I am really happy to be part
of the Oakton community which started for me this fall 2005. I have
been teaching Philosophy, Business Ethics and Humanity type courses
every year since 1988. This year, after teaching an exhilarating
and fun Humanities course at Oakton two mornings a week, I head
to DePaul University to teach some evenings. Over the past six years
I have taught mostly at DePaul's loop campus. I really enjoy the
diverse student body downtown and their hard working attitude. In
my classroom at both institutions, I seek to reach every student
by making the past relevant to today’s world and by showing
how the contemporary world arises out of historical ways of thinking.
It is especially important for me to try and help students think
critically about the present society and their significant influence
upon it. Whether consciously or unconsciously, each person’s
thinking and actions impact and so alter our world in some way.
This is to say, not only can each person make a difference,
but that each person can not help but make a difference,
a big difference, everyday, to the world we hold in common among
us. For it is precisely within this moment of awareness that we
can begin responsible discussions about current cultural forces:
political, economic, racial, sexual, environmental, technological
and more.
These statements of pedagogy reveal my research interests
concerning how narrative works as a way of forming and informing
our individual identities as well as our communal history and future.
Core stories, exemplary stories, great stories of history, religion,
and politics are embedded into our background understandings that
organize our society. We dwell in these stories as they are
a part of us and determine how we live and act in a society. It
is in this way then that who we are is already fixed for us in the
cultural context we are born into.
In another way though, the uniqueness of each human being
always marks the possibility of beginning something new. Following
Hannah Arendt’s insight into the essential element of action
along with her view of its political relevance, I am particularly
interested in tracing how stories can transform a way of thinking.
How is it that stories, stories about Socrates or stories of Jesus
for example, can so greatly transform cultural ways of thinking
and being? We can begin to understand a way of dealing with this
query when we see that our relationship to nature, to ourselves
and to others can be altered every time we say what is
. And, to say what is, as stated and exemplified by the first historian
Herodotus, is to tell a story. In all significant actions like telling
and listening to remarkable stories, humans appear and disclose
who they are. Moreover, stories set something novel into motion.
To put this briefly another way: story transforms the human heart.
Applied to current cultural milieu -- the present political,
economic, racial, sexual, environmental, technological setting --
the crucial question becomes, what story needs tobe told today?
I look not only to philosophy and history for the future of our
world and the answer to this question, but to the students and their
significant contributions.
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