Educational Philosophy

My, how times have changed

In 2001, I was a newly minted PhD in Biology. Unsure whether academia was where I wanted to spend my life, I nonetheless applied to several faculty positions, and was honored and surprised to receive two job offers. Both were for tenure-track positions at small liberal arts colleges. I accepted one—at The Evergreen State College—and regretfully rejected the other, although there was much to recommend both the college, and the colleagues whom I would have had there¹. Recently, I found the Educational Philosophy that I wrote in application for one of these positions², and am sharing it here, unchanged from the original. I am struck by several aspects of this document, not least that it earned me two job offers in 2001, but would almost certainly fail to do so today.

The final line is this:

Education is about enriching the lives of students so that they may live informed, enlightened lives in which they have the curiosity to ask “why?”, the knowledge to ask “are you sure?”, and the courage to ask “is this right and good?”.

Embracing uncertainty, knowing that you do not know, and that what you think you do know may be wrong—this is foundational to a scientific approach to the world. Over the last decade, and especially since Covid, we have seen an increasing focus on certainty, and on single static solutions to complex problems. Perhaps most alarming of all, those appeals to authority, and to silencing those who disagree, has arrived under the banner of science. #FollowTheScience, we are told, when that has never been how science worked. I hope, still, that the educational philosophy that I laid out here, as a young scientist who was yet to discover most of the joys of teaching, can once again rise up in institutions of higher education throughout the land.

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Educational Philosophy from 2001

Education is at the heart of a functioning, democratic society.  As such, teaching is an honor, and an intellectual and creative exploration.  In teaching, as in science, process is paramount.  When students are able to derive meaning by applying their own logical, critical, and creative skills to a problem, then they have learned.

As a teacher, I aim to guide students into being:

• rigorous, intellectually honest thinkers

  • whose first inclination when confronted with a hypothesis is to attempt to falsify it

  • who do not accept “facts” as truth simply because they come from an authority

  • who are skillful in using data to derive new interpretations or hypotheses

• creative and open to new paradigms

  • who seek new ways of doing, seeing, and understanding

  • who periodically reevaluate their belief systems, as new evidence arises

• effective communicators

  • who write and speak well

  • who can use technology to enhance, but not supersede, content

• respectful of diversity, both in other people and in academic disciplines

  • who seek connections between disparate concepts

  • who maintain open minds, and do not jump to conclusions

According to my past students, my primary strengths as a teacher are that I am knowledgeable and respectful, always open to questions, and that I take discussion beyond the expected boundaries. They say that I give clear explanations, but also insist that they try to answer their own questions.  They find my classes thought-provoking, the grading hard but fair, and cite organization, flexibility, and patience as other qualities.

Students respond positively to being recognized as individuals, with needs and goals outside of the classroom.  Students who are successfully encouraged to make connections between the subject matter and their own experiences derive more lasting meaning from their education.  Increasingly, students bring diverse cultural backgrounds to their education.  With these come unique learning styles.  When I was training Rosalie Razafindrasoa, a graduate student in Madagascar, she initially assumed that, as the teacher, I was infallible, and not to be questioned.  I found a subject about which she knew more than I did—the particular herpetofauna of the island on which we were living—and encouraged her to teach me what she knew.  After this interaction, our relationship became more fluid, and much more effective.

Students, like all people, will rise, or sink, to meet expectations.  When a teacher expects consistently high quality, the students rise to the occasion.  Lowering the level of expectation to include more students in the category of “success” fails in two ways: some students will probably still fail, and those who succeed have less to be proud of for their efforts, and fewer skills to take with them into the rest of their lives.  Education should not serve primarily to make the student feel good about herself in the moment.  Education is about enriching the lives of students so that they may live informed, enlightened lives in which they have the curiosity to ask “why?”, the knowledge to ask “are you sure?”, and the courage to ask “is this right and good?”.

The School of Athens. Detail of a mural by Raphael, 1509 - 1511, at the Vatican. Portrayed here are Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Archimedes, and Heraclitus, among many others who sought a fundamental understanding of their world.

1. I am not sharing the name of the other college that offered me a tenure-track position, but I will share that I also stumbled upon the spreadsheet that I made comparing the two schools while trying to make the decision, and the considerations included not just the expected—e.g. salary, benefits, teaching load, research support, library, general intellectual environment, freedom to develop new courses—but also things like weather in January (and in August), farmer’s market / availability of local produce, nearby national parks, quality of local mountain biking trails, and open pottery studios.

2. The other position also required a teaching philosophy, and is identical to this one, except for being a few paragraphs longer, and tailored to the particular school to which I was applying.