Statement of Teaching Philosophy

My best teachers who pushed me the hardest and taught me the most consistently displayed two qualities in their teaching: passion and compassion. These are the qualities that I strive to bring to my own work, both when teaching undergraduates in Religious Studies and Women’s Studies and when working as a Lead Teaching Assistant.

When I model passion in the classroom, I hope to inspire my students to see the significance and value of the materials that we study. I strive to sweep them up in the excitement of intellectual inquiry and of discovering the strange in the familiar and the familiar in the strange. In the classroom we deconstruct religious and cultural forms in American life and beyond. I ask my students to look for what is recognizably American about Appalachian snake-handling churches, and to question their unexamined assumptions about gender roles in marriage or ministry.

Modeling passion also means setting a tone of intellectual rigor, so that students can see the value in developing critical reading, thinking, writing, and speaking skills, rather than seeing course requirements such as well-honed thesis statements as meaningless bureaucratic hoops through which they must jump. I seek to empower my students as active participants in their own education through classroom choices such as arranging desks in a circle to disrupt the assumption that knowledge will flow only from teacher to student. I want my students to leave my classroom with the enthusiasm, confidence, and skills to critically engage in lifelong learning.

Compassion is key to my approach to both course materials and to the students themselves. I approach the study of religions with critical empathy, seeking to understand how religions make sense on their own terms, without losing the intellectual perspective of comparative religions. Many of my most exciting teaching moments come when I am able to lead students who have known religion in a deeply committed way from within one tradition into understanding of and respect for other religious traditions.

Carrying compassion into the classroom also means having compassion for the students who have unique learning styles and lives that extend beyond the classroom. Because different students learn in different ways I bring a combination of teaching modes into each of my class sessions. This includes using lectures, group discussions, PowerPoint presentations, and films. It also includes helping students to make connections between historical and theoretical course materials and current events or media. To help them to make personal connections to the academic material I gave my students in Introduction to American Religions the option to write a term paper analyzing their own families’ religious histories. I am also aware that college students’ priorities and even their educational processes are not limited to their official coursework so I seek to understand and be sensitive to circumstances of class, race, gender, sexuality, and age that shape their educational needs.

As long as I have the privilege to teach my students will also be teaching me how to be a more effective educator. I am continually attending to my students’ responses and evolving new ways to impart knowledge, skills for acquiring and interpreting that knowledge, and the enthusiasm to continue learning.