For me, the central purpose of education is to encourage students to be critical, successful, and engaged members of society. My role as an educator is to inspire students to take ownership of their education. In my instruction, I help equip students with the skills and knowledge they need to make informed decisions, achieve their personal and professional goals, and participate in society to make the world a better place for themselves and others. For these reasons, I consider my philosophy of teaching to be better described as a philosophy of learning.
I think the best way to accomplish this goal is to be more of a facilitator than a teacher. Rather than solely relying on lecture-based instruction, I have conversations with my students that help them understand the material, draw connections to what they already know, and apply the information to both past experiences and future or hypothetical situations. I work to help students see the parallels between the communication discipline and their studies from other programs and places within the university and community, and to appreciate the connectedness that all knowledge has outside of the classroom. Essentially, my goal for student learning is to help students understand course material in fun and interesting ways and to make that material relevant to their lives outside of my classroom.
I avoid “depositing” knowledge in the classroom, and instead encourage students to find ways to apply what they learn in my classes to their future careers and personal/professional aspirations. Particularly, I challenge students to understand the central role communication plays in constituting our world and the ways in which they can effect change by becoming more competent, sympathetic, and affective/effective communicators. I bring students into contact with course material to help them understand the “how” and the “why” behind “what” we teach in communication, enabling them to draw connections between and among different social and relational contexts rather than merely drawing on deposited knowledge of the “do’s” and “do not’s” of public discourse and involvement. In this way my class becomes a site of dialogue, where students learn and process through sharing and struggling with ideas together.