Pedagogical Statement
I consider teaching to be my most fundamental responsibility as a scholar. It is the reason I became an academic and am pursuing a career in higher education. I have found teaching to be challenging and rewarding as well. In my training I have attempted to unite the many strands in modern classics including art history, archaeology, philology, anthropology, and history.
In order to make the process of teaching successful, instructors must assess the needs of every audience, and occasionally each student within that audience. Sometimes the fact that the course is envisioned as an introduction to the topic can assist this assessment. Students with little previous knowledge of the ancient world often need basic facts and cultural nuances explained to them which we as classicists and archaeologists can sometimes presuppose. These include gender roles, the class system, and even divergent attitudes toward violence and rape. I believe it is immensely important for students of the ancient world to realize that the Romans and Greeks were not “just like us except in togas and tunics”. An awareness of the construction and expression of these long-dead cultures will give students the tools to examine and understand their own and contemporary cultures. The ability to understand how we got from there to here and the interconnectedness of the human experience is an essential component of this process. It makes what students are doing more relevant to their everyday lives.
Apart from the methodology of course instruction, a successful teacher focuses on the needs of students. First-year students generally need to be exposed to material they have never encountered before in order to begin to develop the capacity to assess ideas critically. Critical thinking exercises such as a close reading of the ancient authors coupled with material culture studies can help in this process.
In order for advanced and graduate students to fully engage with their own research, they must become excited about the past. I attempt to empower their own initiatives and encourage a more intimate relationship with the material through group projects, more intensive reading assignments, focused seminar discussions, and supervised independent study.
Examples of Course Enrichment
I have undertaken many short projects which have proven successful in the classroom.
When teaching Roman history in Buffalo, I assigned excerpts from Augustine to half of the class and excerpts from Celsus to the other half. The next day I impersonated Constantine, newly ascended to the throne, and had each half argue whether or not "I" should legalize Christianity. This provoked a very heated debate based on the works of these two ancient authors.
In another introductory course I had students attempt to illustrate Plato's Allegory of the Cave which produced some creative representations (and ensured they would forever remember the philosophical theory espoused).
For a Roman Britain class at Bradford University, my students spent an entire session together translating the inscriptions on Romano-British funerary monuments. This was a way we could connect with the common people of the ancient province instead of merely focusing upon grand themes and elite culture. It was amazing how much detail about an unknown person's brief, unrecorded life could be gleaned from these artifacts.
At Stanford, I initiated a film series to accompany my Roman archaeology class. We watched ten movies not to see how accurate they were in representing Roman culture, but how the filmmakers and their contemporaries envisioned the Romans. My stated hypothesis in the class was that no one ever represents the Romans neutrally. In Carmine Gallone's Scipio Africanus (1937), the Romans embody the fascist ideal, while in Cecil B. DeMille’s Sign of the Cross (1932) they are a symbol of decadence and corruption. Federico Fellini’s Satyricon (1968) uses a fragmentary Roman novel to meditate on the state of our fragmentary knowledge about the past, and Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979) skewers organized religion by reconstructing an absurd image of Roman antiquity. Such non-traditional approaches, as well as formalized lecturing, have in the past enabled me to interest students in the Romans and Greeks and to enrich their learning process.
My current program at Stanford encourages its faculty to teach outside of their discipline for one quarter a year. Last year I was able to run a very interesting class on modern sexuality and gender issues. Called “Sex: Its Pleasures and Cultures,” it examined how various societies construct their ideas of sex and gender. In the class, we were often dealing with sensitive and difficult topics. My challenge was to create a secure and welcoming classroom environment while finding ways to make these complex, provocative ideas approachable and understandable. Once the course syllabus was set, I began to construct my approach to the material, and formulate a strategy for my sections. I identified the core ideas we would be addressing and created talking points, assignments, and supporting evidence to guide the students through the (often very complicated) world of humanistic sexuality studies. Our core texts were quite varied in form, including The Symposium, Miller’s The Crucible, Weimar Republic scandal play Lulu, Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex, Anne Fausto-Sterling’s Sexing the Body, and a medieval Kabbalistic text on marriage. This wide-ranging bibliography required an assortment of teaching methods, but the luxury of allotting two weeks per text on average allowed for a great amount of in-depth study and analysis. Student input was a crucial component, not only in the classroom discussions, but also in a more formalized manner with regular facilitations given by students on subjects pertinent to that week’s topics.
Other challenges in the “Sex” class included urging the students to differentiate between fact and opinion (their own and societal) and to ask difficult questions in an academically safe environment (what we in the class welcomed as “riskful thinking”). As you can imagine, this was sometimes daunting given the subject matter, but not once did I encounter any resistance on the part of the students to follow me down that path, since I had already cultivated their trust. In fact, these tools of humanistic inquiry proved to be a legacy the students said they happily took away from the course. My own critical and interdisciplinary training in archaeology, art history, and classics enabled me to step outside of my normal field of expertise, and succeed.
