I clearly remember the hopes and puzzlements I pondered throughout my undergraduate experience. I recall as well the classes I wanted to flee and the professors whose words have echoed down through the years. It is these memories that guide my philosophy and approach to teaching. Perhaps most fundamentally, I believe in engaging both the heart and the mind if education is to be a truly transforming experience--which it certainly should be. For me, learning is always interactive and purposive taking place at different levels of appreciation, understanding, recognition and application. In every class I strive to facilitate the students' acquisition of a quality of mind necessary to grasp the interplay between the individual and society and one that will help them as individuals use information to achieve lucid insights applicable to the world around them and pertinent to what is happening within themselves. Every course is designed to illustrate the relevance of the sociological enterprise to everyday life by examining and deconstructing traditional "truth" relative to "inconvenient facts" and contemporary scholarship. I do not believe the majority of students attending college do so under the simple compulsion of having nothing close to do. My personal concern is whether I am providing the structure and process to serve those students in my classes who want to learn and who must ultimately be the architects of their own education. I reject the notion that students go to college merely to get a job as well as the belief that college provides nothing more than vacuous paper certification. If such views are common, is it not because we have failed as teachers and professors to communicate and illustrate the value and joy of learning? to demonstrate the fundamental import of education in discovering who we are and what we are able to contribute to our culture and society? I feel strongly that the liberal arts approach is the most viable philosophy for teaching and learning. When considering a course or even a particular class within a course, my goal is simply to attempt to provide a window on the world. This is the courageous enterprise of teaching--an enterprise I often find exhilarating and always find humbling.