Teaching

My pedagogy stresses active, experiential, and collaborative learning. Recognizing the problematic power dynamics and the well-documented ineffectuality of traditional, lecture-based pedagogies, I structure my courses around hands-on exercises that require students to work together to produce concrete outcomes from otherwise abstract course readings or difficult theoretical constructs. As I’ve documented in my publications on teaching and game-based learning, I explicitly present these exercises to students as games---challenges which, lacking a correct or predetermined answer, require them to experiment or otherwise play around with the course materials. Then, by way of reflection, I ask students to present the results of their work to the class. I subsequently use these results as a starting point to foster sustained class discussions about readings or concepts.

 

In keeping with the tenets Paulo Freire’s liberation pedagogy, I thus require students to not only take responsibility for the content of the course, but to simultaneously construct themselves and perform as subject experts in relationship to the course content. My goal in doing so is ultimately to teach students how to teach themselves: to provide them with crucial, hands-on experience in the problematics of how to approach and master complex and sometimes difficult content (above and beyond the specific content of my courses) on their own terms and for their own means. The goal of my pedagogy, as such, is to inspire students to approach difficult problems, questions, and issues in the future not from a position of fear, uncertainty, or resentment, but as critical opportunities for growth, engagement, and enlightenment.