As someone who studies the cultivation of habit, the transmission and inculcation of the practice of learning has always driven my pedagogy. To learn is to cultivate the practice of communal curiosity, and to hone our awareness of how, what, and why we think. As I argue in my recent publication, “The Practice of the Pause” (Teaching Ethics 2026), the most important knowledge I can foster in students is not content, but the practice of curiosity and self-reflection: the bodily feeling of it, the internal and intrinsic virtues necessary for academic inquiry.
All of my courses therefore present an argument, rather than simply delivering content; as I am fond of reminding students, if you just want the facts, you could just ask Google or ChatGPT or (preferably) the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Sometimes, the duration of the argument is just for one class period. I tell students that I will wear the “hat” of whomever we’re reading for the day. I come into class and write one of the philosopher’s central claims on the board, and then challenge my students to use the text to build a syllogism around the claim—and then to deconstruct it. Throughout the discussion, I draw their attention to the practices I employ or that they build for themselves: see how my definitions here force you to ask the question in such a way that my argument is the correct answer? Notice how seductive this line of reasoning is while you’re in it, but feel that disjuncture inside you as it rubs the wrong way against your intuition? In this way, I teach them the key concepts and terms, but also how philosophers have arrived at those ideas, and how they have collided with one another in academic conversation.
My book (Reading Bodies, Edinburgh UP, 2022) contributes a materialist account of empathy rooted in embodiment and the lived experience of pain. I do not shy away from the difficult discussions about pain, so that students can also see the practice of care for our research subjects. Students respond deeply to the gentle rigor that I bring to explorations of others’ accounts of pain, and we engage in conversation about empathy on the margins of social hierarchy. Along with those smaller arguments, I make arguments that may take the entire semester. For example, a curated journey through the history and philosophy of science lays the groundwork for a series of paradoxes: pain is both mechanical and vital, measurable and immeasurable; people in pain are both individuals and members of a population. The semester ends with a set of case studies: women’s pain; the pain of Black folks throughout American history; the opioid epidemic. The paradoxes suddenly arrive in stark relief against the lived experience of these marginalized bodies’ pain and how their pain has been (mis)understood and (mis)treated. That extension of care allows for students to take ownership of their own positions and choices, and to cultivate both rigor and care in their own scholarship.
Most importantly, as I embody care and critical reflection for students, they learn to cultivate it in themselves intrinsically. As one student wrote in an email mid-semester in PHIL 310 (CNU Spring 2022):
I remembered suddenly yesterday while I was working on this [essay] that it’s an assignment and I’m supposed to turn it in. It feels like I’m just exploring my thinking and having interesting conversations with you, and not just doing something for points.
My teaching philosophy can be encapsulated in this goal: to create a safe space where students are co-creators of their own learning, and can hone their thinking with me as an empowering guide and mentor.