In Fall 2015, I am teaching Biopolitics and African American Political Thought. In Spring 2015, I taught African American Political Thought and a seminar, The Politics of Human Reproduction. Please see the link to my syllabi below.

As an instructor, I aim to enable students to claim the concepts and texts that we study as resources for understanding both the powers that shape our everyday lives, society, and world, and our own power to respond creatively. I attempt to foster this sense of ownership through lively and varied lectures, discussions, and activities that emphasize the relevance of the material to students’ own experiences. I encourage my students to read and listen carefully, but also to question the texts, themselves, one another, and me.

The practices of careful reading and clear writing are the point of entry for this larger agenda, and I work to assist students to hone these skills both during and outside of class time. Discussion of a text always begins with a mapping of the main ideas, through pre-assigned student presentation of the material or as a collective exercise. Because good writing requires practice, I tend to assign short response papers frequently in addition to more intensive writing assignments. As I give feedback and they respond in turn, a sense of open dialogue emerges. This also allows me to gauge improvement over time, and to catch potential challenges before students are faced with more complex projects. Because I believe that even excellent writers can always improve, I encourage all my students to use writing centers, peer tutors, and other campus resources as they write and refine their papers.

I also work to support students’ grasp of the more complex concepts and questions through sustained in-class discussion and debate. What forms of life are or have been valued over others, according to what reasoning, and with what effects? What can we learn about ourselves – our human weaknesses and strengths, our society, our globe – through examining histories of political thought, of gender, sex, and reproduction, of health and medicine, of racial oppression and resistance? What kind of action is possible, and when and where? How do our texts change us, challenging us to see, think, feel, and live differently? In my African American Political Thought course, we have explored such questions through a role-playing debate between Martin Luther King, Jr, and Malcolm X over the question of political violence. In my Science and Politics of Reproductive Health course, I brought in guest speakers on both sides of the abortion question; students were overwhelmingly eager to hear reasoned arguments from positions with which they disagreed.

While I consider myself responsible for maintaining the clarity and purpose of course discussions, I strive to foster genuinely inclusive conversations, and use a variety of techniques to draw students into participating, including in-class writing prompts, student-led facilitations, and pair and small-group dialogue as a prelude to class discussion.

In larger courses, my lectures are designed both to guide students as they work through challenging texts, and to provide enriching background or supplementation of the material. To make concepts more vivid and to provide real-life examples, I also frequently incorporate material and audiovisual resources. For example, when teaching David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, originally published as a pamphlet, I bring in Black Power pamphlets from the late 1960s to get us thinking about the advantages of the pamphlet form. When teaching the final chapter of W.E.B. Du Bois’ Souls of Black Folk, which thematizes the complex political and cultural significance of the “sorrow songs,” or African American spirituals, I bring in recordings and videos of some of these songs by both vernacular singers and commercial artists, black, and non-black, as a way to think about the politics of cultural reproduction and appropriation. In my sessions on J.S. Mill and Frederick Douglass, I use images from 19th century medical texts, advertisements, and popular magazines to exemplify the roles of race and gender in the prevailing political imagination.

I employ a broad variety of techniques to facilitate student engagement, including guided group discussion, in-class writing exercises, and group projects. I also use the short reading response assignments to help focus class time; as students are required to complete them the evening before class, I am able to use them to identify particular points of interest and/or confusion. Many times these responses also include insights and questions that serve as apt starting points for discussion. I also work hard to ensure that the major assignments give students the opportunity to link political theory to concrete issues that seem urgent and relevant to their own lives. In my Science and Politics of Reproductive Health course, students undertook a semester-long policy brief project that involved intensive research that included developing an annotated bibliography, multiple draft revisions, and an in-class peer-review process; the many commented in their evaluations that they found the process very enriching for both their research skills and their knowledge. I also like to invite guest speakers at key points in the semester, giving students a chance to connect with cutting-edge thinking and practice related to the texts that they are studying.

In my seminars, I assign a 2-page summary/response paper for each text as a preparation for discussion. In order that we all achieve a clear grasp of the material, following the excellent example of one of my best graduate school professors, I will insist that we read appreciatively for the first part of the discussion, homing in on what the text has to tell us before launching into comparison and criticism.

I take teaching very seriously as an ongoing learning process of my own as well. This means not only that I consider students to be partners in a collective project of understanding, but that students themselves teach me how to be more effective through evaluations, conversations, and engagement in class sessions. I strive to listen to this feedback and to actively respond.

I am committed to creating safe, empowering academic spaces for students of color, women, GLBTQI, disabled, immigrant, and working-class students. As a white woman who teaches black political thought as well as texts about race, racism and Euro-American imperialism, I have found it helpful to explicitly acknowledge the specificity of my own experience and vision, while also resisting easy equations of identity and perspective. I try hard to be attentive to unequal power dynamics in the classroom, and to intervene in discussions in a way that avoids shaming or shutting students down. My goal is for all students to leave my courses confidently armed with new concepts and an enriched understanding of our political world. I also hope that they take with them a deeper propensity both to listen to others and to question what appears to be inevitable.