Who Am I?
Where Am I?
Teaching
Philosophy
TEACHING PORTFOLIO

William M King

Afroamerican Studies Program

University of Colorado
at Boulder

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Statement of teaching responsibilities, areas covered, kinds of courses taught.

I have been a member of the Black Studies Program (now the afroamerican component of the Department of Ethnic Studies) at the University of Colorado since 26 August 1972 (except for the period 1979-1982 when I was assigned to teach, although still rostered in Black Studies, in the College Expository Writing Program; and July, 1982 to June, 1986 when I was temporarily re-rostered in the Social Science Division of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, albeit with primary teaching responsibilities in Black Studies. During my sabbatical year, 1980-1981, I was visiting research professor at Lincoln University, Lincoln University, PA, an historically black college, where I lectured on topics in Black Studies and ongoing science and society research that had been funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities). I was recruited to Colorado from Utica College of Syracuse University where I had taught courses in Urban Philosophy, Research Methods,Urban Planning and New Town Design, Politics and Community Organization, and coordinated the Center for Urban Studies, in that year to cover courses in the social sciences generally and Black Studies in particular, in view of the academic work and experience, both professionally and personally I had in those areas.

In the years since my arrival, I have offered general, topical, and period courses in Afroamerican history; courses in the social sciences and various areas of policy studies (both black and nonblack oriented--for example, Science, Technology and Public Policy [UG]; Ethics and Public Administration; Science, Technology and Society [G]) at the undergraduate and graduate level, served on several thesis and dissertation committees in Sociology, Psychology, History, Public Affairs and Education, and directed one Ph.D. dissertation in Sociology on black police officers. I was able to do this because I had been appointed to the Graduate Faculty of the University in 1974. Because my preparation and experience, both within and without the academy have been inter and multidisciplinary, and given Allison Davis' observation that the task of the black scholar is too important for him to remain in the discipline in which he was trained, I have usually been assigned to Centers or Programs in the course of my academic career rather than to a traditional academic department. In this way I have been better able to take advantage of my background by drawing from all of the areas in which I have done work and by venturing into areas in which I have an interest--for example, Blacks in Science and Technology--to offer a more comprehensive picture of the forces and phenomena of the universe to my students. As you might imagine, this has not been without its difficulties.

Statement of personal educational philosophy, its aims and objectives, and a word on my particular instructional strategies.

My philosophy of education is based on the premise that when you know who you are, you know what you can do. Thus, my aim and objective in the classroom is to assist the student in learning a thing or three about herself and the world around him during the semester. I tell my students at the beginning of each course that I expect them to take responsibility for the quality of their own education, because education, unlike schooling, is a participatory process that focuses on drawing out and developing rather than inculcating all with the one true faith. This is often a difficult row to hoe for the instructor because it is a slow process whose results are not easily seen except over time forcing him to be patient and willing to allow the student to sometimes grope her way to an answer. The emphasis here is on the processes of learning as distinct from the product of learning. I am less concerned with transferring a specific body of information from teacher to student than I am with exposing him to perhaps two or three ideas during the course of the term that are then examined, reexamined, critiqued, reviewed, applied, evaluated, whatever. In several of the courses I teach that deal with power, ethics, change, and related topics, I ask them to identify what for them is important and spell out what they are willing to do to get what they want. And then I turn it back to show that having is a very different thing than wanting. This type of orientation requires that students learn to question: What they know, what they believe, what they have previously taken on faith. It requires them to come to grips with the idea that truth is not an objective ideal but rather a social product made up of selected bits and pieces of acceptable information organized for some specific purpose which they are called upon to identify. Indeed, I point out, it is belief that informs scholarship and values that give meaning to facts. To question systematically, I tell them, means that they must acquire discipline that they can then use to secure mastery over whatever talents they possess. No matter how much talent you believe you have, I point out, if you have no discipline, you have no talent because your potential is unfocused and you cannot use those talents in your own best interest or to serve your fellow beings. Because I also believe that research and teaching are service activities in the cause of social advancement, I ask my students to commit themselves to the pursuit of excellence however they choose to define it.

Operationally, my classes are run more as discussion groups than as teacher-oriented lectures. After some preliminaries, definition of terms, articulation of the main ideas I hope to cover, and related items, drawn mostly from the main and supplementary materials (this usually takes up the first two or so weeks of the semester, and, is repeated as often as a major section of the course is introduced), the class is split into smaller groups each group having the opportunity to present several times during the course of the term. Those members of the class that are not presenting are then given an opportunity to critique the presentation. Those who presented are then given the opportunity to rejoind. Once they have finished, I add my own comments and close each class with a short summary that aims at providing context and relates the specific material covered that day back to the overall objectives of the course. Evaluation is by means of short essays in which each student is asked to respond to an idea, event, person, process, that is usually taken from the assigned reading material. In completing these essays, they are told to make sure that they do not overlook themselves as resource and that the quality of their work will be assessed on the basis of how effectively they make whatever case they are arguing. Each course syllabus spells out the criteria by which their work will be evaluated. There is also some additional information provided to give them a sense of what a specific grade means in the systems that I employ.

For a more extended discussion see my essay on my Philosophy of Education.

Recapitulation of program design efforts and major design criteria

In 1974 I was a principal author of shaping the courses then offered in Black Studies into a major so that students enrolled in the program might work toward completion of a Bachelor of Arts degree. I also designed several of the new courses that went into the major including the introductory course, the course in research methods and research practicum, and the senior seminar that was intended to reflect a synopsis of all that a student had learned in progressing through the Black Studies curriculum. In addition to these, I proposed and developed a number of other content courses in history and the social sciences that I also taught over the years. Some of these courses, representative syllabi of which are included in the next section of this portfolio, were: "Black Religious Life in America," "The Life and Times of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.," "The Civil Rights Movement," "Black America and the War in Vietnam," "Race, Class and Gender," "The Afroamerican Scientist and Inventor," "The Black West," and "Black Community Development." In all of these endeavors, I sought to communicate to the students the richness and complex texture of the black heritage as it had come to be defined by scholars in Black Studies. More recently, I have been involved in developing a graduate program, an earlier draft proposal of which is included in this portfolio, for the new Department of Ethnic Studies that came into being in January 1997 and is comprised of programs in Afroamerican Studies, American Indian Studies, Asian American Studies, and Chicano/a Studies, and a comparative track incorporating the former American Studies Program that superceeds the older Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America (itself now a part of the department) of which Center Black Studies became a part in 1987. During my two tours (1974-75; 1982-1986) as director of Black Studies, I worked to implement many of the innovations that are listed above and are now part of the degree program in ethnic studies and continue to do so as coordinator of Afroamerican Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies.

Representative syllabi of courses designed and taught by professor William M. King

Proposal for an M.A. Degree in Ethnic Studies or a Ph.D. Degree in Comparative Racial and Ethnic Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder (First Draft)

Teaching goals for the next three years

I have said from time to time that with another 20 to 30 years experience, I might finally learn a thing or three about teaching. When I initially took the decision to teach as a career at age thirteen one afternoon in the library at Patrick Henry Junior High School in Cleveland, Ohio, I knew that the most important task that lay ahead was finding out as much about myself as I could. I believed that then and still do because I have learned that regardless of the subject a teacher teaches, what is really being taught is the teacher--his beliefs, his attitudes, his values, his interpretation of the facts gathered, his assessment of the ideas and information to which he has been exposed. I better understand now that it will take me all of my life to know who I am. As I have progressed along my journey, I have come to better appreciate that teaching is about sharing. Sharing what I have learned with others so that they might more effectively understand themselves and the worlds of which they are a part. It is my intention to continue along this way. More specifically, I am in the process of designing new courses that address specific sections of the undergraduate core curriculum--for example, a course on the 60s prepared for the critical thinking skill area--and courses that might be utilized in the proposed graduate program for DES in the area of coparative race and ethnic relations. I am also revising and updating older courses to more effectively meet the needs of newer student generations who will live the majority of their lives in the twenty-first century.

Reflective statement and closing comments

The poet, Mari Evans, has written that the task of the black scholar--for that is how I define who I am and what I do--is to speak truth to the people. Truth, however, is in the eye of the beholder and is very much a function of the belief system one adopts and adapts to his own experiences and the meanings made of those experiences. It has been said of me over the years, that I am a controversial, nonconventional teacher. I am not sure I know what that means. In all of the places and ways I have taught, from pre school to post-doc, in all of the things I have written in both academic and popular media, I have sought to do one thing and one thing only: Tell the truth as I have witnessed it. I am less interested in being consistent than I am in being honest with myself. My ever growing awareness of my own ignorance has been a major driving force in that part of my life devoted to academic pursuits. After teaching for almost four decades now, it is clearer to me now how much more there is to learn, how much more there is to do.

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