I was fortunate at Oxford to be supervised by two folks who not only do excellent research, but were unbelievably curious about the philosophy of methodology and knowledge. These two men, Dr. Robert Walker and Dr. Kenneth Macdonald, taught me much. I find myself repeating one line, I believe uttered by Robert, again and again in my classes: “Theory is what we use to interpret what we see.”
I love this line. Too often, I find my students unwilling to discuss the theoretical because they see it as the opposite of practical. They want their learning to be grounded in reality, and consider much academic theory to be an echo chamber within an academic silo. Robert’s quote is a reminder that good theory is practical; it affects the way we view the world. I shudder to think how many of us would fail this “good theory test.”
The broader point Robert was making was that we all have our own “theories” that explain what is going on around us. A quick example:
As an undergraduate at Penn, I once saw the police being very aggressive with an African-American man on campus, pushing him up against a wall. The officer was being physical enough that I almost stopped, despite having no idea what was going on, and interjected myself. And maybe I should have.
But look at all the assumptions that I was making underneath my own choice. I was skeptical of the way police would treat African-Americans and locals. I assumed, because of the way the man was dressed, that he was not a student, and that as a (white) student, the cop would be more reasonable with me. But I also feared that injecting myself into the situation might “get me in trouble” (a fear that is somewhat embarrassing in hindsight).
All of these views, of society and the situation, impacted how I dealt with what I knew, which was simply that an African-American man was pushed up against a wall by police aggressively. They were my “theory.” And they led me to an action that still makes me a little ashamed; that I kept walking.
I find that once students start thinking of theory in this type of tangible way, a few things change. First, they stop being scared of “building theory” or “testing theory.” Of course we need to understand what is going on around us better, and those understandings need to be constructed and consequently looked at critically. How we view the world should be constantly refined and challenged.
A big improvement follows in their academic writing. Once they view theory as something to be built and critiqued, they are far more likely to aggressively argue and support a position (their new theory), while simultaneously critiquing the theories of others (hopefully with evidence).
Of course, this never happens all at once, and all too often I watch my students eyes glaze over when I try to explain it. But it’s a great thing when it clicks. Students become more comfortable moving from broader themes to examples, and back again. They start to see and critique texts in terms of their wider significance, and treat the information at their disposal as tools in a wider discussion. These students, often unbeknownst to themselves, have become “theorists” in the classical sense that Robert and Kenneth taught me at Oxford.
That is one of my favorite teaching moments, in no small part because I hear my mentors’ words coming out of my own mouth.
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