Teaching

Teaching statement

Through designing and executing independent courses at several universities in a variety of countries including the US, France, Italy and the UK, I came to appreciate the challenge of teaching excellently. I have been lucky to work with groups large and small, and students of varied social and cultural backgrounds. I have also worked with many students for whom English is a second language.

Although I learn much from each course I teach, I want to draw here on two in particular to explain how I arrived at my present approach. They go back a few years now, but the things I learned still influence my teaching.

One is a class on Empire, Nation, and Economy: French Colonialism in the 20th Century, taught at Sciences-Po, Paris in 2011. The other is a class on Social Foundations 1, taught in NYU’s Liberal Studies program in Paris in 2010. The first was an elective class for 22 second year students, and assumed a certain level of pre-existing knowledge of history. The second was a large, introductory course, based on important texts and broad social, political and cultural trends in the period from pre-history to the 5th century CE. In each case I was asked to devise a syllabus from scratch and teach the class independently.

Whether teaching well away from my own research expertise, or right at the heart of it, I was confronted with the critical importance of organization. Delivering two excellent performances in class every week requires careful selection of materials, thoughtful structuring of the syllabus, and going the extra mile when tailoring lectures to readings and handouts to both. All this while leaving enough room to improvise according to the unique unfolding of a given class session. Scrupulous preparation not only made me more confident, but also palpably transmitted itself to the students, for whom my own approach provided a benchmark. Having worked hard on the essential analytical points and historical concepts for each session, I was pleased when students in their evaluations praised the clarity of my lectures and my ability to create an atmosphere of constructive exchange. An emphasis on both always favors weaker or less confident students who might otherwise feel intimidated. Finally, the use of digital learning platforms during and outside classroom hours, helped me to give students a forum in which they could collaborate as teams on organized research and writing.

A second lesson was the value of setting clear, high standards, formally and intellectually. I gave the first week of classes over to an exploration of the goals and expectations of each course. And I used early lectures and discussion sessions to address over-arching theoretical concerns. For example, by rooting debate in students’ own perception of what keywords like ‘culture’, ‘nation’ or ‘civilization’ mean, and with the help of provocative deployments of these terms in the news media, I connected students’ lived experience to perennial social and political questions. We thereby elaborated a shared agenda for the semester. By repeatedly revisiting these critical themes over the course – identity, gender relationships, perspectives on the ‘other’, class or race-based social dynamics – students developed skills in comparing texts and historical societies. They also placed their own experiences, 'common sense', and culture into perspective. These overall themes gave structure to my lectures, fuel and focus to discussion sessions, and provided students with another tool with which to approach field visits to museums and local sites.

A third lesson consisted in the degree of enthusiasm and energy required to give pedagogical coherence to a class session. We used a great number of challenging primary sources. The political writings of the évolués of the 19th century Senegalese Communes in West Africa, or poems by ancient South Asian mystics, initially worried students with weaker understandings of African history or non-religious backgrounds. But, as the discussion progressed, I asked students to work in small groups to decipher a paragraph or a stanza and then explain it to the whole group. Through this technique the overall themes of the text emerged more clearly. Students listened more closely to one another and began to articulate their own interpretation. I actively moderated this process, working with each group to improve precision in their thinking. Gradually the students adopted these standards of clarity and inquiry. Because analytical techniques learned in such contexts are also relevant to written assignments, I integrated the same terminology and method into essay prompts.

Finally, these courses brought home to me the perennial importance of a sense of humor and of humility in the classroom. Without compromising standards these things add cohesion, make the hierarchy of teaching more constructive and give the classroom group more solidarity. Although all these lessons emerged in the specific context of very challenging courses involving first and second year students, and though my approach evolves continually, I believe they are quite applicable generally and have certainly proved useful even in seminars for advanced undergraduate, Masters or doctoral students.