TEACHING PHILOSOPHY AND INTERESTS

William J. White

Teaching Philosophy

My philosophy of teaching has emerged from my experience as a teaching assistant and adjunct instructor at Rutgers, a large university with a highly diverse undergraduate population. I have taught classes both large (two hundred students) and small (two dozen), been required to create my own syllabi and reading lists, and listen to the plaints, pleas, and pleasantries of countless undergraduates. This experience has led me to form a native theory of teaching — an idiopedagogy, if you will — that emphasizes the role of the student as learner over that of the professor as teacher. A few main precepts are elaborated here:

• Teaching is not about demonstrating what the instructor knows. Rather, it is about guiding students through an intellectual terrain and giving them the resources to navigate that terrain individually. Good students want and expect to be intellectually challenged by their courses. When class standards are high, students do exert themselves to meet those standards. For example, in my Communication and Popular Culture Class, I gave students a very difficult essay by Umberto Eco that served as the basis for further discussion of theories of popular culture, and which I required students to comment upon in their own formulation of a theory of popular culture. At the end of the semester, students assessed the Eco piece as hard but useful to them.
• Students learn best when they are required to apply concepts to problem-solving situations. Good students take a great deal of pride in their mastery of problem-solving techniques. Classroom exercises, assignments, and examinations should all be oriented around enabling students to develop the ability to use course-related concepts to interpret, analyze, and understand relevant phenomena. For example, in my Organizational Communication class, I developed an in-class exercise to introduce concepts of power and conflict. I broke the class into teams, assigned each team member an organizational role, and gave each team an organizational chart that they had to "re-engineer" according to a list of options. Each student had to balance a common interest in increasing the efficiency of their organization with a personal interest in maintaining their own power. In class discussion later, students generally agreed that this was a fun and useful way of thinking about power and conflict in organizations.
• Students are willing to extend to an instructor a great deal of trust. Until the instructor demonstrates otherwise, they grant that he or she is doing his or her best to lead them somewhere, to get them to a place where they can say, "Yes, I learned something in this class." This gives the instructor a lot of latitude in designing a course, but also requires that he or she have some clear view of the course's objectives for student learning. For example, in my International Communication class, I wanted students to be able to organized the syllabus around a few key topics (Globalization, National Identity, International Relations, etc.) and let students select one of those topics for their own semester project.
• Grades, while the least interesting and most troublesome thing about teaching as far as most instructors are concerned, are the central concern of students. The instructor must strive to be scrupulously fair in the assignment of grades, and give students as much information as possible about how grades will be assigned and what the instructor's expectations are in terms of class performance. Grading is the area in which students will tolerate the least ambiguity. For example, in my Communication Research class, I gave three assignments intended to lead students through the hypothetico-deductive research process. For each assignment, I gave a detailed outline explaining what it should contain and a sample paper that showed one way of meeting the assignment's requirements.

These four precepts influence how I design and run my classes. I try to identify solid, challenging readings and lead students through the arguments they make, so that they begin to gain an understanding of the theoretical and conceptual relations among ideas. I use in-class exercises and assignments to make students work with those ideas. I present detailed syllabi that outline the course material and explain how it builds toward a unified exploration of the course topic. I also provide in-depth instructions for all course assignments, including in many cases a sample assignment so that students can see what it is that I expect from them.

Teaching Interests

I have taught a broad array of communication classes, and I have enjoyed teaching them all. I find that teaching a class is a way of learning something new, and requires me to broaden my own knowledge and interests. However, it is important for a professor's teaching assignments to complement his or her research interests while at the same time meeting the academic needs of the department in which he or she is located. I would like to outline the broad categories of courses that I believe would augment my research interests:

• Social Science Research Methods. Quantitative and qualitative research methods at the undergraduate or graduate level. Social network analysis and bibliometric methods. Semantic network analysis. Philosophy of science, with attention to epistemological issues and their relation to methodological questions.
• Scientific and Scholarly Communication. Institutional, technical and social structures of science and scientific communication. The role of disciplinarity in science. History of science, with attention to changes in the system of scholarly publication over time and the impact of new technologies on that system. The role of expertise in policy, law, and other decision-making. Public perception and understanding of science. The sociology of knowledge. The political economy of science.
• Organizational Communication. Theories of management and organizations. The role of expertise in organizations. The role of scientific knowledge in organizational decision- making. Innovation in organizations. Social network analysis of organizations, and social capital in organizations. The interaction of management theory and practice. The impact of new technologies on organizational forms and functioning.
• Mass Communication. Theories of popular culture and popular culture criticism. Mass communication policy and regulation. Science journalism and popular science. Science fiction and science in the popular imagination.