A group of us have talked about sharing our teaching philosophies. In that spirit, I am excerpting the relevant sections from my application for promotion and tenure below.
Pursuit of Truth
I like to say I got my teaching philosophy from my smoke detector: test weekly; do not paint. However, while that is a fine approach for an appliance, I am driven by a higher purpose. My teaching is motivated by the pursuit of truth, but this seemingly simple, even trite, idea is beset by numerous challenges from many unexpected directions. We can find truth only when we avoid deception, and deception comes to us in several ways: from faulty information sources, biased search engine algorithms, and our own cognitive biases. The quest for truth is a perpetual struggle, at the center of which lies the world’s educators: teachers and librarians.
“Test weekly; do not paint.”
My smoke detector’s teaching philosophy
Technology
The pursuit of truth has driven me since I was an undergraduate studying computer science at Plymouth State College in 1999. I was inspired by the romantic promise of the microcomputer revolution. For the first time in human history, technology gave individuals the power to communicate and organize across boundaries, through traditional barriers, and around entrenched institutions. The Internet had the potential to strengthen democracies and destroy tyrannies. This egalitarian potential was embodied in one of the earliest and most successful Internet companies: Google. Google’s corporate mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Those eleven words articulate, arguably, the loftiest goal in human history.
Twenty years on, technology’s democratizing power has garnered a mixed legacy. It seems to have spread oppression as often as it has liberty. No silicon Mongol has yet breached the great firewall of China. Social networks have become insidious clearinghouses for people’s private data. Viral misinformation and surreptitious ads manipulate populations on a scale that twentieth century dictators would have envied. Once-insurgent startups like Google have become staid institutions whose vested business interests don’t always overlap with those of common people. All troubling setbacks for the pursuit of truth.
“Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
Google’s corporate mission
Librarianship
A few years after graduating, I found myself working as a technologist in the library. I always intended to remain a technology professional. Before long, however, I discovered the parallels between the IT profession and the library’s mission. Seemingly opposite worlds–the rapidly changing digital one and the ancient analog one–turned out to have basic commonalities. The American Library Association–the main professional organization of librarians in the United States–has a mission that is quite similar to Google’s: “to enhance learning and ensure access to information for all.” Librarianship, therefore, was dedicated to the same pursuit of truth that stirred my youthful idealism when I embarked on my career in technology.
“To enhance learning and ensure access to information for all.”
American Library Association mission
As I continued in my role as library technologist, I learned more about the history of librarianship. The Library of Congress was created after the War of 1812 when Thomas Jefferson sold his book collection–the largest personal collection in the nation–to the young republic. Jefferson, whose most notable achievement may be drafting the Declaration of Independence, wrote to an acquaintance in 1816, “if a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilisation, it expects what never was and never will be.”
I should note that Jefferson was a slave owner; a mixed legacy that parallels that of technology today. Still, the advance of Jefferson’s ideals has rendered his most inhuman deeds today impossible. In other words, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” have brought freedom and flourishing to the world so far as they have spread. Decades earlier, Jefferson had written to a different acquaintance these words: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. but I should mean that every man should receive those papers & be capable of reading them.”
“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilisation, it expects what never was and never will be.”
Thomas Jefferson
Today, of course, we amend his words while preserving the original spirit: substitute “man” with “person” and “newspapers” with the multitude of information sources at our disposal. Setting aside the government-or-newspapers dichotomy, the lesson I take from Jefferson is the conviction that a free society cannot be maintained without a literate and informed citizenry. Becoming an educator, therefore, is no less than the responsible stewardship of civilization. Because information is the lifeblood of our social institutions, the intersection of technology and librarianship where I stand is the crossroads of democracy.
Philosophy
Parallel to my career trajectory in information technology was my interest in philosophy. From ancient Greece, and from the intellectual traditions of India and China, to the present, philosophy is the primordial soup from whence other disciplines arise. One of the most fascinating ideas I encountered in philosophy is the saying, attributed to Socrates: I know that I know nothing.
This thread of intellectual humility can be picked up again in the seventeenth century, in DesCartes’ famous I think, therefore I am. Founder of modern philosophy, DesCartes adopted an extreme skepticism that attempted to strip away all belief and to build a new epistemology from the ground up. If everything I think I know turns out to be an illusion, the first thing I can possibly know is that I exist. Knowledge proceeds cautiously from there.
As another great thinker, Charles Darwin, succinctly put it in the nineteenth century, “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” Recognized as the progenitor of the theory of evolution and one of the greatest scientists to have lived, Darwin’s humble posture is worth our admiration.
Great philosophy thus probes our deepest assumptions, questions our most sacred values, and inspects the darkest recesses of our psyches. I carry this spirit of fundamental questioning with me each time I enter a classroom. The pursuit of truth demands no less.
“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”
Charles Darwin
Conclusion
My values have been shaped by the confluence of technology, philosophy, and librarianship. My teaching philosophy, then, can be described as the marriage of the radical intellectual humility passed down from Socrates with the Enlightenment ideals embodied in Jefferson. The best articulation of this I have found is a statement by British activist Maajid Nawaz: “No idea is above scrutiny; no people are beneath dignity.” Thus, the dogged pursuit of truth and the innate value of every human being are indispensable to effective teaching and, indeed, to our society.