My goal in teaching is to build greater awareness and vitality in students' ability to encounter ideas and other people. Content and the acquisition of skills, like writing, bring us in to congress; they are essential. Yet, it is the way in which we learn to encounter challenges, peers, instructors, and ourselves that seems to allow for the most profound "teaching moments" to emerge. In a broader sense, my pedagogical philosophy is centered around modeling and fostering the optimal encounter, one which is centered on: creative thinking, questioning, effective writing, interpretive awareness, the analysis of evidence, personal responsibility, openness to feedback, and the awakening and growth of one's personal curiosity. Respect is primary in the educational encounter. From a place of inclusion, the instructor and the students must be able to create an optimal atmosphere for learning. I recognize the challenge of vastly different perspectives and interpretations, in both students and course content. I believe that a healthy classroom environment allows for disagreement, mistakes, and even paradox. Yet the classroom must still value respect above and through each of these challenges of learning. I prompt students to consider what being respectful truly means. My primary foci as a teacher are history and psychology. While they are variegated methodologies, even within themselves, both are anchored in the study of human nature, power, relationship, and potential. Students, in general, tend to find these areas of inquiry germane and compelling. My job thus becomes creating a structure in which students can find themselves in dialogue-- to reach the ability to observe and engage with a dialectic. For example, students can encounter how problematic the notion of "freedom" has been in American history by examining primary documents that call for personal freedoms, especially ones that are directly contradictory of each other. In psychology, students can consider the challenges of research design and the incredible rewards, and limitations, of empirical research. If the questions of human nature are of deep interest to the students, the students are tasked with understanding answers that have been proffered by great minds, and more importantly assessing those answers and building some conclusions and opinions of their own. Facilitating the encounter is one which should inspire awe and discernment in the student and the instructor. Students should grow to venerate the pursuit of knowledge, and struggle with the ambiguity and challenge that some of the content's questions present to them. This process should be challenging, humbling, and enriching. Students should learn to be in dialogue with their peers and master the art form of listening. Asserting their own opinions, using evidence and rational thinking, and respectfully disagreeing with others, is of utmost value. In a world where communication is ubiquitous and never-ending, students' abilities to witness others and assert themselves are vital. Students' abilities to work with the incredible proliferation of information, sifting and discerning evidence from journals, texts, and the Internet, are essential to their understanding that not all evidence is equal.