Gopal Krishnamurthy, PhD

The following principles currently serve as injunctions that orient my teaching:

Principle 1: Pay close attention to everything and don’t take anything for granted.

Principle 2: Unless you are just conveying information, do not meet or answer a question or problem on its own terms, since inquiry is not merely moving from question to answer to question, but questioning the questions themselves.

Principle 3: Disrupt any distinctions that perpetuate spurious dichotomies and divisions (e.g. between teaching and learning or disciplinary boundaries [science and poetry]).

When we teach ‘safely’, we proceed so that our core and oftentimes hidden beliefs about relevance, ability, intelligence, motivation, assessment, excellence, equity, teaching, learning, academics, subjects, school, practicality, and the so-called ‘real world’ are never fully called into doubt. We assume that we know a great many basic ‘truths’, and hence, teaching essentially involves a search for principles and practices that justify and apply these ‘truths’. When we teach with risk, however, we expose these foundational beliefs to the perils of inquiry. Everything is up for grabs: How can we uncover (rather than cover) a curriculum that creates and sustains a sense of wonder about the world that we inhabit? When and where is learning visible? Why school? When and where is teaching? My work holds the question and promise of: how can we learn to reframe and turn our educational, social, and environmental challenges on their heads and teach to disrupt the known, the familiar, the settled and taken for granted – so that solutions emerge from the careful relocation and reformulation of questions and problems?

Teaching is, for me, a vibrant learning experience. My classes advance ecologies of learning by engaging students in investigation and dialogue, application, reinforcement and consolidation, review, and assessment of learning. New content is connected and integrated with previous understandings. Oftentimes my classes bring students, teachers, and myself to a situation of “not knowing” and wonder – which calls for innovation, experimentation, and creative work.

I was nominated twice for university-wide outstanding teaching awards (including by faculty and students in the Environmental Studies Department) at the University of California Santa Barbara, USA. I am named alongside Noam Chomsky, Sylvia Ashton-Warner, Jonathan Kozol, Eleanor Duckworth, and others in elaborating liberationist views of education (page 20) Ayers, R., & Ayers, W. (2011). Teaching the Taboo: Courage and imagination in the classroom. 2nd Edition, New York, NY: Teachers College Press, Columbia University. In response, one of my Science Teacher Certification students asked, “this is all very well, but what does ‘elaborating liberationist views’ look like in the everyday moment-by-moment experience of teaching and learning”? I continue to cherish and explore this challenge and question.

I frequently use theater in playing out, challenging, and reframing teaching-learning situations. My teaching balances careful preparation for engagement with course material and the exploration of new ground as it emerges. Often, my classes are fun, exhilarating, productively frustrating, and certainly challenging.