Roger Turner

Philosophy | Experience | Syllabi | Evaluations

Teaching Philosophy

A range of experience informs my teaching. I have taught with scientists and historians, developing numerical modeling techniques with underprivileged high school students at the Santa Fe Institute, tutoring a freshman biology class in writing, and exploring the techno-politics of science fiction with advanced undergrads at Penn. I have received specialized training in teaching public speaking, expository writing, and grant writing.

Survey and Core Curriculum Courses

In designing introductory survey courses, I begin with the assumption that for most of the class, this will be the only history course they take. I aim to help students differentiate “the olden days” by introducing them to the world’s many pasts, by developing overarching themes that help students organize the diversity of history into stories that explain why things are and how things might have been different. Survey lectures ought to present a coherent narrative that offers students secure knowledge—definite events, accurate chronology, common interpretations—they can use in the future. The discussion sections, by contrast, should give students a sample of how our discipline produces new knowledge, by encouraging debate about the interpretation of primary sources, for example.

Assignments

I design assignments that encourage students to connect the course material to their everyday lives. I call these “noticing activities,” because they require students to pay attention to the world around them, and look carefully at the natural, built, and media environments in which they live. For example, in a course I’ve designed on the history of computing, I will ask students to keep a computer diary, recording when they encounter computer and networked technologies over the course of a week, including things like barcodes, ATMs and credit cards, as well as email and the Internet. These activities help students realize how immersed they are in a world of taken-for-granted technologies.

Expository Writing

No skill is more important than the ability to write clearly. I developed skills as a writing instructor by participating in Penn’s “Writing Across The University” program. Faculty and instructors associated with the University’s writing center led several workshops. One of their simplest but most effective suggestions was to build time for multiple drafts into the syllabus. As I assisted biologist Sally Zigmund with a freshman writing seminar, I saw how much students’ writing improved between drafts. While my advice helped them refine the structure of their essays, the redrafting process itself sharpened the students’ understanding of the course material.

As a teaching assistant for Mark Adams, I came to appreciate the pedagogical value of short expository writing done repeatedly. In his course on Science Fiction, students read two novels every week. Every week, they turned in a one-page essay comparing the books. While the task was difficult at first, they wrote concisely by semester’s end. I plan to use similar assignments in my own courses.

Public Speaking

I learned how to integrate effective public speaking assignments into courses as a participant in the University of Pennsylvania’s “Communication within the Curriculum” program. Working with instructors from Penn’s Center for Teaching and Learning in a multi-session program over the course of a semester, I learned both the theory and some practical tricks for helping become better oral presenters. Through discussions about grading speaking assignments fairly, I came to appreciate the value of using a rubric to separately evaluate students’ depth of analysis, the clarity of their argument, and the quality of their posture and voice. While all three are necessary to an effective presentation, improving these distinct abilities require different instructional approaches. In developing assignments, I emphasize analytical thinking and logical narratives, encouraging students to think more and polish their PowerPoint slides less.
I put my training to use as a teaching assistant for an introductory public health course built around a series of increasingly challenging oral assignments for the undergraduates. Students worked their way up from individual presentations before their recitation sections to group presentations in front of the entire 110-person class. Helping shy students develop material that they felt confident and enthusiastic about was extremely gratifying.

Graduate Teaching

I find three styles of graduate courses particularly effective: reading seminars, research seminars, and survey supplements. In reading seminars, my goal will be to expose students to the breadth and depth of a scholarly field, not to develop an intensive knowledge of individual texts. The tenure system produces a torrent of publications, and I’d like to help students understand the geography of the flood. Final papers in reading seminars will ask students to write things they might use later, like review essays, mock grant proposals, or course syllabi.

In research seminars, I will aim to help students develop a manageable research project that can lead to a first publication. My courses will have limited assigned reading, to encourage students to focus on their primary source material.

Survey supplements are graduate courses designed to help future professors learn to teach common classes. Taught in conjunction with an introductory undergraduate survey course, grad students attend undergraduate lectures, and then discuss alternative approaches and narratives during seminar with the same professor. Students leave the course having developed their own syllabus and list of readings for a course they are likely to teach in their early career. I saw this approach effectively modeled by Mark Adams; I paid particular attention to the craft of lecture writing, a central strength of his popular “Plato to NATO” survey. Attention to undergraduate teaching can also be incorporated into graduate reading seminars. In a 20th century American History course I took with Sarah Igo, the last part of each session was a discussion about how to use the week’s readings in undergraduate teaching.

Grant Writing for Graduate Students

Although I had already written a couple of grant proposals, it was not until Penn’s “Navigating the Grant” program offered special training that I understood why my proposals had been successful. I now use what I learned to help other graduate students as a formal (and informal) grant advisor. I remind students to say first exactly what you want the money for, show them how to use the right amount of jargon, and explain why you should talk to the Program Officer before you write the grant. I learned these simple strategies from grant-funded faculty and Career Services staff. I’ve also spoken with a variety of National Science Foundation Program Officers, and somehow became the guy charged with distributing one NSF program’s announcement posters around campus.

When teaching graduate courses, I will encourage students to write a mock grant proposal as a final assignment. Exposing students to this distinctive genre is both good professional development and intellectually useful. Beyond the money and prestige, grant proposals often require writers to step outside of disciplinary assumptions and reflect on the larger value and justifications for their work.

Textbook Costs

Students are justly concerned about the increasing costs of textbooks. I plan to use some basic techniques to help students reduce costs, such as including ISBN numbers on syllabi, pointing students towards reliable used book sources like ABEbooks.com, putting books on reserve at the library, and helping students adapt earlier editions of textbooks when there is little difference in the educational value. I will also encourage students to access some course material through the library (rather than provide them photocopies in course packets), since developing information retrieval skills is part of a university education.

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