Dr. C. Hendricks

After focusing in graduate school on evaluating the views of Julia Kristeva and Michel Foucault on the political role of intellectuals, I have so far done most of my research on the work of Michel Foucault, largely in the area of the political role of intellectuals. I have also studied Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France, especially those from 1980-1984, where he engages in a historical analysis of the relationships between philosophical practice, truth-telling (parrhesia), and personal, social, and political transformation. I plan to write more about parrhesia in the near future.

Of late, however, I have focused my research more on the area of teaching and learning, and especially on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). I have been working to make my teaching more scholarly (basing my practice in data from the literature on teaching and learning as much as possible), and am planning some research projects of my own to collect data and contribute to the literature myself. I am particularly interested in research on learning communities (Arts One is an example of a learning community), how to help students improve their writing (including how best to organize and implement peer feedback activities, what sort of feedback from the professor tends to be most effective, how to ensure that that feedback is actually used in later work, and the efficacy of scaffolding writing assignments), and possible causes and remedies for the gender imbalance in philosophy in North America (and possibly elsewhere…I just am not as familiar with elsewhere).

I try to do posts on various scholarly articles on these and other topics in my blog on teaching philosophy, You’re the Teacher. When I’m teaching, my blogging rate goes way down, but during breaks between terms I try to keep up with posting regularly.