Inside Out Prison Exchange

Tomorrow I begin training as an Inside Out Prison Exchange instructor.  Inside Out trains teachers to lead courses where half of the students are from a college (outside) and half are incarcerated (inside).  The goal is not to help the inside students (any more than teaching helps all students, and teachers) or to study inside students.  The goals are many - but the primary goal is to take one's teaching, learning and study into a unique space that brings together groups of people that are often kept apart.

I'll check in from time to time to let you know what I learn.  I assume I'll be learning a great deal that is unique to this program but also learning a great deal that is generalizable to all of our pedagogy.

My personal goal is to teach a course or courses through this program at my SLAC (Small Liberal Arts College).  So perhaps my posts on this will continue for some years - that's the hope!

Panagiotis G. Ipeirotis's Experience with Plagiarism

Many of you will by now have heard the controversy stirred by Panagiotis G. Ipeirotis's post Why I Will Never Pursue Cheating Again. The original post has been removed. Inside Higher Ed describes the post, why it was removed and some of the reactions it garnered.

But something seems to have been lost in the mix. According to IHE, Professor Ipeirotis intended to generate a discussion about how to best deal with cheating. His experience called into question what he calls the "arms race," response in which we devise cheating detection mechanisms and students (or those who sell to students) devise cheating mechanisms. His suggested alternative? Using pedagogical techniques that are relatively immune to cheating (e.g., alternative assessment techniques, group work, public work, etc.).

So let's talk about that. Do any of you design your assignments, grading schemes, etc. with an eye towards a classroom in which cheating is either difficult or impossible? Should we do so? Are there pedagogical goods independent of avoiding cheating that these alternative techniques and assignments offer? Can designing a cheating-immune assignment work against good pedagogy? Can doing so be yet another instance of the "arms race" approach to combatting plagiarism?

Teaching Research

This last semester I finally came up with a series of assignments that taught students how to do independent research over time over the course of the semester. The research project culminated in a final research paper of five to seven pages (revised once) and a class presentation of ten minutes. Both the final papers and presentations were very successful.

Here is the set up for the assignment: students choose their own research projects, within the rough limits of the course topic. Their research must use multiple sources not assigned in class. Beginning about week three or four, I assigned a series of nine or so smaller assignments, due about every other week or so:

1. Three Possible Research Topics
2. Research Report and Research Plan (what have they done to come up with their topics, and what plan do they have to begin research, e.g., meet with a research librarian).
3. Research Topic and Research Report
4. Research Report: Incorporating Quotations and Citations (at least three in-text citations, at least three in-text quotations).
5. Annotated Bibliography and Research Report
6. Revised Research Report Topic
7. Research Project Precise
8. Revised Annotated Bibliography
9. Revised Research Project Precise

I should also add that I scheduled two class times for the whole class to meet with a research librarian to learn more about how to use the library and about how to distinguish reliable from unreliable sources.

Why did this work? Well, first, the course was capped at nineteen. I know that many folks don't get this opportunity - but maybe a stripped down version would work for courses with up to thirty-five students? Second, I was able to give feedback quickly because my feedback was directed primarily to their research rather than the mechanics of their writing (we worked on this using short three to five page papers throughout the semester). Third, it asks students to do research the way we do: slowly, over time, with much rethinking and revising of the project.

The quality of the papers was much higher than usual. In addition, the writing was far more fluid and sophisticated. Most happily, the papers incorporated citations, quotations and research in an intellectually honest and insightful way. They learned that writing about a topic informed by the literature is not the same as paraphrasing or summarizing and that one can write an original paper that reflects one's own work even while incorporating the work of others.

The presentation was key. It takes up a lot of class time - ten minutes each meant that I had to devote about five instructional hours just to presentations. They presented after their first draft but before their second draft. The presentations were excellent. Because students chose their own topics, they were eager to share their findings with the class and eager to hear what others did. The presentations also forced students to think more explicitly about the structure of their papers. The final drafts were substantially revised (a rare event) and were revised because the students had really rethought how to present their arguments and explanations.

An all around success! Have others used a similar method or other methods to encourage students to do research? Pitfalls? Successes?

Academically Adrift Part I: The Disengagement Compact

In Academically Adrift (hereafter, AA), Arum and Roksa identify a phenomenon that I assume we all know all too well. George Kuh calls it the disengagement compact (AA, 5). Faculty and students strike a bargain - a rather expensive one. The bargain is one in which teachers agree to ask little of students while providing an entertaining simulation of teaching and good grades, and in which students agree to ask little of teachers while providing compliant behavior and a routine simulation of learning. The teacher is rewarded with time and good student evaluations and the student is rewarded with time and a good GPA.

Who among us would admit to striking such a bargain? Not I. But as Arum and Roksa point out, the bargain is not struck among individuals, nor is it struck in a vacuum. As teachers, we enter an educational system in which this bargain has already been struck collectively. In addition, the bargain is but one among a complex web of tacit agreements among students, faculty, administrators, parents, politicians and government agencies: parents want their children to live in a pleasant, safe environment while becoming more mature and independent; students want a socially engaging college experience; parents and students alike want a credential; professors want a regular, secure salary and time for research; administrators want measurable improvements in student (consumer) satisfaction; politicians want practical outcomes; government agencies want practical, technological innovation. None of the members privy to this agreement have undergraduate student learning as a priority (AA, 124-5).

A Teacher Does What We All have Done, or Wanted to Do and Suffers the Internet Age

You may have heard of the viral video of a Cornell teacher reaching his breaking point: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuLaQoQP9oo. I wouldn't include it, but for two things: 1) it was mentioned in Newsweek, and 2) it went viral. It might be worth it for us to talk about it. I showed the video to my students today in order to encourage some discussion about respect in the classroom - in both directions.

I felt so awful seeing the video. I know that I have done that, or the equivalent. I don't think that I have done it recently, but certainly I did it early on in my teaching career. You know how it goes: there are some behavioral problems in your classroom, you bite your tongue, use the principle of charity, soldier on...until you break. And when you break, you break big. The break will happen on a day when you are tired, the students appear especially passive, you have spent your evenings and weekends grading, grading, grading, preparing, preparing, preparing and, well, we all know what happens next: that one thing that you may have been able to shrug off two weeks ago just sets you off.

I asked my students to compare this to the incident a number of months ago of a Jetblue flight attendant who lost it with a rude passenger and quit. The general reaction was "you go!" People supported his moment of lashing out in a way that people online have not with the Cornell teacher. Why? I am not asking that rhetorically - I think that the question is interesting and instructive. For example, if a student were to lose it in the classroom we have a whole (administrative) apparatus that would be operative in dealing with the situation. But passengers in a plane are not merely rude but positively disruptive. My own students noted that the in the course of being angry about disruption, the teacher disrupted the classroom.

I'm not condemning the teacher - not at all. I can't, since I know all too keenly the instincts that compelled him and that he wasn't able to tamp down that day. But neither do I think that his behavior represents the best judgment (I would hazard that he would not either.) But why do we celebrate the Jetblue attendant's reaction to rudeness and denigrate this understandable (but perhaps not justifiable) reaction to rudeness?

I ask this also because I think that we can learn from this as teachers. The one thing that my students agreed on was that no matter what was and wasn't rude or over the line, the teacher's reaction was ineffective. That's probably right. So. Here are the practical questions:

1) How do we deal with behavioral issues in the classroom - especially a large classroom? (I exempt myself here - I can say "call the student into office hours," but my classes are very small compared to many courses taught by my colleagues.

2) How do we think about education, students, ourselves in a way that can prevent that build up of resentment and frustration? Some degree is inevitable: our students are frustrated, and often quite rightly and often for reason that have little to do with us directly. We are frustrated, mostly because we want to do well, and to have some sense that we are doing well. But day to day, it is very difficult to get a sense from our own students that we are reaching them in any respect.

Perhaps this makes clear what an emotionally complex terrain the classroom is. We haven't talked about this much. Are there things we want from students that are misplaced (a sense of accomplishment) and are there things that they are expecting of us that are misplaced (a sense of approval)?

Not For Profit, Episode Six: Passivities

Nussbaum's book is rich with ideas, examples and arguments. I'd like to focus on just two things, though if I had the time and the space, I've no doubt I could get wonderfully lost in a dialogue with and about this book. I will do a two part post. First, I'd like to focus on the notion of passivity and the role of imaginative capacities in education. Second, I'd like to suggest some conclusions I have drawn concerning administrative choices in higher education

Part One: Imaginative Capacities

Like most philosophers reading this book, I found myself nodding in agreement over and over again regarding the indispensability of a Socratic education. But I wonder whether Nussbaum's other central pillar of an education for democracy - imaginative capacity - is in some sense even more crucial and in more danger of disappearing. I wonder too, if it isn't the area over which the humanities and arts have the strongest claim.

Arguably, the mathematical, natural and social sciences are practiced best when practiced Socratically. In addition, the mathematical, natural and social sciences are exceptionally well-placed to engage students in activities that require independence, creativity and problem-solving. If the humanities and arts are being slashed at the expense of other programs that are regarded as more valuable, defending the arts and humanities as foundational for critical skills may not be enough (not that Nussbaum does that). In addition, in my experience, students who enter college with impoverished critical skills are nevertheless able to acquire them if given the right sort of higher education.

On the other hand, the arts and humanities are arguably in the best position to cultivate the ability to imaginatively project beyond the self and the present. One might say something stronger than this - that while this capacity is not the exclusive domain of the arts and humanities, it simply cannot be developed independently of it. I think this is true. In addition, in my experience, students who enter college with impoverished imaginative skills are rarely able to develop them further in even the best institutions of higher learning. I have suggested in the past that the explanation for this cognitive - some skills, if not developed at an early enough age simply atrophy.

Furthermore, if we still wrestle with the kind of passivity that motivated the great educational reformers to whom Nussbaum introduces us, and I think we do, it is the capacity for conscious, imaginative activity that is the key. Passivity is so corrosive because it strips thinkers of their agency - it weakens their ability to direct their attention and make choices about what to think about and how to think about it. In fact, it corrodes this ability to such a degree that among the things one who lacks it cannot imagine is that one can even exercise choice in such matters. As the late David Foster Wallace writes in his brilliant commencement speech, the inability to make personal, intentional, conscious choices about how to directs one's thoughts places a person in "an imprisonment so complete that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up" (This is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life, New York: Little, Brown and Company: 2009, page 32.)

Finally, the critical skills embodied in and developed by Socratic activity are at best hollow and at worst dangerous when not developed in dynamic interaction with the development of the kind of projective imagination cultivated by the arts and humanities. We wish to admire Socrates, not the Sophists. One thinks of current political figures whose argumentative skills are finely honed but whose conscious compassion and empathy are, to say the least, stunted. Perhaps this is the key to earlier concerns in this blog about the many examples of highly educated demagogues.

Part Two: Who, Specifically, is Behind All This?

There is no doubt that, as Nussbaum puts it, democratic education is on the ropes. The systematic dismantling of the arts and the humanities is only the beginning of a wholesale destruction of the democratic model of higher education for the purpose of political expediency and perceived economic gain. But who is doing this? As Nussbaum points out, the business world has been telling us for years that college graduates do not have the necessary skills for the workplace. Administrators hear that. But what they refuse to hear is that the skills they are looking for are: creativity, flexibility, resliance, precision, independence, and intellectual integrity. They aren't looking for flat-footed, instrumentalized "job skills," built for "the common man" in the "practical," "real world." It's not educators engaging in this kind of anti-intellectual, empirically baseless speculation. It's not the business community urging liberal arts colleges to become vocational institutions. And it is not educators or business people who are justifying the existence of higher education by re-casting the sciences along wholly pragmatic lines while using the same to sacrifice the arts and humanities. Nussbaum's example of the University of Chicago's Viewbook being scrubbed of all images of students sitting, thinking and reading in favor images of gleaming laboratories was haunting - not because it came as a shock but because precisely the same thing happened at my own small liberal arts college. The people who are driven by these anti-intellectual, short-term, callous motives and who are doing the hands-on work of dismantling higher education are administrators (obviously not all of them - there are many who fight the good fight). They are the fastest growing group in higher education, the group with the highest increases in salary, and, some have argued the main reason for rising costs in education.

One thing practical we can do right now is end administrative bloat.

But I Want to Save the World Now

I am extremely lucky to have wonderful students, not just in the sense that they are diligent and eager, but also in the sense that like many students at my school they are intrinsically interested in the welfare of others. This post is also a bit of a preview to our reading group on Nussbaum because students like these have found a use, and indeed, perhaps the primary use, of a liberal education. But...they see it as impeding their efforts...what do I do with a particular student of mine who is a good example?

Taking Course Goal Seriously

How do we articulate course goals in an age of knowledge and information? Does it sacrifice the notion that we ought to trust the power of the texts themselves and our expertise at helping students navigate such texts? Do we do a disservice to students by emphasizing the very targets of assessment mechanisms - knowledge learned - at the cost of a more loose and cryptic notion of what "students should come away with."

0 1 320 1829 Lewis & Clark College 15 3 2246 12.256

T.S. Eliot asked in his 1934 poem The Rock: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” I find myself admonishing myself with these words as I craft my syllabi. I should note that I am coming off a year sabbatical, which makes the problem I describe here only more acute.

When I was on the job market I was given sage advice about how to answer a certain interview question: how would you teach course X? I was told: don’t hand them a syllabus, don’t spout a bibliography – talk about what you want students who take the course to come away with.

I took the interview advice and I also took the advice as it was probably intended: if you get the job, think this way about your courses as well. I followed it. But eight years later, I find myself having more difficulty taking that advice. In crafting my syllabi I seem more interested in what the students should know – what information they should have – than in what they should, cryptically, take away from the course.

As the bloggers here know, I have an uneasy relationship with assessment. In a trivial sense, it is absolutely necessary and helpful. But for many of us earnest and honest teachers, it also makes us uneasy – not because we do not want to be assessed, but because it tends to ask the very questions that are making me uneasy about the way I have found myself thinking of my courses lately: should courses be judged on what information and knowledge they impart?

I’ve been prepping a course in Modern: 17^th and 18^th Century philosophy. In trying to cover as much as possible and in trying to make sure that students understand the scientific and historical contexts I find myself crafting a syllabus that maximizes information at the cost of trusting the texts and trusting myself.

This post doesn’t pose a question so much as a challenge to myself and others during this pre-term time: how do we, in the age of assessment, take course goals seriously by asking what it is that we want students to (cryptically) come away with? For my part, it is not information or knowledge, but understanding. And such understanding might come at the price of information and knowledge.

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?

A happy result with student writing

I've just finished grading a batch of papers for my Introduction to Philosophy course. This semester I assigned several (five) very short readings on how to write a philosophy paper over the course of the three weeks prior to when students would begin their papers. The readings were culled from various texts and websites about how to write philosophy papers. Here are the results:



Many of the sorts of errors that can distract us from assessing the progress of our student's skills in philosophy were wonderfully absent. Gone were the windy introductions, the awkward, high-falutin' language, the simple proof-reading errors many of us feel we cannot leave unmarked, etc. It was freeing to be able to spend most of my time focusing on the areas of the paper that demonstrated success (philosophically speaking) and on the specific skills they ought to focus on in order to improve (philosophically speaking).

While it is true that clear thinking and clear writing cannot be divorced, placing the burden on students to work on these areas of their writing prior to submitting work is empowering and effective. It also prevents students from becoming demoralized by an overload of comments.

Of course, it could be fluke. But I'll be doing this in all my 100 and 200 level philosophy courses from now on.

The Reading Brain

Do our students have radically different cognitive structures than ourselves?

The December 24th issue of the New Yorker contained a 'Critic at Large,' piece by Caleb Crain, 'Twilight of the Books." I've been haunted by it. The principal point is not that the newer generations are reading less, which we already knew. It is that they are reading differently. The truly frightening suggestion is that such differences make a difference at the cognitive level for developmental reasons. From a young age, people are encouraged to hone the skills required for, say, reading a technical manual, while the skills required for reading a novel or a piece of philosophy (e.g., imaginative capacities) are left undeveloped. We know that some cognitive functions - language use in particular - has a "window" beyond which the capacity for engaging and strengthening that capacity is lost. It's presumably a function of the plasticity of mind.

In my introduction to philosophy course I do some basic formal and informal logic for the first few weeks. I have been surprised to find that the one skill they truly struggle with is finding counterexamples to claims. So, for example, I will give them a claim such as "All art is beautiful," or "If something is alive and capable of motion, then it is an animal." They really struggle to find counterexamples to these sorts of claims. I'm not surprised when introductory students find philosophy or even basic formal logic alien. I am surprised when they find it difficult to do something which I thought would be relatively second nature. Evidence for the possibilities raised in "Twilight of the Books,"?

Perhaps. There is also the well known psychological bias that when a human recognizes some previously unnoticed phenomenon, she begins to see it everywhere. I hope that this more optimistic reading is the case.

But it highlights a further thought, for me: we are often asked to conform our teaching to the "learning styles" of our students and to their "learning differences." I should hope that there are some limits to this. I would not like to conform my teaching to accommodate this particular learning style. In addition, to take the not-so-optimistic view, the empirical evidence may show that an eighteen-year-old whose imaginative and analytical capacities have, so to speak ossified, may never be able to recover them so matter how skillful her teachers are.

The Consolation of Philosophy

At this point in the semester (or quarter) it is useful to think about what sorts of things one can do that will help one remain engaged and enthused in the classroom. Just when our energy is running low, so is our student's. Here is something I do to revitalize.


I pick some philosophy to read - just for myself - that has nothing whatsoever to do with my own research or with what I'm currently doing in the classroom. It feels like a guilty pleasure. But it really helps me in the classroom. It reminds me of what I love about philosophy and teaching philosophy. Recently I've been reading up on the Absurd, and I also purchased a book on Epictetus by Long. Neither of these topics has anything to do with 18th century philosophy of mind, or with the courses I'm teaching. But being as worn out as one gets at this point in the year, I don't expect I can do much research now anyway. Might as well indulge my philosophical curiosity.

Teaching the History of Philosophy

When teaching the history of philosophy I encourage students to approach the history of philosophy as they would contemporary philosophy. It is as important to identify, outline and reconstruct Locke’s arguments as it is to identify, outline and reconstruct Peter Singer’s arguments. For each, one must use the principle of charity and considerations of overall coherence. Originality does not primarily consist in arriving at some completely novel idea but in providing explanations, arguments and interpretations of ways that philosophical problems can be or have been treated.

I emphasize that when one identifies, outlines, reconstructs and explains an argument, one is providing an interpretation for which one is responsible, i.e. one that is open to criticism.

Students often ask: “When do I get to do philosophy?” This is a difficult question to answer because when we ask them to explain, for example, Reid’s criticism of Locke’s theory of personal identity, we are asking them to do philosophy. But they often take us to be asking for a book report and they wonder why we’re not “letting them” do philosophy.

Any advice about how to make clear to students that when we ask them to provide interpretations and explanations of various positions in philosophy as exemplified by particular figures – from Socrates to Singer – we are asking them to “do” philosophy?