STATEMENT OF TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
At the very beginning of the first class I ever taught as a primary instructor, I asked my students of the introductory level, writing-intensive lecture course on “Ancient Myth: East and West” to write their own myth. This was a short, creative exercise intended to encourage students to actively engage with the question of myth, and for me to evaluate their understanding of it before we read any primary sources: to create a myth, of course, requires some understanding of its essential elements. This, I emphasized to my students, is fundamentally individual: we – as humans of various and diverse cultures and backgrounds – see the world through a series of increasingly constrained lenses, all subject to our own background, training, and conceptions of the world. These lenses are not necessarily insurmountable obstacles; but, I told them, it is very important, as responsible scholars, to understand our own positions and how they color the way we interpret and represent the ancient world, as well as our own modern one. In a class that explicitly compares myths from around the world, each one of them particular to its unique context – chronological, geographical, cultural – it is necessary to understand not just the modern perspective(s) with which we approach these myths, but also the diverse lenses and media (oral, textual, archaeological) through which these myths were created, perpetuated, and passed on. Only then can we fully appreciate the rich historical details of and purpose(s) for which we study ancient myth in the first place: in order to better understand the cultures in which ancient myths were created, the role they played then, and how they still resonate in today’s world.
What I discovered is that students are, almost without exception, very enthusiastic about approaching the (ancient) world creatively and reflectively, especially when it comes to the challenge of articulating and analyzing their own perspectives. The final assignment for that same myth course was to reflect upon their created myth and analyze it in the same way that we had approached myths from around the world and across time over the course of the past semester. Consider again, I asked them, the influences you can now identify within your own myth, and how that impacts your interpretations of ancient myths. How does your understanding of what myth is and how it operates change the way you understand myth to operate in the modern world, either through the perpetuation of ancient ones, or the creation of new ones?
The students’ response was overwhelmingly positive, not just in terms of exuberance but also in terms of the energy with which they responded to those prompts. Their responses were so impressive, in fact, that when I taught the course for the second time I expanded the assignment into a semester-long portfolio project, comprised of short writing assignments, in which students created and analyzed their own myths according to the themes through which we approached diverse myths (e.g., creation stories, trickster figures, or hero myths). In their end-of-semester reflections, students marveled at the influence of ancient myth not just on their own myths but also on the modern world. That experience has impacted the way I continue to encourage my students to evaluate artistic, archaeological and textual material in the same way, by comparing the motivations and impacts of depicting food in art throughout history. From ancient Roman mosaics and Greek vases to carefully staged ‘foodie’ photos on social media outlets like Instagram in my current undergraduate course on “Food and Drink in the Ancient Mediterranean,” I try my hardest to demonstrate to students that to learn to look at the ancient world is to learn to look at their own.
That, in a nutshell, is my teaching philosophy: personal engagement; reflection; iteration; and application. In the proposed and taught syllabi that are available in my teaching portfolio, you can find this philosophy embedded in the design of each course, all of which vary, according to level and focus, from undergraduate lectures on pre-modern travel infrastructure, to graduate seminars on data analysis and visualization within the increasing scholarly prominence of digital humanities in the study of the ancient world. But each syllabus is designed around (relatively) short assignments that build upon each other over the course of the semester to culminate, through ongoing reflection and revision of the evidence, approaches, and paper structure, in a final project that is truly a product of the entire semester. These exercises provide the means for reaching my learning goals for students: critical analysis of evidence and interpretations; the capacity to approach material from a variety of perspectives, including creative or experimental approaches that push the bounds of traditional scholarship; and the application of these ways of thinking to intellectual and practical issues outside academia as well as within it.
What I discovered is that students are, almost without exception, very enthusiastic about approaching the (ancient) world creatively and reflectively, especially when it comes to the challenge of articulating and analyzing their own perspectives. The final assignment for that same myth course was to reflect upon their created myth and analyze it in the same way that we had approached myths from around the world and across time over the course of the past semester. Consider again, I asked them, the influences you can now identify within your own myth, and how that impacts your interpretations of ancient myths. How does your understanding of what myth is and how it operates change the way you understand myth to operate in the modern world, either through the perpetuation of ancient ones, or the creation of new ones?
The students’ response was overwhelmingly positive, not just in terms of exuberance but also in terms of the energy with which they responded to those prompts. Their responses were so impressive, in fact, that when I taught the course for the second time I expanded the assignment into a semester-long portfolio project, comprised of short writing assignments, in which students created and analyzed their own myths according to the themes through which we approached diverse myths (e.g., creation stories, trickster figures, or hero myths). In their end-of-semester reflections, students marveled at the influence of ancient myth not just on their own myths but also on the modern world. That experience has impacted the way I continue to encourage my students to evaluate artistic, archaeological and textual material in the same way, by comparing the motivations and impacts of depicting food in art throughout history. From ancient Roman mosaics and Greek vases to carefully staged ‘foodie’ photos on social media outlets like Instagram in my current undergraduate course on “Food and Drink in the Ancient Mediterranean,” I try my hardest to demonstrate to students that to learn to look at the ancient world is to learn to look at their own.
That, in a nutshell, is my teaching philosophy: personal engagement; reflection; iteration; and application. In the proposed and taught syllabi that are available in my teaching portfolio, you can find this philosophy embedded in the design of each course, all of which vary, according to level and focus, from undergraduate lectures on pre-modern travel infrastructure, to graduate seminars on data analysis and visualization within the increasing scholarly prominence of digital humanities in the study of the ancient world. But each syllabus is designed around (relatively) short assignments that build upon each other over the course of the semester to culminate, through ongoing reflection and revision of the evidence, approaches, and paper structure, in a final project that is truly a product of the entire semester. These exercises provide the means for reaching my learning goals for students: critical analysis of evidence and interpretations; the capacity to approach material from a variety of perspectives, including creative or experimental approaches that push the bounds of traditional scholarship; and the application of these ways of thinking to intellectual and practical issues outside academia as well as within it.
A physics student came to one of my classes and, in response to the question of why he was interested in taking a class on the archaeology of travel and pilgrimage, said that he had "had a debate this summer about whether a pilgrimage had to involve physical displacement. I realized I did not know much about pilgrimage." If I can bring topics like pilgrimage and travel to a table surrounded by physicists and archaeologists alike, then I believe I have begun to fulfill my role not just as an imparter of information, but as an educator who can foster dialogue.
You can read more about my reflections on the integration of my ongoing research in my classroom in SEEDD in the Classroom.
