To Alleviate Suffering: A Professor Reflects on the Moral Stakes of His Teaching

Abstract

This article is a meditation on a professor's effort to fuse the personal and political in his teaching and, especially, to reframe the stakes away from the technical and toward the moral. As a teacher and educator, I consider two questions about my teaching that emerged from the mandate to reflect on teaching effectiveness during my promotion and tenure review process: Are my students more powerful in the world because of my teaching, and does my teaching alleviate suffering? I theorize what each question means for how I approach my classes to uncover larger questions about what it means to teach. In particular, I argue that any consideration of teaching reduced to a set of skills fails to attend to the sociocultural reality of students' lives, and thus reproduces suffering.