During my Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia, I had the opportunity to work as a teaching assistant for a variety of courses. I made use of these occasions to practice my teaching skills by giving guest lectures on a broad range of topics (see CV). Moreover, what allowed me to hone my teaching the most is probably the tutorial sessions I held for two terms for the course “Foundations of Chinese Thought.” They consisted of weekly meetings with three separate groups of students, in which I would help them understand the material through class discussion. In general, I would start with a brief, five-minute intro to allow students the time to concentrate on the topic. Then, I would use slides with some key questions stemming from the material but of broad philosophical interest to stimulate discussion. The discussion would typically start in small groups and then move to the whole class.

During 2024, I taught “Introduction to Critical Thinking.” As it was the summer term, classes were allocated three-hour slots, which allowed plenty of time for activities. The idea was to focus each class on a different philosophy paper on a topic that I thought might spark students’ interest. I kept the range of topics diverse to allow everyone to find something that they liked. Moreover, I selected the papers in such a way that they would allow me to introduce various tools of critical thinking, such as the distinctions between soundness and validity, that between descriptive and normative considerations, and the notions of a counterexample, a metal experiment, a reductio ad absurdum argument, and that of an infinite regress argument. Those notions provided a basis for designing class activities. Regarding assessment, students had a final as well as in-class 30-minute quizzes at the beginning of every week’s second class. I would mark the quizzes by the following class so that I could begin that class by discussing the exercises on which they struggled the most.