Teaching

Pedagogy

I love teaching. It is an enormous responsibility and an enormous privilege. When done with care, the rewards are enormous too. I find that college-aged students have an insatiable appetite for questioning the world around them. When I invest time and effort into my pedagogical practice, my students respond with an invigorating degree of curiosity and engagement. In order to facilitate the most positive, accessible, and rewarding classroom environment that I can, I use a number of strategies.

I prioritize inclusivity. I am unequivocal in my efforts to create a classroom that is actively antiracist and affirming of all sexual orientations, gender identities, and educational backgrounds. This is reflected in my inclusive language in the classroom, as well as my continuing efforts to diversify my syllabi.

I cold-call. I believe very strongly in the practice often referred to as cold-calling (although I prefer the gentler voluntelling). I implement this practice for several reasons. First, knowing that students will be asked to answer questions in each class incentivizes preparation. Second, thinking through things together and out loud helps us learn. Third, when the instructor selects students to answer questions, this helps ensure that each student is afforded an equal opportunity to participate. Otherwise, it is not uncommon for a handful of confident students to dominate the discussion. Cold-calling helps mitigate this imbalance. (See, for example, this recent study which suggests that cold-calling mitigates gender disparities in class participation and encourages students to volunteer more frequently.)

I balance skills-based and knowledge-based learning. The latter centers on learning the content of the course, while the former centers on cultivating a set of skills that the students can transfer to other settings. These are skills such as effective writing, reading comprehension, and asking well-formed questions. I have developed a number of strategies that I believe successfully prioritize both kinds of learning. For example, I assign student-led debates. I find that nothing incentivizes students to learn a philosophical position like having to reconstruct it (and then defend it) in front of their peers. I also assign scaffolded research projects by implementing small checkpoints over the course of a semester. I break down each step of the research process, from choosing a research question and finding potentially relevant sources to annotating, drafting, and giving feedback.

I incentivize broad engagement with the field. It doesn’t matter whether my students are headed for dental school, consulting, professional ballet, or a graduate program. No matter their career aspirations, I encourage them to engage with the field of philosophy after the semester has ended by submitting their research papers to undergraduate journals and conferences. Beyond another CV line, this presents students with an opportunity to apply the skills they learned in my course outside of the classroom. Submitting to a journal or presenting at a conference gives us a chance to practice public speaking, revising, and simply hitting “submit.” Each of these is a valuable skill regardless of one’s career trajectory. Therefore, I encourage broader engagement with the field by building these opportunities into my course syllabi.

Course Evaluations

The following graph summarizes my evaluations (mean scores on a scale of 0-5) from the last four courses I taught at Duke University. My complete course evaluations (dating back to 2018) are available upon request.