This statement is a description and discussion of the approach I take to teaching and factors that have shaped my philosophy of education. The essay will speak to my general style in teaching and to my specific philosophy in teaching  social work. It is a tentative statement that will always be incomplete. My pedagogy is reshaped with each class that I experience.

     During my twenty years of teaching I have adopted and expanded on a model of college and university teaching called a teacher-scholar-service model. This model assumes that all of classroom activities, scholarship, and public service are interrelated. They are of a piece in my higher education pedagogy. I share what research I do with students in my classes, involve them in community and research projects I may be participating in, and often will talk with students about controversial issues in social work practice and education and the university in general.
     In the classroom I make extensive use of a Dialogic/Socratic approach to teaching that I learned at Carthage College in Wisconsin and Coker College in South Carolina. This involves extensive questioning of students and attempts to test and expand their critical thinking abilities. Students often resist this approach. The approach can leave some students feeling that I do not keep on the topic or that I am "picking on them". Many students suffer from the belief that there is always a "right" answer and they will be embarrassed if they get it "wrong." They may ask: "What should they say or write?" I will not, however, tell them!! Beneath the seeming disorder there is an underlying order. I am seldom just looking for one answer from the students. I do, however, make extensive use of classroom technology and lots of handouts to provide more structure.
     I have read extensively in critical educational theory including the work of bell hooks, Stanley Aronowitz, and Paulo Freie among others. I have also been influenced by social constructionism, some post-modernist models of thinking about the social world, and feminist social thought. I, however, started thinking about the education process a long time ago, in a place not so far away....
     I am a white male who grew up in the days when Jim Crow was being taken apart in the south. A foolish war was being fought in Southeast Asia, and Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Kenneth Lancaster were among that 80% of the eligible males who managed to go to school or hide in the National Guard to avoid the discomfort of sleeping in mud. In the late 1960s, as an education student planning to become a high school history teacher, I was required to take a course called "Philosophical Foundations of Education". All sensible students feared the course. An intellectually demanding Professor Emeritus taught the course in the School of Education of the small, southern, liberal arts state college I attended. Without a written course outline but with a 15 year-old textbook, the Professor used the dichotomy of Idealism versus Materialism as a basis for the discussion of philosophical problems in education.
     If human action, according to the Professor, were explained by the capacity of people to create social institutions from the power of their minds, the structure and problems of an educational system would be explained and remade through the well-meaning and intellectually honest forums of open debate. On the other hand, said the Professor, if the demands of the surrounding material world structured ideas and action, than the discussion of education problems would be framed differently. Of course the nature of that surrounding material world was never clearly described. The social impact of economic systems was completely ignored.
     The six major papers required for the course involved selecting important issues in education identified by the textbook and discussing them from either an Idealist or Materialist position. Terms such as Epistemology, Metaphysics and Logical Positivism constantly bombarded the largely hapless and non-philosophical class. As a philosophy minor I had an unfair advantage. I constructed three papers as an Idealistic Materialist and three papers as a Materialistic Idealist. The Professor bought it! I got the highest grade in the class and personal praise from the Professor. The class, however, managed to go through an entire educational philosophy course without articulating a clear statement about the process they were all determined to join. Needless to say I did not complete my teaching certificate!
     The purpose of this brief story is to illustrate two points about the evolution of my educational philosophy. First, my approach has emerged from a rejection of the false battle over the dichotomous framing of educational thinking presented by the well-meaning teacher described above. Graduate education didn't help much in this battle. The categorization of thought described above did more to mask rather than to reveal the nature of the formal process of education. Education, whether formal, non-traditional or a combination of the two, is a social process involving social structure acting on human beings, people acting on structures according to their individual and group interest and a multitude of combinations of both of these factors. This makes the discussion of the philosophical foundations of education much more complicated.
     Secondly, my educational philosophy has had to emerge in an American society that has largely ignored the reality that people bring a wide variety of experiences into the educational process. Much of the intellectual activity in American education has, historically, been predicated on the assumption that the knowledge and skills required in our society can be objectively defined and passed on to those who are the smartest and work the hardest. All people, according to the traditional approach, can be tracked along rationally defined paths that are followed by those best suited to absorb the knowledge of those paths. People are placed in the appropriate path according to how well they repeat the knowledge that is presented as the passwords of the most desired of the paths. This still dominant assumption in American education is not as simplistic as the nineteenth-century division of vocational and academic tracks. It is now best represented by the continued importance of categories of letter grades as the determining factors for measuring success and the overwhelming hegemonic position of white males in all institutions that are fed by the education system.
     My philosophy of education has been shaped by an at times painful, and anger-inducing, realization that the diverse and complex nature of human potential, learning styles and ways of looking at the world, have been largely ignored in the structuring of formal educational systems. Instead of a complex process that tries to seek out and expand to the fullest the potential of all persons, we have structured an abusive and elitist education process that  largely serves white males of middle and upper class origins.
     My particular educational philosophy has also been shaped by a combination of work experiences and academic preparation. I consider myself a social worker and a teacher. The social work experience shaped my understanding of the wide variety of individual life experiences that people bring to encounters with social institutions. Each individual I have joined in the social work process has a complex and interesting history that defines him or her as a person. Each has a unique set of life experiences that calls for a particular response on the part of each institution they encounter. Unfortunately the response of institutions for most people has been one based on the survival needs of the organizations rather than the particular needs of each person.
     As a teacher, using the best of social work values, I assume that students have varied ways of learning that I can make use of and perhaps help to improve. Each student has a particular way of seeing, a world-view, that is shaped by their family and community. They also experience the warping influences of racism, sexism, able-ism, and social inequality. I try to use my social work skills in the teaching experience to draw out from students the positive potential that I know is there.
     Social work education, especially at the undergraduate level, has placed an emphasis on teaching techniques of practice. Teaching the basic tools, the how to of social work, can be useful. It is also limiting. My teaching also includes a great deal of attention to the "what" of social work over the "how." I want students to think critically about the significant moral issues they have to deal with in social work. They will deal with issues of death and dying, family violence, mental illness, poverty and social inequality. Social workers need to think about the social meaning and significance of what they are doing. If they are going to have an impact on social policy they need more than just technical tools. They need clarity in their belief systems. Social Workers need psychological self-awareness but they also need a critical social awareness of what special roles they can play in their community. They must have a more critical awareness of the relationship they have with others that goes beyond a mechanical adherence to some vague professional set of roles they may play.
     I have taught in a wide variety of settings. I have experienced a multitude of cognitive styles presented by students in a formal educational environment. This variety of cognitive styles must be taken into consideration in the shaping of a just and effective curriculum. Rather than allowing the narrow conceptualizations of the powerful to define the core of what is to be considered a valid educational experience the curriculum should reflect the complex nature of human experience.
     The reality of formal education in any society is that it is a political process. The larger demands of society for people who will conform is in a contested relationship with the desires of individual students to act out their uniqueness and challenge the expectations of that larger society. Teachers, whether they like it or not, are right in the middle of this contested relationship. When I teach I try to help students gain necessary skills that will help them in their larger life activities. I also want students to gain the skills that will allow them to critically engage the demands of the larger world.
     The academic preparation of the student needs to be linked to the larger life activities of work, family and political participation in such a way that the learner is not just adopting conforming habits and behaviors. The teaching relationship, especially in the social sciences and applied disciplines, should involve the development of critical skills, not just to solve particular problems, but to think about the larger social world in an informed and active manner.
     I have at the core of my philosophy of education the assumption that teaching involves a relationship in which I join with the student in their effort to learn. An important element of this relationship is that I will be learning along with the student. That is why I have a special love for working with so-called "non-traditional students". These students have had life experiences that add a unique vigor to the classroom especially if there are younger, more "traditional" learners in the class.
    The teaching relationship involves an understanding that behaviors and habits of the mind are just as important in classrooms as factual material. Students, as well as teachers, need to be able to connect the classroom experience with what happens in the world outside the formal educational setting.
    My teaching philosophy, like my approach as a social worker, involves a strong interdisciplinary perspective. I read in the academic discipline of social work but I also read history, sociology, philosophy, and even psychology. This is, of course, an obvious approach for any student of the social sciences, especially an applied discipline such as Social Work.This interdisciplinary approach not only suggests a model for organizing and teaching course content it also presents an approach to thinking about the world that students can apply in a wide variety of life experiences. Interdisciplinary teaching and learning can make use of the wide variety of ways of learning and thinking that both instructors and students bring to the classroom encounter.
    But my perspective has been shaped as much by other work experiences as it has by academic preparation. I have been a counselor in a GED program, a caseworker in child protective services, a social worker in a special needs foster care agency, and continue to stay in regular contact with social service organizations in the community. All of these experiences are part of what I do as a teacher.