Afrodesia McCannon

I have been a professor in Liberal Studies at NYU since 2008. By training, I am a medievalist, focusing on medieval memoir and expression of medieval subjectivity. Although my education, career, and travel have taken me all over the world, I am a native New Yorker from four generations of New Yorkers. I come from a family of artists and consider the arts an essential part of one’s education and one’s formation as a full person. In the Arts and Cultures Sequence at NYU, I teach all aspects of the global ancient and pre-modern world. My essential goal in any course I teach is to have the students think critically about the topics of the class. ‘Think critically’ is a phrase repeated so often as to have lost the force of its meaning, but I think the constant reiteration of this goal exists because for educators thinking critically is the central skill or dynamic interaction of skills they most want to pass on to their students. For me, critically thinking is the thought process which allows a person to examine any object, concrete or abstract, in a nuanced and informed manner and come to a personally relevant conclusion about the object and about their own patterns of thought. As an educator, I know that the topics of the class stay with students to varying degrees, but the patterns of thought ingrained through a liberal arts education are enduring.