I am honored to have been asked by the Center for Excellence in Teaching (CET) to be a featured faculty member and am glad to share some of my own reflections and thoughts on the experience of my teaching and its relationship with my scholarship at Georgia Southern University. Arriving in Statesboro in the Fall of 1995 from my doctoral studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I was immediately impressed by the commitment to and the importance of classroom teaching at Georgia Southern. My Department Chair in the Department of Political Science, Dr. John Daily, who went from his position as Chair to his later role as the founding Director of the CET, emphasized the importance of my classroom instruction and teaching, this at a time when I had only recently completed my doctoral studies in a research-focused setting where teaching had comprised only a small part of faculty and graduate student commitments and time. My earliest mentor in the classroom, Dr. Deb Sabia, brought an enthusiasm and a passion to her teaching. Deb’s enthusiasm was an inspiration to me from my very first days at Georgia Southern while John Daily’s guidance as my first Department Chair kept my attention squarely upon my work in the classroom.

Within the first few years or so of my arrival at Georgia Southern, I was able to watch the emergence of the Center for Excellence in Teaching (CET) which came about at a time when I had begun to question my own expectations of myself as a teacher. Happily, the arrival of the CET at Georgia Southern provided a place for me to explore the use of instructional technology that I used with growing success in both the classroom as well as in my scholarship, a relationship that over time blended together as they so often do as we settle into our academic careers. In the CET, I soon found a camaraderie and a willingness to explore the uses of technology and its application in the classroom in creative and innovative ways. Faculty colleagues, including John Daily as well as Alison Morrison-Shetlar, now at the University of Central Florida (UCF) and Steve Bonham, were a source of great encouragement and enthusiasm about the resources available through the CET and together they spent many days looking at innovative ways of using instructional technologies in the classroom. Georgia Southern’s Provost, Dr. Harry Carter, was an enthusiastic supporter of the CET and attended many of its receptions and its events much as many of Georgia Southern’s administrators continue to do today.

Within my first few years at Georgia Southern, I found myself settling in to what I thought then and to a large extent now was a productive balance between my classroom instruction and my scholarship, which I pursued with roughly equal amounts of enthusiasm and time. It was in this time that I gained a renewed sense of confidence and purpose in my teaching, one that more and more blended classroom instruction with the research projects I wanted to pursue. I learned by the end of my 3rd or 4th year at Georgia Southern that bringing my research and my scholarship into the classroom was a rewarding and satisfying way to blend my balance of teaching and scholarship. I saw my classes more and more as a place to explore ideas in my scholarship with my students, inviting them to think about the same questions I was thinking about in my research.
Even more significantly for my teaching by this time was a commitment I made to rethink and to rework my teaching approach to my Department’s course in the Core Curriculum, POLS 1101 Introduction to American Government. Quarter after quarter and then Semester after semester for my first several years at Georgia Southern, I had reinvented the class every time I taught it. I continually tried new ways of making the course interesting and relevant for my students. I experimented with new topics, incorporated different exercises, and constantly tinkered with this course, something that in retrospect I came to realize took an incredible amount of time as much as it was rewarding to myself as an instructor and, I hope, my students in these classes.

It was at approximately the time of my tenure and promotion to Associate Professor that I took a very different turn in the teaching of POLS 1101. I cleared my desk, took a very deep breath, and reinvented the course as a series or a sequence of narratives or vignettes. I grew more comfortable than I had ever been in teaching POLS 1101 as I reinvented the course as a series of interrelated yet largely stand-alone narratives or stories which built upon each other and overlapped but not so much that students did not come to each class realizing that we would essentially be learning entirely new narratives of material in each classroom session. I coupled this with what I hope is an effective way of incorporating instructional technology into the classroom. In developing these narratives or stories in my lectures in POLS 1101, I made a decision to include what is now considerably less than half of my instructional or lecture material in PowerPoint slides, allowing students to write down key information from PowerPoint slides (which often incorporate photographic or related images as well as text) and then lecturing with much more material than is on the slide. Students can write down the text of a typical PowerPoint slide in my class in approximately 1 to 2 minutes, allowing me to then expand upon the text and incorporate much more material that I deliver in the lecture itself. Students realize from the first day of the class that additional materials will come from the lectures and not the PowerPoint slides. Accompanying this very early also was a decision I made, no doubt to the chagrin of some if not most of my students and which cuts against the grain of the Web-ification of higher education today, namely my decision not to post my PowerPoint slides on the World Wide Web or in any electronic-based portal. My decision is entirely based upon my emphasis on the non-PowerPoint portion of my course lectures, specifically, that some students missing class for whatever reason would be tempted to assume, quite incorrectly, that 10 or 12 PowerPoint slides were the equivalent of an hour’s lecture. When I explain my rationale to students accustomed to accessing such materials on WebCT or related Web-based services, I like to think that I do so in a way that sincerely expresses to students from the first day of class my very genuine commitment to wanting them to accept nothing less than full attendance in all lectures of my class as opposed to substituting a print out of a dozen or more PowerPoint slides as even the partial equivalent of having attended the class.

Working on and developing my POLS 1101 course has been the sole determinant of what has been success far beyond what I might have ever imagined I was capable of as an instructor when I arrived at Georgia Southern in the Fall of 1995. Winning the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences (CLASS) Award for Excellence in 1999-2000 and then 2004-2005’s Wells Warren Professor of the Year was success unimaginable to me even just a few years before winning these awards and I think it is a reflection of my confidence and my relaxedness in working with my POLS 1101 course. In recent years, I have adopted and incorporated many of the techniques and the lessons from my POLS 1101 course into my Upper Level courses in the Department of Political Science, adopting teaching strategies that incorporate instructional technologies in ways that free students from over-reliance on taking notes from a projector and a screen in a darkened classroom and that emphasize their listening to my lectures and then having time to ask questions and react to materials in their own ways. I have consistently worked to schedule days entirely dedicated to student discussion, debate, and classroom exchange every few days in all of my Upper Level courses, days which allow the students to broaden and deepen their understanding of the materials. My Upper Level courses also have a significant component of writing for my students, which is done in multiple rough drafts throughout the Semester so that students and I interact throughout the Semester on their research projects. Working with multiple rough drafts gives me the chance to assist students to broaden their arguments and deepen their research. Written rough drafts of all research papers are an important part of all of my Upper Level courses and students are required to turn in materials on a regular basis for my comments throughout the Semester. This Spring 2008, I have also begun experimentation with the development of a “Wiki” for student writing and research in my Upper Level courses, creating a collaborative online teaching and learning and writing environment where the students have created their own topics as they relate to the course and develop their own content that students can then read, edit, modify, or expand upon.
Teaching, as my friend and colleague Dr. Deb Sabia reminds me always, is a journey. It is a process of continuous reflection and refinement at every stage. Every day, I keep my eyes and ears open for everything and anything that I can incorporate into my classes and my teaching and that I can also incorporate into my scholarship and my writing. Thankfully, nearly always, I can find a bit of relevance to both my teaching and my scholarship in so much of what I learn and listen to and read every day. I think the true reward of having decided, as an undergraduate, to change my major from Computer Science to Archaeology and, finally, to Political Science was the reward of an academic life where the news of the day and the headlines in the morning newspapers become the very stuff of my teaching and my writing. I always tell my students that my favorite part of teaching is when I read a headline or a story in the newspaper that morning that I can incorporate later that same day into my lectures or my course discussions. I think my own excitement at finding a story or anecdote in the morning’s newspapers or the late night’s The Daily Show With Jon Stewart that I can bring to into the classroom and incorporate, thinking on my feet in the moment of the lecture, is something that I am grateful that, in the eyes of many of my students, is seen an enthusiasm for what I feel is my ability to share with students my very genuine love of what I study and teach and write about in my scholarly and teaching and writing life.