My primary goal as a teacher is to help students become more competent and confident in their ability to study independently. I want to help them become lovers of life-long learning.
Students come to realize that college education is more than training for a job. It is about becoming a more open, sensitive, interesting, humane, thoughtful, articulate, inspired and inspiring person. Ideally, students become public intellectuals, people who learn to take deep and genuine pleasure in exercising their capacities to dream, to reason, and to create.
In his classic book on teaching, Begin Here, Jacques Barzun writes, “In the name of progress and method, innovation, and statistical research, educationalists have persuaded the world that teaching is a set of complex problems to be solved. It is no such thing. It is a series of difficulties. They recur endlessly and have to be met; there is no solution--which means also that there is no mystery.” I heartily agree with Barzun, and accordingly, I ask a great deal from my students, both in terms of their time and in terms of the intellectual challenges I pose to them. I believe that creativity as well as long-term commitment to learning comes from a trust in oneself that can be best fostered through challenging classes.
I also believe that teachers need to be more than merely learned. As Eric Hoffer suggests: “In times of great change, it is the learners who will inherit the earth, while the learned increasingly inherit a world that no longer exists.” And it is here, in this regard, that teaching needs to be informed by active scholarship. Scholarship enhances teaching, not merely through keeping apprised of the latest developments in the field, but also because of the intensity or ‘presence of mind’ that accompanies being an active scholar.
My favorite courses to teach are COM 271: History of Communication Technologies, COM 295: Theories of Communication, and COM 301: Interpersonal Communication. Teaching at GVSU for the past 12 years, I have had the chance to work with many wonderful and talented students, and they never cease to amaze me. In class I am always stimulated and challenged by their questions, and I learn a great deal from their papers. Students at GVSU are hard working, and our best students are as good as the best students anywhere. Many have landed desirable jobs upon graduation, and some have earned placement in highly selective graduate programs. It is a thrill and honor to be part of such a great enterprise.
Anton has presented numerous competitively selected papers at national and international conferences and has published dozens of scholarly articles in journals such as Communication Theory, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Human Studies, Semiotica, ETC, Bulletin of General Semantics, The Atlantic Journal of Communication, afterimage, Communication Studies, and The American Journal of Semiotics. He is a Past Chair and Program Planner for the Semiotics and Communication Division of NCA. Highly active in the Media Ecology Association, Anton is a trustee on the Board of Directors for the MEA and serves as the Editor for the journal Explorations in Media Ecology. Most recently Anton was named a Fellow of the International Communicology Institute, and a member of the Board of Trustees for the Institute of General Semantics
Working in the areas of communication theory, semiotics, phenomenology, philosophy of communication, media ecology, and rhetorical theory, Anton's has three recent works: First: SOURCES OF SIGNIFICANCE, a book in Purdue University's Philosophy and Communication Series, develops a neo-Stoic philosophy that acknowledges the sacredness of life and simultaneously opens new horizons of courage and purpose in the face of mortality. It is a book about heroism, gratitude, and the more than mundane register of everyday acts.
Second, the edited volume VALUATION AND MEDIA ECOLOGY: Ethics, Morals, and Laws explores how communication technologies shape, maintain, and/or alter moral practices and sensibilities regarding justice and the good. Noted scholars and media ecologists address how communication and communication technologies bear upon valuation, contemporary life, and the human condition more generally. Finally, Anton's most recently released book, a collection of essays called COMMUNICATION UNCOVERED spans the fields of general semantics, media ecology, semiotics, philosophy of communication, and communication theory more generally.