My teaching philosophy is founded on a certain recognition and an accompanying imperative. I recognize that the best sort of learning happens when people can act in concert as as autonomous learners -- that is, when they are engaged in the activity of learning for highly internalized reasons, independent from extrinsic motives for learning (rewards or punishments). Learners who are less than autonomous are passive, fail to ask questions; they require a maximum of planning on the part of the teacher, because they do not initiate projects without prompting. More independent learners are imaginative, use their teachers and each other as resources for the pursuit of whatever questions drive them, and so take the discussion in unexpected directions. I realize that most students are, for a variety of reasons, not sufficiently intrinsically motivated to organize their own learning without the authoritarian intervention of the teacher and the institution. The imperative for a teacher who understands this is to find ways to work within this context toward a situation in which students can become more autonomous learners.

My methods are open and experimental, but are always constructed with this end in view. For instance, I structure much of my literature classes around discussions led by student groups, so that class time can be taken up with exploration and questioning rather than lecture, and so that students spend more time talking to each other than to me (I am, after all, more interested in hearing what they have to say about the text than what I have to say about it). Even the teaching of composition, in which expertise is called for more often than exploration, can be accomplished in a cooperative and decentered fashion: thus, I incorporate writing workshops, in which I teach students how to evaluate each others’ writing so that they can help each other with the work of revision. I structure, I initiate, I intervene, but at all times I strive to help create conditions in which authoritarian modes of learning can be exchanged for more participatory and democratic modes.

I have also created a page sketching out some of the suprisingly advanced pedagogical ideas of William Godwin (1756-1836), an English social philosopher who wrote tracts that got him into trouble, married Mary Wollestonecraft (the foremother of modern feminism), fathered Mary Shelley (the author of Frankenstein), and influenced William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and his wayward son-in-law Percy Bysshe Shelley.