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SOC HOME
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TeachingMy commitment as a teacher is to create a learning environment that confronts issues of contemporary interest from a critical, cross-disciplinary/interdisciplinary perspective by engaging students in inquiry to such an extent that they get “hooked” on learning. I strive to set up interesting class sessions that entice and invite students into an exploration of the subject matter at hand and beyond. As such, I focus on helping them to employ and apply concepts, ideas, and theoretical constructs to contemporary thinking and understanding - to unearth, find, and discover people, places, ideas.I enter the classroom as I enter scholarship and service – with an approach that is interdisciplinary, feminist, and constructionist. In fact, it is an approach which intertwines all three. Interdisciplinarity is at the heart of my work; I see it as complementing specialization rather than opposing it. It is both a skill and an epistemology, creating a web of connections between and among disciplines and traditions of knowledge. Its importance is that by its very nature, it seeks to change the origins of thinking and constructing and hence, the production of knowledge. It acknowledges that knowledge is not owned by any one discipline but that true to systems thinking, or for that matter chaos theory, it recognizes and honors the interconnectedness of every event with every other event. In essence, like feminism it challenges disciplinary boundaries. Feminism is the soul of my work. Feminist inquiry calls into question disciplinary boundaries and argues instead for cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary understandings and analysis. In an academy, built on disciplinary boundaries, this is often a risky place to be. One is often in the position of conducting scholarship and teaching content which may in fact be in conflict with department based (because they are discipline-based) beliefs, theories, and traditions. My pursuit of collaborative teaching and collaborative research allows me the opportunity to engage in ventures which heighten understandings across and fuse understandings among disciplines, helping us to come to understand the interdependent nature of our interactions. The end result for me is stronger and more conceptually accurate foundations upon which to build and facilitate change. I also bring a constructionist perspective into my teaching and scholarship, an understanding that institutional/structural design of programs, policies, etc. is the result of and determined by how a problem has been defined and the theory of causation ascribed to it. Teaching students about ideological positions across the political span is important here because the position one holds defines the issue/problem and its causative elements and hence determines its resolution. As such, there is never just one approach or resolution to any one issue or problem despite rhetoric to the contrary. The courses I teach include: |
OFFICE: 120 Bedford Street Portland (207) 780-4763 (207) 780-5698 (fax) deprez@usm.maine.edu MAILING: Department of Sociology University of Southern Maine 96 Falmouth Street P.O. Box 9300 Portland ME 04104-9300
Luisa's Links:
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