Teaching PhilosophyTeaching students how to think critically rather than to passively absorb information posits often unforeseeable challenges to both the instructor and the students. But this is precisely the motivating force which has driven me into a teaching career in the fields of East Asian Studies and ethnomedicine. In both subject areas, my teaching aims at much more than a mastery of the course-specific material. There is no greater reward for me than to observe an entire class engaged in a lively discussion about human nature from a Confucian or Daoist point of view or the moral ramifications of contemporary Taiwanese treatments of ghost fetuses, discussions which often continue outside the classroom. This allows students as individuals to competently display their knowledge of ideas and ways of thinking that they knew absolutely nothing about several weeks earlier. But just as importantly, the class as a whole has succeeded in creating an atmosphere in which every individual’s opinion is valued equally, where young and old minds are stretched, questioned, and opened, and where diversity based on age, gender, class, culture, or any other personal experiences is recognized as an invaluable contribution to the ultimate outcome of cooperative learning. It is my hope and intent that my students will carry these experiences with them into their future lives and apply them to areas that might have absolutely nothing to do with the course subject. I have had the privilege of fine-tuning my methodology for teaching introductory undergraduate courses in many years as a teaching assistant and summer faculty at the University of Arizona’s East Asian Studies program. There, I have developed a large variety of teaching skills. I have taught intimate three-week summer sessions with mostly Religious Studies and East Asian Studies majors , but I have also organized, managed, and sometimes taught large lecture classes with over 200 students and supervised other graduate students as a Head Teaching Assistant. I have learned that creativity, innovation, flexibility, and a willingness to let the students’ needs and interests shape each class are essential tools for successfully engaging students who are initially motivated primarily by the need to fulfill a non-Western civilization requirement in the general education curriculum. My long involvement at a Tier One Research Institution with a large community of outstanding scholars, instructors, and graduate students has also prepared me to teach graduate-level classes where students are engaged in advanced research questions and introduced to the academic community through my own example. In addition to the university environment, I have greatly benefited from my teaching experiences at Pima Community College. For me, the greatest attraction there has been the diversity of the student body, ranging from minorities, to low-income adults under full-time work pressure, to single parents, divorced housewives returning to the labor force, retirees, foreign students with deficient English skills, and young and privileged university transfer students. Rather than regarding their personal backgrounds and struggles as obstacles to the course, I treat every one of them as a valuable asset, who, when tapped effectively, contributes to the learning outcome of every other member of the class. It is a source of great pride both for me and the students when they hand in their final portfolios, complete with research papers, reflective writings, group discussions, and such cooperative projects as a poster board demonstration or websites at the end of the course. In order to address the diverse needs of Pima Community College students even more effectively, I have also piloted a web-based version of a “Chinese Civilization” course. The electronic environment has forced me to carefully rethink my role as teacher and the intent of the course. Since the traditional element of lecturing is eliminated, I see myself primarily as a facilitator who provides students with access to the course material and directs their exploration thereof. I assist them in acquiring academic study skills such as note-taking from the assigned readings, critiquing material from journals, books, or websites, completing academic writing and researching tasks, and forming productive learning communities with rotating individual roles. The applicability of these skills in their future professions is pointed out to them and is therefore a strong motivating factor for class participation. Moreover, the mostly asynchronous nature of a web-based course encourages students to reflect on the material and draw connections to their own life experiences and values. Lastly, my teaching has been affected by my experience in offering courses on Chinese culture and on the history of Chinese medicine at the Asian Institute of Medical Studies, a graduate program in acupuncture and Asian medicine. The joys of teaching my specialized subject area to a group of highly self-motivated and interested adult learners are obvious. While the students eagerly await my informative lectures at the beginning of class, I derive equal pleasure from the intellectually stimulating debates that follow. Teaching a group of acupuncture students about the classics of their field feeds directly into my anthropological research interest in the contemporary interpretation and cultural adaptation of traditional Chinese medicine in America. In conclusion, my teaching is rooted in the rewards of facilitating the interaction between different cultures. This applies not only in the context of introducing traditional Chinese humanities and medicine to students from non-Chinese backgrounds. It is also the basic aim of medical anthropology classes where students are exposed to ways of interpreting health and illness, gender, or the human body which differ fundamentally from their own biomedical and scientific culture. Born and raised in small-town Germany, I have spent extensive time in Taiwan and Japan, before living for almost 20 years in Tucson, Arizona. There, I was deeply imbedded in the Hispanic community, in particular through my involvement in regional Mexican border music, on both sides of the border. My current life in Taos is an extension of this interest. Thus, I have always enjoyed the challenges and rewards of cross-cultural communication, in both my private and my professional life. |