Animal Friends

Abstract:: This lesson helps students explore personal beliefs and feelings toward others. Students will examine stereotypes and how they influence interactions. The lesson emphasizes peer relationships, awareness of feelings, understanding /accepting differences and self-knowledge.

No Strings Attached

An Exercise of Self Examination that Exposes Societal Influences on Diversity Leadership

Abstract:: Leadership programs routinely offer candidates self-assessment instruments such as the Myers-Brigg Type Indicator to help them identify their probable leadership traits, leadership styles and other personality constructs. One routinely overlooked yet crucial component of school leadership programs is self examination that includes the development of intellectual and ethical attributes that transcend administrative tasks, namely their social attitudes. Professors of educational leadership are compelled to offer students perspective-taking opportunities that unearth weighty and influential dispositions and attitudes that are not consonant with 21st century school leadership. This manuscript offers an internship activity that helps programs to meet NCATE Standard 4 but also affords students an opportunity to delve into their interior life to assess whether their inner realities are based on truth or socialization.

Abstract:: This class is an introduction to many of the central issues in a branch of philosophy called philosophy of mind. Some of the questions we will discuss include the following. Can computers think? Is the mind an immaterial thing? Or is the mind the brain? Or does the mind stand to the brain as a computer program stands to the hardware? How can creatures like ourselves think thoughts that are "about" things? (For example, we can all think that Aristotle is a philosopher, and in that sense think "about" Aristotle, but what is the explanation of this quite remarkable ability?) Can I know whether your experiences and my experiences when we look at raspberries, fire trucks and stop lights are the same? Can consciousness be given a scientific explanation?

Abstract:: This is a seminar on "self-knowledge" -- knowledge of one's own mental states. In addition to reading some of the classic papers on self-knowledge, we will look at some very recent work on the topic. There will be no lectures. Each week I will spend half an hour or so introducing the assigned reading, and the rest of the time will be devoted to discussion.