[Linking image: Course evaluations suggest that these teaching methods are working . . . ]
Teaching
Teaching as collaborative work? It’s true, and not to be overlooked! Indeed, the scholarly agenda and commitments on display in all of my other work directly connect to my teaching. In teaching, I learn a tremendous amount from students—not least as they constantly present new experiences as well as difficult questions and challenges which can resonate in surprising ways with scholarship.
In that context, I really view teaching as a process of guided inquiry and collective study rather than a matter of delivering content or performing expertise. I approach the classroom as a space where students can take stock of and begin to question sedimented forms of common sense, experiment with new intellectual practices and forms of collaborative knowledge production, and cultivate potentially transformative forms of praxis—typically based on a common theme, object of analysis, or collective goal. Generally speaking, I encourage students to experiment with new ways of producing knowledge, especially through different modes of inquiry that invite them to re-evaluate aspects of their thinking and learning that they may be taking for granted. I encourage students to conscientiously inventory and work to renovate their own existing frameworks of knowledge, habit, and interaction—to always consider the broader social and historical-structural entanglements at play even in the most mundane and intimate aspects of life, and to question the futures to which their own practices might lead. In the classroom, we use our lives and experiences to pose critical questions about processes of knowledge-formation and power. I provide substantial ongoing support so that students feel comfortable articulating, pushing up against the limits of, and renovating their own thoughts and practices along these lines.
I have been lucky to have wide latitude to experiment and refine these connections within a school (Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell) with stated commitments to engaged, inquiry-based pedagogy emphasizing collaboration and shared leadership. Here are some of the courses I have recently taught:
-Approaches to Cultural Research
-Cultural Studies Research Practices [Graduate]
-Discovery Core I: Self and Society in Everyday Life
-Expedition Seattle: Power and Place in the Emerald City [Graduate Studio]
-Institutions and Social Change
-Interdisciplinary Inquiry
-Research Colloquium Seminar [Graduate]
-Social Theory