UC Santa Cruz - Center for Teaching Excellence

Dean Mathiowetz – Teaching Statement 2005-06
Assistant Professor, Politics

Given the many amazements of my first frosh days at a university where the student population was five times the number of souls in my agricultural hometown, it’s remarkable that I so vividly remember my first college class, “Contemporary Political Ideologies.” The professor opened the lecture of 250 students with what seemed at first to be merely a casual survey and discussion of students’ political views. Of course the perspectives ranged more broadly than I could have anticipated, but that was no surprise. What got me thinking was how the professor went on to engage students’ offerings so as to draw out the differences among the idioms that animated their divergent points of view. In that first hour I was intrigued by an idea I have continued to explore since: that political life is premised not on a common language, but in the friction among and fertilization across different ones; that politics is a process of negotiation and translation among these idioms; and that the very terms of political discourse are spaces for action and change.

This insight is fundamental to everything I pursue as a scholar and teacher of political theory. In all of my work I endeavor to break open words and to thereby render enigmatic the self-evidence of cherished truths. In my teaching, I do so with a view toward students’ discovering a role for themselves in unsettling and affecting the trajectory of political discourse. In seeking to make students’ own words and idioms ever so slightly unfamiliar to them, I hope to render these words and idioms truly appropriable; in suggesting what’s at stake in their appropriation, I hope to encourage students to take responsibility for their language and realize their power in it. This aim leads to different teaching approaches in different pedagogical settings, a fact I’ve had ample opportunity to explore since my course offerings run from my own 250-student introductory class (“Citizenship and Action”) to a graduate seminar (“Interpretive Problems in Political Theory”), with plenty of stops in between: an upper-division core lecture (“Ancient Political Thought”); a junior seminar (“Foundations of Political Economy”); a senior seminar (“The Politics of ‘Interest’”). Though these courses differ widely in size, setting, and subject matter, I pursue strategies of defamiliarization in them all.

So, for example, after a week of relatively accessible readings that raise issues of race and resistance in “Citizenship and Action” (the lower-division lecture) I assign twenty-five pages of Aristotle’s Politics and a writing exercise that requires putting one of the former issues into conversation with Aristotle’s text. The Politics jars the students not only with its density and obscurity, but also with its apparent affronts to many of their values. Aristotle’s endorsement of slavery on the basis of nature is a case in point. Students’ indignation at Aristotle’s invocation of ‘nature’ in this context becomes an opportunity to explore, by way of general discussion, what competing ideas about “what’s natural” circulate in present-day political discourse, and how questions of justice and policy (e.g. same-sex marriage) can be seen as hinging, in part, on disagreements about what counts as ‘natural.’ What, I then ask, is Aristotle’s view of ‘nature’?

We set to work together, students culling evidence from the text while I map their offerings on the board. This method of discovering that Aristotle holds a view of nature foreign to present-day discourse not only models strategies for reading and studying difficult texts and ideas, it also allows students to re-orient their initial objections. And so we find that for Aristotle ‘slave nature’ may be revealed primarily in the refusal to deliberate about any thing, after having been given a real opportunity to do so. This possibility pushes students’ concerns about inclusion and action into new relief. Continuing this work in their essays, students confront whether Aristotle’s theory rightly excludes from political participation those who, for example, hold racial categories as themselves ‘natural’ in the sense of not being up for public deliberation. Or students consider whether political resistance can get its power by opening spaces of deliberation that were previously closed. Some students take up Aristotle’s view, others dispute it; but throughout this process, students learn that while Aristotle must speak to their concerns about citizenship, their own categories and presuppositions must be available for enlargement and emendation, or defended on unforeseen grounds. Probably most useful to students is their sense that a very unwelcoming text can come to have new meanings for them when they appropriate it with others than it does when they struggle with it alone.

A graduate seminar requires a different approach, though my concern to trouble the familiar with the strange is the same. The special challenge in the seminar is to bring those who experience estrangement and unfamiliarity into the discussion. “Interpretive Problems in Political Theory” uses philosophy of language, feminist ethnography, and historical theory to grapple with the promise and problems of understanding political and philosophical texts across radically differing cultural and temporal contexts. The often dense and esoteric readings promote a potentially unhelpful divide in the seminar between those students whose prior work in one or more of these areas has readied them to dash into the complexities and minutiae, and students for whom the material is new, utterly difficult, or strange. For obvious reasons those in the latter group may hesitate to enter a discussion too easily dominated by the former. Therefore I begin the seminar by saying that (at least) two kinds of voices are needed in our discussions: ‘complicators’ on the one hand, and ‘clarifiers’ and ‘simplifiers’ on the other. By suggesting a crucial role for the latter group of students, I enjoin them to bring to discussion what only they who confronted the texts as new, difficult, and strange can: the clarifying question born of frustration or bewilderment, or the insight of a simplifying remark that cuts against the grain. Often only such a question or remark can throw the stakes of a conversation into view, turn a discussion toward more fruitful terrain, or prompt more surefooted students to rethink their fast positions.

In the grad seminar as in the lower-division lecture, and at every point in between, when students become travelers in other worlds, they may more fully and conscientiously inhabit their own. In realizing the power in seeing otherwise, I hope that students will seek this power beyond the classroom. Since my own greatest thrill is being shown a sliver of surprising strangeness in a word, phrase, text, or idea, the insights that students bring to the classroom from their wealth of other worlds provides me fresh joys at every turn. But more importantly, each opening a student discovers becomes an imperative to hold open that space for the next. This, I believe, is the true reward and responsibility of teaching: to pass along to others what our students have taught us, while ever remaining open to the unexpected.