Philosophers' Magazine -- on teaching

The Philosophers' Magazine, a well-known UK publication, will focus its next issue on teaching. Preview below the cut:

Subscribing to Teaching Philosophy

I've been posting information about the contents of Teaching Philosophy for a while, but you may not know how to subscribe. The basic information is here, but a rundown:

• Members of the American Association of Philosophy Teachers receive online access free with membership.
• Annual print subscriptions are $33, $40 for online, $53 or online and print.
• Institutional subscriptions are (as expected). But I'd encourage your libraries to subscribe so that all of your faculty and students have access.

Latest issue of Teaching Philosophy

The latest issue of Teaching Philosophy is now available:

Sarah Cashmore

Changing Values in Teaching and Learning Philosophy: A Comparison of Historic and Current Educational Approaches

This paper examines the pedagogical values inherent in various traditions of philosophy education, from the ancient Greeks to current practices in Ontario high schools, and asks whether our current educational practices are imparting the philosophical values we wish to bestow upon our learners. I compare the approaches of Socrates, Descartes, and Dewey on the nature of philosophy and the pedagogical frameworks they defend for transmitting the “spirit” of philosophy, and then examine the Ontario curriculum guidelines for the teaching of philosophy. In past philosophical traditions, dynamic growth, free questioning, and social responsibility are considered essential to the practice of philosophy. Certain factors in today’s educational institutions limit students’ abilities to achieve those values, although the appeal to these values is the same. I end with recommendations for amendments to the Ontario curriculum expectations that would help put the philosophical development of the individual student more clearly at the centre of these guidelines.

Christopher Gifford

How to Teach Metaphysics

This paper examines the pedagogical values inherent in various traditions of philosophy education, from the ancient Greeks to current practices in Ontario high schools, and asks whether our current educational practices are imparting the philosophical values we wish to bestow upon our learners. I compare the approaches of Socrates, Descartes, and Dewey on the nature of philosophy and the pedagogical frameworks they defend for transmitting the “spirit” of philosophy, and then examine the Ontario curriculum guidelines for the teaching of philosophy. In past philosophical traditions, dynamic growth, free questioning, and social responsibility are considered essential to the practice of philosophy. Certain factors in today’s educational institutions limit students’ abilities to achieve those values, although the appeal to these values is the same. I end with recommendations for amendments to the Ontario curriculum expectations that would help put the philosophical development of the individual student more clearly at the centre of these guidelines.

Alexandra Bradner

How to Teach Philosophy of Science

Philosophy of science is a challenging course to teach. This paper offers suggestions for early-, middle- and late-career professors who teach philosophy of science at the undergraduate or graduate level. The advantages and disadvantages of four different course designs are discussed, and a list of possible syllabus topics is presented. The paper encourages a thoroughgoing approach to inclusive pedagogy: it recommends that we look for ways to highlight a range of underrepresented voices throughout the semester, instead of tacking on one or two feminist readings at the end of a course. The author reports success with two forms of student assessment, in particular: a peer participation grade and a series of short critical response papers. Also covered are learning goals, textbook selection, and faculty assessment.

New issue of Teaching Philosophy

The latest issue of Teaching Philosophy (volume 37, no. 4) is out. Detailed contents below the fold.

EngagedPhilosophy.com: Using Civic Engagement in Philosophy Classes

EngagedPhilosophy.com: Resources for Using Civic Engagement in Philosophy Classes

EngagedPhilosophy.com, launched with a grant from the American Philosophical Association, provides tools for faculty and students to implement activist or service projects in philosophy classes. 

It includes assignment guidelines, many sample projects, student testimonials, and data supporting use of civic engagement in philosophy classes. 

Founders Ramona Ilea, Susan Hawthorne, and Monica Janzen, of Pacific University Oregon, St. Catherine University, and Hennepin Technical College, respectively, support a model of student-initiated civic engagement that encourages student agency, development of skills for citizenship, and insight into the practice and importance of philosophical reasoning. 

Why try it in your classes? In the words of one student,  

“This [project] enabled me to become impassioned in a new way, and express my realizations, insights, in a different way than an academic exercise usually allows…This forum forced me to make connections I may not have necessarily made. And I am very pleased with the outcome.”

2014 Lenssen Prize winners

Let's extend congratulations to Ann Cahill and Stephen Bloch-Schulman. Their article, "Argumentation step-by-step: Learning critical thinking through deliberative practice," Teaching Philosophy v. 35, no. 1 (2012), pp. 41-62 is the winner of the biennial Lenssen Prize for the best article on the teaching of philosophy. Congratulations to Ann and Stephen!

New articles in Teaching Philosophy

New articles, from v. 37, no. 2, of Teaching Philosophy are now online. Abstracts below:

Forrest Perry Corrupting the Youth This paper describes a project I have my students do that is based on parallels between the position Socrates describes himself as being in when addressing the charge that he corrupts the youth of Athens and the position critics of capitalism in the U.S. are in when they try to make the case that capitalism is a deeply flawed system that needs to be transformed into something better. For the project, students are asked to give to three audiences of their own choosing a presentation in which they argue against capitalism. The main aim of the project is to help students to appreciate that although the unexamined life may not be worth living, living an examined life can be difficult to do since it can feel a little like dying.

Christopher A. Pynes Seven Arguments Against Extra Credit Overwhelmingly, students desire the opportunity to earn extra credit because they want higher grades, and many professors offer extra credit because they want to motivate students. In this paper, I define the purposes of both grading and extra credit and offer three traditional arguments for making extra credit assignments available. I follow with seven arguments against the use of extra credit that include unnecessary extra work, grade inflation, and ultimately paradox. I finish with an example of a case where extra credit could be justified, although it relies on an important equivocation. Ultimately, I show that extra credit is neither a pedagogically sound nor a conceptually coherent grading practice, and I conclude that extra credit should not be part of the pedagogical toolbox. Sinclair A. MacRae The Cooperation Game In this paper I explain how to play and administer a game that helps teach students a lesson about the value of cooperation and the role of ethics and the law in obtaining the conditions under which cooperation is reasonable. I also discuss several applications of this Cooperation Game, primarily in courses in social and political philosophy, introductory ethics, and the philosophy of law. The game can usefully be played with a range of groups of students from small tutorial sections to large sections over one hundred, and the game and post-game analysis can be completed in one or two classes.

Elizabeth Schiltz How to Teach Comparative Philosophy This article articulates a range of possible pedagogical goals for courses in comparative philosophy, and discusses a number of methods and strategies for teaching courses intended to achieve those ends. Ultimately, it argues that the assignment to teach comparative philosophy represents an opportunity to design a course with remarkable freedom and tremendous potential. Comparative philosophy courses can engage students in unique ways that not only increase their understanding of the fundamental assumptions and beliefs of non-Western traditions, but also facilitate the development of the skills and dispositions that enable them to become better philosophers.

"Contemporary classics" on the scholarship of teaching and learning

I'm occasionally asked for recommendations for where to get started in the scholarship of teaching and learning. Thankfully, Paul Corrigan has compiled a list of what I think of as the "contemporary classics" in this area. Spilling the beans, they are:

John Tagg,
The Learning College Paradigm

Dee Fink, Creating Significant Learning Experiences

Maryellen Weimer, Learner-Centered Teaching

Rebekah Nathan, My Freshman Year: What a Professor
Learned by Becoming a Student

John Bean, Engaging Ideas

Latest issue of Teaching Philosophy

It's now available online. Here are the contents:

Teaching Philosophy - Volume 37, Number 1 - 2014

Jennifer Benson The Problem of Tokenizing Radical Philosophy - Advice for Junior Academics and Allies Teaching radical philosophy is tricky business, especially for junior academics. We are offered lower division introductory courses and service courses in applied philosophy, perhaps as adjunct or single-year contract employment. Our instructional objectives and teaching materials are often defined by others. We may only be able to include one or two readings in radical philosophy. Meanwhile, many students are defensive when our courses introduce criticism of the various forms of injustice generated by the social status quo. Offer students a single radical source in an otherwise conical reading list and one risks having the source dismissed as a tangent, bizarre and non-philosophical. In short, the readings are tokenized: instead of making the course more diverse and honoring the diversity in philosophy, the radical content is dismissed as strange and unimportant. Recognizing the material necessity of adjunct teaching and short contract teaching, and the importance of philosophy that aims at social justice, I offer best practices when one can only teach a few sources in radical philosophy.

"The primary postulate of American education"

Daniel Willingham's review of Amanda Ripley's book The Smartest Kids in the World is so laudatory that it makes it sound like a must read for any American educator. Ripley compares U.S. education to three nations whose educational systems are widely recognized for their quality: South Korea, Finland, and Poland. The success of these three nations makes the usual explanations for the U.S.' struggles look weak: poverty is high in Poland, we spend more money on K-12 education than they do, etc. This is not to say it's all peaches and cream in these three societies. The South Korean system is widely derided for producing stressed out, miserable, uncreative kids.

But what unites these systems is a cultural expectation: "an expectation that the work will be hard. Everything else is secondary." In contrast, Willingham proposes that among the "primary postulates" of American K-12 education is

a propensity to learn is innate, instinctive and therefore inevitable. That, in turn, means that it should be easy. This assumption is pretty much the opposite of the one Ripley assigns to South Korea, Finland, and Poland. ...Many Americans seem to think that it's not normal for schoolwork to be challenging enough that it takes persistence. In fact, if you have to try much harder than other kids, in our system you're a good candidate for a diagnosis and an IEP. 

I start teaching again for the fall term tomorrow. No doubt many of the students I teach this term will exhibit just the sort of attitudes we'd expect them to exhibit given that they've been shaped by an educational culture ruled by this postulate: fear of failure, the tendency to blanch in the face of even modest academic adversity, little attention to the time management needed to make persistent effort possible, the belief that a "full-time student" can put in half-time effort, a disinclination to seek help.

In short: Ripley's onto something.

A note to Teaching Philosophy reviewers

I wanted to say thanks to all those who've volunteered to review manuscripts for Teaching Philosophy. (And for those who haven't, here's where to sign up.)

I also wanted to give one bit of advice: A couple of those who've signed up as reviewers have e-mailed me asking why they've not been select to review any manuscripts. In all likelihood, the answer is simple: You did not select any reviewing interests when setting up your profile. When selecting reviewers, I generally look to those who've expressed some interest in a manuscript's topical area. But if you do not indicate any reviewing interests, I'm not likely to select you as a reviewer. So I'd encourage anyone who hasn't done so to edit their profiles to include reviewing interests to do so. Reviewing interests can be subdisciplines (environmental ethics, ancient philosophy, logic, etc.) or pedagogical concerns (student writing, testing and evaluation, teaching and technology, etc.). Thanks!

Learning orientations and political bias

Later this week I'll be joining fellow ISW'ers Jennifer Morton and Harry Brighouse for a conference on "Education: Ideals and Practices." It looks to be a great event, and I thought I'd share my paper with our readers. I'd welcome any feedback you might have. The paper draws on a fair amount of empirical research about learning and personality, but it was motivated by my own observation that students' political beliefs map onto personality differences that shape how students learn.

Here's the abstract:

Anti-Conservative Bias in Education is Real — But Not Unjust

Conservatives commonly claim that systems of formal education are biased against conservative ideology. I argue that this claim is incorrect, but not because there is no bias against conservatives in formal education. A wide swath of psychological evidence linking personality and ideology indicates that conservatives and liberals differ in their learning orientations, that is, in the values, motivations, and beliefs they bring to learning tasks. These differences in operative epistemologies explain many demographic phenomena relating educational achievement and political ideology. Systems of formal education thus disadvantage conservatives, especially in the later stages of formal education. Conservatives are therefore ‘selected against’ in the process of formal education, not due to their values or ideology but because their learning orientations are not especially conducive to academic success beyond a certain point. However, because the bias against conservatives in not ideological in origin, a case cannot be made that conservatives are victims of institutional injustice. This bias against conservatives in formal education could be mitigated were the purposes of formal education radically modified (the education of the military class in Plato’s Republic serves as a model). But such a model of formal education would ill serve the needs of modern, industrialized, information-driven societies.

Latest issue of Teaching Philosophy

Teaching Philosophy v. 36, no. 2 is out — contents below the fold.

Experts as teachers, revisited

About two years ago, I asked in this e-space whether knowing too much about a given subject might be an impediment to teaching that subject. In other words, is expertise sometimes a barrier to teaching effectively?

I hypothesized that it can be when mastery of the subject comes too easily (making it difficult to relate to those who struggle to master it all) or when the instructor is simply "too close" to the material to be able to conceputalize it through more naive eyes.

Turns out that there's something to this worry: Experts in a given subject often have what some researchers call a "pedagogical blind spot" for that very subject.

Task praise revisited

Six years back, I praised Carol Dweck's work on how different forms of praise shape our attitudes toward learning. Me quoting me quoting Dweck:

"Central to Dweck's work is a distinction between two ways that learners come to understand intelligence:

Prompting the "learning emotions"

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending a workshop put on by Linda Nilson from Clemson University. The aim of Linda's workshop was to identify teaching techniques that, based on extant research on learning and cognition, enhance deep learning, retention, and retrieval.

There was an abundance of rich material in her workshop — some of which I may post about at a later date. But I wanted to share a particularly intriguing suggestion Linda offered concerning the "learning emotions."

The ethics of teaching

The long awaited International Encyclopedia of Ethics has just been published.  This looks like it will be an excellent resource. Readers of this blog may be particularly interested in my entry on the ethics of teaching.

Latest issue of Teaching Philosophy

The latest issue of Teaching Philosophy is out, with lots o' good pedagogy stuff: assessing learning in online courses, 'inference blindness,' and the value of asking students what philosophy teaches. Full TOC below the fold:

Just asking about 'Just in Time Teaching'

I've been experimenting in my classroom with some ideas inspired by Just in Time Teaching (and here). I'm intrigued by the JITT approach and would love to hear from others who have incorporated JITT-like techniques into their teaching (or who have considered doing so). I've not been able to locate any examples of JITT in philosophy teaching.

I'd be interested in knowing:

1. How does JITT differ from the inverted classroom?
2. A lot of JITT literature emphasizes that pre-class exercises should be open-ended or problem-based. Why not more 'objective' activities like quizzes, etc.?
3. How do students react to JITT methods? Does it enhance engagement and student interest?

Teaching Philosophy, 35.3

The newest issue of Teaching Philosophy is now available. Abstracts and contents follow below.