Teacher & Mentor
What kind of ancestor do you want to be? This is the central question that "Dr. John" (as his students call him) poses in each class he teaches or community workshop he leads. The health of the land and the just social relations of our communities provide, over decades and centuries, the ultimate answers to this question. Humble in the face of the unknown reactions of future generations to our ways of being, we must develop the ecological literacy and social ethics for seeing, hearing, and predicting those answers as they emerge.
Having taught in seven disciplines and for three universities, Dr. John believes that professors teach at their best when they serve as "head-learners" with students. For each course, Dr. John identifies the central question of the semester and leads students on a journey through key texts, media, visiting speakers, field experiences, and community reciprocity projects that most empower students to explore those questions. For each day's class of each semester, Dr. John's only preparation is to cultivate that day's compelling question from assigned material and to wrestle through both the material and student reactions to the material and to each other in order to transform the question into new understanding, insight, wisdom, and questions...but rarely landing on concrete answers.
In fact, one hard-to-stick-to rule that Dr. John has for himself as a teacher is never to pose a question to which he knows the answer. When students sense that the teacher knows the answer, they freeze up or unnecessarily compete against each other in a game of "guess what the teacher is thinking." When no one, including the teacher in the room, knows the answer to the question, then authentic conversation emerges.
Please let Dr. John know if you would ever like to "Zoom In" to join the class conversation from any internet signal on earth: jhausdoerffer@western.edu
Recent Courses:
Having taught in seven disciplines and for three universities, Dr. John believes that professors teach at their best when they serve as "head-learners" with students. For each course, Dr. John identifies the central question of the semester and leads students on a journey through key texts, media, visiting speakers, field experiences, and community reciprocity projects that most empower students to explore those questions. For each day's class of each semester, Dr. John's only preparation is to cultivate that day's compelling question from assigned material and to wrestle through both the material and student reactions to the material and to each other in order to transform the question into new understanding, insight, wisdom, and questions...but rarely landing on concrete answers.
In fact, one hard-to-stick-to rule that Dr. John has for himself as a teacher is never to pose a question to which he knows the answer. When students sense that the teacher knows the answer, they freeze up or unnecessarily compete against each other in a game of "guess what the teacher is thinking." When no one, including the teacher in the room, knows the answer to the question, then authentic conversation emerges.
Please let Dr. John know if you would ever like to "Zoom In" to join the class conversation from any internet signal on earth: jhausdoerffer@western.edu
Recent Courses:
- Mountain Resilience
- Climate Solutions
- Environmental Ethics
- Tina Smiley's "Building Sustainably at Martin Luther King National Historic Park"
- Cassidy Cichowicz's "Mountain Sustainability Indicators"
- Kaitlan Mahoney's "Fiji Player's Choice: Athletic Empowerment through Sustainable Food"