Chris Amirault is an instructor at Brown. Nick and Dan took his course on Phil Ed the first year he taught it; Chris did something similar at a later juncture. He is commonly referred to as “Batman”, because Dan, for reasons known only to Dan, decided he looked like Bruce Wayne. ::shrug::
Batman is a highly skilled [teacher] and theorist of education. His pedagogical style is characterized by

1. A [Socratic] structure intended to maximize dialogue and minimize traditional lecturing.
2. Methods to artificialize (it’s a word if I say it is, damnit) discourse and encourage self-consciousness and self-regulation in speakers. Typically, the class will be divided into an inner and an outer circle, the job of the outer circle being to make specific observations of the inner circle, such as “who speaks how many times” and gender-based contribution counts, etc. This is, obviously, closely connected to [Foucault]’s surveillance-based models of discipline; indeed, it even resembles the [panopticon] in superficial structure.
3. A (quasi-ironic) self-criticism. (See [Zizek])
4. Intense leftist values.
5. A close reading fetish.
   These tend to be a natural obstruction to the kind of intuitive, flowing conversation in which students like Nick flourish and dominate; as a result, there was no end of conflict there.
   

   See also:
   Education, Dewey, Dan, Chris, Nick