In 2017, I was honored with the Columbia College Chicago Excellence in Teaching Award. At Columbia, I taught courses in the Humanities and Cultural Studies, with emphasis on curricula in Philosophy and Media & Popular Culture Studies. I have extensive expertise in Thesis supervision and the pedagogy of Undergraduate Research, with a decade of experience designing and delivering the Cultural Studies Research Capstone Thesis course sequence.

I have taught classes–such as Philosophical Issues in Film, Food & Culture, Critiquing Children’s Culture, Introduction to Cultural Studies, Introduction to Philosophy, and Postmodernism & Posthumanism–that integrate close reading, textual analysis, critical inquiry, visual literacy, interdisciplinarity, and ethical inquiry to create a learning experience that challenges students and that matters in everyday life. My classes integrate Humanities texts and methodologies with special attention to the context of arts and media production & consumption, utilizing multimedia, learning management systems and digital communication. I have documented excellence across all delivery modalities (in person, hybrid and asynchronous). I model passionate inquiry so that students can experience the ways that knowledge is empowering and joyful.

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Ann Hetzel Gunkel Ph.D. Statement of Teaching Philosophy

My teaching philosophy is based on a passionate belief in the transformative power of critical thinking at both a personal and social level. I aim to create pedagogy that is engaged, challenging, and supportive of student learning. While much of my work models for students a critical encounter with theoretical paradigms as a contemporary real-world tool of social engagement and ethical action, I follow a very ancient model of teaching and learning. Education in the Platonic sense, PAIDEIA, is not the filling up of an empty vessel with content but rather a mentoring and modeling of “turning the soul around,” a reorienting of the person in unfamiliar and critical ways of seeing, of learning to see in another way. These ways of seeing are tools especially vital for creatives who practice in the arts and media fields.

Grounded in classical humanities & philosophy but encountering the texts and practices of contemporary culture, my classes aim to teach traditional texts in unfamiliar ways and engage the subjects of popular culture using the methodological tools of traditional inquiry. The teacher models, collaboratively develops, and shares a set of tools for engaging the world and one’s one work. These tools open a classroom space where education becomes “the practice of freedom,” which, according to bell hooks, is the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the ethical transformation of their world. Student evaluations call my courses “life-changing, rigorous, passionate, and inspirational” testifying to a pedagogy that aims to benefit students by cultivating their talents as critical thinkers and life-long learners. Students find new and powerful ways to consider images and representation as both consumers of those images and as ethical storytellers.

I agree with Hegel that “nothing great in the world has ever
been accomplished without passion.”

As my central vocation, my commitment to transformative pedagogy guides all my work inside and outside the classroom. I offer a supportive learning environment that integrates theory with everyday practice, centering the study of arts and media alongside humanities methodologies. The courses I offered in the School of Communication & Culture (formerly Liberal Arts & Sciences) span Interdisciplinary Humanities, Philosophy and Cultural Studies. Student evaluations in all these courses reflect my ability to engage students of every major and level of expertise, ranging from senior thesis writers to freshman in a wide variety of arts & media majors in Liberal Arts & Science core courses. A leader in online pedagogy, my student evaluations – always amongst the highest in my department, school and institution– document a pattern of excellence across teaching modalities, including In Person, Hybrid and Online Asynchronous courses. The core teaching values which support these outcomes and comprise my approach to transformative pedagogy are rigor, passion, engagement, and mentoring.

RIGOR: Student evaluation comments consistently stress the challenging and rigorous nature of my pedagogy, calling it intellectually empowering. In short, students know and resent when we dumb it down. The secret to this pedagogical value is not heaping stacks of graduate level materials on a class and setting them loose. Rather, I aim to engage students in rigorous reading, writing and critique by demystifying how complex texts are structured, by demystifying the processes of generating and asking questions, by demystifying the process of writing, and by offering the support required for students of varying levels of preparation to become part of the discourse.

PASSION: I agree with Hegel that “nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion.” Passion is needed if teaching to be more than the transmission of content. Passion allows for the classroom to be a place where students and teachers learn to love learning. My student course evaluations most frequently note the passion and energy of my teaching, describing the classroom atmosphere as inspirational, infectious, exciting and enthusiastic. Without energy, without excitement, without the sincere conviction that thinking matters and that our shared enterprise is important, my pedagogy would fall flat.

ENGAGEMENT: The third value of my teaching philosophy is engagement. If students were to master the course material but not find it relevant to their lives, I would feel that the enterprise was a failure. Student evaluations often note the intellectual, professional and personal value of my courses. If knowledge is not personal it does not have transformational power. My pedagogy aims to engage students in the radical idea that learning has radical potential. Ideas mean something not only in our classroom, but in our work and in our everyday lives. If students do not connect their learning to their own worlds, they will not be engaged in anything more than a formal exercise.

MENTORING: Finally, to engage students in a rigorous and passionate inquiry, I am committed to providing support and mentoring. Some basic tools I use for that support are: an atmosphere of respect and trust so students can believe that their ideas matter; an openness to questions and the testing of ideas; frequent meetings, messages and contact outside of class; as well as clear and frequent feedback on writing and essays. Mentoring is especially critical in the pedagogy of undergraduate research, as developed in my decade of experience designing and delivering the Capstone Research Thesis course sequence. Student evaluations frequently comment on the extensive mentoring and support I provide to students both in and outside of class. One cannot have rigor without support or claim to value high standards without clear pathways for achieving them. As a Philosophy teacher, I must not only show students of arts and media that they are ethically responsible for their professional work but to provide the skills by which they can understand and analyze their own practices of making, so that their education can truly become the practice of freedom.