In the News

From the NY Times, February 24, 2009:
"In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth"

Gatekeeping Graduate School

Over at Pea Soup there is a lively discussion about advising students applying to graduate programs in philosophy:

http://peasoup.typepad.com/peasoup/2009/02/gatekeepers-to-the-profession.html

The idea being floated is that there is an implicitly conservative tendency in the way that many of us approach such advising. We spend a lot of time talking about what graduate school is like and what the profession is like, and perhaps we also give advice about the most beneficial behavioral strategies for succeeding. In doing so we implicitly endorse the current culture and practices of the profession - the bad along with the good. What sorts of experiences have you had in advising undergraduate regarding graduate study? Do you ever discourage students from applying? Do you go beyond giving advice? That is, do you help them put together a package and prepare them for the professionalized atmosphere of graduate school?

On Course: Students as People

In this chapter Lang addresses key issues surrounding how we should, as teachers, relate to our students as people. He wants us to remember that students have lives outside our classrooms and that these lives may have a negative, as well as positive, impact on their academic performance. He gives as one example how one of his student's work deteriorated over the course of the semester. In talking with her about her performance she made it known that her mother was dying. Another example was of a student who was in an abusive relationship with her significant other. Many of us have had similar experiences that have helped to shape how we understand and interact with our students. Some of us may even have had similar experiences as our students. Lang's point is that there are factors other then ability and desire that impact student performance and that remembering this fact is crucial to us if we are to be successful as teachers. The key is to be able to maintain our academic criteria and standards as well as try to reasonably accommodate student's legitimate needs.


Relative to recognizing our students as compete people, he discusses a number of key issues:1) Stick compassionately to our standards2) Listen, but don’t counsel3) Know your campus4) Protect yourself5) Age6) Gender7) Attendance status8) Race/ethnicity. We have discussed many of these points before, so I will not dwell on all of them. I would like to make a few comments on 2 and 4.

As I have mentioned before, there are only two reasons why people fail; they either cannot or will not do the work. Both of these issues need to be addressed by us as they arise in so far as they impact the student’s performance. Simply refusing to do the work requires only that we make it clear to the student what the consequences will be of continuing to operate in this frame of mind. A student who cannot do their work needs our counseling regarding what can be done to make the necessary adjustments so that performance can improve. We should only counsel relative to improving their performance in our class, not on what they should do relative to the problem they are facing in their lives resulting in poor performance. Relative to this, we should direct them to the proper persons that can offer that type of assistance. We can be empathic to what the student is going through, but we should not let our empathy detract us from what we are requiring of our students to be successful inour course. Part of our job is to keep ‘their feet to the fire,’ so to speak. We may offer an extension, but we should never allow them to not do what is assigned.

Regarding ‘protecting ourselves’ it is crucial that we not be perceived as 1) playing favorites, or 2) creating a hostile environment within which we expect learning totake place. Regarding the 1st point we need to keep a professional attitude towards our students. We need to remember that relationships, even professional ones, are reciprocal in nature. We need to treat our students respectfully if we expect to be treated respectfully. We need to treat our students fairly and equally unless we have an overriding reason to treat someone outside the norm. e.g., an illness/death in the family, or outside workcommitments that the student cannot avoid. But, the reason must be defensible and if we are making adjustments for one, these adjustments must be available to other students if they find themselves in similar circumstances. Regarding the 2nd point we need to be aware of how our behavior is interpreted by our students. This is particularly true with the ever-increasing cultural and demographic diversity being seen on college campuses as well as the general community. In light of the changing demographics within our institutions we need to be aware that what we find unobjectionable, may be objectionable to others. The extent to which a student may find our behavior unacceptable could result in our creating an environment where that student’s performance is less then had we been aware of the impact our behavior was having on his or her performance and making the necessary corrections. This can be rather tricky. I suggest that you watch for reactions to what you are doing and note negative type responses. If negative responses continue then change your behavior. At times you may have to make an apology to either a particular person, or the entire class, if you overstep some boundary, unintentionally or otherwise. I do speak from experience on this matter. I also encourage an open door and open dialogical approach to teacher/student interaction. This approach makes it clear to students that they can come to you and discuss any issue that is class related without fear of retaliation. I encourage students to address a problem as it arise and not to wait and let it fester. Being open can disarm potentially disruptive situations and maintain a good professional student/teacher relationship.

I know that this will sound old fashioned, but simply follow the ‘Golden Rule’ in our interactions with our students. Keeping this in mind will help us remember that we are not one-dimensional and that all of us are leading full and complex lives

An exericse in gender and family justice

Harry Brighouse at Crooked Timber outlines a most ingenious exercise designed to help students appreciate the relevance of family life and the division of labor for questions about justice between the genders. I'd be curious to know if anyone out there has done something similar and what your experiences were.

Lang -- Students as Learners, Part II

I’d like to take a minute start a discussion on the second part of Lang’s chapter on “Student Learning”. In the second part, Lang discusses Perry’s model of intellectual development in college. He has a lot to say that’s pretty interesting – especially for those of you who teach ethics. Check below the fold for more.


Perry’s claim is that students in college tend to talk through a developmental model as they progress from freshmen to seniors. This developmental model has two major points. First, Perry thinks that as students progress through college, they come to have different beliefs about the status of the truths of the subject matters they are encountering (its metaphysics, say). Moreover, they come to have different beliefs about the accessibility of those truths (its epistemology, say). As they progress through these stages, their way of understanding how their education should and should not be structured changes accordingly.

Here are Perry’s three stages:

Stage One: Dualism (the Education Fundamentalist)

When students start college, Perry suggests, they are dualists. They believe in absolute truth, and they think that their professors possess those truths. As a result, they want the professor to just “pass it along” in an uncomplicated lecture-oriented format. Because the transmission of facts should be uncomplicated and factory-like, students in this stage dislike discussion or small group work. After all, what’s the point? It’s not like the other students have the knowledge, so these pedagogical methods are really just wastes of time. Interestingly, Lang also suggests that students who have a difficult time moving out of this stage may, in fact, turn out to be dropouts, perhaps because thinking of knowledge and truth in a different way requires too much accommodation and revision.

Stage Two: Relativism (the Education Chameleon)

At the second stage, students have overcome Dualism. But here they start to challenge all education. As far as they can tell, if there are no right answers, then they are all the same. As a result, students start to see education as really just a game (and mostly bull). It’s just a bunch of paper pushing, a shell game that they need to figure out. As a result, they become uninteresting in knowledge, and more interested in figuring out “what the teacher wants”. The teacher has the goodies (the grades), and so they need to figure out how the teacher plays the game so they can get them.

Stage Three: Commitments (the Educational Existentialist)

I don’t think Perry uses “existential” but I will because it sounds similar to me. Here, the student learns to transcend the relativism stage and make a commitment to being an embodied learner. The student accepts that part of what education is requires their own appropriation of what they are encountering. The teacher is now not seen as a game player or a sage on the stage but instead an experienced facilitator whose job it is to introduce students to previous “commitments” and then create an environment where new facts and commitments can be formed.

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There are lots of places to go with this thread, so I’ll leave it open. However,

I’ll briefly note a few things:

1. The move here from one to the next does remind me of Nietzsche. In the dualism stage, the student thinks that God is truth. In the second, God is dead, but with God’s death truth dies too. As a consequence, we might see this not as a movement away from dualism, but rather a move into a kind of lamenting dualism. The student is mourning the death of Dualism, suggesting that if there are no absolute truths, there are no truths at all. In stage three, the student finally learns to overcome dualism entirely (as far as I see it). The student learns to see truth in a new way (different from stage one and two).

2. In my own ethics course, oddly, I don’t move through these stages as Perry has them. Instead, I start with the assumption that my students are relativists, and try to get them to move past it to a form of Dualism, to a recommitment to truth. Then at the end, I use Nietzsche (specifically) to challenge their newly-formed dualism and leave them with the convictions to ethics and to living a good life, but with no preference for relativism and a new-found dislike for dualism. My hope is that this creates the ground for “commitment”. But I’m not sure if it actually happens. I’d be curious to know how other people structure their own ethics courses.

Any thoughts in general?

If solitude dies, does philosophy go with it?

The always provocative William Deresiewicz observes that today's college students, thanks to the omnipresence of technologies that connect them to one another and to the larger world, have "lost the ability to be alone, their capacity for solitude." If true, does this have consequences for those of us attempting to teach philosophy?

We've discussed the challenges of group work often here at ISW, with many emphasizing that the heavily socially networked students of today often gravitate toward collaborative learning. But does philosophical understanding also require an ability to work in solitude — to be alone with one's own thoughts? One worry is that the technologically-induced absence of solitude makes introspection and true engagement with texts impossible. Deresiewicz:

And losing solitude, what have they lost? First, the propensity for introspection, that examination of the self that the Puritans, and the Romantics, and the modernists (and Socrates, for that matter) placed at the center of spiritual life — of wisdom, of conduct. Thoreau called it fishing "in the Walden Pond of [our] own natures," "bait[ing our] hooks with darkness." Lost, too, is the related propensity for sustained reading. The Internet brought text back into a televisual world, but it brought it back on terms dictated by that world — that is, by its remapping of our attention spans. Reading now means skipping and skimming; five minutes on the same Web page is considered an eternity. This is not reading as Marilynne Robinson described it: the encounter with a second self in the silence of mental solitude. But we no longer believe in the solitary mind.

Deresiewicz wonders if the modern university has too readily fostered this aversion to solitude, to the detriment of the students they claim to serve:

To hold oneself apart from society, is to begin to think one's way beyond it. Today, of course, universities do everything they can to keep their students from being alone, lest they perpetrate self-destructive acts, and also, perhaps, unfashionable thoughts. But no real excellence, personal or social, artistic, philosophical, scientific or moral, can arise without solitude. "The saint and poet seek privacy," Emerson said, "to ends the most public and universal."

So: Have students lost their ability to live in their own minds? And, conceding that the epistemology of philosophy is largely discursive and social, to what extent is that ability needed to get the full value of the philosophical classroom experience? My particular concern is that one of the goals of philosophical education (and liberal education, more generally) is to help students develop self-understanding and an authentic intellectual stance. Might the presence of so much technology and connectivity put these goals out of reach?

An intriguing laptop policy

Andrew Cullison, occasional commenter here at ISW, recently unveiled a new laptop policy. This is a topic we've touched on before here, and Andrew reports that the policy is working well to this point. The key idea: student are required to upload their notes to a common location when they bring their laptops to class. I'd be interested in trying this out. (Also: check out some of the comments on Andrew's post, several of which endorse "canonical class notes," an extension of Andrew's idea.)