The Philosophers' Cocoon

Teaching Lemonade (Beyoncé) in a feminism course (Louise Pedersen)

By Louise Pedersen, University of Utah

I am a fifth-year graduate student at the University of Utah. During the Fall ’19 and Spring ’20 semesters I taught an upper-level undergraduate course titled “Philosophical Issues in Feminism: Lessons from Beyoncé’s Lemonade.” During the first week of class, the students watched Lemonade, which served as the entry point into the academic literature on the related topics. I got the idea for the class from writer Candice Benbow who, after the release of Lemonade in 2016, initiated an interdisciplinary collection of texts (over 200) that could be used for a Lemonade syllabus (Lemonade Syllabus 2016).    

For those unfamiliar with the world of Beyoncé, Lemonade is a visual album featuring twelve songs that narrate the struggles of being a Black woman in America. Each song is accompanied by its own music video, and when watched in sequence, these videos create a one-hour movie full of visually stunning imagery. The narrative of the film tells a story of a woman who has been betrayed by her husband. It is an intimate look at a personal love story that covers eleven emotional stages: intuition, denial, anger, apathy, emptiness, accountability, reformation, forgiveness, resurrection, hope, and redemption. While the story is captivating, it is the metanarrative of Lemonade that is philosophically interesting. The metanarrative concerns the broader context of historical meaning, embodied experiences, and knowledge production (from the perspective of Black women). These are the philosophical elements that I teased out of Lemonade.

Teaching Lemonade as feminist philosophy is a way to connect critical theory with real-world issues. The students learned how (theoretical) issues of gender, race, and oppression are undeniably related to the history of African American women. While the star power of Beyoncé might initially have interested students in the class, I found that they quickly switched their focus and became immersed in the topics from the metanarrative.

Building the Syllabus Based on Lemonade’s Metanarrative

When I taught the class, I divided it into three units: feminism, intersectionality, and race and oppression. We spent roughly five weeks on each unit. During the fall semester, I taught the class twice a week (80-minute classes), and during the spring, I taught it three times a week (50-minute classes). I preferred the format of twice a week since it gave me more time to go in-depth with the “heavier” material.

Unit 1, Feminism: Lemonade invites questions about what it means to be a feminist. Can a feminist be sexy (as Beyoncé surely seems to believe)? Why would some, like bell hooks in her article Moving Beyond Pain, say that Beyoncé, in all her exploitative, capitalist endeavors, is bad for feminism? How should feminist philosophy be understood with regards to dominance and patriarchy? The main readings for unit 1 were from Patricia Hill Collins’ Black Feminist Thought supplemented by articles by Catharine MacKinnon, Sally Haslanger, and Sandra Lee Bartky.

Unit 2, Intersectionality: Intersectionality is an integral part of Lemonade. With Black women portrayed in all shapes and sizes against an antebellum background, we are reminded that gender, class, and race (to mention a few factors) are ever-present features of our social world. In this unit, I stressed the importance of acknowledging privilege and understanding the multifaceted adverse effects of oppression. The University of Utah does not have a very diverse student body (it is 70% white with just 1% African American), so this was a good teaching opportunity to raise awareness of a topic that the students (most likely) had been unaware of.

It is important to note that I am also a white woman. I was born and raised in middle-class Denmark, but I have lived in the United States for the last twenty years. I use myself as an example of being aware of my privilege, and I am conscious of trying not to speak for others in ways that are harmful (to not encroach where I have no epistemic authority). This problem of speaking for others, as Linda Alcoff has argued, is one that comes with a heavy responsibility, as it could reinforce existing hierarchies and silence lesser-privileged groups. The main readings for unit 2 were from Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge’s Intersectionality accompanied by articles by Marilyn Frye and bell hooks.

Unit 3, Race and Oppression: In Lemonade we hear Jay-Z’s grandmother give a speech in which she says “I had my ups and downs, but I always find the inner strength to pull myself up. I was served lemons, but I made lemonade.” Beyoncé’s use of this idiom is an ode to Black women. Despite a history of oppression, they have proven to be resilient and strong against such hardship. In unit 3, I focused on what a theoretical framework of oppression might look like and on what connections such a framework would have to race. The readings for unit 3 were a selection of articles by Iris Marion Young, Kristie Dotson, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Anthony Kwame Appiah.

Assignments

The students were graded on a variety of assignments: two short reflection papers (20% of final grade), participation (20%), a short presentation of a topic (relevant to the class) from a news article (15%), a comprehensive final exam (20%), a final paper abstract (5%), and a “Lesson Learned” final paper (20%). By writing the five-page final paper, the students came full circle. They had to choose a lesson they had found valuable from Lemonade and connect it to something they had learned from the metanarrative. They students were incredibly resourceful and imaginative in writing these assignments. Here are some examples of the titles of papers the students wrote: “Forgiveness, Faith, and Redemption in Lemonade,” “Black Women’s Spirituality in Lemonade,” “Cultural Trauma and Black Families,” Color Brave: The Symbolic Use of Color in Beyoncé’s Lemonade,” “Personal Identity in Beyoncé’s Lemonade,” and “Southern Reformation: Beyoncé’s Rejection of Negative Stereotypes in Lemonade.”

In conclusion, using popular culture as an entry point into philosophy is a great way to gain the interest of undergraduate students. Beyoncé’s Lemonade offers rich opportunities for philosophical inquiry, as it is full of subtle references to gender, race, oppression, power, and hierarchal relationships. Lemonade puts black girl magic at the center, and, very unapologetically, squeezes those lemons and douses them with a heaping spoonful of sugar.

 

 

Teaching a pop-culture philosophy course

A lot of really cool practices have been shared in Helen's unusual teaching ideas series. While I've tried out a few unusual things over the years, and I generally try to 'expand the canon' (in terms of content I assign), for the most part my courses have been pretty conventional. My courses are usually highly-structured, with daily reading responses, in-class group work, traditional exams, term-papers, and so on. I also confess to previously being skeptical of 'pop culture philosophy classes' of the sort I've heard about over the years (e.g. courses on Harry Potter & Philosophy and whatnot). However, because I think it's important to be openminded and experiment pedagogically, last fall I created and taught a lower-division special topics course, 'Philosophy and Pop Culture' for the first time.

As you can see in my syllabus, I structured it thematically similar in many respects to how I teach an ordinary Intro class (though I taught a number of specific themes here that I don't there, including figures--such as Ayn Rand--who I don't standardly teach but who have had considerable influence in pop culture). Beyond that, however, the course could not have been more different than past courses I have taught: different in terms of course  policies, content, assignments, and many other things.

First, I experimented with different course policies. For example, whereas I normally have strict attendance policies, in this course I experimented with not having one (above and beyond the requirement that students must turn in their homework). I decided to experiment with this in part because I thought the course's content would be interesting enough to draw students to class on their own, but also because I read a Chronicle of Higher Ed article a while back on the importance of helping students find intrinsic motivation and interest that I found persuasive--so I wanted to give it a shot. Another logistical difference was that whereas course meetings in my other courses are highly structured, in this one there was no daily structure beyond a short lecture by me along with (usually) brief presentations of pop-culture material (television scenes, songs, etc.). These policy experiments, to be honest, did not work terribly well--and some students expressed dissatisfaction in my course evaluations (which were decidedly mixed). However, other aspects of course--the daily reading responses I had students do and especially the final project I assigned--were truly special. Indeed, many of the final projects were truly inspiring, reminding me of why I wanted to be a professor in the first place and how philosophy can be transformative for students.

The reading response assignments I gave were similar to the ones I normally require in my courses, but in this case students had to use some element of pop culture--say, a scene, dialogue, or lyrics from a film or song I assigned, or an element of pop culture of their choosing--to shed some kind of philosophical insight on the reading for the day. These were wonderful in a couple of respects. First, students routinely offered really nice insights on the pop culture works I assigned--and the pop culture works themselves appeared to help students grasp the philosophical issues in the readings better than in my standard courses. Second, students brought in outside pop culture material--scenes from their favorite shows, songs, and so on--far more often than I expected, in ways that again were often really insightful, but also brought (in particularly vivid ways) elements of their background, social identity, and experiences to bear on the philosophical material in ways that I think enriched the classroom for everyone. Finally, the way that students brought pop culture they identified with to class brought students together, helping them relate to each other--and to me as well (students would often talk to me over class, saying things like, "Do you know this song? I think it totally relates to what X was arguing today). The dynamic between students, and between them as me, was very different--more human, more personal, I'd say (in a good way)--than in just about every other class I've ever taught.

Finally, there were the final projects--which I thought were the highest point of any course I've ever taught. Here, I gave the students an option: they could either (A) select some feature of pop culture of their own and use a detailed analysis of some element of it to make an original philosophical argument on a topic in the course (much like in a standard term-paper, but focusing on using the pop-culture in question to make an effective argument); or (B) they could create a pop culture work of their own (a song, a short film, etc.) and then use it to make an argument. I wasn't sure if any students would choose option B, but one student did: an international student who painted a gorgeous original painting to convincingly argue (inspire by Socrates and Nozick) that it is possible, through self-deception, to have high levels of subjective well-being but live a miserable life. All of the other students chose pop culture works from the world around us--and the things they chose and the arguments they gave were, by turns, hysterically funny, moving, and insightful. Let me give just a few cases.

I will begin with one case. One student, an art major, said he had always been taught in his major that "art is subjective." In the course, however, we read a short article giving a Wittgensteinian analysis of art as a family-resemblance cluster concept. So, the student said, he wanted to figure out whether that could be right. He then showed us the following (very silly) video:

Then he told us about Vito Acconci's notorious Seedbed performance art piece (which I had never heard of before), where "Gallery visitors entered to find the space empty except for a low wood ramp. Hidden below the ramp, out of sight, Acconci masturbated, basing his fantasies on the movements of the visitors above him. He narrated these fantasies aloud, his voice projected through speakers into the gallery." The student's question was whether there is any cluster concept (or set of family resemblances) for 'art' that competent language users really share, or whether the concept is so "open" that art really is just subjective. The student didn't solve the issue of course--but we had a fascinating, insightful, and hilarious class discussion.

Another student, who is Catholic, did his project on the problem of evil, showing this astonishing song and video (which I think is fantastic, both in content and performance at all levels, audio, visual, personal, etc.):

The presentation and discussion that followed--which examined the extent to which whether a theodicy seems persuasive may depend largely on one's epistemic standpoint, ranging from one's social identity, to one's personal history, to the psychological standpoint one is in from one moment, or day, or year, to another. It was the single best discussion of the problem of evil I've ever been a part of. 

Finally, a third student picked several scenes from The Green Mile to examine whether Kant's ethics can provide an adequate analysis of what prison guards are morally obligated to do when they know in their bones that an inmate who is about to be executed is innocent. Should they follow orders, or do they have a duty to help the prisoner escape, even at great cost to themselves?:

After showing this video, the student shared that the case was profoundly personal to him: that his own uncle was convicted and executed for a crime that there was convincing evidence he did not commit (e.g. DNA evidence that was ruled inadmissable). The student argued, choking back tears, that Kant's theory requires guards to do their duty. While subsequent class discussion (which was conducted compassionately by all) debated whether Kant's theory really has this implication, the student who gave the presentation came up to me after class and said the course had opened his eyes about a tremendous number of things--about his own life and the world he lives in--that he had either never thought about before or had thought about but felt like he didn't understand. He said the course changed his life. I choked back tears. I remembered why, at that moment, I had always wanted to be a philosophy professor--and of just how much of a privilege and responsibility it is.

'Scavenger hunts' as a teaching method

By David Egan (Hunter College)

I recently finished teaching a course on aesthetics for the first time. Because aesthetics is a topic that students have an independent interest in (insofar as they all have at least some interest in the arts, even if that interest is primarily satisfied by Netflix) I tried in a number of ways to incorporate their own aesthetic experience into the class. One of the more successful experiments was a "scavenger hunt" that I held roughly every week-and-a-half to two weeks.

The hunt itself worked as follows: I would post a challenge on the course website for them to take a photo according to some specified criterion and a week later in class we would review the results together. The grade for their contributions was low (5% of the total course grade) and they got full credit if they made at least three contributions over the course of the semester: no grade and no judgment for the content of the posts. (More than three contributions counted toward extra credit for their participation grade.)

In selecting topics for the scavenger hunt, I aimed to find assignments that would feed into the material we'd be discussing in that class, and the most successful assignments were the ones that did that most successfully. I'll give a couple of examples:

Teaching scepticism cross-culturally (Roger Clarke)

This is a guest post by Roger Clarke, Queens University Belfast

I've found myself teaching a class ("module", in the local dialect) on scepticism in Sextus Empiricus, Nāgārjuna, and Zhuāngzǐ. I do so, despite a complete lack of training in any of the philosophical traditions those three philosophers belong to. I think this might be interesting to others as an example of (a) teaching what you don't already know and also (b) including non-Western philosophical traditions without, I hope, either tokenising or taking jobs away from specialists.

Let me acknowledge something important at the start here. I'm a cisgender able-bodied white man. I even wear a beard. I look a whole lot like the stereotypical philosopher. Regardless of how much respect I deserve from my students, I have had to do less to earn it than other folks might. So, some of the strategies that have worked for me might not work as well for other teachers. I am, after all, describing here a style of teaching that involves the brazen absence of a certain kind of expertise usually present and generally expected in a teacher; for this to work, students must be willing to believe the teacher deserves their job and has a sound plan for the class.

Reflective practice exercise (Kate Norlock)

This is a guest post by Kate Norlock, Trent University.

Thanks to Helen De Cruz for encouraging me to write about my favorite assignment for this series. I am not the only professor who assigns a “Reflective Practice Exercise” of some sort, so I’m not sure this qualifies as unusual. So many of you do similar things that I’m keen to learn of different versions in the comments! But I am finding myself sharing my particular version a lot, and I hope it is interesting or helpful to others, especially if you teach introductory courses of over one hundred students.

First, here is the full text of a typical version of my Reflective Practice Exercise. 

The short version of it is this:

Pick one of the theories on our syllabus.

Plan out how you could practice it for at least seven hours over seven days.

Then practice it, and read and write about it every day of practice, following the instructions for how to write brief entries every hour/day. Then write a summary page about your own experience according to the instructions.

Before I go into the details, let me provide this quick explanation as to why I started assigning Reflective Practice. I am influenced by scholars of teaching and learning who argue that students benefit from assignments that involve them in their own learning processes. When I assign a hundred students to read Aristotle, they read his statement that it’s not enough to just hear or read what virtue might require, it is necessary to practice the virtues; otherwise, Aristotle says, they are “like patients who listen attentively to their doctors, but do [none of the actions].” This assignment is my attempt to get students to not just listen to me, but do the activities that Aristotle and I describe.

Of course, they do not have to practice Aristotle’s ethics! In the first month of the term, I make the pitch to my intro students that they must read over the whole syllabus and choose one theory to practice for at least seven hours and ideally over seven different days. I introduce the assignment to the students months before it is due, but advise them that I will not collect their work until after our midterm break. We talk about the project as a class, and I encourage them to start thinking early and often about what to practice, and how. I remind them of the exercise again, occasionally, in the course of covering different theories in different weeks.

They can choose any theory from our syllabus, with the following condition: “Although it is tempting, don’t choose a practice that you’re already doing for the same reasons identified by an author of this course… This is an opportunity to reflect on a habit you do not currently have.” On the first page of their write-ups, students write a line or two explaining why they chose the practice. (Since Stoic Week often occurs during our fall term, some students are motivated to choose it as their practice. Most of them are clear about why: “I thought Epictetus was wrong and weird and utterly the opposite of me.”)

Teaching Ethics to Business Students: The Ethics Project (Jason Brennan)

This is a guest post by Jason Brennan, Georgetown University

I work in a PPE-style department at Georgetown’s business school. I generally teach 2 preps a year, one traditional PPE-style course and one applied business ethics course on a particular subject (such as business and the environment, or social business and non-profit management). Most of my students are business majors. 

Teaching business ethics can be difficult for a bunch of reasons. One is that there just isn’t much good business ethics worth reading, period, so there isn’t much worth teaching. The academic subfield is rather weak. (For instance, one of the most widely cited papers on sweatshops literally contains no argument for its conclusion.) Many of the textbooks are bad—they consist entirely of platitudes, or case studies, or awkward “What would a utilitarian do in situation X”-type chapters. A third reason is that business students are often not that interested in learning philosophical ideas—and (fourth reason?) their lack of interest is largely justified. If you study the moral psychological literature on why businesspeople make moral mistakes, it’s not usually a problem of moral confusion which can be clarified with philosophical training, but instead problems about moral blind spots, conformity, akrasia, or bad incentives created by bad rules.

For the past 8 years, in my PPE course and in some of my business ethics classes, I’ve been using what I call The Ethics Project as my main semester-long class activity.

Here’s the basic description:

Think of something good to do. Do it.

Unconventional teaching ideas that work: Teaching Experimental Philosophy to Undergraduate students (Helen De Cruz)

I've been teaching a course on experimental philosophy to third-year undergraduates at Oxford Brookes University. The course is a mix of teaching the basics about statistical thinking and using statistical methods, and an introduction to experimental philosophy as an approach to answer philosophical queestions. Of all the courses I am teaching, this one has the most positive teaching evaluations, and also is the course that students put most effort in (as several students told me, they worked very hard on this course). 

How the course is set up

I teach this in weekly sessions for 2.5 hours in a seminar room with computers. 

The course alternates between discussions about recent papers in experimental philosophy and practical sessions. The discussion sessions are in a seminar format. We look at recent works in experimental philosophy, such as Markus Kneer and Edouard Machery's recent paper on moral luck. We also discuss papers on what experimental philosophy is, such as Regina Rini's and Antti Kauppinen's work. I start each session by briefly walking students through the experimental setup of these papers, and the broader philosophical implications (because, not everyone does the reading although my sense is students have at least skimmed these papers). We then discuss whether the papers under consideration successfully establish what they set out to do. I also let students individually, or in groups, think about alternative ways to test the same claim (e.g., folk views on moral luck, whether being a utilitarian makes you morally better). 

The aim of these theoretical sessions is to give students a good sense of how experimental philosophy works and what its limitations are. Usually, the discussions are engaged and occasionally students come up with wonderful ideas. 

The practical sessions I start with a one-hour introduction (I know this is long, but it really does take some time, at least for me) to explain a particular statistical technique. I look at the history of the technique, who invented it, what it has been used for. We go into quite some details about the mathematics - this really engages some students but it is fair to say some students find this boring. The majority seem at least mildly engaged. 

Unconventional teaching ideas that work: Asking your students to perform 90 minutes of kindness for no reward (Eric Schwitzgebel)

Guest post by Eric Schwizgebel, University of California, Riverside, reprinted from Eric's personal blog the splintered mind. 

Followers of this blog will recall my post from October 30, where I solicited ideas about a "Kindness Assignment" for my lower-division philosophy class "Evil". The assignment was to perform ninety minutes of kindness for one or more people, with no formal accountability or reward. I canceled one day of class to free up time for students to perform their act of kindness. I described the Kindness Assignment as "required", but I told them I would not be checking on or grading them in any way.

Here's the full text of the Kindness Assignment.

During the final exam, I gave students a single detached page, front and back, on which they could write about their experiences with the Kindness Assignment. The page was prominently marked as "optional". I said I would not grade their responses and would only view the responses after final grades were submitted, so that their reports would have no influence of any sort on their grades.

On the page, students could say what they did (if anything), what they learned (if anything), how they felt about the fact that there was no reward or accountability, how they felt about having spent 90 minutes that way, and how their thoughts about the assignment connected to course themes. I also asked students whether they thought I should give the Kindness Assignment again, and if so, what if anything they would recommend changing. Here's the full text of the response sheet.

Three hundred and ninety-eight students took the final exam. Of these, 150 (38%) wrote something on the Kindness Assignment response sheet. It was a long and difficult exam, and since responding was optional and not for credit, some students who completed the Kindness Assignment may not have submitted a response. I assume that many or most of non-submitters did not complete the assignment. Reviewing the responses, I estimate that 20% of the students who submitted a response said that they did not perform the assignment. Thus, approximately 120 students performed the Kindness Assignment and chose to tell me about their experience.

Understandably, in the context of an exam, only a minority of students took the time to answer all eight questions on the two-page response sheet. Some just gave a brief summary of what they did. Others praised or criticized the assignment without detailing what they did.

Responses to "What, if anything, did you do for the Kindness Assignment?"

 

Unconventional teaching ideas that work: Mindfulness meditation in the philosophy classroom (by Sara Protasi)

Guest post by Sara Protasi (Puget Sound)

My use of meditation in teaching philosophy has gradually grown out of my own, alas still too sporadic and inconsistent, personal practice. I became acquainted with mindfulness meditation through both yoga and psychological therapy, and through a workshop that I attended as a graduate student.

When I started teaching a class on human nature, in 2015, I introduced the students to meditation through two readings. One is a difficult, but in my view rewarding, scholarly article about the role of sati (mindfulness) in classical Buddhism (Bhikkhu Bodhi 2011). The other is a short paper presenting some studies on the (positive) changes in the brain brought about by a consistent meditation practice (Davidson, R. J., & Lutz, A. 2008)

It was natural for me to start the class discussing these readings with a short meditation exercise. Students liked it, and one group of students in particular asked me for repeated sessions throughout the semester. That inspired me to incorporate meditation in the class more regularly.

Unconventional teaching ideas that work: Skill-focused teaching through a philosophical service project (by Nathan Nobis)

Guest post by Nathan Nobis, Morehouse College, Atlanta, GA USA

I teach an "Introduction to Philosophical Ethics" course in an interactive, discussion-based and skills-focused manner. The core skills involve trying to figure out whether a reason given in support of some conclusion on a moral issue is a good one or not. We start with common arguments, things that ordinary people often say, and then move onto arguments that philosophers focus on. Here's my simplification of what we do:

I try to provide a minimal set of concepts to do what we do, with a one-page handout "Philosophical Ethics: Almost Everything You Need to Know" and a video on formulating arguments in logically valid form, typically as syllogisms. We practice these skills on a variety of contemporary moral issues, mostly in the order presented by Rachels' Elements of Moral Philosophy book.

Their final assignment involves students sharing their moral reasoning skills with an audience of people not in our class. Students have to show this audience how to rationally evaluate moral arguments, using examples they provide, and then teach the audience some basic skills at doing this, involving arguments that the audience provides. I call this "philosophical community service."

Here is the assignment:

Philosophical Service Project

For this assignment, you will perform some "philosophical community service." The service you will provide is demonstrating to the community how to think critically about moral issues using the logical methods we've practiced in this class. So, you will model thinking in systematic ways about moral issues, engage some arguments from your audience and help them evaluate these arguments.

Here's what to do:

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.

Unconventional teaching ideas that work: The curiosity project (Melissa Shew)

[UPDATE: comments now open!]

By Melissa Shew, Marquette University 

There are only three requirements for the Curiosity Project. The Curiosity Project MUST:

1. Engage and respond to a philosophical question, sincerely asked and pursued
2. Use individual group members’ gifts and talents
3. Be wildly creative

At the beginning of a semester, when I tell students that they will be giving a group presentation and I write these criteria for it on the board, few of them think that they’re capable of creating a 35-40 minute presentation in philosophy, especially at a foundational level. Most don’t even know what philosophy is or why they’re required to take it, let alone how it relates to their lives, academic interests, or the world. They are uncertain, skeptical, and worried. Some are intrigued, of course, but they are in the minority. Most students at the end of the semester, however, are genuinely surprised by what they have accomplished through their Curiosity Projects.

I developed the Curiosity Project eight years ago and have used it in a variety of upper- and lower-division college courses as well as at the high school level. This project is adaptable to a variety of courses and diverse populations, though I think it is of most value in introductory philosophy courses. My anecdotal evidence suggests that students in introductory courses find immense value in pursuing their own philosophical questions in a collaborative project with their peers. They learn how to investigate a philosophical question in a complex and meaningful way that includes rigorous philosophical research through sustained use of philosophy databases and resources. They also often enjoy it and work hard because they feel like they are “hot on the trail” in pursuit of their question. It is very much their own adventure.

This investment in their own education is a manifest rejection of what Paulo Freire calls the “banking model of education,” a top-down model of teaching that mimics oppressive structures as a whole. In this view, the best student is the one who is most obedient, docile, and imitative of the educator in being able to reproduce a body of knowledge, for this reproduction is the standard by which academic success is measured. In contrast, my sensibilities as an educator integrate four different pedagogical paths that I try to live out in the classroom and that motivate the Curiosity Project for me:

1) Socratic pedagogy;

2) Critical pedagogy, especially in affirming the “problem-posing” model of education

   through dialogue (Freire) and bell hooks’ work on engaged pedagogy;

3) Ignatian pedagogy, summed up by St. Ignatius’ statement that an “enduring

   contemplative stance” is essential for education;

4) Feminist pedagogy, in which educators reject the banking method of education “in

   favor of a more complex and social process of knowledge-making through interaction,

   collaboration, and negotiation." In this view, "every learner brings a specific perspective”

   (“Construction of Knowledge,” from “A Guide to Feminist Pedagogy,”

   https://my.vanderbilt.edu/femped/habits-of-head/construction-of-knowledge/).

Indeed, as a result of their work on the Curiosity Project, many students in my classes have decided to major or minor in philosophy, feeling both personally and academically fulfilled by the discipline, recognizing both their desires and abilities to enter into it. Moreover, the project also implicitly encourages students to recognize the importance of the humanities more broadly, which I consider a great good in our current climate of higher education. I’ve had many students pursue upper-division project- and research-oriented and interdisciplinary opportunities as a result of their completion of this project. Additionally, students appreciate that they cultivate a wide variety of skills that can be helpful in pursuing internship, scholarship, and job opportunities.

Unconventional teaching ideas that work: Using monastic meditative reflection in the classroom (Jake Wright)

By Jake Wright, Senior Lecturer at the University of Minnesota Rochester

In my introduction to philosophy class at the University of Minnesota Rochester, I begin each class with a fairly lengthy session of meditative reflection, based on the medieval monastic practice lectio divina. 

I’ve spelled the practice out for my students in more detail here, but very briefly, I choose an excerpt of text for students to reflect on privately, followed by a brief group discussion, additional private reflection, and finally, all-class discussion.  

The passage is often, but not necessarily, from reading assigned for the day and illustrates some important point that I want students to have a fuller understanding of before we begin class.  For example, I’ve asked students to reflect on Paley’s description of the human eye to drive home the weight of his analogy, and I’ve asked students to reflect on Marquis’ discussion of why killing is wrong to set the table for a discussion of how death impacts the value and meaning of life.  In each case, the selected passage is quite short—no more than a paragraph and sometimes as short as a single sentence—in order to allow students to reflect more deeply on a single concept or point, rather than trying to hold an entire argument, view, etc. in their head.

The goal of the discussions, both group and all-class, is to get a sense of students’ reactions to the excerpted text.  These reactions might include trying to interpret the text, but also gives students a chance to voice other reactions, like confusion, revulsion, or the feeling of “getting it”.  For example, though abortion wasn’t the day’s topic when we reflected on the Marquis excerpt, students were aware of the passage’s source; some expressed discomfort with Marquis’ account not because of what he said in the moment, but where the view ultimately led. 

After the group discussion, I take a moment to quickly collate the responses, which I’ve written on the board, and pull out major themes.  Is there a student whose interpretation is spot on?  Is there an interpretation that is problematic, but in an interesting or illustrative way?  Does there seem to be a common source of confusion or interest?  These will typically serve as both a starting point for the class’s formal discussion of the topic and also useful references as we work our way through the material.  (I typically work from a handout and not slides so I can have more flexibility in how I discuss topics.)

Starting class in this way has had a number of benefits.

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.

Unconventional teaching ideas that work: On writing fun, strange, and open ended exams (C. Thi Nguyen)

Guest post by C. Thi Nguyen is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Utah Valley University. His first book, Games: Agency as Art, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. 

I try to write exam questions that are funny, startling, and open-ended. My goal is to give students a lovely note to end the class on. I want their final structured activity in my class to exemplify the virtues and joys of open-minded investigation. I give them weird questions – presenting them with funny situations, novel problems, new and thought-provoking arguments. I give them a wide range of questions to choose from, so they can pick exactly the topics that get them the most excited. And I give them questions that are open-ended – that I don’t know the answer to. And I tell them so explicitly.

The last interaction we have with our students is often that final exam. For many of our general education students, this will be the coda to their only brush with philosophy – maybe their only brush with the humanities. The final exam is the grand finale. And what taste do we want to leave them with? Do we want to leave them with the sense that philosophy is a dreary thing, forced on them from the outside? That doing philosophy is trying to meet some external standard, where what looms in their head most strongly is the sense of possible failure? Or do we want to leave them with the sense that philosophy is a live thing, that it can play with new topics — that it can, in fact, be fun?

Many philosophy teachers now agree that we should try to embody the virtues of thoughtfulness in the classroom. Instead of just laying out what we think is the right theory, we make a show of open-mindedness and thoughtfulness. We push for dialogue, we flip sides in the middle of class, we reflect and visibly enact the process of reflection. But we also usually abandon that pedagogy when it comes to exam design. I used to make boring exams, because I had assumed that the sole purpose of an exam was to assess the student’s abilities and knowledge.

One of my graduate school advisors used to caution against thinking that the only purpose of grading was to render a judgment of student abilities. Grades, she said, are another teaching tool for getting through to the student — a way of communicating to the student, of signaling to them that they’re doing better or worse. I expanded that suggestion to the design of exams themselves. Assessment is only one function of an exam. Exams are a structured activity for the student, where we direct them to think in a certain way and in certain problems. They are yet another tool we have to suggest certain intellectual attitudes. And the final exam occupies a very special place. It is the final taste they get of philosophy – what will linger in their mouths, when they think back on it. If we can use tests to get students to like philosophical reflection, to enjoy critical thinking, to feel the payoff in their get, then we should — even if it comes at the price of a complete, fair, and rigorous assessment.

So here’s the nitty gritty. I teach a lot of introductory ethics courses and introduction to philosophy courses at Utah Valley University, a large, open-enrollment university. Many of my students are first-generation college students. Most of those taking introductory ethics are doing so only to fulfill a requirement. On the very first day of class, I describe the purpose of the class, and tell them exactly what the exams will be like. I warn them, before they’re committed to the class, that the exams will be unusual.

Unconventional teaching ideas that work: Teaching about personhood without mentioning abortion (E.M. Dadlez)

Guest post by  E.M. Dadlez, Professor at the Department of Humanities & Philosophy, University of Central Oklahoma

I am teaching Contemporary Moral Problems, a freshman core course, in central Oklahoma. Many, MANY students are pro-life. It is hard to motivate a discussion without religious overtones. It is hard to talk about personhood without an immediate segue into souls. I have adopted the following strategy in order to motivate intuitions about what personhood may consist in and what rights might be ascribed to different kinds of individuals (and in order to demonstrate that non-religious intuitions about the matter are possible).

Thought experiment. I write a list of entities on the board, in no particular order: a five-year-old child, an ant, E.T., a patient in PVS, someone in a temporary coma, a 90-year-old scientist who has just discovered a cure for cancer but has not yet passed it along, a Labrador Retriever, a serial killer…. The class is informed that all the individuals on the list are trapped in a burning building with no way out (response to student question: static prevents E.T. from phoning home). Only we can save them. At hand is a primitive Star Trek transporter (fellow nerds always perk up at this point), primitive because it can only transport one entity at a time. No, the scientist cannot put the ant in his pocket. This will result in a creepy fusion such as we’ve all witnessed in The Fly and other deathless works of speculative fiction.