STATEMENT OF TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” (Nelson Mendela)
Teaching, for me is about an intellectual growth and transformation.
At Yale University, I have served as a Teaching Fellow at both undergraduate and graduate levels. I am currently serving as a Senior/Lead Instructor in International Affairs and Security and Politics, Law and Economics sessions for Yale Young Global Scholars 2015.As a trained Political Scientist, my primary goal in teaching is to convey knowledge about how political science informs our understanding of the social and political worlds.
Developing a skill of well-informed political analysis calls for a combination of extensive factual knowledge and solid intuitions, grounded in analytical and interpretive abilities, straddling many different areas of knowledge, from global affairs and international economics to political philosophy. I am dedicated to helping students develop those skills.
One of my overarching learning objectives is to challenge students to apply policy analysis and development tools in order to offer viable and innovative strategic solutions for the most pressing global challenges. I ask students to define security problems systematically, and to select and apply analytical tools in the service of better policy decisions. In that way, not only students are able to gain in depth knowledge of the course materials at hand, but they are also stepping into relationship with the real world around them.
Being deeply committed to excellence in teaching, I design my courses in a way that puts an emphasis on critical and comparative reading of the primary sources, analytical thinking, seminar discussion, and intensive writing. In my classes, students are responsible for analyzing a body of assigned readings on a specified problem, and answering the memo questions along a specified set of criteria. The selected texts I assign for each seminar represent the major theoretical positions on topic at hand. As a whole, I design my classes to encourage critical evaluation of existing academic literature. My goal is to provide students with a wide range of views that differ in both the evidence they provide and their persuasiveness. The questions I am instructing students to consider when reading the course materials are the following: What is the argument the author is trying to make? Why does it matter? What are its strengths and weaknesses? What are possible counter-arguments? Above all, how does the argument advance our understanding of the topic at hand?
In my Capabilities and Limitations of Military Power in Dealing with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), a class I have designed for the Yale Young Global Scholars 2015, I ask students to define problems systematically, draw conclusions and propose their recommendations by inspecting the following set of questions: Is it possible to defeat ISIS solely through the application of military power? If not, which non-military instruments of national power should be considered to address this problem and how would they be best applied?
As a proponent of active and participatory learning I like to encourage in my students an awareness and introspection of the specific intellectual skills on which they can improve and an interest in bringing concepts and evidence together in answering important questions about the political world. Educational development is an open-ended journey. I am dedicated to helping students excel in their own pursuit of intellectual excellence.
-Ksenija Pavlovic-
