with President Gutmann


I am pursuing my PhD in Anthropology because I am passionate about the ways that social science concepts, and anthropological concepts specifically, have opened my eyes and forever changed the way I view the world. When I am in the classroom, I aim to expose my students to a similar awakening. I see my role as a teacher as helping students to better understand their social environment and to view it in a new light. I want my students, whether anthropology majors or non-majors, to recognize that the way they live in and think about the world is one among many. I want them to grapple with the varying forces of connection and difference that link or separate them from other people around the world. I aim to help students think interrogatively about the world around them, to connect academic readings to visible social phenomena, and to be accountable for their own learning and decisions. When I am successful, students become thoughtful observers of their social environment, more critical thinkers, and are empowered to construct their own understandings and judgments.

A crucial part of reaching these goals involves a willingness to make students intellectually uncomfortable. Particularly in introductory-level courses in cultural anthropology, I push my students to denaturalize their assumptions about themselves and their communities. A central part of cultural anthropology involves exploring examples of familiar social practices or beliefs—such as marriage or gender roles—that look quite different in other societies. It is equally important to then turn the analytic lens back on ourselves, thus I push students to confront their own assumptions about social norms and practices. For example, I framed one recitation on the social science concept of “social roles” around an article from the Daily Pennsylvanian about the differential treatment of Greek “Katrina students” at Penn in the wake of last fall’s hurricane. Over the course of the discussion, we examined students’ preconceptions about why it is socially acceptable for a fraternity or sorority member to preferentially help an incoming student from his or her own Greek organization, and linked this to a broader understanding of social roles in society, and how we come to understand the rights, duties, and expectations associated with these roles. Such close-to-home examples often make students feel unsettled in the short term, as they challenge their own assumptions about sensitive issues such as race, gender, religion, and class. Yet these discussions can lead to demonstrated changes in their understandings and expectations of the world around them.

Deliberate efforts to foster this discomfort are only productive in combination with a supportive learning environment and an integrated overall course trajectory. I aim to help students feel comfortable with the knowledge and capabilities that they bring to the classroom, while helping them to develop their weaker areas. I work to create a classroom space in which real thinking—not intellectual posturing—takes precedence, and in which all of us, myself included, can be challenged and can learn and grow. My philosophy in discussion sections is to provide guidance and direction while proactively creating space for students to find their own voice and perspective. I strive to provide students with the tools to make sense of complex texts, to formulate their own questions about the material, to feel comfortable raising questions, and to trust their own abilities to think critically and learn from one another. When we are successful in this, the classroom balance shifts over the course of the semester, where students increasingly take the lead while I become more of a facilitator and a resource.

I believe that having clear course goals in place is also central to this productive discomfort. My best experiences as an undergraduate and a graduate student have been in courses that cohered and evolved in an interrelated way over the course of the readings, discussions, and assignments. I strive to provide this sense of integration not from a rigid course design or narrow goals, but rather from thoughtful attention to, and communication about, the key themes of the course, how the course fits into the discipline more broadly, and how the readings intersect with the course themes. When this works best, students therefore understand the overall aims of the course, and are willing to engage and explore more broadly in classroom discussions.

I value balancing overall structure with flexibility in the daily teaching plan. There are a variety of dimensions of learning I can prioritize on any given day—for example, ensuring students’ comprehension of a concept; emphasizing a particular skill, such as identifying an author’s argument in a text; or generating active discussion in which students clearly articulate their ideas and debate one another. I remain flexible in the classroom in order to capitalize on student-generated moments that lead towards these diverse ends. For example, if a student asks a specific question about the assigned reading, I may shift discussion to a detailed textual analysis, allowing us to decipher a complex passage as a group. Or, if a student links a reading assignment to a current event, then I may either build subsequent discussion on this insight, or aim to foster this student’s ability to lead the group’s discussion. Against a backdrop of a clear course trajectory, these diversions can enrich our overall goals, rather than become tangents that hijack the discussion. In general, I believe that following students’ energy and interests is the most productive way to build momentum and maintain students’ enthusiasm.

Finally, I believe that I can best meet these overarching goals through working closely with my colleagues. As one of several teaching assistants in large introductory-level classes, I devote considerable time to this collaboration because I value the increased creativity and opportunities for learning that derive from teamwork with other instructors. By making explicit our pedagogical goals and decisions about course content through teaching-group discussions, we each become better teachers. I see co-teaching as an opportunity not to be constrained by others’ choices, but rather to frame my own course content decisions within a broader approach to social science instruction and to fostering life-long learning. I intend to pursue this same approach to collaboration when I teach my own courses in the future, situating my courses in relation to courses taught in my own and other departments, allowing students to synthesize their learning across semesters.

Overall, I believe undergraduate education is fundamentally about learning to think creatively and critically, through reading, writing and discussion. I see teaching anthropology as an opportunity to cultivate in students a variety of critical thinking and logical reasoning skills, while also helping them to learn more about themselves and world around them that extends beyond their local community or nation.