On this page, I am showcasing my teaching in philosophy at the university level. I taught my first university course (Critical Thinking) in 2006 while earning my MA in philosophy at Loyola Marymount University. Since then, I taught from 2008 to 2012 while earning my PhD at Fordham University and from 2013 at Hokkaido University and Hokkaido University of Education in Japan. Here, I provide a sample of the course syllabuses and teaching resources I have worked on for teaching philosophy.
A complete list of relevant teaching experience is available elsewhere on my website at /teaching/.
Here are syllabuses for my teaching in philosophy:
While at Fordham University, I taught four sections of Philosophical Ethics and four sections of Philosophy of Human Nature.
More recently, I have also taught a section of Presentations, Publications, and Ethics in Research and 4 sessions of Environmental Ethics course at Hokkaido University
Additionaly, I have incorporated philosophical texts into other courses at Hokkaido University of Education including 8 sessions of a Introduction to
Syllabuses
Ongoing Projects
Flipped Classroom Critical Thinking
As part of my current teaching, I work with students who are non-native speakers of English. At the same time, as a philosopher by profession, I do not want tomake my classes mere English classes. As a solution, I have started to use a flipped lecture style for this class. What that means is that my lectures are freely available on youtube. Students watch them as homework. I start each class with questions and a quiz. Then we work on more advanced problems that build on the knowledge in class. (I welcome comments and suggestions for how to do this better).
I have been teaching this course for the last five years and have developed three different flipped versions of the course, changing it based on the questions, comments, and difficulties students face.
The video part of this work is available for use on
youtube.
The in-class exercises are being revised each semester to more effectively teach critical thinking concepts.
Comparative Philosophy
Plato and Confucius were near contemporaries who both grappled with the relationship between tradition, truth, and ethics. For Plato, a major challenge is getting at the core of things so that people can behave ethically -- which often involves questioning received knowledge. For the Confucius of the
Analects, this often has the opposite form.
I have developed a combination of lectures and reading handouts to help non-native speakers understand the projects of the two thinkers and the important concepts at work in each by reading excerpts from
The Apology of Socrates,
The Euthyphro and the
AnalectsDescartes
While teaching in Japan, I often have offered the chance to study Descartes with me by writing precis about the
Meditations. For most of my students, this is a rather challenging task as they are not used to Descartes' writing style and the arguments he presents.