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Over the course of 14 years of teaching, I have found that working with students has proven to be the key to my own scholarship and intellectual life. I also believe that I serve students as a conduit, not merely to their disciplinary futures, but more importantly to their development as criticially engaged and culturally literate citizens and human beings. I see the classroom as a forum for students to practice the communicative and interpretive skills necessary for life and work in evolving, complex societies. My class meetings are scheduled conversations in which all are invited participants expected to contribute.
In my teaching of writing within NYU Liberal Studies and Global Liberal Studies (GLS), I work with students to help them envisage writing as means of questioning, problem-posing, analyzing, synthesizing, and contributing to academic discourses. I believe that the most effective learning happens when students are invited to actively produce their educations, rather than when they are treated as passive recipients of information. I ask my students to envision and position writing as the cornerstone in this active process of discovery and creation. In my Sophomore Approaches seminars within GLS, I encourage students to become active theorists of their cultural and social worlds, producing explanations of various aspects of culture and society while drawing on theoretical models as diverse as psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, post-structuralism, semiotics, post-colonialism, the sociology of scientific knowledge, and media studies.
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