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Katerina O. Sinclair
Teaching Philosophy

In my former job as a child abuse investigator, I found that there was tension in my department between co-workers who considered their first priority to remove children from all but the best family situations and co-workers who considered their first priority to be the preservation of the family in all but the worst situations. Through my attempts to balance these priorities, I articulated a personal philosophy that reflects my values and views about helping people in need. This philosophy pervades the way that I structure my courses and the ways I interact with students, and contains four basic tenets:

• Respect

  All people should be treated with respect. Although this tenet appears to be simple, I have found this to be the most challenging tenet to implement. To treat all people with respect in social services meant treating parents who have deliberately physically, emotionally, or sexually abused their children with respect. To treat all students with respect means treating those who are absent, apathetic, or academically dishonest with respect.

• Collective Responsibility

  We are collectively responsible for success in our own lives and in the lives of others. In the classroom, this means that successful learning only occurs when we are all engaged in the material. I have shied away from thoughts that the “final word” rests with either me or my students when it comes to learning. To assume collective responsibility means that every person in the class, myself included, must bring attention, enthusiasm, and a willingness to engage in dialogue.

• Unique Contributions

  How we each contribute to collective success depends upon our unique roles and talents, with recognition of personal challenges that threaten our ability to contribute. As with most tasks that are directed toward improvement, I sometimes find myself directing my courses toward addressing deficits in learning rather than capitalizing on the things that students already do well. By focusing on this tenet, I find that I am able to recognize their strengths and use them to build student confidence and interest in course material.

• Practicality:

  With limited resources available, our questions and our answers must be practical and applicable, leading to a direct, measurable improvement in people’s lives. At first glance, this tenet may seem more applicable to social services. I believe, however, that practicality is essential to a successful class and is inherently linked to developing critical thinking skills. In all courses, I try to enhance comprehensive and evaluative skills regarding theories or interventions, skills that can be applied to any employment setting. Second, although many students are content to satisfy their intellectual curiosity through education, most students in my classes have struggled with balancing work, school, family, and social interests. In class, I am mindful of the value of time, making each activity or reading purposeful.

By following these tenets, I strive to create a student-centered classroom that directly applies to their future careers, which are generally in the human service field. For example, one of my favorite classroom activities is to take a newspaper article about a recent study and locate the original research article. The students then list questions they have about the study that were not addressed in the newspaper article, and we locate the answers within the research article. This activity serves several purposes. First, students become critical consumers of research within a setting that they are likely to encounter after leaving college, namely, reading the newspaper. Also, they learn how to locate information within research articles and evaluate the information at their own level. Most importantly, students learn how bias can be introduced into studies. They slowly realize how seemingly “objective” information can be distorted to support personal beliefs. Students respond to this exercise with enthusiasm, citing the relevance and timeliness of it. They also report increased confidence in reading research as they become more familiar with the structure of the articles and interpreting complex questions. Further evidence of how I apply these tenets to the classroom is available throughout my teaching portfolio, along with students’ responses to this application.

Overall, students are delighted with the atmosphere of my classes, responding to my enthusiasm and open-mindedness regarding different viewpoints. I am purposefully transparent in class about my personal values; I use these values to demonstrate the difference between how I would report the findings of a study in contrast to someone with differing values. In response, my students come to reconsider their values, how they were formed, and how they may bias their responses to ethical dilemmas in their careers. Through this process, they come to articulate their own personal philosophies about how they approach complex problems and, I hope, become better consumers and producers of social science research.

For more information about my general teaching style, please refer to my Reflections on Teaching page.

For more information regarding how I use technology to enhance my teaching, please refer to my Reflections on Teaching with Technology page.