Profile
Running a Program and beyond: Using past experiences, and knowing what is right for you.
The University of New England in Biddeford, Maine. In an office on the 3rd floor of Decary Hall, Professor Kenneth Courtney the coordinator for the Global Studies programs and an associate teaching professor of Political Science according to the UNE website. Talks about how he drove through a road of his own education, through maintaining and getting degrees, to becoming a head of a small and unique program in a university that is STEM based.
Professor Courtney shared that he had gone to get an undergraduate degree in Computer Science at Montana State University. “I realized that Computer Science wasn’t the major for me, and in the meantime I started taking literature and philosophy courses, and doing well in them. So I became a double lit-philosophy major as an undergrad.” Said Courtney, as he continued on about his school roadwork. “I went to grad school the first time in New Zealand, University of Canterbury and I was doing my Masters in ancient philosophy and platonic ethics and I finished that. Then I started a PHD at the University of California in ethics still with some ancient greek component and then that didn’t fit either. I left the University of California: Davis and traveled around for a couple more years, started and finished my PHD at the city University of New York City in political philosophy.” This is just a little bit of Courtneys background which helps lay out how he ended up becoming the coordinator for the Global Studies Program at UNE.
Courtney had some hardships that helped play into how his classes are set and the way he teaches as well as getting a empathy and sympathy mindset similar to his as he was an undergraduate and graduate student and traveling around in study of the global world. “ So in between Montana State where I did my undergraduate and finishing in New York was about ,almost a 17 year old path there and a 20 year path at the start of my undergrad. In the meantime I traveled with a film crew in Southeast Asia. I taught English as a foreign language in New Zealand, and then in Taiwan and then in Malaysia. I went back round the world with a friend and lived in India briefly and other parts of Southeast Asia and Central Asia. Travel became this kinda break.” Courtney said as he talked about his background and experience through traveling the world mainly in Asia. He went into how the Global studies program at UNE was started Where he stated “But I was always writing and reading and thinking about academics and it sort of fell in my lap. When I came here the former Dean Jeanne Hey wanted to start a Global Studies program here. She and I had talked. She was a political scientist by training, and so she knew me and I knew her, and she said ‘So it sounded like you’ve traveled a lot, and you sound like you’re interested’, and so I said ‘Yes I am interested in international politics,’ and she said ‘I want to start a global studies programs and I want you to run it,’ And that’s how the program started”.
One of the hardships Courtney went through helped him come to the mind set he has now with students from his own experiences that help him give advice in order to help guide students to what they feel is best suited to them. He talked about his experience at the PHD program he had finished “I took a course called semantics, (At the City University of New York) not an intro to like just semantics. I thought oh this sounds cool and interesting and it was worse than my undergraduate computer science experience, and everybody in there really knew things that I did not know anything about, so I was completely out of my depth. I didn’t take the advice that I give to students now, which is if something is a terrible fit and you’re really not understanding it and you have had a reasonable opportunity to consider taking a different course. Consider backing out. I struggled really badly and I worked incredibly hard for like a B minus in this class, which in graduate school you’re not supposed to get.” It is ok for students to be completely out of their depth, it helps them learn about themselves Courtney also says what he learned. “I took away two things from this experience, don’t be a friend to back out, don’t be afraid to change, like actually appraise weather this is the right fit for you, change is good sometimes, and the other larger thing, oh right life isn’t fair and you just have to roll with it. Jesse was going to get a better grade in that class no matter how hard I worked, no matter how many more assignments I did then him, he still did better than me in the class. And that’s fine in the big picture it doesn’t matter.”
Courtney’s teaching style has changed his class teaching format based on how previous classes he had in graduate school, and how students he is teaching now work in needing to understand how classes are run. To help make the courses he teaches more understandable for students to work with even after a while maybe it’s not the best fit for them. As well as how much the influence on the format has changed overtime from teaching. “Honest answer they have evolved, I’ve been teaching at UNE for over 10 years now. First as a visitor and then starting in 2015 full time. I think I sort of taught classes like all my students were grad students and made them read all the books I had just read. And I also wasn’t doing as much as global studies international relations stuff as I am now. “ But that has changed when Courtney spent more time etching and developing a program. “I think it’s sort of evolved over time, I thought, what’s the best way to sort of get students interested in this material, it’s not making them sit down and read like the history of Paleo-Phoenician war cover to cover. It’s giving them a half dozen articles about these conflicts that you’re vaguely aware of; like let’s talk about Russia and Ukraine and lie let’s talk about the different perspectives on Israel and Palestine, and even more abstract things like let’s build off ideas that I worked with in graduate school.” It is important to get an education, and know what is right and worth it for what students want to be educated with. A switch of majors sometimes helps students find a direction and make them more confident when specializing in something they like and enjoy doing. Some major that fits them and isn’t a terrible and horrible experience helps bring a calmer and more enjoyable quality to life.
