A Statement of Teaching Philosophy
A quality education is characterized by the experience and practice of formation rather than merely the transmission of information. While the acquisition and application of facts, ideas, theories, and data are critical to one’s intellectual development, none of these elements are received ahistorically nor are they sufficient in themselves. That is, a quality education attends to the broadest context to challenge students, to shape the way they think and ask questions, and to cultivate a more consequential interest in the given subject. In sum, a quality education understands its task as the formation of students’ imaginations, understood as their pre-rational intuition of the good, the true, and the beautiful.
How does this “pedagogy of imagination” realize itself in practice? Four strategies recommend themselves in the political science classroom:
- (1) To acquire a more concrete imagination of political life, stories and examples are essential to the material. Like the use of parables and fables to cultivate moral virtue, historical examples, case studies, and engagement with current events expose the complexity of institutions and everyday politics and bridge the gap between the “textbook” version of politics and what actually happens.
- (2) A pedagogy of imagination attempts to minimize strategic and superficial learning by structuring assessments that evaluate students’ thinking rather than their ability to accumulate grades and adhere to rules (though these basic elements are no less essential). Students are asked, for example, to enter key debates in the literature, take a side or create their own, and to offer a defense of their position based on historical examples and circumstances.
- (3) Students bring a diversity of perspectives, biases and prejudices to the classroom. It would be tempting to avoid these aspects and circumvent the tension, but this deprives students of an opportunity to have a meaningful and challenging dialogue. Instead, I seek to provoke these difficult conversations and facilitate them in a way that discourages individual conformity, hyperbole, and intolerance and encourages respect, toleration, honesty, and especially humility. The classroom is a space for students to struggle, speak honestly, make mistakes and ask questions. While blatant discriminatory and violent speech at odds with common decency and a positive learning environment are prohibited, I encourage students to cultivate a modest skepticism – not to the end of a kind of nihilism, but to a point where they see the world differently. They ask more precise questions, examine their assumptions and word-choice more carefully, engage others with greater humility and respect and recognize the limitations and opportunities of human knowledge.
- (4) Finally, the way students imagine themselves and their own abilities factors significantly in course outcomes. Research has shown that many students, especially women, minorities and first generation students, have internalized negative cultural stereotypes that act as restraints on the expectations they have for themselves. Some respond to this by lowering expectations, but a pedagogy of imagination sees this as an opportunity to raise expectations. This does not translate into “busy work” – piling on reading and homework that does more to foster resentment, apathy and strategic learning rather than genuinely formative learning that endures beyond the semester. Instead, the effective teacher sets very clear standards and rubrics for quality writing and engagement, and then provides resources for students to meet these expectations. With writing assignments, in particular, I go to great lengths in syllabus supplements to outline expectations, identify common compositional mistakes and offer resources for quality writing skills useful in any course.
I do not begin a course assuming each student is an ignorant “hard-drive” who may or may not be willing to “upload” the information I offer. They each come with distinctive intuitions about what the world is like, what is right and wrong, good, successful, effective, and so on. Rather than choosing over-simplified methods of coercion, fear and regurgitation, a pedagogy of imagination seeks to cultivate learning that endures and which corresponds to the complexity of the material and to the uniqueness of each student.