Teaching

Teaching is perhaps the most important public role of most academics. While our research most often reaches only academic audiences, our teaching can equip our students with the ideas that help guide them in their personal lives and in how they shape the wider world. For this reason and because of the intrinsic importance of the insights of political theory and political science, I take special pride in my teaching.

I spent four years at Columbia teaching Contemporary Civilization (CC), a year-long seminar course introducing students to the core texts of the Western political, moral, religious, and philosophical tradition. This has given me extensive experience teaching ancient, medieval, and modern political thought (and many ideas for novel courses in political theory). At Murray State, I have taught courses in political theory, American politics, and public administration, including American National Government, Introduction to Political Theory, and Ethics in Public Administration. I have also taught two seminars in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics (PPE); one focusing on markets in theory and practice and the other on rational choice theory and behavioral economics.

In addition to my teaching experience, I’ve sought out pedagogical training to improve and enrich my teaching methods. I also organized and taught two seminars on course design during my time as a Lead Teaching Fellow at Columbia.

Syllabi for courses I’ve taught can be found below:

Markets: Theory, Practice, and Limits

Public Opinion and Democratic Theory

Problems in Contemporary Democratic Theory

Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West I

Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West II

I have also begun developing a version of Introduction to Political Theory that takes what I call a conceptual literacy approach. I explain the approach and share the work-in-progress materials for the course here.