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 should 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 202: Critical Interpretation, COM 271: History of Communication Technologies, COM 295: Theories of Communication, and COM 301: Interpersonal Communication. Teaching at GVSU for the past 10 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 over 40 conference papers and addresses at national conferences and has published dozens of scholarly articles in journals such as Communication Theory, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Human Studies, Semiotica, etcetera, Bulletin of General Semantics, The Atlantic Journal of Communication, afterimage, Communication Studies, and The American Journal of Semiotics. 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 trustee on the Board of Directors for the Institute of General Semantics
Advancing the ideas of scholars such as Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Kenneth Burke, Erving Goffman, Ernest Becker, Gregory Bateson, Anthony Wilden, Suzanne Langer, John Dewey, Dorothy Lee, Hans Jonas, Lee Thayer, Marshall McLuhan, Walter J. Ong, and Neil Postman, Anton has made significant contributions to the areas of communication theory, orality/ literacy studies, semiotics, phenomenology, philosophy of communication, and rhetorical theory.
Anton's most recent work, a book soon to be out, develops a neo-Stoic philosophy that acknowledges a profound sacredness to life while 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 life and death.