Lester K. Spence, PH. D.

Teaching

My approach to teaching has three components.

First, it provides a critical corrective to traditional disciplinary approaches.

To correct this approach my black politics courses revisit the idea that black interests are homogenous (that there is a single identifiable black political interest). In my courses on urban politics this approach translates into revisiting some of our core ideas about how cities function, how urbanization itself occurs, and how a range of urban policies are shaped by racial politics.

The goal of a liberal arts education is and should be developing civic capacity, creating citizens for the 21^st century.

Along these lines my approach to teaching emphasizes participation. While some subjects I teach require longer lectures—the transatlantic slave trade for example—I still work to generate class discussions because I believe students learn best through class engagement, and because I want them to learn to push back against accepted views of how the world functions, even when those accepted views are views I promote.

Finally, the subject of much of my teaching is the city.  Although universities like Johns Hopkins are important urban actors (engaging in public-private partnerships with city officials and agencies, purchasing and developing real estate, providing cultural capital to the region, etc.), rarely are their students exposed to the cities they reside in—indeed Hopkins students, faculty, staff, and administrators consistently refer to the “Hopkins Bubble”.

This bubble, ostensibly designed to keep Hopkins students safe also segregates them from Baltimore. Since I joined the Hopkins faculty in 2005 I’ve innovated several courses designed to dissolve this bubble, including a 2010 course combining photography and black politics, a 2012 urban politics course encouraging a deep dive into Baltimore politics, and most recently courses that examine recent efforts to contest racial and economic inequality.

For these efforts I was given the Johns Hopkins Distinguished Faculty Award in 2009 and was nominated again for it in 2010 and in 2015 was named an Engaged Scholar by the Center for Social Concern. My work has attracted a coterie of students also interested in examining these issues for the purpose of problem solving them, and on two occasions undergraduate theses I supervised on racial politics won department awards.