In 1923, Kahlil Gibran suggested that “If a teacher is indeed wise, he [or she] does not bid you enter the house of his [or her] wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.”  This maxim guides my teaching.  For three years I have taught undergraduate, master’s, and PhD courses at UCSC.  As an education professor I have both the challenge and joy of a kind of irony: my job is to teach about teaching.  Its challenge, of course, is also its joy: how to practice what I might preach. 

Our country’s education history is steeped in a didactic, transfer model of teaching and learning where the dominant pedagogy has too often been about passing on some autonomous body of knowledge to be received and warehoused in passive students like cans of beans in an empty stockroom.  Yet, ever since educators like Dewey, Montessori, and Freire there has been an alternative paradigm: teaching as providing crafted opportunities for students to interrogate the world for themselves and construct their own resultant understandings of, and orientations to, it.  It is inside this alternate history—sometimes termed constructivism or critical pedagogy—that I locate my teaching.

At the undergraduate level, I currently teach three courses: Aesthetic Education; Education, the Media, and Society; and Critical Pedagogy.  There are similarities among them, though I also believe different courses require different methods.  In all, the primary purpose is to invite students into the authentic discourse of the course’s content.  For me, curriculum is a conversation; as I design courses I consider into which conversations to invite students (and why), and how best to facilitate students’ intellectual involvement and excitement in them.  My hope is always to situate students at the nexus of several historical and academic conversations related to the topic—and see what happens. 

Another goal is to connect the curriculum to students’ own unique pasts, presents, and futures.  Our students at UCSC are erudite, bright, and moral; and they have already had an abundance of diverse experiences.  My pedagogy tries to tap into their knowledge reservoirs in order to (a) breathe life into the material, (b) demonstrate how students are already knowledgeable in many areas of education, (c) illuminate for students how they tacitly rely on and build complex “theory” everyday, (d) help students interrogate and adjust some of their previously held beliefs, and (e) encourage them to mostly talk to and learn from each other.

Yet the shape and the contents of each course differ. Aesthetic Education relies on philosophical investigations to define art and articulate its usefulness, and student-group projects to link the arts to human development and education.  Education, the Media, and Society draws on media studies and critical theory to investigate how society has represented education in film, television, and newspapers (and how those news and entertainment representations, in turn, influence education).  Critical Pedagogy begins near the beginning with looks at Hegel, Marx, Gramsci, and Bakhtin in order to frame contemporary perspectives on how schooling contexts and practices can be (and have been) at turns oppressive and liberating, which raises the central question I pose to students: how will you be part of the solution in education, not part of the problem?

I also teach master’s and doctoral courses on education.  In these courses, the contents and conversations are slightly different from those in my undergraduate classes: these courses tend to be more intimate, fuller of the disciplinary lexicon, and more focused on the professional uses of the material.  I currently teach three graduate seminars: Becoming an English Teacher, Language and Power in Education, and Sociolinguistics in Education. 

In all courses I attempt to creatively, energetically, and compassionately scaffold students’ own critical analyses of how education has shaped them and others, and what kind of future educators they hope to become (and why).  I also attempt to model the behavior I hope they will adopt in their lives and teaching careers. This includes candor, mutual respect, explicitness, approaching topics from multiple angles, the teacher as ‘guide on the side not sage on the stage’ (as Deborah Meier has written), group activities, and balancing rigor with comfort.  It is my goal to help students get into knowledge conflicts—encouraging them to examine what they thought they knew, how they came to know it, and whose interests their education has served—and well as help them out of those conflicts. Any teacher who helps dismantle a student’s prior-held, deeply embedded world view without offering an exit strategy does a disservice, I believe, to student learning.  And, finally, I try to make student voices and feedback a privileged part of the course structure.  I consider my job to be as much a listener as a talker; for me, a thoughtful question trumps ten minutes of my proselytizing.  And I find that I learn myriads about my teaching by listening to students, so that each iteration of a course is slightly better than the last.  It is in this way that I try to complete each course by closing the loop of the academic journey students and I have taken together.  If Gibran suggests we take students to the thresholds of their own minds, then I feel bound to end the journey at a place well described by Thomas Carruthers: “A good teacher has been defined as someone who makes him or herself progressively unnecessary.”

When done right (a feat not always accomplished, but I continue to try…), this situation leaves me with the privileged reality I believe all teachers treasure: former students who contact the instructor to offer an update on their lives, connect the course to their current worlds, and share some heartfelt appreciation.  I tell my own students that as teachers they should save thank-you notes from their students in a box to re-read on those days they wonder if all the trouble of a life in education is worth it.  I’m honored that my time here in Santa Cruz has allowed me to add to my own box, courtesy of UCSC students.  And I’m honored to be considered for this teaching award, though I do not want to rest on my laurels.  I will strive to take each group of students further and deeper into their own academic and intellectual development, so as to make good on Kahlil Gibran’s eighty-four year old promise.