Reseach Associate

TEACHING STATEMENT

Yavuz Akalin Department of Management Arizona State University

Teaching Philosophy and Methods

I believe that the major products of universities are well-prepared students; prepared not only to deal with today’s world, but, most importantly, to be able to advance it. Therefore, I consider the quality of my teaching as the major goal for my academic life. I always admired faculty who cared for their students’ success and I would like to become one of them. I think narrowing down the education of social science to simply memorizing some concepts and theories is a disservice to students. While the knowledge is a necessary component of education, the art of creative thinking should be a basis of this knowledge. Therefore, a good teacher should focus on key insights and methodological reasoning to nurture critical thinking capacities of students. I believe that students should be enriched by sufficient knowledge to generate viable opinion about a particular social or business phenomenon. More importantly, however, they should learn the principles of causal inference. In my teaching, I always emphasize the key role of “ruling out alternative explanations” and the critical role of “establishing temporal order” for any viable assessment of key social science issues.

Evidence of Teaching Effectiveness

I gained teaching experience at the undergraduate and graduate levels through independently teaching three courses and serving as a teaching assistant for more than ten different social science courses (Global Economy, International Business, Microeconomics, Macroeconomics, Introduction to Political Economy, Research Method, Sociology, Technology and The Economy) at Arizona State University, the University of Texas at Dallas, and the University of Texas at San Antonio. Of the courses that I served as a teaching assistant, I independently taught several sections of these courses. As the sole instructor of three courses (Introductory Statistics,...