The core of my pedagogy is the belief that its importance and difficulty lies in establishing a balance between an intellectual rapport between faculty member and students; but perhaps more importantly, engaged, mutually responsive dynamics between the students themselves. Establishing a vibrant and successful seminar or lecture environment for me requires focusing early in the course on building mechanisms by which students minimize their reliance on myself as a mediating tool - for example, bringing to class small pieces of writing out of which we construct a conversation - and beginning from the outset to build and refine the role of their own voice in the classroom. I believe that my focus on the interplay between those two factors, particularly the empowerment and interconnection of student voices, is the deeper source of the balance in course evaluations between characterizing me as having "knowledgeable ...enthusiasm" and "love [for] the material," and highlighting the positive dimensions of the class discussion itself distinct from my role in it. Comments regularly note the importance to me of allowing students to develop their own textual interpretations and ideas about the theoretical and practical issues at the center of the class conversation: I make every effort to displace students' hub-and-spoke instinct to rely on me as they push through new texts, and encourage a more active dynamic of students addressing each other's readings and concerns directly. Although I do spend time focusing on cultivating the skill of critical reading in my course assignments, in class I try to regularly bring their hermeneutic process to bear on the ways in which the students think about and read (literally in media) contemporary political issues that they take the readings to address.