Unconventional teaching ideas that work: Feeling it first (Brendan Larvor)

By Brendan Larvor, Reader in Philosophy at the University of Hertfordshire

I was teaching philosophy of science to second year undergraduates at the University of Hertfordshire.

At first, I taught philosophy of science the usual way, with a lecture followed by a seminar. The approach was to illustrate philosophical points with examples from the history of science in the lecture, and then talk about them in the seminar. What I learned was that the scientific examples didn’t help the students to understand the philosophical points at all. These were mostly humanities students. For them, the scientific examples were at least as hard to understand as the philosophy. Above all, the whole topic was too abstract.

Through their bafflement, I came to understand a principle that has guided me ever since: lectures make no sense unless the hearer has already had an experience that they can use to interpret the lecture content. When writing a lecture, one has to ask at every stage: what in my audience’s experience will illustrate or exemplify the point I’m making? This raises an obvious problem: how do you know that your lecture audience has had a suitable experience? Besides, some philosophical material is not the sort of stuff that students are likely to have had prior experience of.

The solution is to use seminars to create the experiences that students need in order to understand the lectures. In my philosophy of science module, I reversed the order of lectures and seminars. In the seminar, we would spend some time playing a game that created an experience, and then in the lecture I would refer to it and use it to give life to an abstract idea. For example, I got students to talk in the seminar about an occasion when they or someone they knew changed their mind about something moderately significant. I would ask them how long it was between having all the evidence and making the decision. Almost inevitably, there was a temporal gap, and this would be something to do with the emotional significance of the decision. For example, people who take up vegetarianism usually know all the relevant facts long before they commit to it. That discussion would provide material for something about the role of feeling and perception in rational choice, which set up part of the following lecture on Kuhn.

For another example, I had students take turns to defend implausible theories drawn from things like fringe archaeology, new-age science or conspiracy theories. Each group of students would take a turn facing a hostile press corps played by the rest of the class. They would learn from this that even a mad idea cannot be refuted in one blow, because refutation is always the result of an accumulation of evidential bad news and ad hoc wriggling. They enjoyed thinking up outrageous auxiliary hypotheses that would keep their central idea safe from refutation. This set them up for a lecture on the Duhem-Quine hypothesis.

I didn’t spend all the seminar time playing parlour games. There was still discussion and group reading. But even these conventional activities took on a different flavour if they preceded the lecture. I would guide the discussion with the lecture in mind, and having discussed the reading first let me speak to precisely the students’ level of understanding when I eventually took the stage. When students struggle with a text having just had a lecture, they try to find the lecture content in the text, which is a losing strategy if the page they are struggling with wasn’t mentioned. Running the seminar first means that students are not distracted by the lecture content as they read, and I can make promises to explain or contextualise difficulties with the book in the lecture to follow.

It’s not a miracle cure. But it was better than drawing planetary orbits to explain a point about Lakatos, knowing that I had lost half the students before I got to the end of the astronomy.

Further Reading

Larvor, Brendan (2009) “Feeling the Force of Argument” in Andrea Kenkmann (ed.) Teaching Philosophy. London & New York: Continuum.

Show and Tell: the Manifest Virtues blog

Writings about pedagogy

Comments

[Marcus Arvan]

So cool - I really want to think about how I might try this out!

[PrinceGoGo]

This sounds great. It seems like a brilliant way to teach Phil of Science, but I'm sure it would work for many other topics (e.g. applied ethics). I try to start lectures with a 'starter question' on some accessible issue related to the lecture topic that will draw the students in, but I love the idea of the lecture being the culmination of the week's progress.

Shame this post hasn't got more attention, but I guess coming the day after a job market thread made such a fate inevitable...

[Paul]

Yes, I also think this is a really interesting idea. I teach a lot of social science and philosophy, and I am sure that this could work in some of those classes as well. Of course, coming up with the exercises is the tough part...