BJ Kurle
The Itinerant Observer
Professional Biography
With a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Purdue University and extensive graduate work in both Philosophy and Teaching ESL from Gonzaga University, BonnieJean Kurle has been teaching and mentoring students from various backgrounds since 1997.
She is known for being down to earth, practical, an excellent teacher and, most vividly, for finding humor in the most random connections.
Having begun her own academic career with a false start, and then returned to Community College as a non-traditional student with job responsibilities outside of the classroom, BJ understands the challenges facing todays college student.
Her passion for intellectual honesty has two faces:
- open acknowledgement of the inequalities in higher education and the workplace for minorities and the poor in order to best facilitate their success in both arenas, and
- clear-eyed awareness of the abandonment of sincerity for the laissez faire bullshit discourse that shapes American values of the 21st Century, responding with a strident activism for accountability, kindness, and compassion in the public sphere.
MA, Gonzaga University; PhD, Purdue University
As a mentor, educator, advocate, and writer, BJ strives to champion intellectual honesty by both written word and living example.
As a coach and consultant, she ensures confidence and confidentiality.
Narrative Vitae
For twenty years, BJ has been tutoring groups and individuals in both campus and home settings, facilitating classroom learning with both traditional and flipped class structures, and maintaining a vanguard position both in innovative universal design for Humanities courses and in advocacy for a more dominant role of the Humanities in the value system that underlines American thought today.
Her imaginative and personal teaching approach is widely commended by peer, supervisor, and student alike.
Her inventive style has perhaps most clearly been shown in her unique textbook, designed for community college and first-generation students, focusing on accessibility to a cohort that finds the traditional, jargony textbook a barrier to learning. Her use of humor and popular culture makes difficult philosophical concepts come alive, and her sly writing style makes students feel as if they are in the know and welcomed to a world previously presented as exclusive and forbidding.
Other projects include
- papers on deception and intellectual honesty,
- papers on pedagogical strategies,
- coaching for personal, academic, and professional development,
- presentations on facilitating classroom respect, and
- a study of two competing American worldviews, inviting the interested person to journey through the beliefs, history, and psychology of two unhealthy mindsets that both shape American values and policy and threaten to undermine American democracy.
