A contagious thrill

The College's newest endowed chair holder has a five-year mission - spread a love for teaching through the Liberal Arts.

L-R: Melanie Hawthorne, Charles Zhang, Stephen Daniel, Heidi Campbell, Adam Seipp, and Esther Quintana met at J. Cody’s for dinner and a discussion about teaching. Hawthorne and Daniel met with these faculty during the spring 2007 semester as part of a project in the Center for Teaching Excellence.

As the College of Liberal Arts looks to the future, teaching excellence will play a greater role in assessing overall departmental effectiveness. For Philosophy Professor Steve Daniel, the latest recipient of both the Murray and Celeste Fasken Chair in Distinguished Teaching in the Liberal Arts and a Texas A&M University Presidential Professorship for Teaching Excellence, this news couldn’t come at a better time. Daniel is the type of faculty member who thrives in a research university setting in that he excels in both the research and the teaching arenas, but his deepseated passion lies with teaching.

As an award-winning teacher with a solid research record to boot, he has some definite ideas about helping faculty members who want to improve their teaching skills. Now he has the funds, and the administrative support, to put his ideas into action.

Pathways visited with Steve Daniel to learn more about his commitment to teaching in a university setting.

PATHWAYS: When did you first realize you might want to pursue a teaching career?
SHD: As an undergraduate, I discovered that I really enjoyed explaining concepts to my classmates. Once, when one of my teachers admitted to not understanding a particular point in Nietzsche, I jumped in and started explaining how the point was related to other aspects of Nietzsche’s thought that I had studied in another course. I volunteered to give a presentation on the topic in the next class; that is when I realized that this was too much fun to give up.

PATHWAYS: Why do you enjoy teaching?
SHD: I love it because it gives me a chance every day to run ideas past students who, for the most part, are genuinely interested in exploring ways of thinking they have never considered before. Even after more than 30 years of doing this, I get excited every time I walk into the classroom because I know this class will be the one in which a student will hear something or think something that will click and make all the difference. It might be some esoteric point by a little known philosopher, or it might be some grand idea about the meaning of life — either way, the thrill of such a realization is contagious, and I want to be around to help it spread.

PATHWAYS: Do you have a teaching philosophy?
SHD: Yes. You don’t teach material, you teach students. Before I begin a course, before I make up an exam or assignment, before I meet with a class on any day, I ask (1) why should my students care about what we are discussing, (2) how can I interest my students by clarifying the issues we address, and (3) what skills or information would I want them to take from this activity and retain one year or five years from now?

PATHWAYS: How has your approach to teaching at Texas A&M changed over the past 24 years?
SHD: I used to think that students learned best simply by being exposed to great ideas. I now know that that is not enough. Today’s students want to be persuaded that what they learn is worthwhile, and that requires enticing them into ways of thinking that initially seem to many of them as beside-the-point, even bizarre. My task thus now demands that I approach my teaching as an art rather than merely a skill, and part of the artistry of my craft is that I show my students how someone can enthusiastically adopt a variety of perspectives and still exhibit intellectual integrity. That’s not easy, but as the 17th century philosopher Baruch Spinoza wrote, “All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.”

PATHWAYS: How do you plan to use the Fasken Chair to affect teaching in the Liberal Arts?
SHD: Last year I participated in the Faculty Teaching Academy, a program sponsored by the University’s Center for Teaching Excellence in which faculty came together for lunch once a month to talk about how they could become better teachers. Each of those lunches provided me with an opportunity to re-think what I am doing in the classroom and to expect more from myself for the benefit of my students. With the funds from the Fasken Chair, I want to give faculty in the College the opportunity to experience that same sense of pedagogic excitement. Perhaps faculty could share a lunch or dinner where small groups meet to discuss a chapter or two from a book like Ken Bain’s What the Best College Teachers Do (Harvard University Press, 2004). Perhaps they could participate in a mini-conference in a particular discipline where invited speakers would meet with them to compare notes about challenges they have faced and how they have addressed them. Perhaps they could form study groups that would meet throughout a whole semester. Regardless of how it is done, my aim is to help all of us in the College become better teachers. And because the funding of the Fasken Chair is substantial and lasts for five years, it really can have a major impact.