Unconventional teaching ideas that work: close reading of Asian philosophical texts (by Ian James Kidd)

By Ian James Kidd, University of Nottingham

In spring 2016, I taught an elective (optional) second-year undergraduate philosophy course at the University of Nottingham, ‘Topics in Asian Philosophy’. Generally, the class has about sixty students, since there’s always great enthusiasm for so-called ‘non-Western’ traditions. Although I’d lectured and led seminars in philosophy of religion, Hinduism and Buddhism before, this course focused more on Chinese and Japanese philosophies, and the intention was to find a novel teaching style, for two main reasons.

The first was a desire to actually make students read the texts, to really know them in detail, rather than just relying on summaries gleaned from lectures or secondary texts. It’s clear that a majority of the students only do the reading if they are strong incentives, so a criterion for a teaching style was to necessitates, rather than merely encouraging, reading. The second was that these traditions were new to me, and sustained immersion in the texts, within a context of classroom debate, seemed a really good way to find my way around in them. (A professor advised me, many years ago, that if you want to really know a subject, “either write a book on it, or teach a course on it”). Beyond these two reasons, there were also the usual gripes that teachers have about students – of essays that repeat back the lectures notes, lack of adequate participation in discussions, and so on.

The solution was to teach Topics in Asian Philosophy using a “leminar” format, which tries to merge aspects of a lecture with a seminar. In its general format, the students are told, well in advance, that the classes will be focused on small-group and plenary discussion of the set texts. I’m explicit that there won’t be lectures, in the familiar sense of my devoting chunks of time to informing and explaining them; for that reason, I also explain that there won’t be lecture notes. We spend several weeks on a single text, which they ought to read, study, and annotate, starting with the Lunyu (Analects), for which I stipulated the translations by D.C. Lau or Edward Slingerland. Before each class, I set three or four broad questions, to act as guides for their reading: the first question for week one, for instance, was “Read Book One of the Analects and describe and comment on its literary style” – a deliberately open-ended question for their first week, given that the class was, for most of them, their first foray into Chinese philosophy. I also gave a list of ‘Things we might discuss’, based on what I supposed might come up in their group discussions (usually, only about a third of these did in fact come up, since predicting the direction of their thought became hard to predict.)

After a few opening remarks at the start of the class, they’d be launched straightaway into small group discussions for about ten to fifteen minutes, focusing on one of the pre-set questions. After this, the module tutor and I would lead a plenary discussion, on which I’d type up ideas, themes, and questions: for instance, the question about the literary style and devices of Lunyu elicited all sorts of questions – “Where are the arguments?”, “Isn’t stating the names of people the fallacy of arguing from authority?”, “Are these statements or just suggestions?” Sometimes, one group could answer the questions posed by another, which had the nice effect of showing them the value of collaborative enquiry. Other students who did the secondary reading could also show off its fruits, as one did when noting that ancient Chinese philosophers thought the authority of moral lessons can be grounded in the lives of certain exemplary persons – jūnzǐ for Confucians, zhen ren for Daoists, and so on).

Generally, the combined small-group and plenary discussions take about forty minutes, after which they’re given a five- or ten-minute break. During that time, I gather the most salient points and improvise a brief micro-lecture of no more than ten minutes, mainly to bring together emerging themes, directly responding to their contributions, provide any contextual information of use to their points, add things they missed, and to point out ways of drawing on the secondary literature (“Several of you asked how the Lunyu came to be edited, so, for that, you should take a look at…”). The micro-lecture then set up a second round of discussions, either using another pre-set question, or, if appropriate, a newer question based on what had discussed. Such meandering made for much more organic discussions, ensuring that our progress – during each class, from week to week – was less rigid. Without a fixed lecture schedule – “Week one: practice; Week two: rites; Week three: ren” – we were free to explore Confucianism in a more open, exploratory way. Actually, the distinctions between topics soon melted away; discussions would naturally invoke themes like practice, rites, and ren, mirroring their integration with the Lunyu and in Confucianism. (The few students who skipped all the classes were therefore dismayed when they asked, a few weeks before the exam, “Which lecture notes do I study if I’m answering a question on the rites?” and learned that there wasn’t a single “rites lecture”).

The course ran for twelve weeks and traced a course through Confucianism (the Lunyu, then the debate over human nature conducted by Mengzi and Xunzi) into Daoism (Daodejing and selections from the Zhuangzi) and then, later on, into Japanese Buddhist aesthetics.

Across the course, two main tasks for me, as module leader, were to keep us moving and to ensure that the route did take in the major ‘sights’ of the relevant texts and schools. One can’t very well teaching Confucianism, for instance, without engaging such self-selectingly important topics as music, rites, and filial piety.) Going from Confucianism to Daoism was easier, since the students wanted criticisms of the Lunyu, whereas the movement from Zhuangzi to the wabi-sabi aesthetic was less organic – not that any of them seemed to mind.

Since the format was experimental, I solicited continuous feedback, from the module tutor and the students, and the consensus was that the leminar format for a text-based class on Asian philosophy had the following advantages:

• It really incentivises doing the reading: most of the class time is taken up with a close reading of Analects, Daodejing, and other texts. Within the class discussions, I would ask them, continuously, “Reference?”, which got them into the habit of being able to point to sections of the texts. It also helped them think philosophically using texts, to appreciate the fact that moral ideas are integrated into practices, personalities, and ways of life. More pragmatically, the students were constantly reminded that half of the exam involved close analysis of selected passages from the texts.
• It helps the students to read in careful and sustained ways, which was clearly not an automatic feature of their approach to philosophical study. Since the Chinese and Japanese texts are often opaque and ambiguous, they hard to work hard to discover their meanings and learn new skills to explore and critically assess the interpretive possibilities that they offer. Some of the students clearly disliked the idea that the texts did not just ‘give’ their meanings, openly and easily, although most of them did come round to the idea that understanding is an effortful practice, worth mastering. (Most of them really got to grips with the relation of literary style to philosophical reasoning once they were taught the exemplarist reading of the Lunyu offered by Amy Olberding – especially the students who were studying classics, theology, and English literature, who were used to narrative analysis and textual hermeneutics). It was also useful, as a philosophy teacher, to realise how much work I had been saving them, in the past, by simply telling them the arguments, the objections, and so on – a style of teaching that doesn’t let them develop the abilities to identify underlying structures of arguments and then assemble them, under their own steam).
• It lets the students see a course which is open and organic in its structure, with one of them saying it was striking to see the class “thinking its way forward”, rather than following a pre-set schedule of topics. Rather than take them on a tour of classical Chinese philosophy with a fixed schedule, we’d use a text as an entry point from which they could explore at will, following their interests. Most importantly, this meant the students were typically always invested in the current discussions, since they had played an active role in its trajectory. (Not always, of course—sometimes, they were more averse to certain topics that I felt they needed to know, such as the Confucian defences of tradition, but those are cases where they simply have to trust in the judgment of their guide, the teacher).

But there are disadvantages, too, some of the main being:

• The improvisatory style is tiring, since though one has a general sense of what might be discussed in the class, one really has to prepare for all possibilities. There is a lot of prior preparation, since until the class gets going, one can’t tell which of the many topics might come up – a class on Confucian rites, for instance, could lead into a discussion of music, or of virtues, or of harmony, or of spontaneity, or go right into the Daoist and Mohist critiques. It takes a lot of preparation to prepare the relevant secondary texts, to know them well enough to improvise micro-lectures on them if they should come up in the discussion, and so on. Still, that’s also a useful skill to try to cultivate and one that becomes easier, with more and more practice.
• The temptation for many students was to forsake the secondary scholarship, and to simply read the texts and comment on them – to “say what they see”, rather than an oscillation between the primary and secondary texts. For the first few weeks, they’re allowed to focus on the primary texts, although, after that, much more emphasis was placed on the back-and-forth use of primary and secondary texts. Moreover, the students were all recommended certain secondary texts, which I’d always use in the classes – for instance, to read out a particularly lucid exposition of some idea, and so show them how to use the scholarship when philosophising. It’s hard work to keep raising the bar, week by week, by requiring increasingly attention to and use of the scholarship. But with constant emphasis and discipline, most of them achieve it.
• The difficult task is to balance the students’ own interests and the wider integrity of the traditions. Sometimes, they wanted to focus on topics familiar to them, such as virtues or the nature of argumentation, rather than others, like the family or the moral significance of music, which were not on their philosophical radar. Sometimes, a topic integral to one of the traditions just did not take their interest, meaning they had to be nudged into studying it – the importance of tradition, for instance. There’s a great value to incorporating their interests, as long as one bears in mind that these will not always track or correlate with the content of the traditions they’re exploring.

Although there are other advantages and disadvantages, the general consensus is that the leminar format does work very well to get students reading primary texts – not least since I told them, at the off, that there would be no lectures, therefore no lecture notes. Nor would I devote time in the micro-lectures to explaining general points (like the origin of the term jūnzǐ, say) which were explained perfectly clearly in the scholarship (in those cases, I would tell them to “read Harrison, chapter four, part one”). The classes were therefore primarily taken up with close reading and small-group and plenary discussions, punctuated by regular breaks and my interventions—one student said that they liked the sense that, in the class, “we are really philosophising, rather than just being taught philosophy”. At least in my own experience, this leminar format works well to get students philosophising from the texts.

 

Comments

[Amanda]

Sounds like this worked very well for you. I am a bit skeptical that the type of students I teach would be motivated to read. But I do think it would be easy to add quizzes, which usually helps with students reading. When the students were doing their small group discussions, what did you do? Did you go around and talk to each group? Sorry if I missed this in the post.

[Ian James Kidd]

Hi, Amanda! With motivation, the reiteration of the importance of close reading of the texts to the exam helped, as did my steadfast refusal to lecture or to provide lectures notes. If they did nothing, I would do nothing. Some of them did come to enjoy the close-reading, too. With the small-group discussions, I left them to discuss, all the while checking on them (either observing, listening in, or, less often, going table to table - sometimes, if I joined in, they'd clam up...!)

[Amanda]

Thanks Ian - not sure if I would have the confidence to stand there and do nothing, but that is indeed a strategy that hadn't occurred to me.

[Clerk]

Would you be willing to share your list of secondary readings? I have a medium-term goal of developing a similar course, and it would be helpful to me to know what you (and then the students) have found helpful in coming to grips with these traditions.

[Ian James Kidd]

Hi Clerk! Sure thing - email me at [email protected] and, once I'm back in the office next week, I will send them. From memory, the main books we used were Ivanhoe, 'Confucian Reflections'; Harrison, 'Eastern Philosophy: The Basics'; van Norden, 'An Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy'; Kupperman, 'Classic Asian Philosophy'; Goldin, 'Confucianism'; Kohn, 'Introducing Daoism'.

[Clerk]

Will do--thanks very much!