teaching and mentoring
General teaching philosophy
bell hooks: When I enter a classroom at the beginning of the semester the weight is on me to establish that our purpose is to be, for however brief a time, a community of learners together. It positions me as a learner. But I am also not suggesting that I don't have more power. And I'm not trying to say we're all equal here. I'm trying to say that we are all equal here to the extent that we are equally committed to creating a learning environment.
Ron Scapp: That's right. That returns us to the issue of respect. Sure, it's bad faith to pretend that we're all the same because the teacher's the one who ultimately is going to grade. In traditional terms that is the source of power, and judging is something we all do as students and teachers. That's not really the source of power in the successful classroom. The power of the liberatory classroom is in fact the power of the learning process, the work we do to establish a community.*
As a professor at a leading research institution, I am employed primarily for my work as a researcher. However, teaching is one of my great joys in life and, in 2007, I was pleased to receive the University of Washington's Distinguished Teaching Award.
I really enjoy both the theatrics and the politics of pedagogy
and, to borrow the words of feminist scholar bell
hooks (quoted above), I like to think of my approach as "teaching to transgress".
What this means for me is that it's my social and professional
responsibility to help create opportunities for students to discover different ways
of thinking and new ways of being critical. And being critical means
more than simply identifying the pros and cons; it means searching for
"hidden agendas", interrogating the taken-for-granted and doubting
anyone who tells us something's good for us. My job as a teacher is
therefore not just to pump knowledge into students - although knowledge is clearly important - but to challenge students and to
help them challenge others. One of the best things about this approach
is that I too am challenged and that I also get to grow from the process
of building new learning communities together with my students.
* Extract from a dialogue between professors bell hooks and Ron Scapp Source: hooks, b. In Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom (1994, p.153)