My experiences stem from a deep respect for the massive state university system that I experienced as an undergraduate (SUNY/Buffalo), the smaller private world of the University of Notre Dame, my five years as college faculty, and from my professional and social interactions, reading, and persoanl reflection. I have several notions regarding what good teaching is, and how it is accomplished.

Good teaching:

1. Has a sound strategy, but is not so over-structured that it stifles crucial peripheral moments that stem from a true openness and awareness
2. Provides tools for students to think historically, critically, and analytically, no matter what the field of study. For example, I don't feel that analytical thinking should be relegated solely to English and philosophy majors; it plays a crucial role in every academic discipline. Good teachers find ways to make sure their material elicits these skills and opportunities.
3. Helps students understand how to help themselves: to self-learn. So much learning goes on beyond the actual parameters of the formal education that the greatest gift I can 'bestow' upon my students is the gift of awareness: that there are many things about the world that they will go on to experience and learn from, and that I offered a set of tools with which to uncover, weigh, analyze, and keep or discard material as they move through life.
4. Can be realized only after a formal core of theoretical and practical knowledge. Allowing students to design their own curriculum and decide themselves what is important and what constitutes knowledge misses the essential fact that "students don't know what they don't know."¹ Great musicians and artists were often aware of and schooled in the core practices and protocols of their craft before they went off on their own and broke new ground. After all, how can artists and musicians (and students) know what is new and relevant if they don;t know what it is that constitutes the norm, or what they are revolting against?...they have no materials for comparison.

Advising Philosophy

Important work has recently been published which I find compelling, and which I feel supports my own beliefs about the impact of advising on the learning and developmental outcomes of students. Particularly, Ned Laff argues that "the advising process offers us perhaps the best opportunity for helping our students become more intentional about their own educations as well as for helping them to recognize the value of the liberal learning outcomes we seek to advance." Laff's research asked students "whether anyone had ever actually talked to them about the core...[he] asked whether any of them had had conversations with their advisors about the nature of core learning, about how core learning can integrate with their overall undergraduate experiences, or about how their core learning could affect their personal or professional development. [He] asked this because advising is one of the best opportunities for students to talk about the values of liberal learning in practice. What they had 'learned' is that the core was something they had to do; that it could be 'knocked out' during their first two years...we were not conveying the importance of liberal learning through advising." Laff goes on to say that "in order to help students better understand the nature of liberal learning and how it informs their overall undergraduate experiences, advising must be reconceived as a liberal learning experience in itself.² I see out-of-class conversations with students as opportunities to explore with them their understanding of the importance of liberal education and how core courses can impact and enrich their lives not only vocationally (and empirically), but also tacitly...subjectively.

Service Learning

I follow Cathy Foos's point that service-learning "can provide for students a valuable experience of community that may serve to counteract the tendency toward isolation...and plays a role in offsetting self-centeredness."³ I always seek to incorporate aspects of the service-learning curriculum (AAHE) into all my courses, and I'm always open to further exploration of such a curriculum on a broader and more comprehensive scale.