3. Philosophy

III. Teaching Philosophy

As a teacher I bring to American students what I consider the most valuable aspect of my European educational background - independent thinking. Immanuel Kant expresses such thinking most poignantly in his definition of the Enlightenment - to make use of one’s understanding without direction from another. Following Kant I encourage students to ‘Sapere aude!’ - ‘dare to know!’

I was very proud of the students in my course at the University of Chicago. By the end of the course the students had both a strong grasp of the alternative models of political theorizing I taught them and their own critical readings of these models. Even those students who initially merely followed my assessment of political thought found by the end of the course their independent voice and, with that, dared to know.

I firmly believe that in such a political time as the present in the United States, where dependent thinking is fostered in media and popular culture, the teaching of independent thinking is more crucial than ever. However, I find that students (especially on an undergraduate level) are often not educated to think and act independently. Kant rightly argues that it is the often the guardians (professors) themselves, even critical ones, who keep their students “from daring to take a single step without a walking cart in which they have confined them” (What is Enlightenment?).

I encourage students to get rid of their walking carts with a rich set of teaching methodologies. Rather than formal lectures, I facilitate close textual reading via both in-depth classroom discussions and brief lectures. I encourage students to analyze the material on their own terms in their presentations, classroom contributions and paper assignments. I reward those students who creatively take up a thinker’s arguments instead of merely repeating what a thinker has to say.

In my lectures I serve as a model for analyzing the subject matter critically and raising questions, which are central to political and social theory. I gradually draw the more passive students into our discussions. In my course at the University of Vienna I asked students collaboratively to work on questions in smaller groups. In my courses at the New School I experimented with film, on-line classroom and guest lecturers. I also devote individual time outside the classroom for those students who have difficulties keeping up with the course requirements.

Students often enter my classes with a suspicion of political and social theory. I aim for students to overcome their suspicions by showing them in the design of the course, our discussions and the writing assignments, how supposedly abstract theories have a central relevance for everyday political and social practice. I make abstract theories accessible to students by using tangible cases taken from current social and political events. Moreover, I encourage students to make connections between theories and their own particular experiences.

At the same time, I keep a space where students engage with theories on their own terms and independent of a reference to practice. This is in tune with my dialectical approach to the theory/practice binary, which implies that theory and practice are both dependent and at the same time independent from each other. I also hope to inspire students’ interest in studying political and social theory through my own enthusiasm for theorizing.

One of my central goals for future classes is to adjust more readily to the different learning tempos and learning styles of my students. At the University of Vienna, for example, students argued that the requirements were too high, given the intensity of a 10-day course and the fact that they had to manage the course material in a language other than German. Although I cut back on the course requirement, I believe that I could have done so more drastically to adjust optimally to the teaching situation.

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