JENELLE SALISBURY

Hi, my name is Jenelle, and this is my website. If you are looking for some information about my work and my background, you might be in the right place, but the best bet is to just get in touch! I'm always happy to chat.

Teaching

Teaching philosophy does involve teaching content within the subject matter of the relevant course, but this is interwoven with teaching a set of domain-general skills that benefit our students both in and out of the classroom. These skills involve close reading, careful/cogent/critical reasoning/thinking, and articulate writing/speaking. My aim is for my classroom to provide space for my students to grow as individuals, thinkers, and citizens. I also value the opportunity to learn from their diverse voices.

I currently teach courses such as Healthcare Ethics, Introduction to Ethics, Introduction to Philosophy, and Logic.

Education

My PhD is from the University of Connecticut (2023) where I studied Philosophy of Mind.

Current Projects

It being my first year in a full-time teaching position, I have been spending most of my time thinking about my individual students and also thinking about my general pedagogical practice. As many of us are, I also spend a lot of time thinking about the role of generative AI in the college classroom. I think there is a great potential for technology to serve to enhance rather than replace human agency and thought, but I also think there are real threats to human cognitive development that can arise from depending too greatly on these tools. I think it is a mistake to ignore LLM's and proceed with business as usual, or to treat them as a nuisance but solvable with the standard plagiarism detection techniques. At the same time, I'm not a pessimist. I think it's a valuable opportunity to fundamentally rethink the aims for our courses and how our assessment methods measure the achievement of these aims.

Additionally, I am thinking about the future of my research post-graduate school. My graduate work was on the unity of consciousness and the first-person perspective, but I am interested in moving forward to do more interdisciplinary work that connects my background in philosophy of mind and epistemology with my teaching-informed interests in the ethics of caring and active empathy.