My Teaching Philosophy

...I aim to make my classroom a place in which everyone feels comfortable and capable.  Using small group work and in-class debates, I encourage a collaborative, student-directed atmosphere, even in large lecture courses.  I make sure that everyone, even the least talkative pupil, has a chance to contribute...I also readily use non-philosophical texts in the classroom, including fiction, legal cases, news articles, autobiography, and interviews.
TEACHING AWARDS

*Nomination, Career Center Faculty Recognition Award, University of Utah. Recognition for contributions to students’ professional development, 3/18

*Daniels Funds Leadership in Ethics Teaching Award, University of Utah, 11/16

Selected Courses

Justice and International Affairs: War At Home and Abroad
(PHIL 3730)

Course description: This course examines war and its effects from a philosophical perspective.  It is organized around four snapshots of war—ranging in time from Ancient Greece to the 21st century Middle East. These snapshots, on one hand, focus on the “theaters” of war. Yet they inevitably draw us back to the effects of war on people outside war zones: civilians at home who may or may not support armed conflicts, family and friends of those fighting, soldiers returning from war, and people displaced by war, i.e., refugees. As a class, we investigate some of the philosophical questions surrounding the conflicts described in these snapshots. For example, is there such a thing as a just war? What makes a war unjust, when and if it is? What are the ethical costs associated with war?  When—and how, if at all—is one morally obligated to resist? What, if anything, do we owe to refugees displaced by conflicts and to soldiers returning home? Students will engage these questions with a special eye towards issues of gender, social class, race, and ethnicity.

STUDENT EVALUATIONS FROM COURSE

Discrimination & Equality in the Workplace
(PHIL 5191)
Course Description:  If we overhear someone say, “You’re discriminating against me,” we recognize the utterance as an accusation.  But what, exactly, is discrimination?  And why is it wrong?  In this course, we investigate these questions with a specific focus: employment discrimination.  We’ll start by considering the ethical and political significance of jobs.  In the course’s second part, we’ll move on to the question: what counts as discrimination in the workplace?  To make progress on this question, we will examine examples of employment discrimination from US case law, as well as bits and pieces of the law itself.  Our aim will be philosophical.  That is, we will be less interested in how one might litigate an actual case of employment discrimination (standards of evidence, burdens of proof, etc.) and more interested in articulating different conceptions of discrimination present in the law.  In the course’s third part, we will look more carefully at questions of wrongness.  Why and when is discrimination wrong?  In the course’s final part, we ask: when, if ever, should workplace discrimination be permitted?  Looking at actual court cases and real-life examples, we will attempt to understand why discrimination is legally permissible in some—but not all—cases. 

STUDENT EVALUATIONS FROM COURSE

Philosophy and Literature: Visions of Justice
(PHIL 3750/GNDR 3960)

Course description: What is justice?  Where do the mandates of justice come from and why do they have authority over us?  How do we know what is just?  When and how should wrongdoers be punished?  Is it better to be just than unjust?  A long line of philosophers has asked these questions.  Though they often disagree wildly, their exploration of the questions tends to take a similar form.  An author articulates a view, presents objections to that view, then defends the view.  Fiction, poetry, and autobiography work differently.  Pairing pieces of literature with philosophical texts, we will examine how different kinds of writers explore questions about justice, the answers that they offer us (if any), and the extent to which literature and philosophy can be brought into conversation.  We pay special attention to the way in which gender, social class, race, and ethnicity feature (or fail to feature) in different accounts of a just society.

Texts include Aeschylus's Oresteia, Plato's Euthyphro, Dicken's A Tale of Two Cities, Marx's Communist Manifesto, Morrison's The Bluest Eye, and Anderson's The Imperative of Integration
Ethical Dilemmas: Living Ethically in an Unjust World
(PHIL 1001)

Course Description:  In this course, we investigate the central question of ethics: how should one live? We begin by developing a conceptual toolkit for understanding hard choices and ethical dilemmas in everyday life. Core concepts include hard choices, transformative experience, and authenticity. In the course's second part, we examine the three most famous theories of ethics in the Western philosophical tradition: Aristotle’s virtue ethics, Kantian ethics, and utilitarianism. Examining these theories, we explore what they say about how we should navigate sticky ethical decisions in everyday life. We end by considering the limitations of these theories and the question of whether it is always possible to live ethically in an unjust world.
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Photos from aussiejeff, educators.co.uk, garryknight