In Socrates' Wake

Higgins The Good Life: Worlds of Practice

2012-02-08T11:29:00.000-08:00

In the second chapter Higgins identifies three domains of goods in which virtues are meaningful - moral traditions, individual life narratives, and practices. The web of connections among these give rise to our individual values and meanings. Practices are the main focus here, because his interest is in teaching as a practice, and Higgins distinguishes two sorts of goods internal to a practice. The first can be realized as a community, as when football fans watch an exciting and well played Superbowl. The second can be realized by a particular member of that community, which he refers to as 'internal goods located in the practitioner'. I find the discussion of goods and their interconnection with practices, life narratives, and traditions giving rise to meaning interesting and reflection provoking.

One of Higgins’ main themes, as Michael has previously noted, is that there is value to thinking about the internal goods located in the teacher-practitioner. I agree, although I am finding it difficult for reasons Higgins mentions. When I think of teaching, the closest analog I can find is medicine. Both teaching and medicine seem other and outcome oriented, and in both one party is in a superior position enabling them to confer benefits to the other. Just as the physician has expertise the patient lacks and aims at the health of the patient, so we as educators have an expertise and aim at the education of our students. For this reason it is difficult for me to tease out why teaching is good independent of the benefit to the student. But this problem seems to suggest a solution, or at least a starting place. Teaching and doctoring are both similar to parenting. All three provide rare opportunities in which my good (as teacher, physician, or parent) and the good of another person are so intertwined that it is difficult to sort them out. I think this intermingling of goods is itself a good and valuable life experience, though it is difficult to articulate why. It also seems on had by the teacher (or physician) more than the student (or patient).

I’m also finding it difficult to think of goods which are realized as a community, if our community is those of us who happen to be in the classroom at the same time. Although teaching seems quite clearly to be a practice, it is unclear to me that we teachers and our students are in a practice-community in the way that the football community is a community. The football community is voluntary, with a clearly shared moral phenomenology. But the students in our classroom may not share any of our values, and their presence is often the result of a choice that is unrelated to the goals of education. (Prior to college, it may not be the result of any choice at all.) Perhaps one of the virtues of a teacher is being able to draw such students in, but to say that seems to presuppose to some value outside of the teaching practice itself, such as knowledge.

Both of these lines of thinking lead me to suspect that either we need something which transcends moral traditions, life narratives and practices or we are left in something of an existential quandary. In fairness to Higgins, he seems sympathetic to the latter in places.

Professors, ideal versus typical

2012-02-06T07:18:00.000-08:00

I'd be curious to hear reactions to a survey described by Maryellen Weimer. The survey asked college juniors and seniors to ascribe various characteristics to the "ideal professor" and to their experience of the "typical professor". Results below:

Teaching Characteristic	Ideal	Typical
Professor speaks clearly/not monotone	93	80
Course and daily goals appear on the syllabus	83	52
Students have a voice; input on course policies and procedures	40	7
Professor talks informally with students sometimes	43	15
Professor lectures	78	93
Professor uses discussion	58	37
Professor does in-class activities/demonstrations	57	21
·Uses humor often/occasionally ·Uses humor occasionally only	97	75
·Cheating/plagiarism policy—investigates and resolves incidents ·Do not know what approach is used to deal with academic dishonesty	58	64
Solicits anonymous, written, informal feedback on teaching/course	68	17
·Solicits student feedback two or more times per term ·Never solicits student feedback	72	30

There's a whole lot of interesting stuff here: You could, for instance, use the items with the greatest discrepancies as surrogates for those behaviors that would likely improve your student evaluations. It sounds like students' having a voice on course policies and procedures, soliciting feedback, and talking informally with students are areas where we could perhaps improve.

But... as Weimer notes, the crucial question is whether the students' "ideal professor" is ideal as doing his or her job, to wit, inducing learning:

The question not answered by this research is whether the characteristics identified as ideal have any bearing on student learning. Based on other research, it is probably safe to say that most of the characteristics don’t cause learning but they may make it a more likely outcome of a classroom experience.

Reference: Epting, L. K., Zinn, T. E., Buskist, C. and Buskist, W. (2004). Students perspectives on the distinction between ideal and typical teachers. Teaching of Psychology, 31 (3), 181-183)

Higgins' "good life" — and internal and external goods

2012-02-02T07:50:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Chris for getting us started with a very lucid account of the overall project of Higgins' book.

Like Jim Spence, I have reservations about the philosophical background that informs Higgins' book: the ancient ethics/modern morality contrast is (I believe) is overdrawn. But rather than be drawn into a discussion of moral philosophy, I'd prefer to focus on Higgins' more immediate project of investigating the goods of teaching.

Figures like Macintyre, Williams, Taylor, etc., get the greatest attention from Higgins, but I think we can all agree that the intellectual progenitor of Higgins' investigation is Aristotle. I understand Higgins' aim as trying to identified the internal goods of the craft of teaching. (Higgins talks of 'practices' rather than crafts, but I'll overlook whatever differences exist between those notions here.) If Aristotle was right and every craft has an internal good (or goods) that define it and at which genuine practitioners of the craft must aim, then it seems reasonable to suppose that teaching, since it seems to be learnable, to involve the development of various human excellences, etc., would also be a craft with its own internal goods.

There's a lot of the book to get to until Higgins identifies the internal goods of teaching. But I would like to note that though Aristotle thought of crafts as having internal goods, the realization of these internal goods (he thought) also depended on the availability of other external goods. A physician can be knowledgeable, conscientious, etc., but he could not realize the internal good of medicine — health, presumably —without an array of external goods, like proper instruments, a hygienic clinical setting, etc.

So too with teaching: The internal good of teaching, from the teacher's rather than students' perspective, can presumably not be realized without various external goods. I think we've all heard stories of decrepit schools in poor communities, with outdated textbooks, perpetual violence, and the like. There are certain minimal material conditions for the act of teaching to be worthwhile for teachers. But I would extend these external goods to other goods less directly connected to the act of teaching as such: a just environment, reasonable pay, safe working conditions, community solidarity and support, etc.

When I talk to students who wish to become teachers, their trepidation stems not from a lack of appreciation of whatever the internal goods of teaching might be. Their trepidation stems instead from a quite reasonable belief that our society cares little about providing the external goods necessary not only for students to learn but for teachers to grow and realize the internal goods of their profession.

Higgins' book is not political. I say this not as a criticism — only to note that little of his book focuses on external goods. And though the external goods provided to those in higher education are greater than those in K-12 education, we're witnessing a society slowly but surely withdrawing from its responsibility to treat education as a public good.

This is a long way of saying that though the task Higgins sets himself in this book is an admirable one, his apolitical approach to the institutional contexts in which we actually teach neglects the fact that it is not lack of appreciation of the internal goods of teaching that makes teaching a difficult and sometimes dispiriting profession. It's the lack of external goods necessary to realize the internal goods.

And here I'll register a critical note: Higgins wants us to recover a self-interested (but not narrowly selfish!) way of talking about the ethics of teaching, one that circumvents the stereotype of teaching as a "helping profession". Agreed. But in the meantime, I'd like to endorse some selfishness — to advocate that we insist that our communities put their external goods where their mouths are and actually make education the 'top priority' we claim it is. If they did, the internal goods of teaching would flow much more freely.

Learning from each other

2012-02-01T08:47:00.000-08:00

Reading Higgins’ book has made me think more about teaching as a practice and our relationship to other educators as a part of that practice, which has been timely, as I recently organized a teacher development workshop for the numerous adjuncts teaching our Introduction to Philosophy course. This is the second time I’ve run such a workshop. I’ve been very preoccupied in running these meetings not to waste the adjuncts’ time and they are not required to attend in order to teach the course. Fortunately, I was able to secure some money from the Office of Undergraduate Education to pay the adjuncts for their time and our department pitched in for food and coffee, but I did feel at the end of the meeting unsure as to whether we should continue to have these every term.

Since we leave it up to the adjuncts to choose their readings, come up with the syllabus, and design the course, one goal of the meeting is to make sure that we are all on the same page with course requirements, learning objectives, etc. This is particularly helpful for new adjuncts. However, we have a whole bunch of adjuncts who are quite experienced and have taught this course for us many times. Since I wanted to make this meeting useful for them too, I focused a significant part of the meeting on pedagogy—sharing handouts, class activities, ideas for how to organize paper assignments, how to give feedback, etc. Though we did share a fair number of ideas about how to teach the course, I ended up feeling that those ideas could have been shared over e-mail, the course website, or an internal blog. And yet, I do have a sense that talking in person with each other about teaching is valuable. I think in order to run a meeting like this in the future successfully I need to be clear about what is that added value. Ideas?

Higgins, Chapter 1: Work and Flourishing

2012-01-29T16:09:00.000-08:00

I should probably start with an admission: so far, Higgins is preaching to the choir in my own case (I’m actually teaching a seminar on Charles Taylor this semester, so I find myself very sympathetic to Higgins’ way of organizing his discussion). Much of what he says resonates with me on a number of levels, particularly theoretically (in terms of ethics in general) and professionally (in terms of teaching). Since it's the first chapter of the book, my aim is not to be critical. Instead, I’ll simply summarize some of the key points of what I see Higgins’ project to be thus far (and it’s a big one) and then at the end of the post I’ll ask a few brief questions to get things started conversationally.

Where should I begin? I don’t have to tell anyone who has read the first chapter that Higgins has bitten off an extremely large bite philosophically. There is so much in this chapter to talk about that it is hard to know where to start. As readers of Williams and Taylor know, these authors have a lot to say, their projects are very large and complicated, and Higgins does a good job of packing their major concerns into 20 pages. That said, it’s hard to then pack those 20 pages into a blog post that can do justice to the larger concerns and at the same time put them in the context of Higgins' own project. I’ll give it a shot – in advance, forgive me my omissions of the more detailed (and interesting) discussions Higgins engages in throughout the chapter. Here I’m trying to just capture the main line of argument so that his project is illuminated.

Clearly, Higgins’ project (so far) is to engage with and understand professional ethics (specifically teaching, later on in the book). However, in the spirit of Bernard Williams and Charles Taylor, Higgins points out that ethics itself as problematic. The reason for this is that modern ethics (or "morality") has slowly and steadily moved away (historically) from ancient eudaimonic ethics. Of course, if this modern movement were seen merely as the latest answer to the old question “what ethical model is best – virtue, deontology or consequentialism?” this would simply reveal Higgins (and Williams and Taylor) as merely preferring the approach of ancient ethics to modern ethics. However, anyone who has read Williams or Taylor knows that Higgins’ claim is far stronger. It’s not just that ancient approaches to value are better ways of solving ethical dilemmas. Rather, the claim is that basic eudaimonic ethics can never really be “moved past” because the questions it asks are necessarily rooted in what is constitutive of human moral life (or agency).

That’s a big claim, so we need to ask: What is constitutive of human moral life? Although the answer to this question is very complicated (in Higgins’ chapter and elsewhere in Williams/Taylor), I think for the sake of this post we can reduce it to some basic claims. Most importantly, eudaimonic approaches to the ethical life root questions about “what to do” inside of a larger background or context – a quest to answer the question “who am I?” This kind of approach sees questions about practical action as only answerable inside of narrative frameworks that aim at assessing the unity of a human life – specifically, a life that is aimed at or oriented towards a substantive good that facilitates human flourishing. So, in a sense, concerns about practical action and questions about one’s own (continual quest for) well-being (flourishing) are necessarily connected.

Modern ethics wants to sever that connection between the personal and the practical. It wants to abstract away questions about practical action so that they are not influenced by concerns about flourishing, as this is seen as not only unacceptably selfish, but also partial. In a sense (and in different ways, depending on the ethical theory) modern ethics sees the project of ethics as one in which the agent learns to reject desire, think impartially (perhaps employ the will), and direct oneself in accordance with purely altruistic obligations (that are motivated in this way as well). Since Higgins (and Williams and Taylor) see this modern turn as out of sync with what we are as agents, the best a competing view (such as deontology or consequentialism) can do is to try to hide those eudaimonic concerns from view and suppress them. In a sense, we have two choices: we can deny and suppress what we are (as quest-driven agents) and follow the modern path, leading to a disfigurement of ourselves as agents, or we can accept and embrace what we are and approach the Socratic questions about life, identity and flourishing as core to how we approach (and root) issues of value in our lives. There’s no third option.

How does this relate to professional ethics, the subject of Higgins’ book? The answer is simple: if professions emerged historically around the same time that the turn between ancient and modern systems of ethics occurred, it will not be surprising if our way of understanding professional ethics is strongly shaped by modern ways of understanding the larger ethical project. So, if Williams-Higgins-Taylor turn out to be right in suggesting that modern morality has wrongly suppressed the more fundamental ancient concerns about flourishing that are lurking beneath the surface, it will also be true that modern professional ethics does the same thing. Essentially, Higgins will use the historical analysis in chapter one – which shows that our modern ethical views are disfigured and myopic – and use it to show that our professional view of ethics (and inevitably, teaching) is similarly disfigured and myopic. Essentially, having a clear view of the “disease” will give us a clearer view of the possibilities for professional ethics – possibilities that are healthier and which are there, lurking beneath the surface, waiting for us to cultivate and develop them.

So what is the myopic way of understanding professional ethics? Combining the modern focus on the importance of “ordinary life” (from Taylor), the belief that desire/ethics and egoism/altruism are in opposition and the fact that ethics is seen in terms of obligations, we get a view of professions that directs us to see that professions are:

(1) Specialized training

(2) Public recognition of practitioners to have autonomy to self-regulate

(3) A commitment to provide services to the public altruistically.

One way of viewing this is to suggest that professional ethics is a way of using and employing the skills in (1) through a system of rules and codes (in (2)) that practitioners themselves create and which are aimed at assuring non self-interested acts of altruism (in (3)). From the modern view, this is seen as not only necessary for professional ethics, but also sufficient, such that following through on (1) – (3) exhausts the conversation about what it means to ethically participate in a discipline.

However, Higgins sees this as overly myopic. Beneath these concerns must be more fundamental concerns that agents have about how engagement with a certain profession contributes to the well-being and flourishing of the practitioner him/herself. If so, proposed answers to “how should I act?” should be understood against that backdrop. If that’s right, engaging with professional ethics in a robust and healthy way requires thinking about how Socrates’ question -- “who am I?” -- can be asked and successfully answered within the context of professional life itself. Essentially, Higgins is arguing that ethics must – in the professional realm and elsewhere – always include a foundational immersion with concerns about human flourishing at the core of agency itself. It is fundamental to our professional life that it be a response to our questions about human flourishing, so ethics must capture and involve that very quest and "agentic orientation." To ignore such questions is to disfigure ethics and our own lives as agents. Only by recapturing this fundamental set of questions (Taylor often calls it a "retrieval" project) can we hope to fully glimpse the whole of professional life. Since modern professional ethics exiles and suppresses those fundamental questions, it can never hope to capture ethical life in a discipline, and in the end will lead us down problematic roads (psychologically and otherwise, as Williams notes).

Personally, I find Higgins’ approach here to be provocative, productive, and necessary. I realize that this post is overly long, so I will limit myself to some concerns about teaching as examples. In my own discussions with my fellow colleagues, I often find that the question “what is the right thing to do, or what are the right practices to employ, or virtues to develop, as a professor?” is almost always answered solely in terms of an abstract and procedural discussion of what counts as maximizing the good of students and their learning. Clearly, those are targets of ethical concern as a teacher, but I am always surprised by the insistence that professional ethics reduces to what hurts or maximizes student outcomes (consequentialism), or in terms of what recognizes or ignores the dignity of a student (deontology).

Quite simply, when I ask “shouldn’t being a good teacher respond on some level to the fundamental reasons why we entered this discipline in the first place?” I am met with faces that show reluctance and lack of comfort. My colleagues are uncomfortable talking about the ethics of teaching in terms of their own ground projects, because to them focusing on such desires as ethically salient is ignoble – it is too self-interested. In a way, many seem to think that our concern with professional flourishing should always be trumped because, quite simply, it’s not a true ethical variable in the situation (or one that is so unimportant that it can be quick defeated by other "obligations"). Personally, I’ve always found this view bizarre and strange. So Higgins is speaking to something that I have long believed, but something that I have had a hard time articulating.

So: are there practices that teachers should embrace that do justice to their own quests for well-being that cannot be simply reduced to the maximization of student learning? If so, what are they? Are there practices that disrupt such well-being? How can we make sense of such an ethical life? What would the virtues be? What are the vices? In Higgins’ sense (and drawing on his reading of Plato) – how do we do formative justice to ourselves, and to our possibilities, as human beings but more specifically as teachers?

These are big questions, and I’m anxious to read what Higgins (and you all) has to say about them.

Humanities Think Tank

2012-01-29T12:38:00.000-08:00

Those interested in reforming the futures of the humanities should check out the new blog, The Future of the Humanities: A Think Tank. It's overseen by Paul Jay and Gerald Graff, who have made a number of seminal contributions to this discussion, including a piece on "critical vocationalism" that I much admire.

Talking the teaching talk, walking the teaching walk

2012-01-29T07:20:00.000-08:00

UPDATE: I posted this a few years back, but thought that it would be timely to re-post it now, as on-campus interviews are in full swing. Any other ideas on how approach a teaching demo are very welcome in the comments!

Hiring season is on in the world of academic philosophy, and I thought a post on a common feature of the interviewing process might be welcome: the on-campus teaching presentation.

Many hiring institutions ask candidates to do a teaching presentation as a part of their on-campus interviews. This is especially true for institutions with a strong teaching focus. To my knowledge, the teaching presentation tends to come in one of two varieties:

A teaching demonstration is when you are asked to teach. Often, you are put in a class meeting for an existing course. Institutions vary in how much latitude they then provide you. In some cases, you may be given a syllabus and a description of the aims or objectives of the class meeting. In that case, you're sort of like a substitute teacher, covering the material the instructor would have regularly covered. In other cases, you are put in a course and given broader latitude to teach the material that interests you or seems appropriate. For example, the teaching demo I did for my present position took place in a philosophy of religion course in which the students had been studying the problem of evil. I do ethics rather than philosophy of religion, so I decided to focus the discussion on how various moral theories might explain why evil takes place (utilitarianism: lack of sympathy, virtue theory: poor moral development, Kantianism: wanting to exempt oneself from moral principles, Hobbesianism: failing to realize the cooperative benefits of being good, etc.). This seemed to work nicely, since it gave the students a fresh perspective on the problem of evil but still related to something they knew a little about.

Some small variations on this demonstration format:
You give a mock class to a random group of undergrads or an undergraduate philosophy club. You have more latitude here, since there's not a course to put bounds on the content.
You give a mock class to a group of faculty. This is very stupid and I wish institutions wouldn't do it. The faculty tend to do a terrible job pretending they are students, and the result tends to be, as you might expect, a philosophical conversation among the faculty.

My advice for teaching demonstrations:
1. Be enthusiastic. Obvious, but if you don't seem like a person who the hiring committee can imagine will enjoy teaching at their institution for, oh, four decades, they're not going to be enthusiastic about your candidacy.
2. Build in discussion, group activities, etc. -- don't make it a straight lecture. Show that you're at least open to something more/other than the 'sage on the stage' approach to teaching.
3. Stoke curiosity instead of settling controversies. I've seen candidates set up their demo by outlining a philosophical problem, describing solutions to the problem that they reject, and then offering their own solution (usually one thoroughly defended in their dissertation!). That's too graduate seminar-y. You're talking to undergrads here, and your main aim is to keep and retain their interest — better yet, to have them leave wishing you would come back. So end with questions, puzzles, etc., instead of with solutions.
4. It's not a research presentation. Don't make your own philosophical thinking the star of the show. You're teaching here, and your job is to facilitate learning.

The other sort of teaching presentation we'll call the teaching talk. Here you're not actually teaching. Instead, you're giving a presentation about some aspect of your teaching philosophy, approaches, or techniques. Here the audience will be faculty members, and often, faculty members from other disciplines or even administrators. With a teaching talk, the institution is looking less at how you teach, but how you think about how you teach. So the hope here is to appear conscientious, thoughtful, careful, and willing to learn more about teaching.

My advice on the teaching talk:
1. Be problem-oriented. Big picture stuff — your "teaching philosophy," your thoughts about the role of education in a democratic society — is nice, but doesn't tell people much about you as a teacher. Instead, pick a problem you encountered in your teaching, describe a solution that you found effective, and explain how and why it worked. The problem could be something like: Students had trouble with historical texts, students asked to revise their papers did so superficially, there wasn't much discussion in my classes, etc.
2. Show that you can learn how to teach. If you're interviewing for your first tenure track job, the hiring committee doesn't expect you to be a seasoned expert. But they'll want to know that you can reflect on your shortcomings and identify how to solve them and improve. So adopt a humble persona and end your talk, South Park-like, with a "here's what I learned about teaching from this experience".
3. Involve your audience. Leave time for questions and discussions at the end, and try to involve your audience in some way during the talk. Ask them to brainstorm ideas for solving the problem you wanted to tackle, or if you're more daring, do a role play with one of you in the student role and one in the instructor role.
4. Again, be enthusiastic. Show that teaching is something you find rewarding and care enough about that you will be happy you chose it as your career.

I'd be interested to hear stories about teaching presentations and how others have approached them, as well as advice for those who will be facing this task soon.

Academically Adrift, the follow up

2012-01-26T20:13:00.000-08:00

The authors of Academically Adrift (much discussed here last year) have released the findings of a follow up study concerning critical thinking, civic engagement, and post-collegiate employment. This looks like more good news for philosophy (if philosophy engenders critical thinking and civic engagement at least!) and bad news for business students:

The study, “Documenting Uncertain Times: Post-graduate Transition of the Academically Adrift Cohort,” used the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized testing evaluation of higher education, to compare the academic strength of 925 students to post-graduate success.

The study comes about a year after University Asst. Sociology Prof. Josipa Roksa and New York University Sociology Prof. Richard Arum stirred debate in higher education circles with their book, “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses,” which broadly found that students’ critical thinking and analytic reasoning skills do not improve during their four years in college. The report released Tuesday studied the same students surveyed in “Academically Adrift."

As a follow-up to that book, Arum and Roksa “were interested to learn if [the outcomes of the] Collegiate Learning Assessment … would be related to employment,” Roksa said.

In the latest study, graduates who scored in the bottom quintile of the test were three times more likely to be unemployed than those who scored in the top quintile, twice as likely to still be living at home and significantly more likely to have amassed credit card debt.

Study results also indicated that business majors in particular failed to display notable strides in critical thinking.

One last reminder: The Good Life starts January 30

2012-01-26T10:36:00.000-08:00

UPDATE: Chris tells me that those with access to library subscriptions to the Wiley Online Library can download the book section by section.

Well, most of us are already enjoying said life, but our online discussion of Chris Higgins' The Good Life of Teaching begins January 30. Here's my earlier introduction.

Added good news: Chris has indicated that though he wants to keep his nose out of our discussions initially, he'll do a guest post (a sort of 'reply to critics') once our discussion ends mid- February.

I hope everyone will buy the book and join the discussion!

"Not all roads lead to oneself"

2012-01-24T06:07:00.000-08:00

The most recent edition of the APA Newsletter on Teaching Philosophy (available here) reprints a newspaper piece by Brown's Felicia Ackerman. In it, Ackerman states a rule she applies to her courses:
"We never discuss our personal lives."

As Ackerman observes, this rule may surprise some, since philosophy is thought to be "personal," especially the philosophical questions she addresses in bioethics. But here's Ackerman's rationale:

"Intellectual discussion requires the unconstrained exchange of views," and the sharing of personal information, especially about "sources of distress" in people's lives, impedes such discussion. Ackerman uses this example: "How freely will students criticize a fictional rape victim for not reporting the rape if they know that one of their classmates is agonizing over having made the same choice?"
Whatever benefit sharing personal experiences might bring to class discussion, it's outweighed by its risk of "derailing intellectual interchange." Students from diverse backgrounds can bring their personal knowledge to bear on such discussions without discussing personal facts about themselves.
Discussion of students' personal lives may "reinforce the validity of personal experiences," but Ackerman's goal as a teacher is not reinforce said validity, but to "make students more rigorous thinkers about philosophical issues."
Teachers who share personal experiences might be more effective role models, but Ackerman disavows students modelling themselves on her.
It may sometimes be true that students better appreciate abstract issues by relating them to personal experience, but this is more constraining than enabling. "People are already interested in themselves. Education should stimulate their interest in other things. Not all roads lead to oneself."

I have my own reactions to Ackerman that I may share later in comments, but I'm curious to know if others endorse her 'never discuss your personal life' rule for teaching. What are the pedagogical merits or drawbacks of such a rule?

Teaching Philosophy Conference CFP

2012-01-17T12:44:00.000-08:00

A Call for Papers from the American Association of Philosophy Teachers:

Dear AAPT community,

We've extended the deadline for proposals for the summer conference to be held at St. Edward's University in Austin, TX from July 25-29. The new deadline is Thursday, February 9 and details are in the attached document. Please consider submitting a proposal - we'd love to see you in Austin!

And if you plan on attending the Central or Pacific APA meetings, the AAPT will be running workshops at each. Details are at our website

http://philosophyteachers.org/.

Short Readings in Philosophy?

2012-01-16T09:24:00.000-08:00

I tend to be in a favor of using short readings in philosophy. This is because, in part, my sense is that many student populations have an especially hard time comprehending full-length philosophical essays (Jonathan Bennett has made similar observations about reading comprehension in history of philosophy courses and has developed excellent texts to address that). Given my style of teaching, I think I am typically able to get a lot of student learning out of a very short reading so I prefer them.

With this in mind, I'd like to share -- with his and his publisher's permission - Russ Shafer Landau's 2 page section "Ethical Starting Points" from his The Fundamentals of Ethics (Oxford University Press) textbook. I've found this page useful at the beginning of the semester in ethics courses since it nicely identifies many moral views that most of already accept, and so it identifies some common ground or assumptions to work from (as well as critically examine as the course progresses).

Concerning this piece, I'd like to ask this: are any "starting points" anyone would like to add? Any that you'd like to remove? I'd like to also ask if there are other good short readings that anyone would like to share. Peg Tittle's What If? Collected Thought Experiments in Philosophy is great in this regard - lots of 1 page or less readings -- but what else is good in the very short readings genre?

Avoiding the pitfalls of Service-Learning

2012-01-13T15:49:00.000-08:00

I recently finished reading the manuscript of Meira Levinson’s wonderful book No Citizen Left Behind. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in K-12 education, equal opportunity, and the achievement gap. In one chapter, Levinson takes issue with service-learning because she thinks that it is often couched as a feel good apolitical non-partisan way of promoting caring and general moral concern in students without really grappling with the deep political questions of injustice and inequality. Students are able to volunteer, feel good about their contribution, but then move on without reflecting on how to confront deeper systemic and structural challenges. She also argues that for minority students, the experience can be disempowering, especially when they are asked to engage in low-skilled menial labor. I think all of these critiques have some merit, and as I have been thinking of teaching my freshman seminar on Justice again with a service-learning component, I have been struggling to think of how to design my course to avoid some of these pitfalls.

The last time I taught this class as a service-learning course, I was teaching at a liberal arts college where most of my students were relatively well-off, lived on campus, and did not have full-time jobs or families. These students enjoyed the service-component though I did have a feeling that for some of them, it was a novelty, and that they would not continue to engage with the projects they had started after the course ended. By the end of the term, I had some ideas about how I would approach things differently were I to teach a service-learning course again. However, this time around I would be teaching a completely different population of students—most of my students will have jobs that take up a considerable amount of their time, some of them will have families, and the majority of them will be minorities. I worry that I am more at risk of falling prey to some of the worries Levinson worries with such a population and, on top of that, making some of the students feel resentful about having to engage in service on top of everything else they have going on. So now I am wondering, how can I retain the service-learning component of my course and avoid some of the pitfalls that Levinson discusses?

Student writing, signposting, and 'no surprises'

2012-01-11T06:37:00.000-08:00

I'm currently advising 22 undergraduate philosophy theses. No kidding!

Let me share a frustration— and an insight — I recently gleaned from a recent batch of rough drafts.

Upon reading the last batch of their rough drafts, I was struck by how even the best prepared, most knowledgeable, most conscientious students gave very little explicit guidance to the reader as to how the overall argumentative strategy of the paper unfolds. Broadly generalizing, the students' papers tended to have structures like this:

Introduction: usually some background on the topic, some indication of why the topic or question engaged in the paper is of philosophical interest
Statement of thesis
The rest of the paper: facts, evidence, arguments, objections and replies, conclusion, etc.

What's lacking here is 2.5: a few sentences outlining how the thesis will be defended. Jim Pryor is terrific at describing this. As he puts it, the point of section 2.5 is to make the structure of the paper obvious to the reader. As I think we can all appreciate, philosophy can be sufficiently confusing that a proficient philosophical writer should strive not only to explain his or her claims or arguments clearly, but also to explain their significance — how the particular claims, arguments, etc. work in combination to defend the paper's thesis. This sort of 'signposting' (some call it 'scaffolding') helps the reader see why, if the arguments, etc. that occur throughout the paper succeed, how their success adds up to a plausible defense of the paper's thesis. So in 2.5, we need something like:

I will defend thesis T first by contrasting it with some other theses — T1 and T2 — that it resembles and with which it can be easily confused. In section 2, I give my main argument for T. Section 3 addresses an objection to T raised by Smart Philosopher X in her seminal article 'Article.' I conclude, in section 4, by drawing out some of the practical implications of T.

As Pryor points out, ideally this sort of signposting will recur throughout the paper:

Another way you can help make the structure of your paper obvious is by telling the reader what you've done so far and what you're going to do next. You can say things like:
I will begin by...

Before I say what is wrong with this argument, I want to...

These passages suggest that...

I will now defend this claim...

Further support for this claim comes from...

For example...

I imagine that most instructors recognize the lack of signposting as a familiar (and frustrating) problem.

Here's the insight: How do we help students see and appreciate signposting (or its absence)? A phrase that seems to be helping my students is 'no surprises'. Good philosophical writing, unlike a magic trick or other more 'literary' forms of writing, should end with the reader being entirely unsurprised: The writer set out to defend a thesis, indicated how that defense would go, and (hopefully) provided a rationally compelling defense. So what I've told many is to apply 'no surprises' to the process of revision. If, at some point in your paper, you engage in a task (making a claim, critiquing an argument, whatever) that surprises you, then it will probably surprise your reader too!. At that point, the student needs to return earlier in the paper and 'signpost' the surprising material. A few students have reported that this exercise has helped them, introducing 'flow' and direction into their writing.

That's the frustration and the insight, but I'd be interested to know how others have tried to encourage the signposting habit in students.

Don't lecture me

2012-01-06T06:05:00.000-08:00

Another great radio piece by Emily Hanford (I caught the end of what I assume was just part of it on the NPR afternoon news show on Sunday) here (audio and transcript both there). She reports the research on the effectiveness of lectures in prompting actual learning: not much. Anyone reading who lectures must listen to/read it. A long excerpt (followed by some comments):

Lecturing was the way just about everyone taught introductory physics. To think there was something wrong with the lecture meant physics instructors would "have to really change the way they do things," says Hestenes. A lot of them ignored his study and kept teaching the way they always had. They insisted their lectures were working just fine. But Eric Mazur was unusual, says Hestenes. "He was the first one who took it to heart." Mazur is a physics professor at Harvard University. He came across Hestenes's articles in 1990, five years after they'd been published. To understand why the articles had such a big impact on Mazur you have to know some things about his history. Mazur grew up dreaming of becoming an astronomer.

"When I was five years old I fell in love with the universe," he says. "I tried to get my hands on to every accessible book on astronomy. I was so excited by the world of science." But when Mazur got to university, he hated the astronomy classes."It was all sitting in the lecture, and then scribbling down notes and cramming those notes and parroting them back on the exam," he says. "Focusing on the details, focusing on memorizing and regurgitation, the whole beauty of astronomy was lost." So he switched to physics. It wasn't as heartbreaking for him to sit in a physics lecture and memorize things. Mazur eventually got a Ph.D. in physics and a job at Harvard University. Like most Ph.D.s, Mazur never got any training in how to teach.

"I just mimicked what my instructors had done to me. I think that's what we all do. So, I lectured." Turns out he loved lecturing. It's a lot more fun being on stage delivering a lecture than it is sitting in the audience watching. And that's exactly what a lecture is, says Mazur: a performance. He decided to make it fun. "Thanks to the setup we have here at Harvard, it was very flashy, like a Hollywood show," he says. "Attention-grabbing demos, me shooting through the lecture hall in a rocket car."Mazur's students apparently loved it. His classes were full and he got great evaluations from the students at the end of every semester. "For a long while, I thought I was doing a really, really good job," he says.

Then Mazur read the articles by Hestenes and Halloun. Mazur's first instinct was to dismiss the results. The test covered such basic material; he was sure his students were learning this stuff. But what if they weren't? How boring it would be to learn physics and never really understand the fundamental concepts that make physics so fascinating. Mazur thought back to his own experience with astronomy; if his students were just memorizing information and solving problems, he had to know, and he had to do something about it. So he gave them the FCI, and he was shocked. "They didn't do much better," he says. "In fact, when they looked at the test that I gave to them some students asked me, 'How should I answer these questions? According to what you taught me, or according to the way I usually think about these things?' That's when it started to dawn on me that something was really amiss."

I am a culprit in the promulgation of the lecture. But this comment by Alan Bostick, alongside the critical comments of Keith M Ellis, haunted me for a long time. I now follow Bostick;s advice whenever possible with, in recent experience, quite spectacular results. I find, though, that asking a single undergraduate to prepare a lecture, is really too much pressure. That may be because they are never asked to do so, but they aren't so I have to live with that. I have usually asked them to prepare in pairs; this past semester, mainly due to my own incompetence, I assigned them in 3s, which seems to have been ideal. In my class of 24 students, not one of the 8 classes which were run by students was less good than the average class run by me, and many were far better than my average (of course, I contributed in discussion, a lot I'd like to think, and I did select the for the first presentation a group of students whom I thought, rightly, would set a standard that would press the others to perform well).

Of course, in a class of 160 I cannot assign lectures to all the students. But I use the guidance that almost nobody can concentrate on even my lecturing for more than 20 minutes, and so break up the classes as much as possible with (I hope well considered) discussion questions, often starting out by asking them to talk to each other, then getting them to discuss in the larger format. I know this doesn't work for all the students, and I know a lot of good students find the ramblings of their peers frustrating, so I do still lecture a fair bit, and exercise a good deal of control in the discussions.

My suspicion is that there is a small subset of students who can and do concentrate for more than 20 minutes; in fact they can concentrate for hours. I was one of those, at least when the lecturer met some low threshold of quality. The reason that many academics in the US system think their own lectures are effective is that they were in that small subset (and their belief is never tested, since they assign the assessments, which are not designed to test their belief in their own effectiveness...). We select for people who are like us.

(Crossposted at CrookedTimber)

"Critical vocationalism" as the future of humanities

2012-01-05T14:09:00.000-08:00

At IHE, Paul Jay and Gerald Graff have an excellent (albeit somewhat long-winded) articulation of a vision of the humanities they call "critical vocationalism". Needless to say, this is the vision that I myself favor. I'd be interested to hear people's reactions to this piece. A few choice quotes to convey the flavor:

We would be the last to argue that traditional ways of valuing the humanities are not important, that studying philosophy, literature, and the fine arts do not have a value in and of themselves apart from the skills they teach. We also recognize that the interests of the corporate world and the marketplace often clash with the values of the humanities. What is needed for the humanities in our view is neither an uncritical surrender to the market nor a disdainful refusal to be sullied by it, but what we might call a critical vocationalism, an attitude that is receptive to taking advantage of opportunities in the private and public sectors for humanities graduates that enable those graduates to apply their training in meaningful and satisfying ways. We believe such opportunities do exist....

If there is a crisis in the humanities, then, it stems less from their inherent lack of practical utility than from our humanistic disdain for such utility, which too often prevents us from taking advantage of the vocational opportunities presented to us. This lofty disdain for the market has thwarted the success of the few programs that have recognized that humanities graduates have much to offer the worlds of business, technology, arts agencies, and philanthropic foundations.

For ultimately, to take advantage of the vocational potential of humanities study as we propose is not to sell out to the corporate world, but to bring the critical perspective of the humanities into that world. It is a perspective that is sorely needed, especially in corporate and financial sectors that have lately been notoriously challenged in the ethics department, to say the least. Humanities graduates are trained to consider the ethical dimensions of experience, linking the humanities with the sciences as well as with business and looking at both these realms from diverse perspectives. To those who worry that what we urge would blunt the humanities' critical power, we would reply that it would actually figure to increase that power, for power after all is the ability to act in the world.

Jumping on the accreditation bandwagon/boondoggle

2012-01-04T10:55:00.000-08:00

On my campus, accreditation (or alternatively, the threat of de-accreditation) carries political weight. Programs and departments seem to get additional resources or support if they can persuade someone in power that unless they receive said resources or support, they won't be accredited or their existing accreditation is jeopardized.

Now, I don't have any particular axe to grind against accrediting academic programs. In professional areas in particular, where it's expected that students' education will prepare them to be competent professionals, it makes sense to have organizations of competent professionals determine whether a program can (or will) succeed in preparing students. Accreditation amounts, in effect, to peer review for academic programs. Indeed, I'd be frightened if there weren't accrediting bodies overseeing (say) medical education.
On the other hand, accreditation looks to me like something of a boondoggle in contemporary undergraduate education: a lever that programs can pull, especially in periods where resources are tight, to ensure that their programs are well-resourced, even at the expense of others. Of course, all academic programs should be concerned about their quality and have some way of investigating that (assessment yeehah!). But those disciplines with accrediting bodies arrogate an unfair rhetorical (and political) advantage: You see it's not just that we think we need X, Y, and Z to assure the academic quality of our program. Esteemed National Accrediting Body says we need X, Y, and Z to assure the academic quality of our program. And what administrator is immune to the collective judgment of the academic community?

Now, so far as I am aware, academic programs in English, history, or other humanities do not have accreditation. But why not — and why shouldn't we in philosophy try to develop accreditation standards and practices so that we can hop on the bandwagon/boondoggle as well? I think the emerging consensus about the main philosophical organization in the U.S. — the good ol' APA — is that it does not have a clear agenda to promote the discipline and that the need is diminishing for various functions it once performed (advertising jobs, organizing meetings, etc.). But surely this would be something the APA could help us do and put its weight behind.

So philosophers: Would you support the establishment of a national body to develop accrediting standards for undergraduate (or even graduate?) philosophy programs? I've made the initial case for it here. But what should we worry about with such a proposal? And what would it ultimately look like — the standards, the evaluation procedures, etc.?

How to Respond to Student Evaluations

2012-01-02T21:20:00.000-08:00

In the next weeks we'll be receiving student evaluations from last semester. We've had much discussion here about evaluations and whether and to what degree they are empirically valid instruments for assessing our work as teachers. I take that for the most part, they are not. But we still receive them, we still read them, and we still need to find a way to read and respond to them, even if they don't do the work that the system takes them to do.

So, what are the benefits and pitfalls of reading evaluations? Perhaps thankfully, I don't get my evaluations back until well after they have been submitted to the administration. This allows me the appropriate amount of time to detach from the particular class, or semester, or whatever stressors that could impede my ability to read them in a way that could be productive. If your institution is different, one piece of advice I would give, then, is: sit on them for a while if you can. Distance can be helpful.

I tend not to read evaluations as evaluations. That is, I tend not to read them as a portrait of what kind of teacher I am. I tend to read them in terms of student experience. In other words: what were their expectations? If their expectations were reasonable, how did I meet them? If the expectations weren't, how might I incorporate more teaching about course goals, more teaching about what particular assignments are designed for, etc. Reading them in this light allows me to be less defensive and to evaluate whether and to what degree I can address what students report in a way that is better on the whole. For example, the last time I taught Philosophy of Language, several students responded that they would like me to give them my lecture notes. I think that this is unreasonable. But! I can meet them half-way: perhaps some handouts on technical terms, etc.

This approach is particularly helpful, I think , when writing teaching self-assessments for review. By approaching student comments as data about how the students are experiencing the learning environment rather than as data about what kind and quality of teacher you are, you are better able to communicate what you want to accomplish as a teacher, rather than reacting. Let's face it: students can say some pretty hurtful things. But even those hurtful things can be dealt with in a productive manner without giving up rigor, high expectations, and a sense that you are responsible for a context that has student learning at its center.

Reading group: Higgins, The Good Life of Teaching

2012-01-02T11:03:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year to our readers and contributors.

Following our very successful reading groups on Academically Adrift, Not for Profit, and On Course, we are now planning a reading group on Chris Higgins' The Good Life of Teaching.

Higgins' book is more philosophical than the others, promising to offer a conception of the practice of teaching (and of professional ethics in general) that focuses on teachers' self-cultivation. Higgins is particularly interested in how to make sense of teaching as a self-interested endeavor in light of how teaching is often classified as a "helping profession."

So our plan is to being the reading group on January 29. Our contributors will be posting regular entries on the book through the end of February. We hope that everyone will find this group enlightening and join in the discussion.

Buy the book: Wiley, Amazon (including Kindle), BN (including Nook)

'Divide and conquer' student reading

2011-12-26T11:21:00.000-08:00

Sarah Clark at the Faculty Focus blog has a few tips on how to motivate students to read by making reading assignments more meaningful. A strategy she called 'divide and conquer' caught my attention:

Divide and Conquer - Divide up the next reading chapter among small groups of students. Student A reads the first section in the chapter, Student B reads the next section, and so forth. The next day, students meet in small groups and report on the section they read. Or you can have groups of students that read the same section meet with students who read different sections. Students become dependent on one another to create the full picture of what was in the reading material. My students seem to enjoy these group discussions, which are a way to become familiar with the material before being graded on it.

I could see this strategy being very effective in philosophy courses, particularly with a few tweaks and additions.

For instance: Your students are required to read Garrett Hardin and Peter Singer on our duties to aid the poor. You assign half the students to read Hardin for the next meeting, half to read Singer. You tell the students that everyone will be responsible for understanding both author's points of view. Assemble the students in small groups and give them some sort of evaluative task (a true-false quiz, a compare/contrast, agree/disagree, etc.) that requires knowledge of both authors. Then tell the students to read the source they didn't read for the next meeting.

I could see some advantages of this 'divide and conquer' strategy:

It might encourage some genuine intellectual collaboration among the students.
Having to explain an author's views to other students could reinforce understanding.
The collaborative task could, in effect, amount to 'pre-reading'. In other words, the students responsible for reading Singer first are providing some intellectual scaffolding for the students who read Hardin first, and vice versa. A student who finds one author's view very plausible might learn that the other author has an objection to that view and be motivated to understand the objection better, etc.

Anyway, has anyone tried a strategy like this? How could you imagine implementing it?

Apps?

2011-12-22T08:58:00.000-08:00

Has anyone found any "Apps" of value for teaching philosophy, ethics or logic-related courses? I've seen some apps for other fields that look good, but haven't found any for philosophy that seem interesting. Thanks!

Learning From Bob

2011-12-21T07:15:00.000-08:00

A while ago, Becko wrote a provocative post about the need to learn "from the right students". We all know who the wrong student is, by the way - the one who is hostile, disruptive, outraged - you know the type. We all hope on the first day that we don't spot this student sitting here, glaring at us. As Becko rightly put it:

We will all spend stressful and sleepless nights worrying over this student. Worse, I suggest, we think to change our teaching based on his behavior...Allow me to suggest that we should not learn from this student.

As I noted in the comments to her post, I think Becko is right to point out that we spend way too much time thinking about this student -- I called him "Bob" just to give him a name -- to the detriment of other students who may not only need our help, but who may actually want (and thus be open to) that help. I'm also convinced that focusing on Bob also leads to lousy pedagogical behavior. Still, whereas Becko thinks there's nothing to be learned from Bob, I do think there are some things that we can learn from him, or at least that we can teach ourselves we unfortunately have Bob around every MWF or TuTh for sixteen weeks. I'm not saying that I've mastered the Bob Experience - I haven't, as this would require a sage-like meditative capacity that I don't possess -- but I have some basic ideas. I'll talk a bit about my own experiences with Bob below, and then mention some brief observations about what to do when Bob is (unfortunately) around.

To start off, in my experience, I've found that there are actually two types of Bob (a "Tale of Two Bobs" as it were). The two are:

a) Philosophical Bob: this character populates upper divisional philosophy courses and isn't really all that interested in philosophy per se, but is rather interested in being the smartest person in the room, being a domineering presence, and so on.

b) Gen Ed Bob: this character is far worse than Philosophical Bob. Gen Ed Bob doesn't really like school all that much, is likely none too happy about having to be in college and is particularly upset about being forced to take this general education course with you (typically ethics for me, since this is part of the gen ed curriculum at my school). Gen Ed Bob doesn't care about being or looking smart, but is more focused on being dismissive, disruptive, and generally aggressive and hostile. Gen Ed Bob likes attention and is simply looking to disrupt the class.

I'm going to ignore Philosophical Bob and focus on Gen Ed Bob, since the latter Bob is a far more destructive and annoying character (more frequently encountered as well). I'll come back to Philosophical Bob in a different post, because I think the problem is different with him, and because I think the solution to the Philosophical Bob problem (which is not a small one, and I think this problem plays a role in the gender problems we have in philosophy) is different as well. So let's focus on Gen Ed Bob in this post, because when I think of Becko's post about who not to learn from, I definitely think of Gen Ed Bob primarily, because he drives me nuts (and yes, Bob is almost always a he) and because I'm always a lousy teacher when Bob is around.

So after many years of teaching, why does Gen Ed Bob drive me nuts? Honestly, I find myself focusing on him not just out of class, but in class. I think about him in the car on the way to school, and on the way home as I "decompress." In class, as I teach, I find myself perpetually "checking up" on him to see what he is up to out of the corner of my eye. As my mouth keeps running on and on about Kant, in my head I'm trying to figure out "is there a way to swing GE Bob to my side today?" All day long I'm trying to figure out how to "crack" Gen Ed Bob's psyche. There must be some strategy that I've overlooked, right? Everyone responds to something. What have I missed? What makes GE Bob tick? Nothing works, and I simply get more frustrated as time goes by.

I tend to strongly agree with Becko that this whole enterprise is noble, but mostly a massive waste of time because Bob is not interested in being a actual member of this course. So it's not all that surprising that nothing works. Moreover, excessive Bob focus on my part is not very good or effective pedagogy because when I engage in it I forget about the rest of my classroom. The other students in the room become innocent pedagogical bystanders on the periphery of the unseen and unhealthy relationship that Bob and I have formed, and which has poisoned the room.

At the same time, it is entirely understandable that we as teachers focus so much on Bob. Bob is like corrosive acid on one's pedagogy. Quite simply - I just can't teach well when he is around. When he's absent the class goes better, because I am better. Why? Well, part of my teaching includes being (or at least trying to be) funny. But I'm not funny when Bob is there because I don't feel funny when he's present. I also find myself most effective in the classroom when I feel a personal connection with the students in the room. When I'm Bob-focused, however, I feel impersonal. So that mood envelops my teaching and I find it difficult to relate to the other students. Last (but not least) I teach best when I am in a flow - when I'm spontaneously thinking about the material, trying to to relate points, and trying to see who doesn't understand what and why. But if I am constantly conscious of Bob and trying to think about what to say to get him "to my side," or if I'm trying to figure out if some snickering aside he has made is causing a disruption at the side of the room, I cannot immerse myself in the subject. I lose "flow" when Bob is there because I'm trying to do two things at once - teach and keep an eye on him while trying to figure out how to stay one step ahead.

Recognizing that Bob has these larger-scale pedagogical effects on me has led me to believe that what we can learn from Bob is how to ignore Bob while at the same time engaging in good effective teaching. How? In my view, we need to redirect our obsession with Bob towards "turning" a small handful of non-talkative students into engaged learners. Bob is hopeless, but those few shy students are not. You know those students (often women, in philosophy courses). I say: completely write Bob off and devote your time to getting them involved. Go home and obsess about them. Come up with strategies. Figure out what makes them tick. What a far, far better use of your time.

In the end, if we can succeed at doing this - turning some of the shy or non-confident students into active learners -- we kill two birds with one stone. We create a better courses for the rest of the students and neutralize Bob. After all, Gen Ed Bob thrives in a classroom environment in which he perceives a general mood of indifference to the class and to the material. Once that classroom environment shifts to one of interest - and it only takes a few students to be "turned" for this to happen! -- Bob almost always checks out and quietly bides his time until the end of the semester. After all, Bob doesn't go against the crowd. He's a bit of a coward. Who knows. Maybe Bob will decide to turn himself around too (not likely).

Now, I'm not saying that this is easy to do, because it is not. However, each of us surely needs to get better at this. Not just for our own psychological health (because you know those semesters can be very trying) but also for the good of the other students in the room.

Anyone have any battle-tested strategies you'd like to share? We all have our Bobs, after all.

Time to take a stand

2011-12-19T20:43:00.000-08:00

Below is the introductory paragraph of a critical paper from a student in one of my intro to philosophy courses. The assignment was to construct a valid argument for the conclusion; we should not believe anything for which we lack sufficient evidence. Then using ideas from Plato or Descartes, James, and Clifford, defend or criticize the premises of your argument. Needless to say, this student lacks the basic writing skills to write a coherent paper.

“Decarte mentioned, Doubt “he said he doubted many things when he was young, but accepted them. He said he was opinionated on many situations, also. So he thought and believed in God, and questioned himself about the belief and existence of God, in which he believes. He stated he did not want to believe in anything false, or false things. Believing in God is a good thing to believe in , because he is the supreme God as he viewed life. His simple thought believing things that are not true, are believed falsehoods and evils. Believing God is a good thing and also there is a choice of doubt to which is better. To believe in what is good, rather than what is evil, it is a person choice.””

I no longer blame students for their lack of basic reading and writing skill. Their lack of skills is a result of a systemic failure. The fault is ours. If we want to change people we need to focus on changing the system. Even though we are getting our student from a source that we do not have any control over, we continue to accept them. We should not let students into the college/university environment without a good foundational set of skills. It is unfair to them. I should never have a person in my class that can only write at the level indicated by my example. If we refuse to accept students that lack the necessary skills they should have learned at an earlier level then educators in the earlier systems will be forced to change how they educate for success.

We need take a stand. It is time to demand that only students that have the necessary basic skills to be successful be allowed into higher educational institutions. We need to move beyond the business modal currently directing education and replace it with a modal that focuses on the intrinsic value of liberal arts learning, not the instrumental value favored by the economic modal. The arguments for the intrinsic value of a liberal arts education are not new and have been, and will continue to be, discussed on this blog. But there is a new source of pressure regarding how to measure success in education that can adversely affect the perceived value of a liberal arts education. Recently, decision makers have begun to question how successful higher education is by investigating the graduation rates. If graduation rates are only a small percenage of those that originally started the process, how good can this process really be? From a business/economic perspective such a process would be eliminated, or at least radically revamped, so that the numbers of people graduating would (more closely) mirror the number that entered the process. There are only two ways to accomplish this: 1) lower the academic standards so that more people pass and graduate, or 2) limit the number of students that are allowed into the process by maintaining high standards and admitting only these that have a good chance of succeeding. I favor the latter But, the fact that today’s students lack the necessary skills to perform satisfactorily in liberal arts course, not to mention business related courses; and are being admitted into college level courses indicates that the former is becoming the reality.

Learning and education is not supposed to be easy, nor do I think it always needs to be fun. Sometimes, it is a ‘royal pain in the ass,’ for both the teacher and the student. But the reality is that more and more students simply do not know how to study; how to manage time, how to read for comprehension, how to write coherent sentences, paragraphs and/or papers, or think critically. Furthermore they are not motivated to learn. As teachers we can continue to complain about this or we can do something about it. We can lower our own expectations of what constitutes academic success and dumb down the material and standards so that more people who start the process will graduate, or we can hold our students to higher standards of excellence and compel them to strive to achieve them. We need to take a stand and hold on to the belief that one of our primary objectives as educators committed to the importance of a liberal arts education is to develop good citizens. This can only be accomplished if we get students with the necessary skills to be successful at the college level that we can nurture and send out into the economic sphere as individuals who can manage time, read for comprehension, write coherently, and think critically.

Here are my two suggestions for starting to change the system:

1) In their first semester of college all students should be required to take a College Success course. This course will focus on fundamentals such as time management, reading and writing skills, note taking, test taking, critical thinking, communication, and diversity training. Students must pass this course with at least a 75% grade or be dropped from the institution. Students can test out of this course with an 80% grade on a comprehensive exam that covers the material of the course.

2) Give all incoming students a reading and writing skills test that demonstrates that they can read and write at the college level necessary for performing well in liberal arts courses. If a student fails this test then he or she must take a remedial course in reading and/or writing and pass with at least a 75% grade before they are allowed into any college level courses. I do not trust SAT’s or ACT’s as an adequate measure of a person’s reading or writing skills. I have had too many students who have done well on these tests who cannot write a coherent paragraph.

I close with this reminder of who we are allowing to graduate with college degrees. We all remember the recent commercial that states “without innovation the world would still be flat.” In all probability, the persons who wrote this and who decided it would make a great commercial have college degrees. Need I say more!

Assessment and Students' Lack of Self-Knowledge

2011-12-19T07:25:00.000-08:00

As part of our departmental assessment, I have conducted a survey among students in advanced philosophy classes regarding how useful they found our entry-level courses in preparing them for the philosophy course they are currently taking. I asked students to rate how well the entry-level course prepared them to read philosophy, write philosophy, reconstruct & debate philosophy (this mirrors our departmental course learning objectives for Intro to Philosophy), as well as how well it prepared them overall. I also asked students what activities they had encountered in their entry-level course (e.g. lecturing, class discussion, writing workshops, etc). Then I asked to name the 3 activities they found the most helpful and the 3 they found the least helpful.

I have just started crunching through the data, but have found some interesting correlations.

For example, though a large number of students cited peer-review as one of the least helpful activities, students who had encountered peer-review in their classes rated themselves as being better prepared to write philosophy than students who had not. The gap between those who had encountered peer-review and those who had not was larger than that for students who had encountered in-class writing exercise vs. those who had not and between those who had encountered writing workshops vs. those who had not, though there was a substantial gap favoring those writing activities as well. However, students had rated in-class writing exercises and writing workshops as helpful whereas they had not rated peer-review as helpful. It is not surprising that students might not have the best access to what activities they learn the most from, but I found the results to be interesting. Of course, the sample here is small—about 80 students—but I thought the data was interesting enough to share. Thoughts?

CFP: Philosophy and High Schools

2011-12-18T13:18:00.000-08:00

The journal Teaching Philosophy (http://secure.pdcnet.org/teachphil) solicits contributions for a special issue devoted to philosophical inquiry at the high school level (including its non-U.S. equivalent, such as Gymnasium, Bachillerato, Sixth Form, etc.), with guest editors Jana Mohr Lone (University of Washington) and Mitchell Green (University of Virginia).

Articles on topics such as (but not limited to) the following are welcome:

· general methodological issues related to teaching philosophy at the high school level

· the challenges and rewards of introducing particular philosophical topics to this age group

· the value of preparing students for humanistic inquiry in college by reaching them during their time before college

· the contribution of philosophy to the cultivation of students' critical reasoning skills

· the issues involved in creating entirely new, philosophically-based high schools

· the potential value of service learning college courses or internships that involve outreach to high schools through the medium of philosophy

· case studies (including either quantitative or qualitative assessment) of initiatives that have incorporated philosophy into the high school curriculum

· discussion of strategies that may be efficacious in overcoming institutional barriers to supporting philosophy classes in high schools.

Submissions from high school, college, and university faculty as well as independent scholars are welcome and should be prepared for blind refereeing. Submitted manuscripts should be no more than 8,000 words.

Deadline for submissions is September 1, 2012. Accepted papers will be published in mid-2013. Submissions should be made via the journal’s online submission system, at http://www.teaching-philosophy.com. Please indicate that your submission is for the Special Issue on High School Philosophy.