Teaching Statements

(This is another post in a series on job-market related things. Previous entries can be found here.)

Teaching statements are kind of easy, but they’re hard to feel good about. Mostly, that’s because they’re about how to be a good teacher, or perhaps more specifically, about why you are a good teacher. And explaining what makes someone a good teacher is a lot like trying to teach someone how to teach. If you try to do it in words, you’ll probably end up saying the obvious and obviously inane: “be engaging, be well-prepared, foster an active learning-environment, make room for everybody, etc.” Yeah, that really clears it up!

What we need here is a reason to talk about something specific that shows that you’ve thought about teaching a bit, and that also shows that you’ll be a successful teacher/researcher once you get to a full-time job. So let’s look at some guiding questions that might help you structure your teaching statement.

• How do you draw novices into the field?

This is a useful question to have an answer to, since enrollment in introductory-level courses is an important issue in many departments. Based on enrollment, departments can ask for more faculty; enrollment in large courses also provides jobs for the graduate students in the department, which means that they can make their money by doing things that are at least thematically related to their own work, which beats the hell out of working outside of the academy, or in another department, perhaps teaching languages.

It’s also a question that allows you to say something specific. You might explain, for example, what the first reading assignment in an intro-level class would be, what you would say about that assignment, and why you’d choose it. Many intro courses begin with proofs of god’s existence. Indeed, some begin with Anselm’s argument. You might want to explain why you think that’s a good idea (makes the kids think that they’ll hear about religion, and who doesn’t want that out of their college courses?—um…), or why it’s not such a hot idea (ditto).

• How do you deal with varying levels of skill, interest, or preparation in the students you’re teaching?

This is a huge problem. Even if you’ve only taught sections of sixteen or seventeen students, you’ve faced it. Some students are really into it and have an easy time engaging with philosophy, others only manage with great difficulty. And that’s before you’ve even begun to address the students who are only taking the class because it satisfies some kind of requirement. Again, talk about a specific strategy. For example, you might try talking about something I’ve done in my intro courses: have most of the work that determines grades be work that gets done towards the end of the term, rather than the beginning. That way, you reward learning, rather than preparation before the first class. The first paper might be worth nothing in terms of a final grade, or next to nothing. This strategy has its drawbacks, too. Discuss.

You might, in this vein, also consider different ways of teaching—should you present the philosophy more through the close analysis of a classic text, or do you want to present the philosophy more through problems that you work through in lectures? This is the debate between teaching historically-oriented intro classes and teaching problem-oriented ones. These terms for the debate are, of course, completely moronic, since it suggests that the historical figures weren’t driven by problems, and it suggests that the problems you might focus on aren’t informed by historical considerations of what has happened in philosophy so far. But there is some kind of contrast there, and it focuses on the centrality of a text and textual analysis. Students might prefer doing one over the other, since in classes that focus more on close reading, the focus is less on the student and more on the original author.

As before, you shouldn’t be afraid of taking a strong and specific stance. Chances are that some of the people you’ll be dealing with have strong views on this subject matter. Chances are also that some of the people you’ll be dealing with disagree with you on this stuff. But for the most part, people who’ve thought seriously about teaching, about what works and what doesn’t work, care most about having other thoughtful people around them, rather than a bunch of windbags. You’ll turn more people off by spewing cliches than by saying something they disagree with.

• How would you integrate philosophy among other disciplines?

Perhaps the first question here should be.

• Would you integrate philosophy among other disciplines?

For better or worse, interdisciplinarity is still something that many universities hold in high esteem. So if you’re able to teach courses that might be of interest to people in other disciplines, you should talk about that. If you’re able to teach courses that are co-taught with people in other departments, even better.

And just to flog a dead horse some more, be specific. It simply won’t do in this context for you to say something like: “I’d like to teach a course in philosophy of mind that brings it into conversation with recent work in psychology.” The key to a good interdisciplinary course is having the non-philosophy discipline actually be relevant to the philosophy. That kind of relevance isn’t a given. I think, in fact, that it’s very hard indeed to make empirical work bear on philosophical issues. So you want to give some specific ideas about how to make two fields connect.