My pedagogy revolves around a commitment to empowering my students as readers and interpreters of theoretical texts. I see teaching as less about imparting pre-given truths than staging an encounter between student and material. To this extent, I see the primary role of an instructor in a seminar setting—after selecting the readings and designing the assignments—as facilitative. The instructor is not there to reveal the lessons of a text to a room full of passive listeners, nor are they there to guide students to a set of conclusions determined in advance. Instead, an instructor is there to help students have the most productive conversation they can have about the texts and themes in question, guided most powerfully by how the material provokes and resonates for the students themselves. 

This approach requires positive efforts to dissolve the sometimes-prevailing sense among students that there are definitive correct answers—known to the instructor—about the issues they are discussing. Many aspects of a text’s meaning and value are essentially contestable, and useful theoretical texts will often inspire, rather than resolve, interpretive and evaluative questions. This requires that teachers be honest about both a text’s limitations and the limitations of their own understanding thereof, and help students see interpretive ambiguity as an opportunity, not a disappointment or a problem. Freed of illusions of correct answers, students can feel empowered to share their own views, ask more powerful questions, offer bolder interpretations, and consider more freely how they might assimilate the texts into their own evolving worldviews. 

This is not to say that my approach to student interpretations is wholly relativist. It remains incumbent on the instructor to leverage the expertise and experience they have to help students understand texts, and also train them to identify and evaluate interpretive evidence themselves. Striking the proper balance between preserving students’ interpretive agency and interceding when they advance implausible interpretations can be challenging, but it is a crucial pedagogical skill. If I choose to express my view on what seems to me to be a questionable student reading, I do so in a way that does not definitively claim that the student is wrong, but rather aims to alert them to the intellectual risks and burdens they are taking on in maintaining their position. The freedom remains theirs to hold to their reading if they choose, but this is a judgment they must make in the face of relevant evidence on the other side.