Featured Faculty
November 2007
Dr. Trent Maurer
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Background I joined the faculty at Georgia Southern in August 2003, straight out of graduate school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I received my M.S. and Ph.D. in Human Development and Family Studies there, after completing my B.A. in Psychology and History from the University of Notre Dame. My current appointment is in the Child & Family Development area of the Department of Hospitality, Tourism, and Family & Consumer Sciences. I also serve as an affiliate faculty member with the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies and teach a few sections of GSU 1210 for the First Year Experience program. My primary areas of scholarship include: fathering and parenting, the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning, and most recently, collegiate alcohol use and sexual assault. I am particularly interested in the role of social cognition in these topics, especially the impact of social perceptions and social norms on behavior (I caught that bug as an undergrad and have been hooked on it ever since!). Like many academics, I have a voracious appetite for knowledge. While preparing an NIH grant submission in summer 2006, I read over 250 journal articles and half a dozen books in a three month period (while teaching two courses, no less). I didn’t even realize how much I had read until I stopped to count and file the articles! Obviously, I adore the work I do. I find it extremely intrinsically rewarding and gratifying, both inside and outside the classroom. I otherwise occupy my time with my various interests, most notably cooking. I find cooking to be a very Zen experience, enjoyable even beyond the way it encourages creativity and challenging oneself. In March 2007, I was invited to give a cooking demonstration for the GSU Museum—talk about fun! Teaching & Learning
Teachers and administrators frequently list teaching students how to think critically as an important goal, sometimes even as the most important goal of higher education, but this idea is nothing new. Indeed, this Cartesian approach to education through teaching students “how” to think predates Descartes himself. I think it says something very telling about our educational system—at all levels—that we are still struggling to teach critical thinking to this day, after hundreds of years of practice. As a result, I take a somewhat different approach to the topics I teach. I don’t teach students how to learn; I teach them to unlearn. I teach them to unlearn all the myths, misperceptions, biases, prejudices, stereotypes, reasoning errors, and logical fallacies that they bring to the classroom as the product of two decades or so of idiosyncratic experiences. On the very first day in all of my classes I focus on the epistemological barriers we encounter in everyday life and how those barriers mislead us and ultimately prevent us from knowing what’s really going on. Learning that we are wrong is never easy and there is always a lot of resistance from students who have been erroneously taught that to question someone or their beliefs is to disrespect or threaten them, but it is worth working through those issues to achieve the eventual breakthrough in reasoning that will result. We learn best from our mistakes not in spite of their emotional salience, but because of it. The more we can learn just how wrong we are, the more strongly motivated we become to cast aside all our erroneous beliefs and perceptions and figure out what’s really going on in the world. Is that not exactly how the scientific method works?! There is no doubt that this approach to teaching is “high risk”; there will be a lot of student resistance to overcome and it takes a great deal of practice, patience, respect, and understanding to do it right, but I see this as a hidden advantage. It allows me as the instructor to be transparent about my own learning and mistakes (in how best to teach it) and to model critical self-examination for my students. Contact Information |
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