Cheryl Foster, Professor in the Department of Political Science, is the ATL’s November 2024 Faculty Spotlight.

What is your proudest teaching moment of the last year?

The Deans in A&S have been working with a cohort of A&S faculty over the last 2.5 years to create a model for URI 101 that takes what we have learned about the first year experience from our expert UCAS colleague and melds it onto the unique needs of students majoring in liberal arts and sciences subjects. I’ve been deeply involved with the faculty cohort and I’m really very excited that we are creating a genuine sense of belonging through establishing trust, inculcating time and self management skills, and meeting one-on-one with each student. Half the time we cannot get the students to stop yakking about whatever we are doing together with them in weekly class! It’s an authentic experience that walks the line between careful curation and unscripted eruptions of student engagement, often over things we did not see coming.

Who is a teaching mentor that you have, and what did you learn from them?

As a first generation college student, I owe a lot to teachers who inspired and supported my development to the point where I could aspire to a four year, residential college. I owe a debt of gratitude to three in particular, whose different methods and devotion I aspire to channel today.

• My fourth grade teacher Mrs. Twomey used to reserve Friday afternoons weekly to let students do whatever they wanted so long as they shared the results at the end. We ran amok, making little plays, playing games, creating class newspapers; Mrs. Twomey would play piano in the background, sometimes there’d be spontaneous singing. It taught me that teachers who love to see their students learn have to let go of tight control, giving students choice and agency within larger structures.
• A very young nun just out of college, Sister Joanne Lawrence in 8th grade, saw something philosophical in me and took the time to show me where I could find books that would feed that part of my heart and mind, because I didn’t really have a way to shape that in my life. She steered me toward classic literature, poetry, cool young adult novels, values-based deliberation. She’d stay after school to talk with me about it every so often. Without her I wouldn’t be a philosopher.
• My high school pre-calc teacher Mike Prodanis, nicknamed Spike by the students because once a week he would award the “Golden Spike” – really just a brass-coated railroad tie or something – to the person who had done the most notoriously ridiculous or idiotic thing the week before. Somehow, he knew EVERYTHING that went on at school, legal or not, and it all came out in the weekly Spike presentation. People did nutty things just to have a shot at winning it. Mr. Prodanis was a Vietnam Vet and a brilliant logician, the single best teacher of analytic subject matter I ever had – he could weave in and out of technical material and humor, knew just when to pull back or focus down, and managed to integrate care for us with forwarding our progress toward mathematical competence. He also said “READ THE MATH BOOK, one line at a time, to derive the REASONING. Don’t just memorize; understand!” I use his methods to help my own students master difficult philosophical reasoning today, shifting between old school theatrical techniques for engagement and intensive bouts of textual analysis.

What are you excited to do next in the classroom?

Two things because I find it hard to make a Sophie’s Choice among my different options!

• I piloted a Politics and Film class last spring, focused on feature films of true stories about people who fought for justice against the odds or despite threats and indifference. The hope was to inspire student awareness about the continuing possibility of democratic change and the difference one determined person or a few people can make when armed with a tolerance for dull but necessary due diligence and a framework for acting on what they take to be just and right. I ran the first half but for the second, I had students form teams and pick films (from a curated list) to research and teach to their peers. They were just terrific! Political Science is now working with the Film department to propose this as a permanent course, which I’ll offer again in Fall 2025. We already have a line of Political Science colleagues ready to adapt it to their own subject areas!
• Beyond URI, I work with military veterans and active duty service members as part of the Providence Clemente Veterans Initiative, looking at the experience of war and homecoming from the Peloponnesian War to the present – for me through a philosophical lens, and with my colleagues through perspectives from history, literature, art history, and creative expression. I am excited to take one piece of what I do there, Just War Theory, and adapt it into a new Political Science course for URI . I’ll be working on this and some other related topics during my Spring 2025 sabbatical at the Naval War College (my first sabbatical since 2007!).

What do you hope students look back on in ten years and say about your class(es)?

That they felt seen, heard, and intellectually empowered, enough to come alive to the wonder of philosophy and lifelong learning…or at least enough philosophy to empower their agency and capacity for self-direction far beyond higher education.

What is a difficult moment that you learned from in the classroom? What did you learn?

So many! But one stands out as a DOH! moment where I saw immediately what I had done wrong and – more critically – why. I had been offering a seminar on issues in environmental restoration, and we spent most of the semester wading through this theory and that, maybe a case study here and there, the basic conflicting viewpoints…with a field trip to the URI Bay Campus at the very end, where we visited and witnessed stages in a specific eelgrass restoration initiative. After that visit, to a person, every student told me we should have done the field trip first, to create motivational acquittance with the actual context of the various debates and theories.

• So WHY did I make the mistake? Typical academic one – believing, wrongly, that a person has to bulk up on all the major existent scholarly hoo hah before they have the capacity to engage with the issue in action. NOT! It’s backwards from that – conjure imaginative engagement with the issue first, create felt curiosity, and when THAT is in place, start the slog through necessary drier material.
• And WHAT did I learn? That the aims of teaching, or what we call the telos in philosophy (the final or end cause of teaching or anything) is not to impart the material as such, or to info dump what we know onto students, or make them think this thing or that via selective perspectives on a topic. Instead, it’s the transformative impact of that material on the person with whom we share it, as well as the implications of that material for our shared world and existence.  For that to succeed, an instructor has to work hard and be the bridge between the person and the material, plus create the impetus for a student’s investment in the process, the struggle, the highs and lows of learning for the sake of their own heightened understanding. HOW we build bridges must change all the time, with each new iteration of material and each new wave of generational student differences. I always grasped the truth of it abstractly, but wow, I felt it strongly when I saw how profoundly I was failing to achieve it in practice with that eelgrass visit!

How have you seen teaching evolve over your career? And/or where do you see teaching going?

I think it’s important to acknowledge that some things never change with respect to the kind of teaching I aspire to do, which is at heart political in motivation – that is, to foster an awareness of individual, intellectual, creative, and civic agency.  In this respect, the developmental readiness of 18-22 year olds to turn around, look at where they came from and reckon with who they are and might want to be, has been persistent over my 36 years of doing this work.

For me, teaching is what bell hooks called Education as a Practice for Freedom, fostering individual and political agency through what she encouraged as Teaching to Transgress. That requires opening up access to the great arc of thought and meaning our species has generated but also offering opportunities for further development to students, especially those who might otherwise remain in the dark about continued flourishing. 

So what HAS changed in teaching?

UPSIDE CHANGES:

• Digital ontology, the emergence of an entire world we inhabit remotely and virtually, with breathtaking tools for new modes of inquiry, expression, and learning. I am so impressed by the capacity of excellent short form video to convey complexity in a competent, inspiring way – it’s often the hook that motivates students to devote time and sweat of brow to parsing their way through more detailed, nuanced readings.
• Today’s undergraduates have so much access to, well, everything! They are also visually astute in a way my generation generally is not.
• How we think about and embrace diversity of all kinds around us every day, which is an excellent thing socially but more so intellectually with respect to insights and knowledge-building via a wider range of viewpoints and identities and backgrounds having a seat at the table.
• Tolerance for difference, with young people today less willing to be bystanders and arriving at college equipped to identify and articulate their values and commitments.

DOWNSIDE CHANGES:

• Student reading skills are far, far less sophisticated than they were 30 years ago, and I am fairly confident this is not just a reflection of my turning into an old crank. I have to incorporate strategies for reading into courses, including time management and slowing it down patiently, even at the upper-level. Writing is a lot better, though!
• The triumph of performativity, or the appearance of reality, over substance, or reality itself. It’s hard to trumpet the value of honest deliberation, slow reading, and patience in an environment where seeming to be something matters more than actually being that something in any substantive way. The pressure on young people is enormous – and it is not helped when adults and institutions of all kinds use media and other visible vectors to express one set of values but then behave in an entirely different fashion in the world of action.
• Barriers to educational, economic, and personal flourishing might be getting worse despite seeming less powerfully prohibitive on the unexamined surface.
• Problems for learning and self-worth caused by persistent wealth, gender, and racial disparities, structural inequities prior to and during college, private generational wealth building replacing any public commitment to social justice investment, and pernicious resource grabs by people who mouth all the right words in the right places but actively close ranks to sustain institutions and practices that ensure continued privilege for themselves or their immediate family or community. Too often this oligarchic tendency in our country masks contingent life circumstances and abundant wealth behind so-called talent or merit. Public higher education has the power to reveal these charades for what they are, but not if it abandons its core mission of actual education in favor of chasing prestige and micro-managing so-called productivity, superficially measured, as the markers of actual, lasting, meaningful scholarly or instructional accomplishment.

What are you streaming that you want others to know about?

I should confess that I read a lot more than I watch anything, but I do recommend New York magazine’s Vulture magazine, especially its TV Recaps, for often hilarious television and pop culture criticism. Its recent chronicling of House of the Dragon and its current follow-alongs of the Great British Baking Show are actually better than the shows themselves!

In general, I’d recommend these previous but enduring series or films that I think capture some of the great narratives of our time through fictional instantiation, which I have watched and rewatched:

• The Wire – still the best television I’ve ever seen. Its precursors Homicide; Life on the Streets and The Corner are also well worth watching
• Evil – now wrapped up, the utterly original, insightful, clever, funny, and frequently frightening series where an atheist psychologist, a trainee priest, and an agnostic techie team up to investigate potential demonic possessions for the Catholic Church. It sounds weird – and it is – but it is also unlike anything else on television.
• Halt and Catch Fire – about the rise of the internet and digital entrepreneurship but also about the roles women and LGBTQ individuals played in those years
• Paterson – director Jim Jarmusch’s masterwork with Adam Driver as former marine who drives a bus by day, writes poetry by night , and encounters a vast range of his fellow humans in the course of a typical day in Paterson, New Jersey. A quietly brilliant, genuinely original film about everyday existential engagement with place.
• The Expanse – best TV based sci-fi I have ever seen, really a show about geopolitics, social and class discrimination, the benefits of diverse leadership, the value of competence, and courage.
• The 1995 BBC long form adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, plus the re-entactment of it on @somenbenfen at Instagram or Tiktok, where he is literally re-enacting the ENTIRE series, mouthing over the original voices/screenplay but representing all the different characters himself, in subtle, laugh aloud ways.
• Get Out; plus Us, two movies from Jordan Peele – with every additional viewing I am convinced he is moving the needle forward on the horror genre in socially-apt, funny, startling, but also psychologically reverberant ways. I will never see – or hear – the stirring of tea in a dainty cup the same way again.
• The Dropout – chronicles the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, which to me captures something essential about the toxic marriage of power and performativity – and what passes as worthy work when it’s really just networks and branding and schlocky sales tactics wrapped up as innovation… but here, with potentially life-threatening results. The documentary The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, is also worth watching for its sobering revelation of just how little there was there beneath the whole Steve Jobs schtick she was channeling.
• Line of Duty – an older British series about ethics in policing, which was ahead of the curve in reckoning with the moral compromises but also the everyday heroism of life on the first responder front lines

More recent outings:

• For those of us who work in classrooms no matter what the level, I’d recommend Abbott Elementary as a show that always rewards the time invested through smart writing, wry wit, courageous realism, and first-rate actors and humorists functioning at the top of their craft.
• Slow Horses is serious psychological fare disguised as zany, dysfunctional espionage and scene-chewing characters.
• As a full-on nerd girl, I’ve naturally just finished Rings of Power and Star Trek: Discovery (RIP), and now await the next installment of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.
• The police procedural Blue Lights, set in Northern Ireland, is excellent, as is The Tower, another British Crime series
• Midnight Mass melds vampire and zombie genres at a slow burn pace beneath what at first appears to be a sleepy island community welcoming a charismatic young priest to its local Catholic church.
• We are finishing the fourth and last series of My Brilliant Friend. I read all the books and have loved the series up until now – the final season’s pacing is off, and I fear is miscast in places, but the actual Naples locale is really the show’s star, and that remains fabulous.

What do you like to do for fun?

I am a reader: fiction, history, biography, applied philosophy, manuals about forensic investigation of death. I am also a devoted patron of public libraries – or when I do purchase, independent bookstores – and remain committed to hard copy reading when it’s for my own pleasure, since so much of my academic work is necessarily online. The heft of The Book in my hands is part of the pleasure; despite the practicality of a Kindle, to which my husband has entirely converted as have one of my daughters and so many of my friends, I expect I shall remain a hard copy stalwart as long as I’m able.

When not reading or grading, ha ha, I prefer to be outdoors, mostly hiking in the woods on trails with family or friends – my favorite way to spend time together! – but also swimming in the ocean or fresh water locally during summer, and sometimes biking (but not at all seriously). I wrote my doctoral dissertation of the neglect of nature in philosophical aesthetics since the mid-19th century, and at the time logic-chopping men would look down their nose at my topic. But neuroscience, ecology, and new discoveries by women about mycelial networks and arboreal connectivity are all vindicating what many of us felt all along – that spending time in nature under non-threatening conditions is not only inspiring, but it literally transforms all manner of bodily rhythms and health indicators along the way.