I am still too close to my 22 years of teaching and Roanoke College to try to write essays about what I learned in these years. In the interim, I want to post a few documents illustrative of those years. The first comes from the academic year 2015-16 when I was nominated by the College for an award and asked to submit my statement. I probably sabotaged any hope of being selected by my admittedly curmudgeonly stance on what constitutes good teaching. In a couple of weeks I will post a blog on Jacques Ellul’s analysis of modern propaganda and how my approach intended to confront head-on our new and terrible world in which it is propaganda all the way up and all th way down.
My philosophy of teaching
It is a great honor to be nominated for the Virginia Outstanding Faculty Award. I respectfully submit this personal statement of my philosophy of teaching in support of it. In a nutshell, my philosophy holds that an outstanding teacher models the life of the mind.
I am not a great fan of “innovative” teaching; in fact, I am so old fashioned that I could fairly be described as a pedagogical curmudgeon. I demand, expect, and motivate intensive reading and sustained reflection on texts that yield meaning only to continual re-reading. I reward rigorous, vigorous writing that demonstrates close engagement with significant texts and critical thinking about them. I cultivate in myself the intellectual virtues of curiosity, the passion to communicate well and fearless pursuit of truth. An outstanding teacher, according to my philosophy, is not a conduit who merely finds ways of passing on nuggets of information in a palatable mode. Certainly, conveying information is a sine qua non of teaching, just as is winning students over to the subject-matter. But this has little to do with popularity contests. In today’s stressful economic climate, you can peddle some pretty thin wares and finds students willing to pay for bargain basement goods. But this almost always comes at the cost of content.
Especially at a liberal arts college, an outstanding teacher instead models the life of the mind that loves the content in all its complexity and difficulty; thus she mentors the joy and creativity of life-long learning. Ergo, I employ no shortcuts or gimmicks, just hard work that earns the grade, where a C really means “satisfactory” and an A really means “outstanding.” As one honor student famously (in Roanoke College circles) commented to complaining peers: “Dr. Hinlicky does not hand out As like lollipops.” But I have succeeded enough in this old fashioned way that my students earn their Bs. I am told that my students “love me” for that. I sense this myself. I enjoy adult friendships with many former students.
A glance at my syllabi would reveal the heavy load of reading in primary texts that I require, together with the regular demand for students to demonstrate their comprehension by routine reading quizzes and frequent interpretive writing assignments. I believe that speedy grading of writing assignments is a key to motivating student progress in mastering demanding content and developing sophisticated writing skills, so I make the effort to return papers by the next class period. If a student turns in a paper with more than three mechanical errors per page, however, it is returned with half-grade loss per day until the paper is revised and re-submitted without errors. This policy is based on the supposition that, with some important exceptions which fairly beg for remedial aid, students come to college with basic reading and writing skills and need only be incentivized to practice and refine them. What they do not come to college with, however, is love for learning, curiosity about content, intrigue with complexity or confidence to master difficulty. Accordingly, we grade immediately the routine reading quizzes in class, which, with some discussion, provides a segue to the hour of interactive lecture on the topic of the day. If students can convince me that I question was misleading or otherwise poorly formulated, I express gratitude for the correction and toss the question from the scoring.
If, as has happened on occasion, most of the class is discovered not to have done the homework, the class is invited to exit and warned never again to return to my classroom unprepared for the day’s work. The same draconian policy applies to a student nodding off: I invite him to return home for needed bed rest, with an unexcused absence for the day. My mantra is, “We are all adults here,” and I mean it. I risk a higher initial drop rate, not to mention a “meanie” award in the beauty contests that bargain-basement shoppers conduct to avoid demanding teachers. But I deliberately make the first two weeks of the semester as demanding as I can in order to establish a healthy classroom, conducive to genuine learning.
What is truly “innovative,” then, is a teacher who never ceases to learn, and so continually updates, renews, and renovates the courses he teaches, in this way confidently displaying before students the joys of on-going discovery. For the same reason, I have especially enjoyed directing senior theses with our majors, which combines face-to-face mentoring with exploration of new material. Within the Department I have been happy to assume the role of utility infielder, taking on new courses and general education assignments as needs dictate, which I make into vehicles of my own scholarly inquiry, so that I learn as I teach and teach as I learn. My kind of “innovative” teaching also recognizes that each new class is really new, a unique combination of personalities which develops its own special chemistry. Relying on whatever worked in the past is not always possible; sometimes one has to think on one’s feet and innovate on the spot. But the capacity to pull this “innovation” off is not intuition; such discernment is the product of experience that has been reflected on continuously.
For the sake of periodic and deliberate reflection on the art of teaching, I have taken advantage of Faculty Development programs which have teachers share their experiences with each other, and in the process discover alternative pedagogical techniques. As hinted above, I am a tad skeptical about the latest techno-gadgetry as cure for what ails teaching and learning; frankly, I think these tools can work more as a distraction from the kind of concentration that is needed to learn to listen to, or read, new content well and to think or write about it beyond the superficial sound-bites that populate the blogosphere. But I make the effort to remain apprized and equipped with technological innovations that I deem helpful, for example, the way that the Internet has made visuals and illustrations readily available. That being said, I do not think that there is any substitute for being alive as an intellectual, both as teacher who instructs and as a living model of learning and scholarship. To evoke the liberal arts vision of the “life of the mind” has been my philosophical passion as a teacher.
When I came to Roanoke College in 1999 and was awarded an endowed chair the following year, it was our mutual understanding that the privilege was granted for the sake of scholarship. Coming from a fascinating but traumatic six years in the 1990s teaching in post-Communist Slovakia, where I had to acquire university-level facility in a difficult Slavic language, I brought back with me a host of writing projects begun but interrupted and postponed. The freedom afforded me by the endowed chair has blossomed into a record of well-regarded scholarly works. As a result, I am now much in demand as a guest lecturer and speaker, with writing contracts stretching years ahead. My discipline, systematic theology in the Christian tradition, has been much humbled in modern times. But its ancient passion to know all things in and under the love of God for the sake of the suffering world fuels my living of the life of the mind. And happily, it fits with Roanoke College’s “Freedom with Purpose” philosophy and its “Statement of Purpose.” It has been a happy as well as fruitful relationship.
I have tried to share this vision by way of interdisciplinary conversations. I have worked hard to host, sponsor, instigate and otherwise stimulate conversation across the divisions by leading the Dean’s Faith and Learning series and moderating my Department’s Religion and Philosophy Colloquium. I have organized numerous guest lectures and semester–long guest professorships. Perhaps the best attestation of that search for synthesis and integration is the co-authored book with my colleague philosopher, Dr. Brent Adkins, Rethinking Philosophy and Theology with Deleuze, which deliberately takes up a dialogue between philosophy and theology at the point of greatest apparent divergence. Whether we have succeeded in our intended integration is for the reader to judge; but the labor to “keep the conversation going” (Richard Rorty) in this highly and even dangerously polarized society is one to which I have committed considerable personal resources.
As an ordained minister of 35+ years, service is in my bones. As a pastor, I have found myself shading into that kind of in loco parentis care for students. I have served the church community with various tenures in part-time pastoral ministry during my sixteen years at Roanoke College; I serve my bishop as an educator of clergy and laity. I have also been involved in the local civic community’s grassroots organization, Catawba Landcare, dedicated to making rural life economically and ecologically sustainable. I am active in several professional societies, making presentations and panel appearances at the American Academy of Religion and the 16th Century Society conferences. I led a seminar at the prestigious International Congress of Luther Research in Helsinki in 2012 and participated in others in Sao Paulo in 2007 and Copenhagen in 2002. I write reviews frequently for peer reviewed journals (Lutheran Quarterly, Renaissance Journal, The Sixteenth Century Journal, Pro Ecclesia, International Journal of Systematic Theology, and others). I have served as external advisor to international PhD candidates (Aarhus, Bratislava and Adelaide) and have written evaluations for tenure and promotion for junior faculty (Marquette). I continue to aid my former institution in Bratislava in these ways and others. I take students to Central Europe every three years for May Term Travel Courses. I served the year before last on the campus wide committee advising the President of the College on the appointment of a new chaplain and I am now entrusted by the college administration with the responsibility for organizing the academic observance of the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation in 2017. I anticipate continuing to serve at this level of engagement in the communities that have treated me so well for as long as I live.