Graduate Quarterly - Winter 2008 - UCLA Graduate Division

Matthew Lockard
Philosophy
MATTHEW LOCKARD
ought to deduct his
trips home as a business
expense: Both of his
parents are teachers, and dinner table discussions
may involve his work as a teaching
assistant in the Department of Philosophy.
Although Matthew and his father—a high
school history teacher—“work in different
areas,” Matthew says, “we both have a
common approach, which is to try to get
students to understand underlying ideas, not
just details, facts, names, dates.”
For Matthew, that may mean using
everyday activities to introduce philosophical
concepts. “I walk to the store and buy
groceries,” Matthew says, “or I scratch the
top of my head absentmindedly while reading
the paper.” Inviting students to examine
the differences between these actions may
lead into a discussion of intention, he says,
and “next thing you know, you’re doing
philosophy, you’re thinking about the nature
of phenomena.”
With his mother, a teacher of English
composition, Matthew talks about how
“to help students communicate difficult
material in plain English.” In one writingintensive
ethics class, Matthew required each
student “to meet with me individually to
discuss the draft, line by line, before making
revisions and submitting a final draft
for a grade,” he says. In just a few weeks,
“most of the students showed a remarkable
improvement in the clarity of their writing
and their mastery of the relevant philosophical
ideas,” he says.
All of this makes Matthew exceptional,
even in a department that seems
to produce a distinguished teaching assistant
every year, leading to a “culture of
extremely high expectations,” says Donald
A. Martin, department chair. Each year’s
candidates are judged not only against
their peers but “also against a series of
legendary graduate student teachers who
are in the back of everyone’s mind,” Professor
Martin says. “Lockard passes this
more stringent test with flying colors.”
Department faculty have been particularly
impressed with his performance in
two technically advanced courses, one on
Gottlob Frege, a German logician and philosopher,
and the other on the 20 th -century
crisis in logic and mathematics.
Given his commitment to teaching, it
is perhaps not surprising that Matthew’s
specialization is epistemology, the philosophy
of knowledge. As he completes work on a dissertation
about the relationship between rational
beliefs and truth, he is also looking for
an academic job. Among the reward of such
work, he says, is helping “students develop
the ability to think for themselves about the
questions that matter most to them.”
18 GRADUATE QUARTERLY Winter 2008