My Teaching Philosophy

Jimmie Manning, PhD

Assistant Professor, Graduate Program

Northern Kentucky University

One of my personal heroes, cultural critic and renowned feminist bell hooks, said in her landmark text Teaching to Transgress that “education is the ultimate practice of freedom.”  It is this remark that I take to be the core of implementing the spirit of seeking knowledge.  Only in learning about other possibilities, interpretations, and truths can a student fully examine his or her beliefs about the world.  Only when questioning what one knows can a person fully and in good faith stand by her or his contentions.  It is for this reason that I continue my quest for knowledge through a career that involves teaching, and I constantly try to open my mind—as well as the minds of my students—to the variety of possibilities that the world contains.

Despite prompting from my parents and teachers to become a lawyer, accountant, or medical doctor, I knew in my heart that teaching was where I found my greatest joy.  In my grade school years, while others anxiously feared giving oral reports or presentations on various subjects, I relished the opportunity to inform.  It was always my hope that I could instill my passion into the hearts of my fellow classmates, and moreover that I incite them to think critically about important issues.

I try to carry this experience into my current day teachings.  I seek to make each and every class important, filled with discussions resulting from student philosophies and interpretations of information provided through course lectures, readings, and activities.   This is important not only to the learning process of my students, but to my own learning process as well.  The very essence of a university education is the free flow and exchange of ideas; I make it my mission to invoke this essence into each and every classroom lesson.

A great part of the learning experience is respecting the viewpoints and opinions of others and coming to realize that the world is full of different people who think, believe, and learn in different ways.  It is for this reason that I believe, especially in a diverse learner-centered institution such as Northern Kentucky University, that discussions pertaining to race, class, and gender are important.  As an undergraduate, this viewpoint escaped me for the first two years of my education.  I was simply concerned with learning the information.  It was the beginning of my junior year when I took a class, Women and Minorities in Literature with instructor Gail Cohee.  She asked that the class sit in a circle so we were all facing each other.  She then instructed the students to have open and honest conversations about their thoughts on the readings.  Hearing others attitudes, values, and beliefs being discussed and applied to the literature soon made this class my favorite.  Even though students sometimes engaged in somewhat heated discussions, the atmosphere was always one of genuine learning.

Gail Cohee holds a special place in my heart as not only a mentor, but as someone who opened my eyes to the world around me.  She taught us to not be afraid to question common perceptions and to look deeper into the world.  It was from Gail Cohee that I began my exploration of critical cultural studies and feminist ideologies.  This dogma remains with me today as I study communication and its impact on the world.  I strive not to only understand the human condition through my eyes, but through the eyes of others as well.

As can be interpreted from my above statements, I hold little faith in the much used “banking concept” of education.  As an undergraduate student my pedagogical studies taught me that most teachers often give information to their students, ask their students to memorize that information, and then test the student to make sure she or he has committed the information to memory.  This form of education is in direct conflict with exchanging and expanding information, yet even some university instructors solely employ it as a classroom method.  From my perspective, this only allows a one way flow and makes null the essence of what a university should be.

The ideal classroom, as I see it, contains a continuous fountain of information.  It is situated so as that the teacher can be taught as well as the student.  It allows people to think not only about themselves and their place in the world, but about the world around them and the sometimes marginalized populations creating that world.  Through experiential methods I continue to strive to meet these classroom goals and to open a stream of learning to allow me and my students to explore the many possibilities of life.