Teaching & Mentorship

As a teacher, I aim to promote knowledge, inspire meaningful learning and initiate the intellectual and individual growth of my students. Teaching is a profession that I have chosen with passion, love and imagination. I know that there is no limit to improvement. Teaching is such a profession that warrants continuous improvement. I have always aspired to be a teacher who, even after decades in the classroom, leaves each session asking how the next one might be better, how students might be better engaged and better inspire this unique set of students. I bring three overarching objectives to the classroom, each of them rooted in my conception of teaching as an invitation to relationship, reflection and transformation. First, I invite students into a relationship with the specific course material. As a professor of International Relations and Politics in the context of a liberal education, I consider my responsibility as creating spaces for students to encounter at both a normative and empirical level fundamental questions of power, justice, identity, equality, and freedom to do so in a manner that connects with rather than builds walls between other subfields, disciplines, and modes of inquiry. I design my courses to advance students’ thinking and reasoning capability in different ways, such as imaginative and theoretical, empirical and normative, comparative and specific. At the end of the course, a significant way to measure a student’s improvement is his or her capacity to critically engage the course topic from a variety of perspectives and paradigms. In addition to assessing a student’s factual grasp of the material, I employ exams, essay tasks, quizzes, and research projects that are open-ended and encourage critical thinking with no single correct answer. Particularly, I am more interested in developing the students’ capacity to argue cogently, persuasively, and synthetically than in the particular content of his or her conclusions.

My approach to student assessment reflects my two goals. First, the student is expected to master a body of knowledge by demonstrating on exams a familiarity with those works, pieces, terms, and concepts studied in the course. Second, students are allowed to reflect upon the material at greater leisure in written assignments that emphasize the skills of critical thinking and listening acquired during the semester. While my standards are high, I help the students to meet expectations by providing office hours, review sessions, and the chance to submit draft papers and revisions. My teaching philosophy will be based on the pragmatic model of Bloom’s taxonomy. Developed in 1956 and revised in 2001, Bloom’s Taxonomy was created by Benjamin Bloom with collaborators Max Englehart, Edward Furst, Walter Hill, and David Krathwohl as a framework for categorizing educational goals. Bloom’s taxonomy is a multi-layered model for encouraging learning by progressing through six levels of increasing complexity. Bloom’s taxonomy is often used to set learning goals and to evaluate student learning in a classroom setting.

Finally, I attempt to inspire intellectual growth in my students by providing them with knowledge and skills that help them to extend beyond the classroom and engage with other related disciplines and the broader domains of their lives. The keys to these skills are a sense of curiosity, open-mindedness, and a thirst for knowledge. I would encourage my students to observe and to question the purpose and meaning of human thought, behavior, and emotions. After becoming thoughtful observers, I would like my students to use their understandings and skills to ask a few good questions, to creatively design a way of answering these questions, and to openly share their new knowledge with others.