PHIL 1000: Introduction to Philosophy
For this section on Instructional Delivery, I want to turn our attention to, and offer a relatively close look at, what I did in one class: PHIL 1000. I believe that what follows below will provide a good picture of how I think about Instructional Delivery, how I base it on research and on disciplinary best-practices and innovations, how I improve it through ongoing reflection and student feedback, and the like. (In Design and Assessment, I shift my attention to PHIL 2300 and 1250, so worry-not: I haven't forgotten those.)
Inspired by my work over the last several years reflecting on the role and value of Philosophy at the community college--and how that overall project influenced a) my redesign of PHIL 2300 in 2015, my sabbatical project in 2016/17, and my involvement in the NEH Summer Institute in 2018--I substantively re-envisioned how I teach a course introducing students to the study of philosophy. (*visit the professional activity page for details of the sabbatical and the NEH project).
A) The Syllabus:
(Ladson-Billings: #1, 4, 5, 6)
I rewrote the my entire syllabus. Here my efforts were informed by two primary factors: 1) a strong desire to communicate, as compellingly as possible, why on earth philosophy matters, for everyone, and to do so in ways that remind people that life is bigger than their income, and that education is bigger than job-training; and 2) a goal to include of some insights I gained from a self-assessment exercise I engaged in, called "Inclusion by Design: Survey Your Syllabus and Course Design." This self-assessment asked me to consider both hidden and actual text, and to attend to:
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People: Who will most likely be in your class? (Consider student characteristics such as race, gender, class, ability, religion, language, geographic region, sexual orientation, ability/disability, first generation college, other invisible status, etc.)
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Content: What different perspectives and viewpoints are included in the course content?
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Relevance: What ways are there to connect the course topic and content to your students and the real world?
p.s. click that >> button, and select the bookmark icon (open current page) to open a new tab with a full page view of the document)
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Pedagogy: What are the pedagogical choices available to you in your discipline and how diverse are they? (Examples: lecture, team-based learning, problem-based learning, socratic method, simulations, role-play, debate, service learning) Values: What values do you intend to instill in this course? (Examples: Inquiry, community, discipline, deliberation, critical thinking, value of difference)
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Climate: How will differences of positionality/opinion/thinking be handled in the classroom? How can you create safe spaces for both visible and invisible minority students?
In the end, I answered those questions for myself, and then put them, squarely and transparently, right into the syllabus itself. Above you can see the results of that effort.
B) Course Organization:
(Ladson-Billings: #6, 4)
I created a whole new structure and organization of the course. Rather than organize the course around some of the more traditional “philosophical problems” (Do we have free will?, What is Identity?, --which we also did cover, indirectly at first, and directly later in the semester), I focused the course around fewer, not-unrelated-but-more-immediately-relevant, big questions: What is Happiness? What is a Good life? What matters? What does a life well-lived look like? Etc. So, while the course remained pretty much chronological, covered the same philosophers mostly, and indeed assigned the same primary texts, the way I approached each and every philosopher and philosophy deeply changed.
I suppose one could say that I designed all the activities and content of the course from a place of quiet desperation: Will they remember this stuff after they finish the course? What about this stuff will make a difference in their lives? What are some ways that this class could help students to find their own philosophically-engaged approaches in their own lives, etc. So, towards the attempt to promote good answers to those questions, I designed each module around exemplars of various “Philosophical Ways of Life:” The Examined Life, The Enlightened Life, The Pleasurable Life, The Stoic Life, The Authentic Life, etc
c) Redesign of Canvas Site
(Ladson-Billings, #6, 5, 4)
I substantively revamped the course Canvas site. Among other things, here I was motivated by a need to a) create opportunities for students to revisit lessons; b) present materials, expectations and instructions in a variety of ways; c) create a constantly reliable space for students to turn to when unsure of direction.
To that end, even for this face-to-face class, I created Modules with substantive overview pages, each including a daily account of what assignments were due before class, what needed to be read/prepared for before class, what workshops or other activities would happen in class; what the homework would be after class, key terms that would come up in class, and links to a variety of other materials: to helpful videos or websites, to assignment instructions and submission pages, to readings resources and handouts, etc.
Take a look at a sample schedule page for a Module -->
D) In-Class Workshops and Outside-of-Class Activities
(Ladson-Billings, #2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8) <-- look at that bang for the buck
I changed the way I run the classroom. At issue here was how to incorporate experiential learning techniques that are so central to inclusive teaching practices, and to allow students the opportunities to “move with” the ideas we encounter, structuring class on the basic premise that students will get more from what we cover if they have time to reflect and explore, and to engage with the ideas by putting those ideas into practice and connecting them to their lives.
Among other inspirations, towards these efforts, I found three books especially helpful: Experiential Learning in Philosophy (edited by Oxley and Ilea (2016), and including an essay on experiential-teaching at the community college level by Minerva Ahumada, a professor whom I visited at LaGuardia Community College during my sabbatical research); Socrates Tenured (2016) by Frodeman and Briggle, arguing for a reimagining of our discipline as “Field Philosophy;” and from Pierre Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life (1995), about the essential connection between engaging with philosophical exercises and cultivating the self.
In-Class Workshops
I set to work redesigning nearly every class meeting in order to center it on the activity of philosophy. Here are a few examples of the in-class workshops I developed:
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Happy Sisyphus: Students' first experience in the class was to try to determine what one could add to Sisyphus’s life, such that they might consider it a “good,” “worthwhile,” “meaningful” one; and thus in effect reflecting on the question of what they intuit as the minimal requirements for a life well-lived.
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The Essence of Sandwichness: To engage the Socratic Method, we tried to answer this question of essence: What is a Sandwich.
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Apology Jigsaw: Students engaged in a “Jigsaw Workshop” to teach each other the basic structure an "apology," by examining examples of modern or classic “apologies” (MLK, Thoreau, DeChristopher, Woo), thus practicing the breaking-down and evaluating the structure of value-laden argument.
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Text --> Art: Students created art pieces (using drawing, poetry, role-playing, or sculpture (with Play-Doh, no less)) to spend time with four principles of Aristotle’s Virtue Ethics (which he compares to learning how to become an artist/musician).
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Mini-Enchiridions: Students worked together to develop “aphorisms-for-today’s busy lifestyle” of a Stoic way of life, and which would become the foundation of a “Mini-Enchiridion.”
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And more.
Aristotle’s Principles of Virtue Ethics, all art-like (Clockwise: the Golden Mean, Practice!, another golden mean, the right education,)
Outside-of-Class Philosophical Exercises
Usually based on the scaffolding set in place by the in-class workshops, these philosophical exercises were primarily designed to allow students to engage key passages, principles, activities and arguments from primary philosophical texts, and apply them to their daily lives. For example:
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The Photographed Life: Students began the semester by exploring their own social media, smartphone pics or the like, to identify and reflect upon the “ways of life” that might be reflected in the images therein.
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Expansive Gratitude: They engaged in a gratitude exercise, drawing on Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths, and which spanned three days.
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My Epicurean Day: They created an itinerary for their ideal “Epicurean Day,” and then tried to do (as closely as possible) everything on that itinerary over the course of a week, offering their evaluations of Epicurean philosophy afterwards.
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Songs for Sisyphus: Over the course of the semester, the class created a Mixtape (a MixCD) for Sisyphus to play on his way down the hill (or, rather, irl, for them to play in their car, or to give to a friend going through a hard time, etc.)
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And more
E) New Signature Assignments
(Ladson-Billings #4, 5, 6)
I developed two new Signature Assignments during the NEH Summer Institute on Reviving Philosophy as a Way of Life.
The whole idea here was based on this central insight that I have come to over the last couple of years: the culminating moment(s) of a philosophy class ought to not-so-much to be some traditional argument-position-paper, where they offer a disconnected, abstract articulation of an issue that they’ve been told they should care about, but rather to get them to apply philosophical inquiry to their own lives, to find the value in their own lives of a philosophical lens…and at the same time, to put a not-so-fine point on it: to breathe life into philosophy.
In the Professional Activity Section of this portfolio, I include a powerpoint of the final presentation I gave at the NEH Summer Institute, where I talked about three new assignments, in the seeds of development, that were inspired by those two weeks (and the three years prior): a) a first-day activity (which became the Happy Sisyphus and the Photographed Life activities which you can see above); b) Student Apologies; and c) My Philosophical Life.
Student Apologies.
This was an assignment I came up with at the NEH, framed around the juicy question, posed to students, regarding their life choices so far: What would you be accused of? (and how do you defend your life?). This apology assignment was not allowed to be merely an issue-paper. Students had to choose an actual decision/choice they made, which manifested in an actual action or behavior, that people who they really cared about disagreed with, but which they still thought was right. Take a look at the assignment for more details.
In my mind, this type of assignment matters so much more than the traditional paper. They were making a philosophical (epistemological/ontological/value-laden) case for their own lives (or at least one or two key choices in their short lives so far). I got a wide variety of topics, ranging from the decision to leave the LDS church; to become vegetarian against her father’s culture; what the proper obligations are regarding sharing fries among friends; about an ongoing fight between a mother and the daughter who loves her but who wants to deal with the loss of her father differently than her mother does. Yeah…some of them were good! And while they were creating a defense of their life, they were also learning logical structure, the way to build a case, the way to write an argument.
We did a ton of scaffolding, including a freewrite “On the big Disagreements in my life,” a module activity called “The Accusations Against Me” (where they began honing in on the topic for their SA), and another module activity called “My Defense” (where they practiced using the Apology-structure they had been learning through the various model-apologies). We also workshopped rough drafts in class before the final version was submitted. (p.s. it was the first time in I don’t know how long that I actually was invested in what the students had written…where I felt like what they had written matters). (p.s. in the end, I think there was too much scaffolding…we were a tad tired of the topic by the time the SAs were due. So, I altered this project a bit, keeping the freewrite, but combining the two module activities into one).
My Philosophical Life
The idea of this SA is to evaluate, assess, draw from the semester’s “models” of Philosophical Ways of Life in order to: a) articulate what it means to call a WoL a “philosophical” way of life; b) to develop one's own concrete answer to what “my philosophical way of life” might be like: what techniques/practices could/ would you use to enact/embody a philosophical approach to life: to other classes? To personal life? To jobs? To life in the public world?; c) to evaluate, through the analysis of primary text, at least two Ways of Life covered during the semester.
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The fun part: The format for this Signature Assignment is an imagined Diary/Journal/Blog Entry, written from the perspective of the student, 3 years later, having lived according to your Philosophical Way of Life. This diary entry includes include a staged photo or other artifact, and an imagined conversation (i.e. quoting and paraphrasing our philosophers) with two proponents of ways of life you think won’t work for you.
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I think the idea of this assignment was great, there is something very powerful about imagining what one’s own
life might look like in the future. But in the end, it didn’t work out as well as I wanted it to. The imagined future wasn’t as creative and insightful as I’d hoped, the imagined problem they were dealing with in their future journal was, often, for instance, something like the death of a grandmother…which was fine (and that can be difficult), but it didn’t really allow much space for real evaluation/reflection on their WOL. The best part of the assignment turned out to the beginning section, where they identified several key tenets of a philosophical way of life, and explained the philosophical grounding of them (the epistemological, ontological, moral foundations), as well as the value to them of those selected tenets. That enabled them to be analytical, the use text, to draw conclusions about systemic and consistent theorizing, and so forth.
My Mini-Enchiridion
(an Improved “My Philosophical Life” SA)
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So in the end, I redesigned this Signature Assignment: I combined the first part of this SA with the Module Activity called “Mini-Enchiridion” (See above).
This new Mini-Enchiridion SA (currently under construction) is designed to be an aesthetically-intentional and scholarly exploration of key tenets that the student thinks could/should ground a good, philosophical way of life. As I explain to the students in the assignment description on the syllabus: “The idea of an “Enchiridion” comes from the Stoic philosopher, Epictetus, whose student culled together Epictetus’s “Greatest Hits” (his best, most useful and valuable aphorisms and nuggets of wisdom) into a “little handbook” that could be carried around and referred to easily. The idea here, then, is for you to create your own greatest-hits “little handbook” of philosophical nuggets of wisdom that you might want to remember and make use of after the semester is over. Towards that effort, you will be explaining and evaluating, using primary textual analysis, at least four selected Ways of Life covered during the semester.”
Case Study/Philosophical Problem Critical Analysis Paper
During this past couple years, and for the first time, I did not assign a traditional critical analysis paper. (We did work with textual analysis, and case-making, during the semester...just not in this traditional paper-mode)
As I’ve explained quite a bit above, that decision is part and parcel of a larger concern for the current trends in philosophy towards an alienation of philosophy from everyday life...an over-academization of a life-blood activity; a concern that informs the WOL approach, the push for a redefinition of the discipline as more “field philosophy,” as well as the insights offered by, for instance, John Dewey, William James, and other American Philosophers of the 20th century. John Kaag describes the concern well in his book American Philosophy: A Love Story: In the current academic discipline, philosophy had veered away from making sense of life. Rather, it “rationally deconstructed it, over-intellectualizing everyday practices and reducing the richness of human experience to a small number of discrete aspects.” As Kaag reflects, for instance, on the transcendentalist and pragmatist love of the outdoors and (for most of them anyway) of community, he notes: “I had the realization that at one point in the not-so-distant past, philosophy wasn’t the sort of thing that was discussed only at formal conferences and in arcane journals. It was exchanged over dinner, between families. It was the stuff of everyday life.” ...and the Critical Analysis Paper was not (is not) the primary mode-of-communication for a philosophical way of living.
In other places—and through other lenses—I’ve described my concern about the monopoly of the critical analysis paper in philosophy. In my essay, “This is Teaching,” for instance, I said this:
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…Our discipline’s focus on a particular kind of assignment—the critical analysis paper—becomes a lens that limits how we experience philosophical texts. Though such papers can develop students’ skills in using evidence, critiquing an argument, and identifying presuppositions, they also limit the questions you can ask and the understanding you can glean. You might miss the moments of wonder, inspiration, connection, and resonance... In short, it’s the critical analysis paper that “waters down” philosophy.
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So, as I’ve shown in all the examples above, I decided to focus on a different kind of experience in my philosophy class.
But…near the end of the semester…I did start to feel the absence of an academic vehicle through which some of my more excited students could invest their interests in those topics like free will, identity, consciousness, etc. (beyond the minor assignments that did not enable the kind of necessary, sustained attention that a SA would encourage).
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So, this semester, I struck out to find middle ground, and to bring back in an option for the more classic critical analysis paper. Now, students have a choice for their Signature Assignments: they do 2 out of 3 possible signature assignments: two of them require the personal reflection/integration of philosophy into their lives; and one is a traditional argument/case-making on a perennial philosophical issue.
After 16 weeks learning about philosophy, and even though they've just begun to scratch the surface of philosophy, students have most likely gained a lot more insight into what philosophy is, and what its value might be for personal, professional and public life. So, for this paper topic, I ask them to write an essay, addressed to a person outside of philosophy, about what value philosophy might have -- as you see it -- for your chosen professional field. Framed around a response to Marco Rubio's infamous statement that the world needs fewer philosophers and more welders, I ask them to explore why might philosophy be valuable for welders to pursue...or scientists, or health care professionals, or graphic designers, computer programmers, business managers, etc. Here's the assignment:
Value of Philosophy / Value of the Humanities Reflective Essays
In addition to opening up a bit of space for the more traditional essay, I also designed final essay assignment in which students engage in a sustained reflection on the value of philosophy, and the humanities generally, on their educational, professional, personal and civic goals, drawing on the texts and philosophies they've learned through the course and applying them to their lives.
F) Philosophical Spotlights:
(Ladson-Billings: #6, 4)
My PHIL 1000 (and my PHIL 2300) was also improved by my experience attending a workshop facilitated by Juli Thorson (Ball State University), at the 2016 AAPT Conference-Workshop, on using imagery, drawings, and other visual modes of expression in intentional ways to improve inclusivity in the philosophy classroom. I've already mentioned the ways that I am bringing more artistic/creative engagements into my in-class workshops above, but it's also worth mentioning here that I created a series of “Spotlight” assignments too. (Program and Report for 2016 AAPT Conference is on Professional Activity Page). Here are a couple of student samples --->
Here’s my assignment's description:
For this type of Assignment, take a concept or a philosopher that you learned about in this module, and engage with it creatively: maybe make a PPT slide or small poster that highlights, visually and textually, the most important/meaningful idea/insight you encountered, or in which you explore how the ideas you’ve learned in the module help you understand an issue or a moral dilemma in new ways; create a poem, song, or drawing that spotlights your chosen concept/philosopher (here, you would probably need to also include an accompanying explanation of what specific concepts/ideas your drawing/poem/song is trying to highlight); some folks have made videos to spotlight their chosen idea/philosopher. You can feel free to be creative, but remember the limits presented by our online medium: whatever you do has to be submitted electronically (this could, however, be a photo of a project). This Module Activity is evaluated based on the extent to which your spotlight offers substantive explanation/presentation of the idea/philosopher (thus, the accompanying write-up for those creative pieces that have little text themselves), and engages with the spotlighted idea/person in thoughtful ways. You do TWO of these over the course of the semester (there is an opportunity to do one in Modules 3, 4, 5 and 6, but you don’t have to do all four, you can do just 2 of them).
Inclusivity and Student Engagement - Student Evaluations
In addition to the quantitative results for my courses, which can be found in the drop down menu of the Welcome Tab above, (and which hover around 4.7); students’ written evaluations, in for instance PHIL 2300 and PHIL 1000, overwhelmingly note the support students feel in their learning, the usefulness they find the content to their lived experiences, the connection they feel to the class and professor due to timely and substantive feedback I give, the respectfulness with which I approach them, the fairness with which I evaluate their work, and with which I teach different philosophical views and/or their applications. Here are just a few comments from students in my PHIL 2300 and PHIL 1000 courses. (See the Student Evaluations drop-down menu item under the Welcome tab for a complete and unabridged set of these written comments):
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I really enjoyed what I have learned in this class, of ways of life and about myself.
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very engaging without too much busy work. The professor genuinely cares about the subject and could change how you think about your life/world in general.
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She is attentive, even in an online class which I think says a lot about her. I have learned to see the world through different eyes. I'm better for taking this class.
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I think this course was a very safe place to provide opinions and hear other opinions.
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a great professor and presented the information (videos) in a simple but intriguing manner. Also that you were quick to respond, and I could tell you really cared about our success.
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the professor gives great feed back on assignments and how to improve for the next time.
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She gave tons of feedback, really explains what she's looking for, and challenges you to prove that you understand the concepts - exactly how learning should be!
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I learned the most from this class than any other I have ever attended, and that not only did I learn the most but I truly enjoyed the learning.
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I would say that even though being an online class it was very inclusive and I felt like I knew my professor and was impressed by her because there was plenty of materials and for each module she does her own lectures and was very explanatory. She did wonderful in helping me connect the lectures, reading and assignments to everyday life and problems.
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You are fair with grading and when going over the tests when we get the answer wrong you go over the correct answer which I like.
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even though it is an online class, you respond to questions fast and that you are willing to help.
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this has been the first online class that I have ever had such continuous, productive, and dynamic interaction with my professor
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The subject matter was all covered clearly, deadlines were clear, feedback was clear
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the professor actually reads what you turn in and gives you specific comments,
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a multitude of engaging assignments and made great use of collaborative tools