The Philosophers' Cocoon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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