Teaching

I define myself as an educator. I have spent my career engaged in higher education at every level from mentoring and classroom teaching to course and curriculum design, faculty development and the reconception of entire universities. Of course, I have created and improved my own courses, as well as developed teaching programs for Rutgers . But for the past decade, I have spent much of my time with grad students, professors, department chairs, and faculty deans from fields as distant as environmental chemistry and microfinance. At post-socialist universities in the Baltics, Eastern, Central and Southeastern Europe, in post-apartheid South Africa and post-civil war Lebanon, I have collaborated with students, staff and administrators to define a new role for the university as a public institution in a democratic society and a new way for universities to teach, broadly understood, that better models the practice of reasoned discourse, tolerance and respect that democratic citizens must learn.

Courses: Undergraduate

Activism and Advocacy (with Beth Leech): This course is about how citizens—young and old—can mobilize and act for social change. Readings, class discussions, and a class project will provide the theoretical context to help you understand the evolution of the organizing tradition and the practical skills to give you the ability to be an active citizen. [Summer Session syllabus] [Winter Session syllabus] [Photos]

Community Organizing: Rutgers New Brunswick—the flagship campus of the flagship institution of the New Jersey system of higher education—sits in the middle of one of the poorest cities in the state. The primary purpose of this course is to engage you directly in the life of New Brunswick , your community, in a collaborative project through which community members will teach you about New Brunswick and you will return the favor.[Syllabus] [Course materials]

Consequences of War: In any number of political science and history courses at Rutgers, you can learn about the causes of these specific wars or of war in general. This course will therefore ignore what these wars were “about” and concentrate instead on three related questions and one major theme: How have America ’s recent wars affected social mobility and changed class relations? How have they changed race relations? How have they changed gender relations? And, combining all these, how have they changed the basic meaning of citizenship in American and what it means to be an American? [Syllabus] [Course materials]

Democracy and Identity: The United States and South Africa purport to be democracies. Democracy purports to be the rule of the people. What democracies do—the laws they enact and enforce, the public policies they make, the way they choose those who make and enforce the rules and regulations, and the process by which rules and regulations are made, disputes over their application are adjudicated, and rule breakers are punished—purports to be an aggregation of the informed interests of individual citizens. In theory, in other words, the individual citizen is the basic building block of democracy. But who is this building block of democracy, this citizen, this individual?
[Syllabus] [Course materials] [Course proposal]

International Community Rebuilding: Croatia 2004: This course teaches the knowledge, skills and attitudes necessary to create thriving communities. It begins from the simple observation that citizens are not born, they are educated, just as successful political communities are not “born” but are created through hard, sustained effort on the part of their citizens. [Syllabus]

International Community Rebuilding: All Balkans 2005: This intensive, three week course brings together teams of university students from all nine Balkan countries (60 in all) to confront both their common heritage and common democratic state-building challenge. The course is entirely interactive and experiential and teaches the knowledge, skills and attitudes necessary to successful democracies through doing, not lecturing. It begins from the simple observation that citizens are not born, they are educated, just as successful political communities—and peaceful regions—are not “born” but are created through hard, sustained effort on the part of real people, unexceptional individuals all.

International Humanitarian Law: Academically, this course is about the effort to forge legal limits on war. But it is not just an academic exercise. It may be an anarchical, self-help world out there, but the simple fact of the matter is that dedicated individuals have changed the “rules of war” and have constrained the behavior of states at war. Thus an important purpose of this course is not just to inform you about their efforts; it is to engage you as one of them. After all, the question of how to limit war is not simply an academic question; it is a call to action. This course is intended to equip you to act on your understanding.[Syllabus] [Course materials]

International Political Economy: This course is about the changing relationship between political and economic power in intern ational relations. It asks: Where did the postwar intern ational economic order come from? How did it function? Who has it served—and hurt—and how? Why has it changed? What will the new, post-Cold War, economic order look like? Who will control it and whose interests will it serve?
[Syllabus] [Course materials] [Cases]

Powering Up: Research Seminar to Assess Alternative Fuel Vehicle Technologies for Rutgers ' Fleet: Students in this course researched alternative fleet technologies and provided the University president and his senior management team with a detailed report on how Rutgers could best comply with the employer trip reduction requirements of the 1990 Clean Air and Water Act. The University accepted many of the recommendations. [Syllabus]

Summer Tsunami Rebuilding Program: This course engages students directly in Thailand ’s healing process and offers a unique experiential learning opportunity. Over the course of two months students combine classroom lectures by academic experts and senior government officials with close observation of the tsunami-affected zone, active data collection as part of a major scientific survey project, and hands-on engagement with NGOs, kids and families. Students live and work on the northern Andaman coast, and contribute to economic redevelopment, ecological, infrastructure reconstruction and future disaster mitigation projects. [Syllabus] [Flyer]

Vietnam Legacy: This course explores how Vietnam shapes America and Americans today. It uses the war as a vehicle to examine issues that have been with us since the Revolution: questions of what it means to be an American and what rights and obligations citizenship entails. [Syllabi 1] [Syllabi 2]

Courses: Graduate

College Teaching: Introduction to College Teaching provides an overview of the essentials of good teaching and the fundamentals of the teaching profession. It begins by defining good teaching and based on this initial definition introduces guest presenters to demonstrate specific pedagogical techniques (best practices for grading, interacting with students, teaching large classes, active learning, and teaching with technology). The course also examines the realities of teaching in the context of the modern college/university system and the multiple roles of the faculty member within the university.
[Course Development Practice Assignment]

International Political Economy: This course's essential purpose is to begin the alchemy of making you into political scientists, into makers, not mere consumers, of political science. We are not, therefore, going to spend hours deconstructing authors’ arguments, interesting though they may be. Instead, we are going to spend our time deconstructing the process of research and reflection by which they came to write the books we read.
[Syllabus] [Course Packet]

Topics in American Foreign Policy: This course offers a passing familiarity with key issues in American foreign policy, introduces the major, competing theoretical perspectives on the sources of American foreign policy and provides the opportunity to read carefully and critically a small number of recent works in the field.
[Syllabus] [Course Packet]

Faculty Development

“CASE Faculty Packet,” a comprehensive but user-friendly manual for service-learning faculty in the Rutgers Citizenship and Service Education (CASE) Program.

“Course Creation Made Easy,” asks the big questions, suggests lots of possible answers and provides simple checklists.

“Faculty Tips” offers just that—a set of simple but effective suggestions to professors about how to improve teaching effectiveness and student learning.

“Getting Started,” a guide to help faculty preparing to teach a new course to assess their prospective students’ strengths, weakness and potential needs and to weigh a variety of possible teaching tasks that they might take on.

“What’s in a Syllabus?” a straightforward guide to creating an effective syllabus that will serve both you and your students well.

“Why Teach Vanilla Lecture Classes?” reviews a wide range of possible alternative formats for undergraduate and graduate courses, small and large.

Curriculum Development

From the Ground Up : From the Ground Up created a joint University of Natal-Rutgers University service-learning program focused on the challenge of creating and sustaining civil society and liberal democracy in the complex, multicultural environment of immediately post-Apartheid South Africa. The basic curricular model used was the Rutgers Citizenship and Service Education (CASE) model, but all courses were developed and taught by UNP faculty as part of the University’s own curriculum renovation program. From the Ground Up now brings 15 American students per semester to Pietermaritzberg for one semester to enroll in service-learning courses Citizenship an courses with their UNP peers and to work at community service placements three days per week.

Global Partnerships for Activism and Cross-Cultural Training : The GPACT Training Manual and activist training course were developed with Mongolian NGO and student leaders in Ulaan Batar, Mongolia in 2001 and has been used successfully since in such diverse locales as American inner cities and post-civil war Croatian villages. GPACT training is not culturally limited or book-based, and works equally well with literate and mixed literate and illiterate groups. It is a 100% interactive, hands-on learning experience. Through an integrated series of hands-on exercises aimed at developing personal confidence, teamwork skills, and leadership abilities, participants learn to identify, define, and solve complex social problems by creating effective community organizations. The GPACT program emphasizes both the critical importance of global awareness and diversity skills in the 21 st century, and of such immediately applicable skills as project development, networking, resource development, budgeting, and fundraising. Participants work in teams throughout the training and at the end every team emerges with an implementable project in hand. Developed with Beth Leech , Lauren Oleykowski , and Undarya Tumursukh.

Joint Major in Global Studies: The proposal for a Joint Major in Global Studies was developed with an undergraduate team in spring 2005 to provide Rutgers students with a global studies option that is competitive with the best offered by our AAU peers. The joint major is discipline-based, structured around both areas and themes, and globally experiential. It will graduate students with strong language skills, overseas experience, and the real world skill sets they need to succeed. The development team crafted the proposal based on data from surveys of Rutgers undergrads and the global studies programs at all other AAU schools, as well as interviews with government and international organization officials, NGO directors, and business executives.
[Global Studies PowerPoint]

Living History : “Living History” is a combined classroom-experiential learning experience that teachs students the history and politics of the American civil rights struggle and grounds their understanding of it in the personal narratives of the men and women whose actions made that history. “Living History” is meant to engage students in two critical ways. First, it is meant to demystify history by letting the actual agents of history speak for themselves as people—and role models. Second, it is meant to transform the students from passive recipients of the historical record into real historians and political scientists by making each student’s course project the creation of an annotated oral history of one of the civil rights activists met during the trip that combines the activist’s recollections with other materials drawn from documentary sources.
[Brochure] [Program Flyer] [Poster 1] [Poster 2]

Social Justice Minor: The Minor in Social Justice provides students with a historically grounded, cross-cultural, interdisciplinary and experiential curriculum that exposes them to the compelling past and present of humans’ ongoing struggle to define and achieve a just society for all, and to our scientific, social scientific and artistic efforts to understand both the origins of injustice and the struggle to overcome it. The Minor is designed to integrate university resources across units and disciplines to give students a focused, structured program that delivers the learning outcomes identified by the University Learning Goals, and educates graduates possessing the knowledge, skills and attitudes to challenge injustice as they confront it in their adult lives. The Minor is also intended to give explicit curricular form to the aspirations articulated in the University Multicultural Blueprint.

Spirituality Project: In recognition of the importance of the college years for individual development and character formation, there is a growing call on university campuses around the country to re-discover ways to better integrate students search for meaning and purpose, values and beliefs with their academic preparation. There have not, however, been significant, systematic efforts to engage this issue at the level of curriculum. Rutgers , The State University of New Jersey, proposes to address the gap in higher education in the belief that as a large, public, research university the educational models developed through this project will provide guidance to institutions around the country

Teaching: Selected Lectures

“Global PACT: Recreating Community in the Balkans by Educating Young Citizens,” Teaching and Learning Conference, American Political Science Association, Washington, DC, 17-20 February, 2006.

"Why Teach? Why Teach Well?” Keynote Address, National Association of Land Grant Colleges , Annual Regional Conference, 5 October, 2000 .

“Recent Developments and Problems in American Service Education.” Address at the Non-Governmental Organization Activities Promotion Center , Tokyo , Japan , 8 January, 1998 .

“Something You Always Wanted to Know But Were Afraid to Ask: What’s in This for Me?” Speech to the University Senate, Southwest Missouri State University , February 1996.

“The Undergraduate Curriculum, Community and Citizenship,” Association for Higher Education, Atlanta , Georgia , January 18-21, 1996.

“Teaching Citizenship Through Service-Learning: Or, Why How You Teach Is As Important As What You Teach.” Paper presented at the 1995 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association. Chicago , Illinois , August 28- September 3, 1995.