Over the course of the past five years, I have been responsible for four different courses, teaching both undergraduate students and graduate students, in the U.S. and abroad. My first teaching experience was instructing three sections of the required Masters of International Affairs Course, "Conceptual Foundations of International Politics" where I was responsible for teaching three sections (with 30 students each) of first year master's students, and taught my course in a seminar format. I emphasized original and creative analysis of the texts by asking two or three students to lead the discussion section of our class, and asked every student to present their ideas on the readings they were responsible for. Last year and this past summer, while conducting my fieldwork in Tehran, Iran, I taught a course on "Medical Anthropology" to undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty at Tehran University. This course followed more of a lecture format (all lectures were conducted by me in Farsi), and I encouraged discussion and asked for response papers throughout the seminar. Over the last academic year, I was a teaching assistant for "Women and Health" at Barnard College, and an instructor for "Introduction to Sociomedical Sciences", the required Masters of Public Health course at Columbia University. These diverse experiences have afforded me the opportunity to be reflexive and introspective about my teaching philosophy and how it changes based on the students I am working with. My approach to teaching is still developing rapidly, but I believe that the four points discussed below are a good indication of my initial efforts.
Encouraging original analytical skills: Because I believe in encouraging individual interaction with texts and lectures, I always ask my students to write three response papers and make two presentations on course material throughout the semester. Instead of beginning my seminars with lectures on the readings, I ask students to sign up in groups of three to talk about their reactions to the previous week's discussion and reading assignments. In this way students are able to form and present their opinions and analyses of course material before hearing my point of view. I also ask them to write response papers on material that differs from their in-class presentation, thereby encouraging close and original analysis of a wide range of texts throughout the semester.
Honing presentation and oral speaking skills: In all of the courses that I have taught, and will continue to teach, I ask students to make a few if not several oral presentations to the class (there will be one or more of these presentations depending on class size and format). This was a skill I honed while attending a small liberal arts college (Occidental College) and one in which I value in my personal and professional life. In smaller seminar courses I ask students to present on readings, and in my "Conceptual Foundations of International Politics" course, one of the major assignments of the course was enacting a debate. I divided the class into teams and then assigned them their debate topics. I did not, however tell them whether they would be debating "pro" their topic or "con" until five minutes before they were supposed to debate, thereby forcing them to prepare both sides and be able to articulate both aspects of their assigned topics. In my larger, lecture oriented courses (such as "Women and Health" and "Medical Anthropology") I ask students to sign up to make individual poster presentations on topics pertaining to the course. They prepare these posters and then present to a group of their classmates and myself, and their classmates assist us in deciding the final grade.
Fostering collaboration in the classroom: The ability to work in groups or teams, and being able to talk about and exchange viewpoints on course material is a vital personal an professional skill. It is for this reason that I seek to foster student collaboration in all of my courses. In the smaller, seminar courses, I assign group projects such as the debates outlined above, or small ethnographic projects (such as the ones I assigned in my "Medical Anthropology" course and designed for my "Introduction to Sociomedical Sciences" course). In the larger, lecture courses, I regularly ask students to break up into groups and discuss their reactions to texts, films or other material I present in class.
Moving from theory to action & Applying core principles: I believe that the best way to learn complicated and abstract theoretical concepts is by putting them into action. I remember struggling with abstract notions of ethnographic methods and fieldwork for many years as a graduate student. All of the courses I took on ethnography provided interesting and rich descriptions of qualitative methods, yet they seemed too abstract. It was not until my third year when I went to the field and began to conduct my own ethnography that many of these ideas finally sunk in. It was for this reason that while teaching my course on "Medical Anthropology" at Tehran University, I assigned the students to conduct mini-ethnographic projects in Tehran as part of their final projects. I am planning to incorporate this section into my "Qualitative Research Methods" course this spring. Assigning my "Conceptual Foundations of International Politics" students to participate in debates on complex issues such as "realism" and "idealism" also helped concretize these theories, and provided them with the debating skills that many have said prove invaluable throughout their professional careers.
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