Roger M. Villamar, Ph.D.

Statement of Teaching Philosophy

Why do I teach? I answer this question simply by saying that I teach because I love to actively
share experiences with my students and want them to reflect on their own life experiences and how
they can connect those experiences to anthropology, not only as a discipline but also as a lifestyle. I
always tell my students when I meet them for the first time, I am not a teacher, I am a sharer, and
of course, they are amused by the unorthodox way in which I use the word share. I turn the verb into
a noun to emphasize the fact that I actively enjoy becoming the agent or the subject of my own life
sentence. I construct my life through narratives and share those narratives with my students through
words, images, films, lectures, arguments, interactions, and activities that I hope will make a
difference someday. I always encourage them to share their own personal experiences the same way.
By the same token, It is always good to make the point that I am a teacher of my own experiences, but
my students are also teachers of theirs, and there are so many things they have seen that I have not
seen or experienced, or vice versa. I favor this approach as opposed to one that essentializes
experiences by homogenizing them according to grand themes that sometimes become inflexible and
misleading guidelines for human behavior. I cant essentialize human life by arrogantly claiming to own
the true narrative of something when I am barely beginning to understand the nature of sharing our
humanness in an educational context.

There is an important narrative nature to our classroom interactions for the teacher or sharer
and the students alike. We all create our own narratives inside the classroom, which will be part of our
narratives someday beyond the classrooms. In class, it is crucial for me to share non-essentialized
narratives that construct and deconstruct language, identity, gender, ethnicity, history, religion,
education, and literacy, among other things. We have all been enculturated to lead lives guided by
traditions that sometimes dichotomize the us versus the them as markers of identity. Because of
that, I always try to motivate my students to realize that we all have inert knowledge and activated
ignorance passed down by tradition that has the potential of being harmful to other human beings. In
this realization, I pose to them the argument that only through activated knowledge where we can
question it, hypothesize different angles, explore other arguments against it, and always leave room
for improvement, can we find a true path to a lifelong educational process.

The dynamic nature of our human existence makes it difficult for me as a teacher to find
comfort in relying solely on definitions. I still use them to frame arguments, and we all use them in
class, but I always share my thoughts and warn my students that basing all our knowledge on
definitions learned in school is dangerous because human life changes all the time, and along with
those changes in the human cultural and physical experiences, we find that many, if not all those
definitions learned in school become obsolete. By sharing opinions and examples of the never-ending
nature of change with my students, I hope they will be prepared to understand that it is not only
through theory, but through experience and practice that we become important agents of human
survival, revitalization, and change. A good practical approach can be illustrated in our utilization of
identity as a concept during course projects. For instance, we focus on indigenous groups around the
world, including the historical processes that affected them, colonization, globalization, and the
importance of the media. Through research and blogging, students deconstruct indigenous frames of
authenticity created by anthropologists, dominant ideologies, and the media. They post entries about
how they learn to appreciate the rich diversity of human populations around the world, and about how
the essentialist nature of dominant ideologies and the media has boxed some human beings into
categories of primitive or inferior.

It is in the nature of that practical experience where I also see the potential for a more
inclusive and relevant education. I have worked with Amazonian indigenous students, mestizo
(Peruvians of mixed descent) students, and American students from very diverse backgrounds, and have
seen that changes caused by the reach of globalized technologies have affected the most remote areas
of the planet. I believe in the significance of using Internet tools and other types of modern
technologies during the college educational experience. Tools such as blogging or vlogging enhance our
awareness of our responsible actions. By writing about a human problem online, or filming a human
scenario and posting it online, students learn how responsibility and ethical behavior are unavoidable
when it comes to using the Internet as a tool for positive change. They become aware that what they
post will always remain in the public eye. Therefore, their awareness involves the need to post
ethically and responsibly. Likewise, not necessarily challenging the individualism that is so prevalent in
our American society, but more like applying the awareness of our also prevalent inert information and
activated ignorance, I like to motivate my students to create a space for collaborative and
participatory learning. I use group writing, blogging, and social media sites to instill the value of shared
learning in my students. Along the same line, such approaches, Internet tools and technologies help
students divert their attention from their old habit of learning content for an exam using static
definitions, to focusing on creatively producing content, which becomes more relevant for what is in
store for them outside the academic milieu.

As a teacher or sharer, it is in human agency where I see the true potential of todays
education. Human agency is the one that helps us to transform, protect, revitalize, or change our
identities as human beings of the 21
st
century. An education for this era, needs to be culturally
sensitive to collaborative values, practical experience, the dynamism of human existence, and the
importance of narratives that go beyond the old clich skills of reading and writing, but that instead
favor forms that are non-essentialist, non-dichotomous, and all-inclusive to ways of expression other
than those in the us group that we belong to. My teaching philosophy is not necessarily mine. It is the
love for education shared by the teachers I have had, like Professor Richard Florio of Passaic County
Community College. In a typical day in class, he would show us his love for teaching and human
histories by bringing in not only European swords from the time of the crusades, but also weapons the
Moche of pre-Inca times, or the Japanese Samurai of the 16
th
century used. And it was not necessarily
the artifacts he shared with us, but the fact that he passionately cared enough to share his collection
with his students. Gestures and attitudes like those, are what shaped me as a human being, and later
on as an educator.