I feel that this kind of skill is cultivated most effectively when I approach teaching as coaching rather than as indoctrination. I am trying to stimulate the cognitive and corresponding verbal skills of my students, and this is best done by eliciting a performance from them and then critiquing it, as any other coach does. I present them with a bewildering array of possible viewpoints, and encourage them, first, to explore them all analytically, and then to have enough confidence in their own insight to be able to draw their own demonstrably reasonable conclusions. This is one of the reasons why class participation is so critically important in my courses—students give me the opportunity to individually fine tune their thinking and their expression before the exams, and thus they stand a much better chance of expressing their thoughts clearly, not only on the final exam, but in general. However, since many students are too shy or are otherwise too intimidated to participate publicly in class discussion, I also accept, as constituting class participation for grading purposes, discussing the material with me, either during office hours or via email. I emphasize that by challenging them to think more carefully, I am not placing myself in an adversarial relationship with them, but that I am their ally. In this sense, too, the methodology of the course is at least equally as important as its content.

This kind of approach also goes a long way towards personalizing the education experience, even in large sections of one hundred students or more. Also contributing to the feeling of intimacy in the classroom is that fact that by the middle of the semester I generally know the names of all of my students, sometimes as many as 300 in a semester. In my smaller classes of 50 to 60 students, I always know all of their names by the end of the first week. I have become somewhat well known among my students, and among colleagues who have seen me teach, for this unusual ability, and it clearly makes the students feel more safe, more confident in their own abilities. This confidence allows them to remove the inhibitions that might otherwise prevent them from participating, even in other classes.

Given that, to a certain extent, I am trying to teach open-mindedness, it is appropriate that all of the courses I teach regularly count towards fulfilling the University’s Multicultural requirements. I get a lot of students for whom this will be their only exposure to Philosophy or critical thinking. It is clear from student and peer comments that students find my courses extremely difficult and demanding. I believe in setting high standards, motivating students to perform up to them, and then rewarding excellence with the appropriate grade. Many of my students are having their first experience with this kind of approach, so I often grade to encourage, rather than to discourage, although fundamentally I have very specific standards to which I hold myself accountable.

In an ordinary semester, teaching accounts for approximately 40% of my assigned workload. This means five courses over two semesters. In addition, I frequently teach overloads (mostly additional sections of PHIL204 [World Religions]), and every semester I have 20 to 25 students taking my course through the distance-learning Focus Program run by Continuing Education. I have recently agreed to a request from the Honors Program to offer Honors subsections of my two advanced classes in Asian Philosophy, and for the past three years I have taught in the Summer College program, for high school students taking college courses. I oversee an average of one or two independent studies each semester, sometimes more. I also teach a class on Religious Diversity in the Resident Assistant’s Course. I currently serve as the third reader of a Master’s Thesis in Geography, and as advisor to a small but steady number of Dean’s Scholars and Degree with Distinction students.

I have introduced a few minor innovations into the classroom setting already: I have experimented with using electronic bulletin boards to facilitate class discussion; I accept emailed discussion of course content as counting towards students’ class participation grades; and I have produced a substantial course manual for each of the three courses I currently teach, each of which includes many original translations and essays and each of which is updated regularly. In the future, I look forward to developing a number of new courses, including Buddhist Philosophy; Daoist Hermeneutics; Death and Dying; Japanese Philosophy; and Religion and Psychology. I am currently writing a textbook on the fundamental Chinese text known as the Dao De Jing, and this work is also resulting in an article on "Teaching Daoism through Chapter 1 of the Dao De Jing," to be submitted to Teaching Philosophy. I also have begun sketching out plans to develop my World Religions course into a hypertext multimedia computer textbook, which would constitute a very exciting use of some of the advantages of recent technological developments.

I make a number of efforts to improve my teaching, by attending and participating in Center for Teaching Effectiveness Workshops; by reading about education and teaching; and by convincing exemplary teachers at the University to discuss their approaches and paradigms. I love to teach, I love to get students to wake up and think for themselves, and so the excitement is still there in every class I teach.