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Student Exemplars

 

Philosophy of Teaching

I take my work as a teacher scholar very seriously and am of the mind that students should come away from their coursework as critical consumers and producers of their professional lives. I structure my courses with materials that enable this growth, and I provide mentoring and support as students struggles with difficult concepts, new ways of thinking, and the very hard work of bridging the theory/practice dichotomy. My teaching provides a scholarly space for this to happen, and my hard work in teaching happens in the classroom, in the moment, as students work to make sense of their shift in thinking.

In my experiences as both an Assistant and Associate Professor in the Reich College of Education, I have learned to structure discussion and assignments that allow discovery, creativity, knowledge construction, critique, and proactive change. The theoretical frame that guides my teaching is grounded in postmodernism. While I do believe in a constructionist philosophy of teaching – one that values that social construction of knowledge that occurs in an interactive, forum-based classroom – I do not always ascribe that those cultural constructions should be the final result of learning. For example, there are cultural constructions of knowledge that limit students, and there are constructions of knowledge that may be, in fact, quite dangerous. If I allow for students’ constructions to be the final journey of their learning, then I believe that I have not pushed them to consider their own positions in the world and how those positions enable their epistemological and ontological frameworks.

Therefore, I push students to examine the assumptions of their knowledge, the limits of their knowledge and experiences, and how they can work the edges of these assumptions and limits. This is the work of deconstruction (a form of postmodern analysis) – to analyze the ways in which structures of knowledge are unstable and can fall apart at any time. This pedagogy, I hope, keeps my students in a stance of critical questioning and reflexivity that will benefit them not only in their daily lives but also as educators and educational leaders.


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