I have come to believe that at the core of my pedagogy lies a deeply utopian belief in the power of education to accomplish individual and collective transformation. Stated so baldly, this sounds, even to me, remarkably naive and sentimental. Nevertheless, I believe that education, at its best, can create something like a working model whereby we come to understand, through our actual everyday engagements, what it would mean to live in a world of mutual respect, shared values, and collective goals.

Because of my scholarly interests in political education and in feminist critiques of authority, I have experimented over the years with a number of nontraditional pedagogical approaches. However, I am now less wedded to any particular pedagogical tactic and much more committed to what might be termed a situationalist approach to teaching. This means that I am committed to remaining open to the intellectual shape and personality of specific classes. I have increasingly learned to trust students to know what kinds of procedures and techniques are most useful to them, and I try to address directly the questions and concerns students have about what we study and why we study it. This not only helps me to understand and articulate my own commitments but, more importantly, allows us all to realize (i.e., make real) the necessarily collective nature of our intellectual enterprise.

Because I often teach large classes, I have thought seriously about, and have developed a profound respect for, the large lecture course as a learning experience. It is commonly thought that small discussion classes, the kind that are necessarily rare in some departments, are the "best" form of education. Having been involved in small classes as a student and as a teacher, I can appreciate their value. But I experienced what I now think of as my first moment of genuine intellectual insight sitting in a huge lecture class here at Berkeley. I had read the assigned material and as I watched my teacher think out loud, inviting us to think with him, I suddenly got the point. Instead of trying to fit some new materials into my scholarly bag of knowledge, or attempting to come up with a response, I allowed my teacher's passion, his sense of wonder, to inhabit me. That kind of experience is what I try to offer students in my teaching.