I view the unifying goal of my academic career to be to cultivate and transfer intellectual as well as emotional wisdom, and to do this in a way that impacts our lived experience.
To that end, I view teaching as a process of encouraging students to make connections between their own experiences and the subject matter. Moreover, in my own education, I have tried to integrate opposing yet complementary views as a dialectical/dynamic thinker would, and I continually convey this intellectual attitude to my students. Generally, I believe a professor should be a facilitator of the students’ own intended directions, offering to them both mentorship and the necessary background.
Teaching in the area of Clinical Psychology and healthcare entails conveying both academic and clinical knowledge (i.e., know-how as well as know-what). Ultimately, I see my goal in doing this as not only to communicate a field of content to my students but to actually help cultivate them into certain types of people. My father, now a professor emeritus, has always affectionately referred to this part of our work as “human gardening.” Particularly when training clinicians, I believe this to be the case. So, I aim to help students develop themselves as critical thinkers, as well as caring, sensitive people with a sense of humour.
When I was completing my Master’s thesis in France, I remember sitting with my professor on his back porch and telling him the results of my elaborate statistical analyses. After taking it all in, he turned to me: “…But do you think it’s really true? Does it fit with your experience of life?” This is a question that I challenge all my students with, to make the material they study come alive, to question it, test it against their own measure, -- and (particularly in Psychology) to consider the meaning and implications of the material for how we engage life.
When I took my first academic position, a senior professor who I admired and deeply respected, took me aside to give me her parting advice on mentorship: “You may be incredibly demanding of your students, and you can expect them to do tremendous work, -- just so long as you’re always fair.” I hope to inspire my students with my passion for our work while I engage them as collaborators. I expect the best of them and I encourage them to continually challenge themselves and to work very hard. At the same time, however, I consult with them on setting reasonable expectations, so I can hold them accountable to their own ambitions. I strive to provide examples of how to manage a rigorous program of work because I believe that these too are skills which must be mentored. All the while, I encourage them not take themselves too seriously, I keep a sense of humour and playfulness in our workspace and in our collaborations.
Finally, a university education draws from our collective science and culture, placing one among the intellectual elite, and I believe that “noblesse oblige.” In other words, higher knowledge and abilities demand a higher level of social responsibility. This philosophy drives both my interest in teaching and my choice of research program. Similarly, I try to communicate to my students the sense of moral obligation which comes from being educated: To use what they have learned and contribute in some way toward improving the human condition.
- Dr. Pascual-Leone
If interested, you can read a brief personal essay by Dr. Pascual-Leone and published in a student manual on the roles of therapy training as a transformative process.