I have participated as a teaching assistant in two courses and as an instructor in three. The TA evaluations confirm that I am an exceptionally effective tutor and explicator in one-on-one and small group settings. Of course, TA's can escape responsibility for major choices in course content, while professors bear the brunt of students' criticism about course content.

My first two instructorships, teaching a summer American Politics course and a fall course in Internet and Politics, met with more mixed reviews, mostly targeted at the heavy workload and what students considered to be undue ambiguity. I had agreed to teach these two courses as a late-notice substitute and had to adopt syllabi from previous professors with limited time for revisions and preparation. There were some significant problems with my implementation of these two courses, but some of the ambiguity was an intentional effort at inductive learning, and the harder working students in each class were more likely to express gratitude for having been challenged. I have learned much about how to bring students to appreciate their role in keeping the coursework interesting and manageable.

Feedback on my most recent Spring 2003 class, "Civil Society, Social Capital and Voluntary Association", which I designed from the ground up with support from Duke's Gerst Program, was very positive, similar in enthusiasm to my earlier TA evaluations. Interested persons are welcome to request a copy of all my evaluations (89 pp.); I have included excerpts below, including several negative comments for context.

I have qualified each of my own courses for Duke's writing-across-the-curriculum program, and evaluations often comment that I have either helped students greatly or been just too doggone picky about English grammar. All three instructorships have been small classes, ranging from six to seventeen students; I have yet to teach my own large lecture-hall class, and expect that I will need a semester or two to begin to lecture really well and to understand how to handle writing assignments well. However, I have plenty of public speaking experience, and I am not daunted by the administrative and social requirements of larger courses. I enjoy collaboration and will work well with TAs and other colleagues to handle big classes.

I am ready today to prepare a wide variety of topics in American and comparative political institutions and/or behavior, and could assemble or adapt a survey class easily. But the most important thing I can say about my teaching ability is that, thanks to my broad experience at Duke, I am confident I can adapt to teach many, many common courses in political science, including most American and comparative and some international relations courses, as well as some modern political theory and up to mid-level statistics. I am not well-prepared to teach a class on formal theory or computer simulation, but would like to acquire such material by observing colleagues or by team-teaching a mixed-methods course. I enjoy teaching for its own sake and could be enthusiastic about a wide range of topics.

Teaching Assistantships

Fall 2000: Introduction to Statistics (STA101, Dalene Stangl, professor)

"Neil was an AMAZING asset to the class. I felt that Neil taught me statistics this semester. He was energetic and more than willing to help anytime. This was very much so appreciated. I would not have been able to master the topics in Neil didn't teach us in lab sessions."
  

This introductory course emphasized the theme of self-government, focusing on civil society, interest groups, federalism and the American institutional political culture. During the intensive summer session, students wrote weekly posts to an online course discussion group and took weekly current-events quizzes; these formed the basis for discussion applying course materials to present-day politics.

There were just seven students in this class, and written comments were scarce on their forms. Several students were dismayed that they were expected to carry a typical Duke workload during the summer session, but in fairness I expected too much in my first solo teaching experience. Students did appreciate my use of the Internet to provide a high level of organization for the course, and at least one found helpful the focus on analysis over memorization.

The course examined the political effects of emerging digital communications and decision-support technologies. Students learned political science theory and research methods, hands-on web design skills in Dreamweaver, and the powerful implications of the combination of the two for future campaigns, elections, and governance. I developed a stand-alone database-driven website for the course (unfortunately, it is now offline due to a server change), including a working election system using actual student votes to compare different decision rules (plurality, Borda count, and approval voting), a peer review system, and the basis for a web-based collaborative class project.

This course had seventeen students. Evaluations were decidedly mixed; students were overwhelmed by the workload and underwhelmed by my insistence that they define their own class project topic and format and do it on the web. For several students, a couple of whom remain in contact with me today, the class was a very positive turning point in their view of scholarship; for others, it was too far above the call of duty. Here are a few representative evaluations:

The creation of this course was sponsored by the Gerst Program in Political, Economic and Humanist Studies. The material provided undergraduates with a broad theoretical and empirical perspective on the debate surrounding the political roles of nongovernmental organizational forms and cultural values, considering both normative political theory and empirical research methods. The course began with an extended study of Putnam's Making Democracy Work and its critics, as a simultaneous introduction to course themes and research design issues.

Evaluations of the course were very positive; again, I benefited greatly from the space to establish rapport in a small classroom setting with just ten students. This student's comments are very generous:

"Amazing class. Was not sure if I wanted to definitely become a PS major. Neil did an amazing job teaching of making me interested in this topic that I previously had no exposure to. Class material very applicable to everything & I feel class has made me think outside 'boxes'.

"This class alone has helped me learn to write better than any other class in my life."