Making a Course One's Own

When you are assigned to teach your first course as an independent instructor, the task can seem rather daunting. You’ve been a student in many undergraduate philosophy courses and probably assisted a few, but teaching one yourself feels like something entirely different.

When I began teaching independently, my default strategy was to solicit syllabi from colleagues who had taught the course before, identify which syllabus seemed like the best fit for my preferred teaching style and course goals, and then model my course accordingly. This strategy may sound perfectly reasonable, and when we’re teaching a class for the first time, it can be very helpful to see how others have done it. However, this strategy also has a significant drawback that I want to highlight. It will be easier to illustrate with a concrete example.

In Spring 2014, I was assigned to teach Introduction to Philosophy for the first time. In preparing to teach that course, I consulted a number of sample syllabi from professors and peers who I considered good teachers. There appeared to be two general approaches: a historical approach that focused on several key philosophical figures and a topical approach that focused on addressing important philosophical questions, usually with 1-2 weeks devoted to a particular question. After some deliberation, I opted for the topical approach.

Most of the questions you’d expect to see in a topical introduction to philosophy were there: Does God exist? Can we prove there’s an external world? What does it mean to know something? Does morality depend on God or religion? On paper, the course seemed perfectly fine, but it didn’t turn out that way.

Once the semester got underway, I struggled to get students interested in some of the material. External world skepticism and pre- and post-Gettier accounts of knowledge were particularly big challenges. And sadly, once the student collective loses interest in a course, it’s extremely difficult to get it back.

The problem, I believe, was that I designed the course too much around what worked well for other instructors and not enough around what would work best for me. Some of the topics on the course syllabus were not ones that I found particularly interesting, even though I did consider them philosophically important. Now obviously it’s possible to project enthusiasm about subjects even when you don’t really have it, but in my experience, students are rather adept at discerning when it’s bogus and aren’t apt to buy into your approach to the subject matter if they think you aren’t into it.

Two years later, I was slated to teach Introduction to Philosophy again, and this time, I went in a very different direction. Instead of following a historical approach or broad topical approach to the course content, I started by asking myself what big-picture philosophical question I would want to investigate for an entire semester. Eventually, I settled on the question, “What is the good life?” I then assimilated a reading list that not only covered philosophical treatments of the topic but also contextualized this material with readings from other disciplines. We looked at happiness economics and the empirical information on the relationship between self-reported happiness and wealth. We examined the psychological concept of subjective well-being and examined what factors in a person’s life made it rise and fall. Then we considered the limitations of the measuring tools of these disciplines and tried to figure out what else beyond a person’s subjective mental states mattered to their life going well.

Through this process, we were able to explore some rather notable philosophical questions – Does a meaningful life require that there be an afterlife? Would you plug into an experience machine that could give you any life you wanted, even if the experience would only be virtual? How is moral imperfection compatible with living well? – but we did so in a very different way than in the previous course. Everything was easier the second time around: I was more passionate about the subject matter, the content felt fresher, and the students got much more immersed in the topics we discussed.

Effectively, I had taken a standard philosophy course and made it my own. The course wasn’t just an Introduction to Philosophy course; it was my Introduction to Philosophy course. This makes a world of difference. When you are teaching material that more directly connects to your own philosophical interests, you’ll be more enthusiastic about the material in the classroom and more incentivized to prep for your classes. Moreover, the students will pick up on your interest in the subject and become more interested themselves, usually resulting in a better learning experience for them.

I saw similar results when I incorporated a short unit on moral psychology into my applied ethics survey courses. I wanted to learn more about the psychological obstacles that often prevent us from acting ethically even when it’s clear what we morally ought to do, and I thought the topic was important. So I assigned a few readings on the subject one semester. The material was extremely well-received, and students generally wanted to learn more of that material. I these survey courses a few more times and kept making tweaks and additions to the readings and assignments. Eventually, the material evolved into a rather robust course unit that incorporated TED Talks and even used Disney’s Zootopia as a way to introduce students to the psychological underpinnings of bias and contemporary prejudice.

Of course, there are limits to how far one can justifiably stretch a course’s subject matter to suit their own interests. I’m not advocating that we wantonly disregard the subject matter traditionally taught in certain philosophy courses. Such a practice would be pedagogically irresponsible in many cases. (Imagine, for instance, teaching Hume’s Enquiry in a bioethics course or Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation in a metaphysics course.) My point is that you have to find ways to put your own signature on your courses – ways to make them unique and meaningful to you. It’s unlikely that you’ll unlock your real teaching potential until you accomplish this.

Doing so doesn’t mean that you have to deviate from teaching courses in conventional ways, though. You may discover that you like teaching the material that a historically-oriented intro course usually covers. Even then, you’re likely to discover different methods of assessment and class structure that better serve what your own teaching style and learning objectives for the students. What makes your course different from others doesn’t have to be the readings.

Summing up, I encourage early-career philosophers to experiment and figure out how to design your courses in ways that make them your own rather than just replicas of courses designed by other philosophers. Your teaching will be more rewarding for you when the course feels like something of your own creation, and your students will usually be more engaged with the course content.

Comments

[Amanda]

Hi Trevor,

I definitely agree teaching your own course is important. That is why I am such a big fan of instructor freedom. Students get better courses when each professor can teach to their strengths.

[Jamie]

I agree. But it’s also important that we justify why we have chosen these topics. Some students who have taken a variety of philosophy classes or are used to being in philosophy would be more familiar with the canons and other literature. They may question why we have chosen X article over Y article. Academic freedom is important but it’s also a double edge sword. The least we can do is justify why we have chosen the articles/readings to our students.

[Amanda]

I can't explain how happy I would be if more than 1 or 2 of my students cared enough that they wanted me to justify my choices.