Teaching
Teaching
Teaching philosophy
My teaching is defined by a student-oriented approach that prioritizes in-class exercises to build foundational skills in philosophical reading, writing, and discussion.
Building analytical reading skills
Good reading skills are difficult to teach because reading is typically a private activity. I build reading skills in class by making reading public. To do this, I use a variety of structured reading exercises. For example, I provide students with excerpts from course texts, put them in small groups, and ask them to identify the thesis or key steps of the argument. I sometimes lead group annotation sessions where everyone can mark up the same text. Another technique I use involves modelling analytical reading myself. I put a passage from a course text in my slides and then talk briefly but sentence by sentence through the important claims and logical connections that I notice. In a certain respect, this approach is similar to the “live coding” exercises conducted by computer science instructors: it directly demonstrates the kind of thinking I ask my students to do. I reinforce these skills by providing students with a brief and accessible guide to succeeding in a philosophy course that offers practical techniques for reading success, like numbering paragraphs, underlining, and continuing to ask “why?” while reading.
Demystifying norms of philosophical writing
Many students start to grasp the norms of philosophical writing only once they have made a mistake and received a lower grade for it. I try to pre-empt this experience through in-class work designed to help students see why philosophers write the way they do, and why we ask students to follow suit. To do so, I lead group critique sessions of samples of philosophical writing. For example, in one exercise, I ask students to read a botched one-paragraph exegesis (written by me) of a text we have covered in class. In small groups and then as a class, we discuss what it gets right and wrong, what is confusing, what improvements could be made, and so on. This exercise puts students in the position of a grader, enabling them to read, perhaps for the first time, undergraduate-level philosophical writing produced by someone else. Simultaneously, it encourages them to make critical, comparative, and collaborative judgments about different ways of writing an exegesis. Because I write the sample text myself, I can seed it with mistakes that I think will be useful for my students to discuss. And because the exercise pertains to a course text, it also indirectly reinforces content knowledge. Variants of the exercise include asking students to compare different theses that respond to a sample essay question and to critique AI-generated texts.
Engaging intuitions in discussion
Learning how to “do” philosophy means coming to appreciate its implications for how we should think, feel, and act. In class discussions, I use case studies to draw out students’ intuitions and show how they connect to philosophical ideas. For example, in a course about the philosophy of protest, I asked students to compare two protest groups: the German radical environmentalist group Ende Gelände to the Freedom Convoy in Canada, a group that occupied the Canadian capital of Ottawa to protest COVID-19 vaccine mandates. I had thought that my students might side with the radical environmentalists, setting the table for a discussion of how the ends and means of protest matter morally in different ways, but they instead argued that the Convoy invoked moral rights that overshadowed the moral urgency of climate change. In the next part of the class, I then used this discovery to introduce theories that posit a moral right to civil disobedience. In this way, my use of case studies allows me to tailor normative discussions to my students’ moral outlooks.
If You Care About It, Do It in Class, or so says James M. Lang for the Chronicle of Higher Education. In teaching, I take up this command, using the classroom to cultivate skills in reading, writing, and discussion through creative and carefully tailored classroom exercises.
Teaching experience
University of Toronto, Instructor of Record
Issues in Political Philosophy, Summer 2023 (46 students)
An advanced undergraduate course focusing on issues in the ethics of protest including civil disobedience, uncivil disobedience, and rioting.
University of Toronto, Teaching Assistant
Introduction to Political Philosophy, Fall 2023 (66 students/3 sections)
Law and Morality, Spring 2023 (45 students/3 sections)
Introduction to Ethics, Fall 2022 (72 students/3 sections)
Introduction to Political Philosophy, Fall 2021 (hybrid/67 students/3 sections)
Law and Morality, Summer 2021 (online/56 students/2 sections)
Introduction to Political Philosophy, Spring 2021 (online/71 students/3 sections)
Ethics and the Law, Fall 2020 (online/40 students/2 sections)
Introduction to Political Philosophy, Fall 2019 (68 students/3 sections)
University of Toronto, Grader
Issues in the Philosophy of Law, Summer 2024
Environmental Ethics, Spring 2024
Marx and Marxism, Spring 2022
Issues in Political Philosophy, Spring 2020
Issues in the Philosophy of Law, Summer 2019
Introduction to Political Philosophy, Spring 2019
Business Ethics, Fall 2018
Other teachables (syllabus ready)
Introduction to Philosophy
Introduction to Metaethics
Introduction to Political Philosophy
Introduction to Ethics
Free Will and Moral Responsibility
Introduction to the Philosophy of Law
The Philosophy of Constitutional Law
Business Ethics
Environmental Ethics