on crucial experiments.

2.  Early Modern Philosophy Jeopardy! 

3.  Fill-in philosophy chart in feminist epistemology. 

4.  Formalization of an argument with an objection by a group of students.

5. Students at an AI and Art exhibit at GVSU's Art Museum