In Socrates' Wake

Plusses and Minuses of Online Readings

2009-07-13T07:49:00.000-07:00

I wonder what experience people have had with using online readings. A recent email prompts this query:

"Drs. [Tim] O'Keefe and [George] Rainbolt [from Georgia State University, Atlanta] have become shocked and annoyed at the high cost of intro to philosophy anthologies. We have decided to put together a web site that has the format of a standard anthology but is composed exclusively of materials in the public domain and of materials that authors have given us permission to use for free. We plan to make this available free on the web. We are looking for input about the web address we should use. We hope that you will take a moment to fill out a one-page survey on some options. To take the survey, just click on this link:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=Srex6oIyncqF7NI1T_2b0Llw_3d_3d

Thanks in advance for your time. If you would like to forward this message on to other philosophy students or faculty, please feel free to do so."

I wonder what experience people have had with using online readings. Mine has been mixed: the problem has always been, at least with my students, that too many of them either don't read them and/or don't print them out and/or they don't bring them to class. So, even though a lot of $ could be saved by their using online readings, they seem to unfortunately resist it and so I am forced to try to make them buy sometimes expensive books. Anyone have any better luck out there?

Weir on lecture shakeups

2009-07-07T11:40:00.000-07:00

Rob Weir at Inside Higher Ed has a nice set of tips to enliven class lectures and presentations. He calls them examples of "didaction" that combine instructor exposition or content and student action. It's definitely a list to check out (though in some cases, it may be hard to apply the suggestions to philosophy: Weir mentions "demonstrating a concept" that was just explained -- is this what we philosophers do with examples?)

One thing I noticed: Several of the techniques are ways of involving students that invite them to participate in contexts where there's little pressure for them to provide a right answer: brainstorming, etc. I've often thought that one factor that suppresses student participation in philosophy classes is that students are very accustomed to participating in discussion, etc. by giving the right answer but feel ill-equipped to participate in the more open-ended, investigative discussions that often take place in philosophy classes, where "right answers" are in short supply. It'd be great to have a set of techniques that work around this student anxiety.

New ETS grad school assessment

2009-07-01T20:49:00.000-07:00

Success in graduate school is clearly not a matter of academic ability alone. In my observation at least, a good many other virtues or emotional dispositions shape whether a person completes graduate school, and in turn, how successful they are in their subsequent academic careers. Plenty of bright people end up leaving graduate school (or the profession) because they are not sufficiently creative, focused, or persistent, for example.

Now our friends at Educational Testing Service, who brought us the SAT, the GRE, the LSAT, and the other standardized tests, aim to identify those who have the personal characteristics to succeed in graduate school. Per the Los Angeles Times:

Is there a way to evaluate a student's drive, persistence, honesty and creativity? What is needed beyond college grades, test scores and traditional recommendation letters?

The Educational Testing Service says it has just the thing. The ETS, which runs the Graduate Record Examinations, will soon offer a supplemental assessment of graduate school applicants on those personal characteristics that could help students tackle advanced studies.

The new online system, called the Personal Potential Index, will ask faculty who know the students to rank them on a 1-5 scale for such attributes as communication skills, teamwork, resilience, organization and integrity. It asks 24 questions, including whether the candidate "produces novel ideas," "meets deadlines," "works well under stress" and "is worthy of trust from others."

So: is the aim of this assessment, assuming it's a good one, achievable? My recollection is that most graduate schools send evaluation forms to recommenders that ask similar questions about students. The hope (I guess) is that the ETS instrument will be more systematic or scientific. I'd be also be curious to know if anyone has ethical objections to this assessment: How would you feel about it if you were a candidate for grad school?

review of ISW in June 2009 issue of Teaching Philosophy

2009-06-26T09:13:00.000-07:00

Those of you who are fans, or at least regular readers, of this site probably also know about the journal Teaching Philosophy, which since its founding in 1975 "has provided a peer-reviewed forum for the exchange of ideas about the challenges faced by philosophers in the classroom, and has published the largest body of original work on philosophy teaching in the English language." Over the years, I have found the journal to be a very helpful resource.

The current issue (Volume 32:2, June 2009) includes a Digital Media Review section. One of the "digital media" under review is this very site. Prof. John Immerwahr (Villanova Univ.), the reviewer, gives a clear (yet concise) overview of this site -- along with advice about how to subscribe to a weblog such as this one.

I'll shatter the suspense -- SPOILER ALERT -- SPOILER ALERT -- SPOILER ALERT --

by saying that it's a positive review! Some selected bits of Immerwahr's review follow. (Seeing the full review online requires that you or your institution's library have an online subscription to the journal, I'm afraid.)

"This particular blog calls to mind the tradition of essay writing from Montaigne through Addison and Steele. The general format is that Cholbi or one of the other regular authors 'posts' a reflection on some issue related to the teaching of philosophy....other readers post comments or reactions to the original comment.... The whole process, in other words, is rather like a virtual 18th century coffee house. Most of the posts are brief, well-written, thought-provoking, and addressed to real concerns for a typical philosophy instructor."
"[The discussion of Michael's post, "What If I Just Don't Like You?", is] an interesting exchange that one can read in just a few minutes. It is just the kind of conversation that one might have in a department common room with a group of serious and thoughtful colleagues. But, as we all know, in today’s hectic world those conversations are increasingly rare. It fills a niche, in other words, between a researched article in Teaching Philosophy and a casual venting with a friend, spouse, or partner."
"ISW allows us to participate in a conversation around issues in teaching that is both thoughtful and thought provoking, inviting further commitment but not requiring it. For a small investment of time, it offers a rich reward."

Hooray for us (especially for Michael), and sincere thanks to Prof. Immerwahr for the positive and encouraging words.

By the way -- as it happens, the other review in the Digital Media Review section (this one written by Ruth Poproski) is of a site developed and maintained by Immerwahr himself: TeachPhilosophy101.org, which "presents strategies and resources for faculty members and graduate assistants who teach philosophy courses, especially at the introductory level; it also includes material of interest to college faculty generally." There's a permanent link to that site down in the lower righthand side of this page. Check it out!

Philosophy behind bars

2009-06-22T11:02:00.000-07:00

Our old friend the CHE has a short piece by Robert Gormong relating his experience of teaching philosophy in a Virginia correctional facility. I've talked to a number of people who've taught philosophy (or cognate disciplines) in prisons and nearly all find it to be highly rewarding. Gormong writes:

Whatever their flaws, I thought my inmate-students were in a unique position to benefit from a class on philosophy. Philosophy is a discipline that ought to help students shape their lives and values — and at Lunenburg, my students desperately needed to rethink their lives. At their best, they understood that. Many of them proved it in their intense devotion to the class.

Anyone else done this sort of teaching? What were your experiences like?

Best student excuses for late work

2009-06-09T11:35:00.000-07:00

Crooked Timber has a nice post on all-time greatest student excuses for late paper s. I'd love to hear other examples of the best excuses ISW readers have received. But here are some personal favorites from the CT post:

"It was during my first year of teaching here in Arkansas that I got my favorite late paper excuse of all time: one of my freshmen comp students told me his paper would be late because, the night before, his stepfather had shot his computer with his shotgun while he was messing around, and it would take him awhile to get a new one."

"I missed an organic chemistry final. My excuse was being in jail and I had the newspaper account of the arrest as proof. The professor was pleased with the originality of my situation and let me take a make-up exam."

"How about “I got my girl friend pregnant and I had to help her get an abortion.” A friend of mine used this on two seperate occasions with the same instructor."

"During a summer session I had a student who failed to turn in an assignment via e-mail because his neighbors, from whom he was stealing a wi-fi signal, moved out, leaving him without internet access. That sounded pretty plausible to me."

Laowai Philosophizing

2009-06-05T18:37:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone, this post isn't really from me, but from Chris Panza who is teaching this semester in China and can't get to Blogger through the Great Firewall. He'd posted it to his blog here, but he thought it might make for a good teaching post as well.

-----

Sadly, my (our) time in Beijing is slowly coming to a close (we leave in July). This is not something that I or my wife are particularly happy about – both of us feel as if we are, just recently, beginning to get our “sea legs” (so to speak) in Chinese culture. The quickly approaching end of the experience has led me to reflect a bit on what I’ve experienced already, especially with respect to teaching and thinking about Chinese Philosophy while here. There are a lot of subjects I plan to talk about in the future on this topic, but the one I’d like to discuss right now concerns the very general issue of doing Chinese Philosophy in China.

In planning for and looking forward to this trip, one of the things I was most excited about was the prospect of interacting with Chinese on the subject of pre-Qin philosophy. After all, I’ve only spoken to American students about it, and with American scholars. So I was eager to talk about these subjects with people who grew up in the same culture that emerged from those very thinkers I was studying.
Although I would have hoped for even more interaction in this way, there’s still a lot to talk about here. Let me start in a simple place: the reception that I received as someone studying/teaching Chinese Philosophy here in China. Before recording my impressions, I should put out a rather large caveat: my data set here is small. Vanishingly so, as a matter of fact; still, my experience is what it is, and it is formed regardless of the paucity of my data “points”. So I’ll just talk about the experience and let the reader take it with the grain of salt that is appropriate.
My general impression is that my reception by others (Chinese) can be split into two large categories – with one group of people generally approving, an another one not. Each group is a big umbrella, housing different reactions that can be thought of as “positive” or “negative”. I’ll briefly describe the two:
A. The Negative Group.
One “group” of Chinese that I meet seemed surprised, shocked, perplexed, and sometimes annoyed, that I would be teaching Chinese Philosophy here in China. To unify the whole group, however, I always found myself getting the same response from others — upon my saying that this is what I was doing here, the reaction was something like, “Huh? You are teaching Chinese Philosophy here?”
How should this be interpreted? What were they thinking when they said “you”? I’ve come away thinking that there are some different ways to interpret it.
a) The “I don’t teach in Chinese, and I read the texts in translation” problem. There is no doubt that some of the more negative interactions were based on these facts. This is understandable to some degree – if a student was studying Joyce’s Ulysses in Mandarin, I’d probably think that was odd too. That said, I did have a few students mention to me (who would read the Analects in Mandarin alongside my discussing it from translation) that they felt that the interaction with translation helped them to better understand what was going on in the original. That’s interesting, though my own grasp of ancient Chinese is not good enough to comment on the observation. Surely a controversial thing to say, however!
b) The ”I’m not Chinese (or at least Asian)” issue. I’d hate to think that this fact meant anything to anyone, but I can’t help but to think that this did bother some people. More times than not, when I would get the “you are teaching what?” reaction, it was from people who had no idea how good my skills in reading Chinese were (or speaking it for that matter, other than the fact that we were talking in English, though that wouldn’t necessarily indicate anything in this environment). This led me to think that the descriptor for the term “you” was “laowai” (foreigner). In the beginning, I thought perhaps I was getting the impression wrong, but after a while I started to feel as if some had a negative reaction to the fact that I – as a Westerner – was teaching the subject at a Chinese university (irrespective of language ability).
Sometimes it seemed as if there might be two different things going on:
B1) At times I got the impression that it was a “what could a laowai really know about this?” reaction. When I got that impression, I would think to myself “would I feel the same way about a Chinese teaching Melville?” I found my own internal reactions to be conflicting. On the one hand, a quick internal reaction said “yes” – what could a Chinese know about the distinctively Western challenges that Melville is dealing with? On the other hand, my more thought out cognitive reactions would then step in and say “no” – that it was silly to think such a thing. A Chinese can read Moby Dick and understand it just as well as someone from Melville, New York (I used to work there, by the way — gratuitous trivia there).
B2) At other times, the reaction I got felt more like the person I was talking to was insulted, like “even if a laowai could know about this, Chinese should teach it.” I’m certain here that if I were convinced that a Chinese could understand Moby Dick as well as anyone, that I wouldn’t care at all whether an American (or specifically someone from Long Island!) taught it. This one I can’t really figure out at all, if I read the impression right. I would hope that in these interactions, I was misreading the situation. But perhaps not.
B3) Third, some people innocently seemed to be genuinely perplexed. Why would this tall Western guy with the thick American accent care about Chinese Philosophy anyway?
Lots of difficult questions and issues here, I think, for anyone teaching/reading/learning about Chinese Philosophy (or any text read in a cross-cultural forum and context, for that matter). Of course, and once again, I might have misread these reactions, so I’m not sure how much stock to put into my own impressions. Still, I did feel them, whether they were veridical or not.
B. The Positive Group
I received just as many, if not more, positive reactions. They too fell into a number of groups, some overlapping.
C1) I definitely got the impression that some were genuinely excited that a Westerner would be so interested in their own culture and philosophy. I felt a genuine sense of pride from some people that a laowai would show such interest in a heritage that they clearly had a great pride for. Here I experienced a bit of a “good for you!” reaction.
C2) Some people simply thought (in conjunction with C1) that it was just great that Westerners and Easterners could talk about something like this, with the hope of forming a kind of “common language” to address common concerns and problems.
C3) Perhaps most controversially, the most common positive reaction I received pointed to a belief that Chinese texts (especially the Confucian ones) had been misinterpreted or misappropriated by this-or-that specific interest group through Chinese history. These interest groups differed – some thought of political groups (both ancient and contemporary) whereas other pointed to their own parents. People who fell into this group were genuinely excited by the idea of discussing these texts in a different context, without the assumption that those interpretations were obviously right.
Some people (in discussion) were genuinely intrigued by my own readings of the texts (Confucian, specifically). Some even indicated that whereas in the past they had had no interest at all in the works, they now saw that they “spoke” to their own concerns in life. Here, I need to be careful: I’m not suggesting here that “the Westerner” came in and saved Confucius from the Confucians (to bite an old Roger Ames article title). I think it was rather that they were simply happy to have someone read the texts in a way that didn’t simply seem to serve the interests of the group giving the interpretation. Some felt that Confucius had been used by parents to “control” them, make them feel bad, or whatever, and there were similar concerns that political powers-that-be had done the same in the past.

On this score – whether I was Western or not, and whether my readings were even accurate – I felt a genuine desire from some people to reconnect with these texts in new ways, as a way of “freeing them” from what they took to be strictly enforced (and wrong or at least rigid) historical interpretations. A few even found a new reason to be self-critical of their own particular way of engaging in their relational environments!

—

Positive and negative reactions taken together, this has been a great experience. I wish it could have been longer. I myself (well, my wife too, as she agrees) could easily stay here a few years. I, for one, know that what I could learn about Chinese culture, or even just Chinese thoughts about their own heritage and philosophy, just barely scratched some superficial surface. On one level, this is deeply frustrating, as I realize just how little I really know. On the other hand, I realize that I knew nothing before, so at least I’ve had the opportunity to engage in even this amount of superficial cultural interaction.

Lang's On Course: Teachers as People

2009-06-02T09:28:00.000-07:00

Lang's final (and very short) chapter focuses on figuring out the person one wants to be in and around the classroom. What sort of teaching persona should one adopt, and why? Lang confesses that he spent too much time and energy on this issue, but given that it is something we all think about, he addresses it and includes such issues as the following:

-How hard of a grader will I be?
-What style of management will I employ in the classroom?
-How much of my personal life should I share in the classroom and with students in general?

It is this last question that Lang focuses on, and I will follow him in this. Lang's first point is that this issue becomes less of an issue as time progresses, because we integrate our teaching persona with our selves, as our comfort level in the classroom increases. Relatedly, Lang says on p. 296 that "the more experience I have as a teacher, the more I am willing to allow other parts of my life, or other faces in my life--father, husband, musician, and so on--to form part of my teaching persona." Finding a comfortable level here will result in naturally staying at that level of transparency.

Lang's second point is a story, summed up by the advice from the head of a seminary: "Just when you think everyone's thinking about you, it usually turns out that nobody's thinking about you at all." This is a good piece of wisdom in and out of the classroom, according to Lang.

Overall I thought the chapter made several good points. Though I've been teaching as a faculty member for 5 years, and as a grad student for a few years prior to that, I'm still working through some of these issues. As I reflect, I definitely show more sides of who I am to my students now than I used to, including significant things such as my family and moral beliefs, and less significant things such as my love for U2, the Kansas City Chiefs, and cycling. Part of this is that I'm just "being myself," but I also think that many students appreciate a professor who opens the door to his or her life a bit. A significant benefit of this is that it fosters trust between students and the instructor, at least from my own experience. And this is crucial not only to an enjoyable classroom environment, but to high quality teaching and learning as well.

How big is too big?

2009-06-01T17:25:00.000-07:00

It appears budget cuts are going to plague the state university system in which I teach for several years to come. In such a climate, many ugly options are considered, including one that I find somewhat controversial: increasing class sizes.

It's taken as conventional wisdom that larger class sizes are a bad idea, whether we talking about kindergarten or college calculus. I sometimes wonder how big a determinant of student learning class size really is though. Place a large number of highly motivated and talented students in a classroom with a motivated and talented instructor and plenty of learning will happen. And I think we can agree that there's a certain limit to the number of students that can be in a room and still achieve a friendly or collegial enough atmosphere for serious discussion. But I wonder how far this goes. Is 100 worse than 50, in a philosophy lecture class, say? Is 300 worse than 100?

But the real problem with large class sizes is, of course, us. And by that I mean that large classes mean more of the most demanding and time-intensive, but often least rewarding, work of teaching: grading, etc. Large class sizes ultimately make for tired teachers, and tired teachers are not especially motivated or energetic. This of course is a hard argument to push in any real life context, since it suggests that we instructors have limits and are not superhuman.

Yet the question still strikes me as a good one: To what extent is class size an impediment to learning, especially in philosophy?

Philosophy's relation to other disciplines

2009-05-20T10:39:00.000-07:00

Harry Brighouse at Crooked Timber has a post referring to an interview with Michele Lamont, who recently completed a book on academic peer review. Lamont has some intriguing remarks about the differences between philosophy and other disciplines, remarks that I think have pedagogical interest:

Philosophy is a problem discipline, and it’s defined as such by program officers. Philosophers do not believe that nonphilosophers are qualified to evaluate their work. Perhaps that comes out of the dominance of analytic philosophy, with its stress on logic and rigor. Philosophers think their discipline is more demanding than other fields. Even its practitioners define the discipline as contentious. They don’t see that as a problem; argument and dispute are the discipline’s defining characteristics.All that conflict makes it difficult to get consensus on the value of a philosophy proposal — or to convince people from other disciplines of its merits. The panels I studied are multidisciplinary. Nonphilosophers are often frustrated with the philosophers. They often discounted what philosophers had to say as misplaced intellectual superiority.

Brighouse comments:

Philosophy seems to be an outlier within the humanities, just as Linguistics is; we have less in common with the other humanities in terms of the concepts and methods that we deploy, and even the subject matter, than they have with one another (I don’t think I could make the case for that claim in a rigourous way, but I’m convinced its true). Some philosophers, furthermore, seem largely uninterested in any other kind of intellectual endeavour, and this just increases the sense of the other humanists that wee are arrogant; worse still, those of us who are interested in other disciplines frequently look to the sciences and social sciences rather than to the rest of the humanities.

I sincerely hope that the arrogance Brighouse and Lamont find among philosophers isn't the norm. Indeed, I like to think that one thing philosophy ought to engender is intellectual humility. And my observation is that philosophy tends to be somewhat more interdisciplinary than many other disciplines. Not having much territory that belongs exclusively to us, we philosophers often have to look to other disciplines to complement our own insights. For instance, it's hard to tell the difference these days between 'pure' philosophy of mind and philosophically motivated cognitive science. With respect to the study of the mind, the interpenetration between philosophy and the empirical sciences is complete. Similarly, though there's still plenty of 'pure' practical ethics or 'pure' political philosophy, a lot of the most interesting work is empirically nuanced too. (I'm thinking of, e.g., so much of the work on global and institutional justice.) Now, this doesn't mean that when philosophers look to other disciplines, they look to the same disciplines. For example, I've often thought that one way to characterize the analytic/Continental distinction is that when analytic philosophers look outside the disipline, they tend to look to the natural sciences, psychology, and the more data-driven social sciences (economics, say), whereas Continental philosophers tend to look to literature, social theory, and the more culturally-oriented social sciences (e.g., anthropology).

Here's the teaching-related thought: Students come to philosophy with some disciplinary background. Even entering freshmen have a working understanding that the methods and objects of investigation vary greatly among history, mathematics, and literature, say. And I suspect that students' early experiences with philosophy are shaped by the place they expect philosophy will occupy in their own mental map of the various disciplines. And this, I think, is a double-edged sword. For while students can find in philosophy something familiar from disciplines that attract them, they will also find in philosophy something to which they are intellectually averse. To put the matter in somewhat stereotypical terms: The computer science major will welcome philosophy's systematicity, emphasis on explicit analysis, and logic, but may not be so enthusiastic about philosophy's openendedness and emphasis on intellectual toleration and empathy. But the English lit major will respond in the opposite way, welcoming the latter and being somewhat put off the former.

Of course, this doesn't imply that philosophy instructors should teach so as to welcome one intellectual orientation: The computer science major and the English lit major both become more cognitively limber by studying philosophy. But it's still worth thinking about student disciplinary expectations and where philosophy fits in. For several years, I've distributed a midquarter feedback survey to my students in my intro to philosophy and intro to ethics courses. One question reads:

This course is (exactly/more or less/not at all) what I expected.

Over the years, the distribution of answers has been about even, 30-40% for each response. This suggests that philosophy, for good or ill, confounds students' mental maps of the disciplines.

I'd be curious to know what teaching challenges this issue presents. I'd also really interested in hearing from people who aren't philosophers about their own experiences studying philosophy and how their reactions were shaped by their disciplinary backgrounds.

don rags: a different sort of student evaluation

2009-05-07T16:42:00.000-07:00

(This post isn't specifically about the teaching of philosophy, so consider yourself warned.)

Michael is busy heroically (I'm not being facetious or sarcastic) refusing to ride the "Student Evaluations of Teaching Are Worthless" Express . Meantime, I thought I'd slightly redirect the conversation about student evaluations to focus on something equally timely at this point of the year: faculty evaluations of students, rather than by students.

A former student of mine is now a faculty member at a US college that has a tradition of holding "don rags" during each semester. As I understand it from her description, a student meets her instructors (i.e., dons) as a group. The student sits there and listens as her instructors discuss her in the third person. They talk about her work in each of their courses, their perceptions of her as a learner ("ragging" on her if the perceptions are negative), what she will need to do if she's to succeed in subsequent years, and even whether she will be asked not to come back. Then the student is invited to comment/respond.

Parts of that practice aren't entirely unfamiliar to me, from my time in graduate school: graduate faculty met each year to discuss their students' progress through the Master's or doctoral program, and sometimes to have difficult conversations about whether some student should be asked to leave the program. They then sent a letter to each student, summarizing their discussion.

Of course, I'm alternately intrigued and horrified by the practice of inviting the student to listen in on that discussion! But I'm also curious about some of the benefits and problems of structured, regular conversation between a student's instructors about that student followed by feedback to the student about the substance of that conversation.

(Some caveats: I don't mean the don rags specifically: they're only one possible model for how to do that. My graduate school department's practice is a different model; there may be still others. And I'm also assuming that these conversations could supplement, not replace, other ways of evaluating our students -- such as comments on their written work, etc. Finally, I'm thinking primarily of how departments could employ this method for their majors, rather than for undeclared students -- who might actually benefit more from it.)

The biggest problem, clearly, is the amount of labor/time that would be required. That would especially be true of departments with many majors and few faculty. My own department would not be especially heavily burdened by doing this, but I'm sure that others would find it very hard to do it annually, let alone once a term.

I can think of a few possible benefits of such a conversation and feedback:

a regular -- indeed, mandatory -- opportunity to talk with one's colleagues might help reduce the sense of isolation that many instructors feel, especially near the end of a term
we all have students who bring different -- sometimes very different -- personas to their different instructors, and that sort of conversation could help each instructor get a fuller, more complex sense of each student
many conversations about assessment that I've been privy to treat the primary object of assessment as the course, not necessarily the student. A "don-ish" conversation could, if it and the subsequent feedback were tied carefully to the "learning outcomes" that the department has established for its major(s), be a consistent way at the departmental level to assess each student's progress through the major
I've taught many students who, not necessarily through any fault of their own, treat each course as a discrete experience, related only coincidentally to any of their previous or subsequent coursework. Conversations and feedback of the sort I'm describing might help students develop/strengthen their meta-cognitive skills, helping them become more self-conscious of themselves as learners and as membes of an academic community.

Are there other benefits or problems with this way of evaluating our students? Can those of you who've been through it (either as instructor or student) chime in?

Lang's On Course: Student evaluations

2009-05-04T12:20:00.000-07:00

Lang's chapter 13 deals with a perennially controversial teaching topic: student evaluation of teaching. Here I'll lay out some of his main claims about student evaluations and talk a bit about his suggestions for improving the results on one's evaluations.

First, let me say that my own reading of the literature on student evaluation supports Lang's conclusion that much of the conventional skepticism about student evaluation is misplaced. By and large, student evaluations validly measure certain aspects of instructor performance (whether students have learned from the course, their enthusiasm, how well the exams or other evaluative instruments corresponded with the course content). At the same time, there are elements of instructor performance that students are not well positioned to evaluate: the choice of textbooks or course content, the instructor's knowledge or mastery of the course content, etc. My own sense is that Lange may underestimate how many bad student evaluation questionnaires are out there: Many that I've seen ask students questions that are outside their competence and fail to ask questions that fall within their competence. And many have basic methodological problems (for example, students are asked to consider double-barreled statements such as "The instructor's lectures were organized and informative").

Indeed, this may be one area where faculty autonomy is overrated. Colleges and universities vary in this regard, but at most of the places I have taught, departments are given some vague guidelines as to how to develop their questionnaires but are left to their own devices beyond that, with the result that different disciplines have questionnaires that vary dramatically in length, content, and so on. I wouldn't suggest absolute uniformity across an institution with respect to these questionnaires, but I wonder if having an outside expert develop the questionnaires might be a good idea. In any event, I'd be curious to know from commenters whether my remarks reflect their own experience of student evaluation in different institutions.

Since Lang's book is directed at new teachers, he gives some valuable advice as to how to improve your student evaluation results.

Know the form and what's asked.
Get additional feedback from students earlier in the term, using techniques such as minute papers, 'muddiest point' exercises, and questionnaires.
Be transparent as you teach, explaining to students how the various activities you provide them promote their learning, etc.

I think Lang is right on target with these suggestions, but let me echo and underscore a few points.

When you get additional feedback, do what Lang proposes and discuss the feedback with the students. Students are willing to forgive our missteps and will tolerate high academic standards if they see that we are acting in good will. Hence, when students give us feedback and we not only acknowledge it but also indicate how we intend to incorporate that feedback in the future, we engender that good will -- and better evaluations result.
Constantly remind students of the course learning objectives. One challenge for students, especially in philosophy courses, is that they are often uncertain as to what they are supposed to learn. If so, then student evaluation becomes a misguided exercise: Students are being asked whether they learned X but their attention is focused on whether they learned Y.
Foster the habit of student self-evaluation. Many of us are nervous about student evaluation because it may not do a good job prying apart our contribution to student learning from students' own contribution to their learning. Clearly, the interaction between these contributions is complex: Sometimes great teaching produces great learning, but it may not always do so. In light of this, I've found it important for students to get in the frequent habit of evaluating their own performance and efforts. This encourages a more mature attitude to instructor evaluation because students are more aware of their role in the collaborative learning process and so are more able to focus their attention specifically on how the instructor helped or hindered learning.

Finally, I think one thing that bothers many teachers about student evaluation of their performance is that the information gathered is often not put into context. I'm familiar with institutions where student evaluations are the only data used to evaluate teaching performance. Student evaluations are valid but limited, and need to be supplemented by other kinds of information: peer visits (though these don't take place often enough to be of great value), expert consultations, instructors' own self-evaluations, etc. Student evaluations measure the outputs of an instructor's teaching efforts, but these other sources of information can help measure the inputs to determine if the instructor's teaching is basically sound, regardless of whether it happens to be effective in producing student learning in a particular case. Teaching is, as Lang reminds us in this chapter, as much art as science.

A suggestion on what to include in course material

2009-04-28T06:54:00.000-07:00

In teaching intro courses there is the standard philosophical readings that most of us use to introduce philosophy to our students. Over the past few years I have been utilizing non-traditional material (as well as the more tradtional readings) in my intro to philosophy and intro to ethics courses. This material has included literature such as The Plague and The Fall by Camus, The Kite Runner by Hosseini, and The Handmaid’s Tale by Atwood. I have also used videos (Youtube is a Godsend) as well as movies. I have found that utilizing this type of material, alongside the more traditional philosophical material, has helped students gain a deeper appreciation for, and understanding of, some of the issues being discussed. I think it is helpful for students to see that philosophical issues arise in the normal context of lives being lived. After all, is that not one of the reasons Plato had for using dialogues that take place in the day to day lives of the people taking part in the discussion. If students can see the ‘naturalness’ of some of the important philosophical issues, I think it makes these issues more real and important for them. They can see how these issues can relate to their own lives. As we think about what material to use next semester I would like to suggest that everyone include at least one non-traditional piece in your required readings. In my intro to ethics courses next Fall I am planning to use The Lakota Way by James M. Marshall III as a way of introducing virtue ethics to my students. This is a collection of short stories within the Lakota Sioux tradition, each one pertaining to a particular virtue or character trait that is desirable for people to possess if they want to lead a flourishing life. Does anyone else have any more suggestions?

From the Wall Street Journal

2009-04-27T08:15:00.000-07:00

So You Want to Be a Professor

By NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY

Late last month, the Web site Inside Higher Ed reported that several universities were shrinking the number of students admitted to their Ph.D. programs this year. Emory University is cutting its doctoral students by 40% -- admitting 220 this fall, down from 360 a year before. Columbia is reducing its intake by 10%. New York University is planning a reduction, although a "very modest" one, according to school officials. And the University of South Carolina is considering a plan to have some departments admit doctoral students only every other year.

There are several reasons for this doctoral downsizing. For one thing, teaching graduate students costs universities money -- at least on first glance. Ohio University economist Richard Vedder estimates that schools spend anywhere from five to 15 times as much on graduate students as on undergraduates. Grad students are taught in small classes with senior professors. And students in doctoral programs (as opposed to those who leave after taking master's degree) are generally on some kind of fellowship. They pay no tuition and receive a school-year stipend between $10,000 and $20,000.

But graduates students also act as teaching assistants, doing a great deal of time-consuming classroom work (and grading) that professors themselves are thus not compelled to do. In all sorts of courses, especially in their freshman and sophomore years, undergraduates may find themselves being instructed more often by a 25-year-old doctoral candidate than by the university's full-time faculty members, who, of course, already have their doctorates (and one or two books to their credit, too). It is an odd, upside-down arrangement, but it has an economic logic: By providing cheap labor, graduate students save college administrations millions of dollars each year in salary costs.

So why the cuts? Well, the calculations work out differently for different schools. For instance, universities in lower tiers might not have to do as much because they can get away with having a higher percentage of classes taught by graduate students. But some of the schools making doctoral cuts this year gave compassion as their reason. Catherine R. Stimson, the dean of Graduate School of Arts and Science at New York University, was quoted in Inside Higher Ed: Given the state of the academic job market, she asked, referring to would-be doctoral candidates: "Is it fair to bring them in?"

It sounds like a logical question, but is it really? After all, the dire academic job market is nothing new. As Peter Berkowitz recalls from his time as a graduate student and professor at Harvard and Yale in the 1980s and '90s: "The departments knew that something like half the students they admitted to their programs wouldn't get Ph.D.s." And, says Mr. Berkowitz (who is now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution), "something like half of those wouldn't get tenure-track jobs."

In an article called "Contingent Faculty and the New Academic Labor System" (2004), Gwen Bradley notes that an academic job shortage is rarely the result of some surprising lurch in supply-and-demand curves, since "the same institutions both manufacture and consume the Ph.D. product." In other words, universities know very well that they are producing far more Ph.D.s than they need. Compare this situation with the medical profession. Even if medical residents are made to work long hours under difficult conditions, the vast majority of them will get jobs as doctors. The vast majority of, say, Ph.D.s in English literature will not. Given that the typical doctoral degree takes six or seven years to complete (during prime job-training and family-forming years), there is a moral problem here. It is no great exaggeration to say, as Mr. Berkowitz does: "Many lives are ruined this way."

With more and more people going to college, one might reasonably wonder why there hasn't actually been a shortage of Ph.D.s in recent years. Two decades ago William Bowen, a former president of Princeton University, predicted as much, claiming that there would soon be far more university teaching jobs than academics to fill them. He co-authored a study foreseeing "a real shortfall" in the humanities and social sciences starting in the late 1990s.

The shortage never materialized. Even during boom times, there was not much of an uptick in job listings for university faculty. Any increase in job demand was met by an overwhelming increase in labor supply. Universities began hiring adjunct faculty members. They typically teach courses at more than one school. (In California, they're referred to as "freeway flyers.") They don't get benefits and, all told, probably earn less than minimum wage.

Not surprisingly, these adjunct faculty members are feeling exploited and getting angry. In recent years, their concerns have been taken more seriously by the American Association of University Professors, which now has committees engaged in rigorous hand-wringing over their ordeal. Marc Bousquet, the author of "How the University Works," sees a couple of key ironies in the academic job market: Getting a Ph.D. now often means the end of an academic career rather than the beginning of one; and the American university, which claims to be an egalitarian institution, relies on people who can only afford to take badly paid adjunct teaching positions because they have another source of income, either from a spouse's job or a second job of their own.

One response may be: So what? Is there any compelling reason that universities -- as self-interested as any institution -- should reconsider their employment policies? Why not staff classes with adjunct labor? Why not give customers the same product at a lower cost?

The last question points to a bigger problem, though: Is it the same product? Who knows? Higher education has gone so far off the rails in recent years that parents and students hardly know what they are supposed to have learned in a freshman composition course or in Sociology 101. And as long as there is a degree waiting at the other end, they hardly care.

Ms. Riley is the Journal's deputy Taste editor.

On Course, Common Problems Chapter.

2009-04-22T21:17:00.000-07:00

It is a bit tricky to find a philosophy teaching angle on Lang's chapter about common problems. I'm afraid I haven't been altogether successful in finding one. As usual, Lang's advice is candid, unimpeachable, and even funny. Nevertheless, one can't help but feel he was running out of a little steam here, especially in his last two questions which ask if he has any final advice and whether these questions constitute exhaustive advice. One can't help but wonder if any academic reading the book would actually have those two questions in mind. But like a good prof at the end of a semester, I believe we can and should forgive Lang for a tired but good humored ending.

Lang offers advice on the following areas: 1) rude student behavior, 2) the use of technology in the classroom, 3) tardy and absent students, 4) remembering student names, 5) dealing with flirtatious students, 6) special concerns about labs and online courses, 7) stage fright, and 8) inadequate superiors. His funniest remarks are at the end of (5), wherein he accurately suggests staying far away from any romantic relations with students, recommending the painting of civil war figurines instead.

I limit my commentary to remarks on (1), (2), and (4). For (1), Lang's advice to choose whether you will confront a student in class or after class is very good. He opts for after class and has found it works well, but any new professor should know that some students will be fundamentally unreachable in either way. In philosophy (because there are no answers, right?) I find that there is a type of student who feels like the need to challenge the possibility that a philosopher could know more than he or she could. This leads to a behavior that is not rude in the sense of academic misconduct, but disruptive all the same. I feel that it is absolutely crucial not to let such a student define one's course and one's perception of the course. This can be a difficult maneuver, especially in an intro class, because our culture likes to see supposed authority hoisted on its own petard and other students can get behind the troublesome student. But the answer is, I believe, Socratic. For these students usually come from a pretty sophistical form of arguing involving equivocation, switching the topic, and (above all it seems), appealing to Hamlet's "more things on heaven and earth". I've found it works to actually engage such a student in a verbal "joust" in class in which one points out and actively refuses to participate in the sophistical techniques while showing how staying on point is vital to philosophical discussion. It can be difficult to get exactly the right tone, but after a couple of tries with this type of students I think I have the pacification measure down well. Sometimes one can even turn on a light in these students' heads that leads to more philosophical study. That's rare. But at least you get your class back.

For (2), we've recently addressed the use of laptops in the classroom and how another blogger, Andrew Cullison, dealt with them. So I'll just make a quick remark on mobile phones. First, the line between a standard phone that can simply call and text and a smartphone (like the iPhone which can do word processing, note-taking, and make you dinner) is starting to blur. It will be hard in the near future to tell if students are using these phones for actual classwork or for fun, but there will be legitimate uses. I like to use the camera in my iPhone after class to take pictures of what I have written on the board. That helps a lot, by the way. But I do believe that as mobile use has become pretty ubiquitous, it is time to end the ridiculous teacher tactics for dealing with phones ringing. Even when they provide great enjoyment for the class, the act of having the professor answer or a student singing a verse of the school's fight song, the class is derailed much more than it ever would have been with a stern look followed by an embarrassed look and a couple button pushes. These tactics are not done in professional settings and we want to think of our students as proto-professionals. I bring my phone to class for reasons mentioned above and though I check religiously, it has gone off once. It's time to accept that it's going to happen, it shouldn't happen, and people don't need extra embarrassment unless the lesson really isn't getting through. All this said, of course, if the student should in any way start *talking* on the phone, hang the person high atop the classroom walls.

Finally, and briefly, with (4): I am one of those people who can remember names. I do a little exercise day one in which I try to remember all 30 students' names. I don't do anything special that I know of. I just happen to have exactly as much short-to-mid-term memory to get them all in and repeat them all back after they introduce themselves. By two to three weeks in I easily have all the names. I understand that there are some people who are "bad" at names. I can't imagine their memory is worse than mine, but so be it. All I have to say is that it really is amazing how the students react if you actively try to remember their names and use them unprompted in the classroom and around campus. Knowing a name lets a student know you consider him or her and end rather than a mere means. I believe that I don't even see a lot of problems other profs do, simply because I know there names and they know I wanted to know their names. If you can do it, do it.

Weir on the art of lecturing

2009-04-20T10:35:00.000-07:00

Following on his "10 Commandments of Lecturing," Rob Weir has a new piece in Inside Higher Ed on how to craft effective lectures. Again, there's lots of good advice about lecturing here.

Have a small number of clear objectives that you return to throughout the lecture. Don't try too much or try to pack in too much detail!
Remember communication basics: eye contact, varying your tempo, have good notes to rely on.
Start with a hook.
Use a small number of well-chosen examples.
Restate the main ideas at the end.

I'd only add two suggestions to his: First, use your chalkboard, whiteboard, whatever you have by way of visuals, but don't let them be the lecture. We've talked a lot here at ISW about PowerPoint, etc. and how students take notes and interact with visual material. I think it's important to remember that the visuals are supposed to help the lecture along, not be a word-for-word reconstruction of the lecture.

Second -- and I'm a strong advocate on this point -- I have doubts that students are well prepared to learn from lectures at the college level. So one technique I often use is to lecture in a traditional way, but then arrange for an exercise that enables students to reinforce their understanding of the lecture while also serving to troubleshoot my performance. This can take the form of a small group exercise where students develop questions based on the lecture, a 'minute paper' exercise, etc. Lectures are important because they are a content-rich way of delivering material, but they are very instructor-centered, which makes it all the more important that we instructors know which material we successfully conveyed and that students have the opportunity to engage lecture material in their own terms.

On Course: Re-Energizing the Classroom

2009-04-12T10:20:00.001-07:00

Sorry for the lateness of this post.

In this chapter Lang discusses the common phenomena that most, if not all, of us go thru, normally towards the end of the semester; the feeling that we are going ‘through the motions in the classroom, trotting out the same old teaching techniques every day.” This realization can be very discomforting and is sometimes difficult to overcome. We have utilized a wide variety of teaching techniques, most of them discussed in this book, and we feel as if we, and the class, are running out of steam. The level of excitement is diminishing and it seems as interest in the subject matter and class discussions has waned. So the question Lang poses (and answers) is ‘how can we provide a spark to get ourselves, and our students, enthusiastic about the subject matter again?” He addresses five ‘experimental strategies’ that we can use to re-energize the classroom and three activities that we, as learners ourselves, can use to “remain fresh as a teacher.”

The five experimental strategies are 1) posters, 2) field trips, 3) inkshedding, 4) trials, and 5) case studies. Having taught for over twenty years now, I must admit that I use case studies as part of my regular teaching techniques. I dedicate the last 2-3 weeks of my courses in ethics to student presentations where they either construct their own case, or utilize an existing case, and analyze the moral issue associated with the case from a minimum of two different normative perspectives. This approach works wonders in that students usually do good work on cases/issues they themselves select. Furthermore, having them present the normative issues turns the focus away from me as ‘expert’ to them as ‘expert.’ The students also more directly interact with each other and I then function as a moderator. The idea of using a poster to map out the development of an argument or a problem seems to me to be a very workable idea; one which I plan to try next semester. In philosophy doing a field trip may be difficult, if not impossible, after all how does one go back in time. But here, I think we can utilize other technologies; e.g. movies/videos, literature/plays, having students attend a departmental colloquium, and/or assigning students to use the Internet to find concrete examples of issues we are discussing in class. For example, if we are discussing world hunger and our obligation, if we have one, to help end it, we could go on the Internet and find concrete examples of people suffering and people helping those who are suffering (Youtube is a wonderful thing). Reacting to an image is different then reacting to an argument! I think both of them have their place in teaching ethics. Inkshedding, the idea of having students write for five minutes on a topic and then giving their writing to another student who reads it and then writes on what they have read, is a strategy I am going to have to think about. If anyone has any ideas on how to incorporate it into teaching philosophy, I would love to hear them. Trials are also something that I think could be very useful in teaching philosophy. After all, we do have the paradigm in Socrates’ trial for impiety and corrupting the youth. Again, if anyone has tried this out, I would love to hear about it.

There are three activities that Lang suggests for helping us to remain fresh: become a learner again, stay currant, and be nosy. As a way of becoming a learner again, Lang suggests taking a course or lessons of some sort. This way you keep your mind open as well as active. It allows you to creatively explore things outside your normal comfort zone. Staying currant is a matter of keeping up with what is happening in educational theory or in your discipline. This may appear to be very time consuming and therefore something that is not practical, but he suggests three relatively easy things we can do in this regard; we can read a journal either in teaching methodologies or in our own discipline. As far as finding out different strategies for teaching philosophy is concerned I recommend the journal, Teaching Philosophy. Most issues of this journal that I have read contain at least one article that I have found useful. ‘Being nosy’ is simply taking advantage of learning from your peers what they do that is successful in their classes. As Lang points out, sometimes simply talking with a colleague about a teaching issue can be more helpful then trying to find a solution on our own. He also suggests that we take advantage of what our institutions offer in the way of programs designed to help teachers become more effective. Finally he suggests that we visit other colleagues’ classrooms and see how they do it.

There is an underlying point to this chapter that I think needs to be brought out. As Lang points out, it is true that we do run into a ‘wall’ sometime during the course of a semester; not all class sessions are as successful as we would like them to be. This should not be seen as a mark of failure on our part, but as a normal part of teaching and one that we can recognize and minimize if we have strategies for doing so. Furthermore, we should realize that we all could improve our teaching. There is a natural tendency to become comfortable with what we do successfully. But, this feeling of comfort itself can sometimes cause us to be not as successful as we could be; we may become complacent. As a way of overcoming complacency, as well as the ‘doldrums’ that naturally occur, this chapter is especially pertinent and helpful; even to someone who has taught successfully for over 20 years.

10 commandments of lecturing

2009-03-30T05:49:00.000-07:00

Over at Inside Higher Ed, Rob Weir offers his own "10 Commandments of Lecturing". I should say that these are more like 10 commandments of teaching, period, but it's an excellent list (enumerated below the fold).

I. Thou shalt connect new lectures to previous ones.
II. Thou shalt move beyond chalk and talk.
III. Thou shalt not lecture like a caffeinated hummingbird or a tree sloth.
IV. Thou shalt not assume too much.
V. Thou shalt link known to unknown.
VI. Thou shalt be enthusiastic.
VII. Thou shalt not be a pompous ass.
VIII. Thou shalt not tolerate disruptive or disrespectful students.
IX. Thou shalt not lecture outdoors.
X. Thou shalt seize learning moments.

I have to say I've violated IX (hey, I teach in California -- outside is inviting!) and try super hard on I. So ISW readers:
- Which of Weir's commandments do you routinely disobey?
- Which of his commandments are diligent in obeying?
- Are there any commandments that need to be added?

when a student dies

2009-03-19T11:32:00.000-07:00

Hello, colleagues, this is my first posting, and I'm honored to have been invited to join. I wish that my first subject were less grim, but it's related to John Alexander's post last month about treating students as people, so it seemed appropriate to discuss it here.

Last semester, I taught a small seminar (an upper-level Philosophy course with only seven students). One afternoon somewhat late in the semester, twenty minutes before class, I received a quasi-automated email from the campus Registrar’s office, with the Subject line: “[Your Student] has been withdrawn from your course”. I thought back to a frustrating conversation with that student at the end of the previous week’s class, about some persistent problems in his essays that he had not, despite my several entreaties, addressed. I didn’t lose my temper or speak disrespectfully, but I was impatient and annoyed and I let him know that. “Maybe he decided to drop the course”, I thought, wondering whether I had been wrong to express my annoyance and feeling some guilt about that possibility.
Barely a minute later, I got another email from a staff colleague in a different campus office, with the Subject line: “[Your Student] has died”. The body of the email was brief, stating only that the student had died late the previous week – in fact, the day after he and I had last spoken.
Of course, I was stunned. [Without getting into details of this particular student’s death, I can say that it was nonviolent, very sudden, and couldn’t easily have been anticipated.] And in about fifteen minutes, I was going to have to go into the seminar and tell the six other students something that I was still having trouble “processing” myself. In slightly more than ten years of teaching, I had not had a student who was enrolled in one of my courses die during the term, and I was almost as unprepared for that as I could be. I was unprepared to hear the news, and I was certainly unprepared to convey it to the other students in the seminar.
Class that day was quite brief. I conveyed the news – such as I knew it – to the students who were there. One student immediately ran, red-faced, out of the room. We sat silently and disconsolately for a few minutes. I told the students that I was at a loss for what to do. I reminded them that we have an excellent counseling center (we do) and that they should please, please consider making an appointment to talk to one of the counselors there. I told them that the Philosophy department would hold some sort of memorial gathering and that I would give them the details as soon as I had them. Then we left.
Given the particular circumstances, and that I was operating mostly on whatever instincts were relevant, I think that I responded about as well as I could have done. Since then, of course, I’ve talked with a handful of colleagues (including one of the counselors) about how instructors can help students when one of their classmates dies. But few of them had faced that situation, and so another important question – how to help the instructor – remained largely open. In thinking about that question, I found it invaluable to talk to that student’s other instructors. We were all dealing with his death, and for most of us (and our students) it was a new experience.
I wish that I had acknowledged, much sooner than I ever did, that some of my students might die during the term. While I knew that it was statistically possible that at some point during my teaching career, one of my students would die, I had not really thought about that as anything more than an abstract possibility. (Not that there’s anything wrong with abstract possibilities, of course.)
I wondered a lot about how I could continue to meet my responsibilities to teach and challenge the remaining students in the remaining weeks of the semester, while also behaving decently in memory of the student who had died (i.e., not acting as if nothing had occurred that might have an effect on the mood of the seminar). There was no question in my mind that the class should continue to meet, but how much class time, if any, should I devote to talking about (exchanging stories about, etc.) the student who had died? Should I keep the same reading assignments, the same writing assignments, the same deadlines, the same classroom? Of course, the circumstances of this student’s life, not just those of his death, affect the way I answered some of those questions. This particular student, though respected by his classmates, wasn’t particularly well liked by them. I knew that, and they knew that I knew it, and so I considered it entirely possible that some of them didn’t feel any need to talk to a counselor at all. Yet I also knew that we all react to death in ways that we can’t always (correctly) anticipate. So, I mentioned the counseling center only one or two other times and then stopped. And I announced the department’s memorial gathering and stressed that attending it was completely optional.
While there wasn’t an obvious link between the subject of the seminar and the topic or experience of (facing) death, part of me feels that I may have missed an important chance to talk with the students about death, dying, and meaning. It’s a bit of a cliché to bemoan the airless, sterile environment of the classroom or of academic philosophy, and I don’t want to be clichéd. But I wonder whether I was guilty of contributing to that kind of environment. Confronted with a very sobering and inevitable part of the so-called “real world”, maybe I should have made the time to talk with the students – in class, not just outside of class – about those Big Topics that are, after all, what drew at least some of them to Philosophy in the first place.

I’m curious to know, from other instructors who have had one (or more) of their students die during the middle of a term, what suggestions they’d give to their colleagues about what to do when that happens.

Teaching Pre-College Philosophy

2009-03-18T11:15:00.000-07:00

Is there a future for pre-college philosophy? Over the past few years, I have been heavily invested both professionally and personally in the question of whether an effective, worthwhile, and legitimate philosophy curriculum can be established at the high school level, and whether a philosopher can make a credible, scholarly career out of teaching high school philosophy. I have collected a substantial, however modest, set of research on the subject ranging nearly fifty years across many nations. In what follows and what is to come, I offer both what I have discovered and my reflections on teaching high school philosophy. At best, I hope to convince that teaching high school philosophy is not only credible, worthwhile and legitimate, but also an important part of the scholarly field that should be taken more seriously and given greater attention by professional philosophers. At worst, I hope at least to justify (if only to myself) my own professional choices. I welcome all responses, both positive and negative, but ask that the discussion develop a constructive response to the question.

In 1958 the American Philosophical Association approved a report from the Committee on Philosophy in Education regarding teaching high school philosophy. ["The Teaching of Philosophy in American High Schools" by Douglas N. Morgan and Charner Perry. From Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, Vol. 32, (1958 -
1959) pp.91-137.] The committee was composed of C. W. Hendel, Chairman, H. G. Alexander, R. M. Chisholm, Max Fisch, Lucius Garvin, Douglas Morgan, A. E. Murphy, Charner Perry and R. G. Turnbul. The report refrained from recommending a national curriculum for high school philosophy, but it laid out in detail the pros and cons of teaching philosophy in high school. Of course, philosophy has been taught in many pre-college classrooms for hundreds of years both here in the United States and abroad, but the 1958 document is the first serious, detailed and rigorous attempt in the United States that I know of to investigate the relative merits for students, the field of philosophy, and the citizenry in general of teaching philosophy to pre-college students in both the public and private sectors. What follows is a summary of some of the arguments considered by the committee and my observations fifty years later. (N.B., In some places I have updated the arguments to reflect more the language of our time.)

Arguments for:
1) Philosophy is intrinsically valuable both in its critical evaluation of the meaning of words and concepts, and in its thoughtful reflectiveness that distances the mind from imposing ideologies and assumptions. It is not the content of philosophy that is essential, but the discipline of the mind. Thinking philosophically is a natural good for the human mind and therefore is a good in itself.

2) Many do not go to college, but would benefit from philosophical inquiry before entering into public life. By thinking philosophically, we become better people and better citizens.

3) Philosophical questions arise in us when they do. The brighter students we teach usually already have been pondering philosophical questions from an early age, but it is also the case that even our more average students as well have paused before the distance of the stars, the immensity of it all, and pondered their place in the cosmos. There is no need to attempt to erect philosophical inquiry in our students; the foundations are already firmly laid. If philosophical questions are already present in our younger students, the danger is not leaving those questions unanswered, but having those questions answered by half-truths and dogmatic ideologies. "So much the worse for our culture. We, as philosophers and educators and human beings, have a serious social debt to discharge. Introducing some intelligent young people to philosophy is one way in which we may discharge this debt." (p. 94)

4) Philosophy is intrinsically difficult. Teaching may cut through the diminishing view of the humanities in our culture and reinvigorate high school studies as something more than mere fact-checking, memorization, and petty busy-work. Philosophy promises to bring some scholarly credibility back to teaching high school.

The conclusion drawn from these arguments was that, "[b]ecause philosophy is good, and because some bright pupils want and need work in philosophy, there is a prima facie case in favor of introducing it more widely. It remains to be seen, of course, whether counter-arguments and practical considerations should prevail against this prima facie case." (p. 95) I appreciate the caution of the committee on this point, first and foremost because those of us who teach high school philosophy, it seems to me, are quite passionate about it, and therefore can easily loose our heads over its relative merits. Nevertheless, I find that my academic colleagues at university and professional conferences are more and more intrigued over the level of proficiency possible both in knowledge of the history of philosophy and in thinking and writing philosophically by young high school students. Here are some examples from what I have seen, where I teach students who are bright but average. (I don't mean that disparagingly, but only to point out that my school provides a fertile place for learning for a wider variety of students than "the best". My institution is not among the elite.) In the past five years I have had the privilege of teaching a course in logic, a problems course entitled "Justice and Public Morality", and a regularly offered set of courses in the history of philosophy (Ancient to Medieval and Modern to Contemporary). I have taken students to multiple lectures and conferences at which they both participated and were engaged. One student even had her paper accepted by blind review to the Wisconsin Philosophical Association's annual conference in 2008 (where ironically my paper was rejected --no hard feelings C.P.). In addition, over the past four years the students have invited three guest philosophers to campus for an open lecture. Each time, they filled the lecture hall with energy and questions. This year's guest lecturer is Prof. Charles. W. Mills of Northwestern, who will be giving a lecture entitled "Racial Justice". So I think I am safe in arguing that high school philosophy has many benefits and can be successfully developed more broadly than might be suspected.

There are, however, good arguments against teaching philosophy in high school. No one really argues against it on philosophical grounds, but arguments can be made that such a curriculum is impractical or unwise.

Arguments Against:
1) The students are generally too immature to understand philosophy, and therefore will not benefit from the study. (Similar arguments, I think, can be made of first and second year college students).

2)Philosophy is too emotionally unsettling to be handled by students who naturally lack a certain emotional maturity. High School students are still too emotionally attached to their parent's world-view, and there is not a healthy way for them to facilitate their break from traditional thinking. Learning philosophy can be a culturally and emotionally overturning thing for young students.

3) On a practical level, challenging pre-conceived notions and ideologies can make parents uncomfortable. They might not appreciate their child hearing arguments for skepticism, atheism and moral relativism at such an early age. (I had an interesting experience with this. I have a "No Hunting" sign in my office. A parent came in one morning to talk about his son and saw the sign. He questioned if I was one of those "liberal" teachers who would hold it against his son that he would be missing a day of school in late fall to go hunting. I told him I would only hold it against his son if he came hunting for me. The joke was lost on the parent. I took the point to heart, however, and assured the parent that while my class would be discussing arguments against things the student may believe, I had no intention on changing the student's beliefs or penalizing the student for disagreeing. The parent left unwillingly satisfied.)

4) In-service jealousy over having the brightest students. (I think this is a perk, but it can have its political back drafts.)

5) Curricula become immediately over-crowded with too many courses and not enough space for essential instruction in math and English.

6) Philosophy should not be taught in High School, because high school teachers are too incompetent in the field of philosophy to teach it well enough. Philosophers never entertain a career in high school teaching, but are only interested in publishing and the collegiate life. Without sufficient expertise in the classroom, teaching philosophy in high school is not a worthwhile pursuit.

This last point hits at the heart of my professional goals. Should the current academic culture change? If teaching philosophy, or how to think philosophically, is important in itself, then we need at least some of the brightest minds teaching it at the earliest levels possible. In this post, and in the posts to come, I hope to make the argument that high school is at least as good a place to start as any. Just as we see it being called for in the field of physics, we must get experts who are willing to serve the greater social good, at least for a time, and teach younger students. This could have as added benefits both the positive creation of better teaching in the college classroom once those who teach high school eventually move on to the university sector, and the recreation of philosophy as a more valuable part of our cultural, educational heritage to come.

I welcome your responses and look forward to further discussion.

JMN

On Course: Academic Honesty

2009-03-13T11:44:00.000-07:00

In this chapter Lang addresses the important issue of academic honesty and in particular plagiarism.

The most interesting fact in the chapter is the ubiquitousness of cheating - Lang cites that surveys show that 47 percent of graduate students have cheated in the past year.

Having taught a three hour session on scientific integrity followed by a one page assignment where I caught 33 percent of the students subsequently cheating/plagiarizing this is a topic I'm particularly interested in.

There is lots of useful advice here, trying to make assignments unique, use electronic measures to detect plagiarism and of course making it clear to students what you take plagiarism to be.

In particular the advice to not take matters into your own hand and deal with things yourself but instead use the university's procedures for dealing with misconduct is excellent, there is no easier way to get yourself into serious trouble than taking matters into your own hand.

What I would have like more of however is advice about dealing with the system, in particular when people are resistant to admitting plagiarism has been detected because it is a hassle (this happened to me, people thought I was just making a big deal about a small assignment).

"They are in need of loans, but they are also in need of meanings."

2009-03-10T12:32:00.000-07:00

Following up Nathan's link to the New York Times piece on "justifying" the humanities in hard times: Leon Wieseltier often fumbles when he talks philosophy and is often much too precious a writer for my taste. But his recent New Republic column on the same topic is an impassioned defense of the humanities; tough times are when humanities are most needed. A little taste:

In tough times, of all times, the worth of the humanities needs no justifying. The reason is that it will take many kinds of sustenance to help people through these troubles. Many people will now have to fall back more on inner resources than on outer ones. They are in need of loans, but they are also in need of meanings. The external world is no longer a source of strength. The temper of one's existence will therefore be significantly determined by one's attitude toward circumstance, its cruelties and its caprices. Poor people and hounded people have always known this, but now the middle class is getting its schooling in stoicism. After all, bourgeois life was devised as an insulation against physical and social vulnerabilities, as a system of protections and privileges secured honestly by work; but the insulation is ripping and the protections are vanishing. We are in need of fiscal policy and spiritual policy. And spiritually speaking, literature is a bailout, and so is art, and philosophy, and history, and the rest. These are assets in which we may all hold majority ownership; assets of which we cannot be stripped, except by ourselves.

It is interesting to speculate on whether disciplines such as philosophy might benefit from an extended period of economic calamity. I know that job seekers are finding the market even more uncongenial than usual this year, and the standard wisdom is that tough economic times drive students away from the humanities toward more allegedly 'practical' disciplines like business. At the same time though, social turmoil tends to encourage more reflection and more questioning of basic assumption and values (I understand that the era of the Vietnam War, civil rights protests, and the emergence of feminism was a period of strong growth for philosophy enrollments), so perhaps there's a silver lining in all this economic darkness.

An "interdisciplinary" introduction to philosophy course?

2009-03-04T13:58:00.000-08:00

Conceptions vary of what philosophy is, or should aspire to, even (or perhaps especially!) among philosophers themselves. One such conception is that philosophy addresses questions and assumptions that are central to, but generally go unexamined, in other disciplines. My purpose here is not to defend this conception of philosophy. Indeed, it strikes me as highly controversial and limited. (Ethics doesn't seem to fit well into this conception of philosophy, for instance).

But I had a thought for what might be an intriguing way to organize an intro to philosophy course: Identify assumptions made in other disciplines and use these as these content objects for the course. So I could imagine you could have a course where:

Students read the Republic, say, and having had it pointed out to them that Plato's psychology is strongly egoistic, investigate to what degree egoism is assumed in orthodox economics or political science.
Students read Descartes and other work on skepticism concerning knowledge of the empirical world as a way of considering whether natural science is naively empiricist.
Students read core sources on free will and determinism and consider to what degree the governing precepts of contemporary biology (or physics, or even sociology) are deterministic.

Better yet, perhaps students could generate the assumptions themselves based on their knowledge of other disciplines. (That might not work if the intro students are mostly freshmen.)

I can see one obvious objection to this approach: It makes philosophy seem like the snarky kid in the corner with no domain of its own, whose job is to hassle other disciplines. Yet on the other hand, I could see two advantages to such an approach: First, it's an ideal way to get guest speakers into your class from other disciplines (and in my view, guest speakers are almost a welcome addition to a class). Second, it seems likely that students will continue to apply the knowledge they acquire in the class because they are likely to go on to study these other disciplines. Teaching philosophy as a 'freestanding' discipline, with its own distinctive problems, encourages students to think of philosophy as something that one does outside of thinking about other things. In contrast, this approach signals that the activity of philosophy arises along side of other intellectual pursuits and is hardly cordoned off from them.

Could such an approach work?

In the News

2009-02-26T06:37:00.000-08:00

From the NY Times, February 24, 2009:
"In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth"

Gatekeeping Graduate School

2009-02-25T14:11:00.000-08:00

Over at Pea Soup there is a lively discussion about advising students applying to graduate programs in philosophy:

http://peasoup.typepad.com/peasoup/2009/02/gatekeepers-to-the-profession.html

The idea being floated is that there is an implicitly conservative tendency in the way that many of us approach such advising. We spend a lot of time talking about what graduate school is like and what the profession is like, and perhaps we also give advice about the most beneficial behavioral strategies for succeeding. In doing so we implicitly endorse the current culture and practices of the profession - the bad along with the good. What sorts of experiences have you had in advising undergraduate regarding graduate study? Do you ever discourage students from applying? Do you go beyond giving advice? That is, do you help them put together a package and prepare them for the professionalized atmosphere of graduate school?