Teaching Philosophy

As a university academic, I'm employed both for my work as a researcher/writer and also as a teacher/mentor. Teaching happens to be something I have always enjoyed. When I was at the University of Washington – with a faculty of some 4,000 professor – I was delighted to receive one of the university’s Distinguished Teaching awards.

Something I particularly enjoy about teaching is its theatrics and “politics”. For me, this means the live, embodied interaction of the classroom and the potential for changing the way my students think about the world around them. I see it as my public and professional responsibility to 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. One of the other benefits of teaching is that I too am constantly challenged and also get to learn and grow from our “learning communities”.

The notion of the learning community is one I take from bell hooks' (1994) book "Teaching to Transgress". Here is an extract from her exchange with Ron Scapp:

“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.”

This sense of shared or collaborative learning is something I take very seriously, even if I recognize the responsibility of my institutional authority and advanced expertise in the field. Like my students, however, my learning is structured by the need simultaneously to doubt and believe everything.

This idea of the “doubting and believing game” is something I came across in my very first semester teaching Introduction to Communication to a lecture class of 450 students at the University of Washington. It’s been a long time since I used a textbook, but this came from Rob Anderson and Veronica Ross’s (2002) Questions of Communication where they, in turn, borrow from Peter Elbow's (1973) book Writing without Teachers.

“Any significant learning ultimately depends on the willingness to play both the doubting and believing games. ... When you ‘play’ the doubting game, you look for errors, find faults, and try to pick apart whatever you're looking at so you can see what's wrong. The object of the believing game is not to disprove but to support and clarify, [assuming] a willingness to suspend doubt, argumentation, and premature conclusions in favour of momentarily accepting the plausibility of another person's position.”