Teaching

I fashion my classes to be adaptive to my students' exploration of ideas, their own interests, and their own goals. I have recently transformed several of my classes particularly those on modern philosophy and Kant — to prioritize breadth (of figures, of topics), among other reasons, in order to cast a wider net and pique interest among a wider grouop of students. Additionally, my assignments are usually adaptable to student goals: in my graduate seminars students must decide on an objective for their final paper — a book review for publication, a 3,000 paper for submission as an APA colloquium, what have you — and our work on their writing is tailored to that goal.

Approaching philosophical ideas in a novel way helps to get students engaged with course material, assists them in integrating and retaining their learning, and can upset narrow conceptions of philosophy. So, for instance, in my Modern Philosophy course, we read philosophy in a wide variety of forms: dialogues (Berkeley's Dialogues), epistolaries (Cavendish's Philosophical Letters), correspondences (Lady Masham's correspondence with Leibniz), first-person narratives (Descartes' Meditations), mathematical proofs (Spinoza's Ethics), philosophical treatises (Conway's Principles), and fiction (Cavendish's Blazing World). At the end of the semester, students must write a paper on course topics in one of these styles. The results are much more creative, interesting, playful, and reflective than when I have assigned basic argumentative term papers. And the assignment is much more popular, to boot!

It is important to me that my students understand how what they are learning connects with their own lives, knowledge, experience, and future. This is crucial to retention of ideas, student buy-in, and the utility of what they've learned. I thus use a variety of integrative activities and assignments in my courses, allowing students the opportunity to assimilate their learning into their lives. For example, I use the RATE tool, developed by the College of Liberal Arts' Career Readiness Initative, to promote student metacognition on the learning process and reflection upon how they can use and advocate for their philosophical education in the future (particularly in employment-oriented contexts like job interviews). In many of my courses, I assign students with journaling assignments (or their equivalent), which ask students not only to summarize what they are reading/learning, but also to freely connect those ideas to their background knowledge and experiences.