Teaching Portfolio

Philosophy, Education, & Technology

The core motivation for my teaching in philosophy is a drive to open students to new ways of seeing the world.  Lewis Gordon once said that “it is absurd [for a student to] leave a learning environment, walking out exactly as [they] were entering it.”  Just so, it is absurd for us as educators to see our goal as anything other than the transformation of human persons.  There are bad transformations and good transformations—ways of changing that can close a person down, limiting their potential and their future, and ways that can open them up to their own capacities as dreamers, thinkers, and actors in the world.  These are the paths dogma and freedom.  The former involves telling students what they should think while the later begins with helping students encounter the tension, contradictions, and paradoxes in their own ways of thinking and in the world as they experience it.  As I see it, perhaps the central goal of philosophy and education are the same: to open up new ways of seeing.

“To educate” (from ēducō and ēdūcō), roughly, means “to grow” or to “to lead” out or through.  When students see the world differently and become more willing to challenge their existing views, they begin to encounter what could be called “rough patches” in experience (or “double consciousness,” to borrow from Douglass).  When they do, students must find ways of growing through that tension, or retreat. 

My goal, then, is to expose students to the rough patches of consciousness, experience, and the social world, and give them the tools they need to keep moving, to ask powerful questions, to advocate for change, and to eventually learn to “guide themselves through” whatever rough patches or paradoxes they encounter.  Perhaps the central rough patch that all students will face the pervasive and swiftly changing landscape of human-technology relations.  Consequently, nearly all of my classes include some discussion of the “challenge and promise” of modern technology.  Nowhere is this effort clearer than in my classes on virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and technology. 

Core Strategies

When teaching, I emphasize conversation, dialectical thinking, and erotetic class structure.  I encourage my students to think out loud and build connections, both among themselves and with me the instructor.  I also press my students to devise their own questions and, whenever possible, I structure classes around research projects.  In so doing, I emphasize to my students how their thoughts and work are situated in a larger and evolving world.  I emphasize to my students that they already have important insights that are worth developing by practicing dialectical and conversational learning and by requiring my students to be prepared to contribute and to learn from their peers.  For example, in my ethics classes, I often assign my students “moral dilemmas,” and give them a short list of popular readings on a particular subject.  In the “Artificial Intelligence” unit of one of my Philosophy of Technology classes, my students first read “Ethical Issues in Advanced Artificial Intelligence” (Nick Bostrom) and then “A Robot wrote this entire article.  Are you scared yet human?”  (GPT-3, The Guardian), and watch a few short clips from the movie A.I (2001, Stephen Spielberg), which aims to depict something of the phenomenal experience of an artificial intelligence.  I then ask them to try to answer the following questions, first in writing, and then together in class:  “What, if any, limits should be put on the development of artificial intelligence?  Why should we put these limits in place?”  The second question is more important than the first, because, in answering that question, students reveal if their concern is rooted more in a fear of the threat of A.I. and a need to control technology, or motivated by a concern for the nature of consciousness and experience.  They must ask themselves whether we should be concerned with bringing a consciousness into existence without first thinking through what that consciousness might be like.

Because of my interest in technology, art, and society, my classes are almost always interdisciplinary (e.g., “Technology and Ethics” or “Art and Existentialism.”). These kinds of classes have the benefit of allowing my students to bring insights from other aspects of their lives into conversation with the various thinkers we study.  Being interdisciplinary also opens up the possibility of working with other departments and disciplines, something I would love to explore further. 

For course material, I like to challenge my students early.  For instance, we always begin my Philosophy of Technology classes by reading Book II of Aristotle’s Physics, focusing on the difficult nature/techne distinction and the teleological structure of his reasoning.  Students regularly struggle with this text but through carefully developed reading guides and a seminar style discussion, we make significant headway after just the first few hours of class.  I then assign Joachim Schummer’s insightful 2001 article in “Aristotle on Technology and Nature” which first clarifies the nature/techne distinction, and then problematizes it by demonstrating that nature and techne substantiate each other in human reason, and by engaging in the thorny issues of human genetic engineering and transhumanism.  The aim with this reading is to show how careful contemporary thinking about the Physics can help us come to a richer understanding of the ontology of technology and the depth of the technological character of human life.  In the first week of class, students are confronted with one of the most fundamental questions of modern life:  what is our aim in continually shaping and reshaping our world and what does it mean that we have now turned those aims and strategies on ourselves?

The deep dive into these texts serves a variety of other purposes.  First, by assigning difficult texts and then helping my students slowly understand them, I demonstrate to my students that they are already capable of engaging with some of the richest and most challenging ideas in the history of philosophy.  Aristotle was a great thinker but wrestling with his work is not in a fundamentally different category than the conversations they already have with each other in class.  Illustrating this point helps build confidence.  The mixture of contemporary and ancient philosophy also highlights for my students that the questions we wrestle with when discussing even the most modern technology exist as part of ongoing conversations with roots that dig back thousands of years.  The sense of continuity that I aim to develop helps my students contextualize their own moment and to feel as though they are developing into people who will have the capacity to take the next step in that conversation.  Highlighting this positionality and pairing these two texts pushes students to reflect further on themselves and on their own growth process through college and beyond.

These skills are polished and developed though an emphasis on writing, communication, and class interaction.  For many of my classes, instead of short assignments or exams, I design long-term project that are presented in various forms over the course of the semester.  These are usually research projects on a topic of the student’s choosing, within the domain of the class.  During the first part of the semester, each student creates a research proposal and works with their classmates to develop a collection of resources to craft an argument that they can then deploy in a research paper, a presentation, and a more publicly consumable format.  Through a series of workshops and peer exchanges, students help each other develop their projects, ultimately, with the aim of presenting their work in a class “mini conference” and as part of an online class journal and website (you can find an example at techandethics.com).  This collaborative process helps students to realize that the ideas they have in the classroom can have a far-reaching impact, and that all thinking occurs as part of an ongoing conversation.  My students love these projects as they both build confidence and give them opportunities to interact with their peers on a deeper level than most classes permit.  Please refer to the “Selected Student Comments” section of this dossier for more on how my students have responded to my classes.

Whether they realize it or not, students make the decision, the moment that they choose to be educated, to become something other than what they were. Teaching philosophy and ethics serves as a way of drawing student attention to hidden assumptions and background ideologies while disrupting the human propensity to depend on the status quo.  In my classrooms, I aim to use that disruptive potential alongside careful argumentative and evaluative strategies to inspire and challenge my students to recognize that they have the capacity to engage deeply with the possibilities of living their own unique lives in the midst of a multifaceted unfolding world.  My students realize that there is no area of life where ethics and philosophy aren’t relevant, and it is my goal as an educator to inspire them to use the strategies and questions developed in the classroom to engage more deeply and carefully with the ethical and philosophical texture of their own lives.  In this way, teaching is perhaps the central component of my self-conception as a philosopher.  I am as excited to help others think through difficult and illuminating questions as I am encountering and developing those questions myself. 

Student Comments & Course Evaluations

Here you will find a complete database of my course evaluations over the last several years. I have highlighted evaluations that I think are especially telling but I have included all of my evaluations for context. I am very proud of my relationships with my students and I have already had the privilege of writing several successful letters of recommendation on their behalf.