2008 Teaching Initiative Award Winner
Richard Sullivan, Ph.D.
- Ph.D. in Sociology from University of California, Santa Barbara (2004)
- Associate Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Teaching philosophy
I believe that learning requires some degree of intellectual discomfort, or what Martin Luther King Jr. referred to as Socratic tension.
Three most valuable approaches that I bring to my teaching practice
My principal goals as a teacher are to engage, to challenge and to promote understanding. To achieve them I strive to generate Socratic tension, promote student participation, and maintain high expectations.
Best compliment from a student
“You made me think.”
Best moment in my teaching career
When students in my course on social movements organized a protest and collectively refused to take the final exam. They presented me instead with a collectively prepared document analyzing in great detail each aspect of the semester’s main lessons and demanded that I accept it – and their protest – as evidence that they had mastered the course material. Their demonstration was the most imaginative, poignant and relevant (given it was a course on protest movements) demonstration of student learning that I had ever witnessed. The students put themselves on the line by risking their grades in an effort to demonstrate what they had learned in such an unorthodox way. Years later, I still get emails from students in that class saying that this episode had a profound impact on them and their education. From it I learned that teaching and learning is often messy and unpredictable, and that great things can happen when we turn over control of the process and embrace spontaneity and encourage improvisation.
