AAPT Members American Association of Philosophy Teachers

In anticipation of our reading group starting in August, I've been reading Nussbaum's eloquent and careful defense of the place of the humanities in education in Not for Profit. But for every Nussbaum, the humanities also need a bomb thrower. Meet the University of Minnesota's Eva von Dassow! (Comments most welcome.)

Reminder: The AAPT Teaching Philosophy conference is next weekend, July 29th - August 2nd 2010, at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, SC. The program is not yet posted, but there many, many presentations that seem very interesting and informative. There should be a big turnout; please try to make it bigger, if you can!

I'm curious to know if anyone there has been involved with the Philosophy Slam program: This is an annual competition for K-12 students wherein they write essays, create artworks, etc. in response to a philosophical question. Last year's question was "Is the pen mightier than the sword?" (The 2009 question was "Greed or Giving: Which has a Greater Impact on Society?")

Here's an excerpt from the winning essay by Achutha Raman:
Martyrs perhaps best exemplify the triumph of language over violence. These individuals are physically destroyed by violence, but through words, they and their ideals are resurrected. From Jesus Christ to James Brown of the antebellum era to Stephen Biko of the apartheid struggles, successful martyrs abound in history, inciting both immediate and lasting action. They show that in a one-on-one battle between the pen and sword, the pen deals the final blow.

Not bad for a high schooler, eh?

Has anyone been involved in this event? Inspired in part by Chris' involvement with middle schoolers, I'd be very interested in getting involved with the Slam. Does anyone have experience with this?

This query is motivated by Jennifer’s post, but is an issue I have been concerned about for a number of years. Do we negatively affect our students' ability and willingness to learn by giving them too many 'aids' to help them succeed in our courses ? Do we end up demanding too little of our students? For many years I have given my students review questions from which their essay exams will be taken. I have also had review session before exams. I have discontinued the practice of having a review session because I found that students did not study before the review and hoped that the answers would be given at the review. Often, the answers ended up being mediocre and were not well-developed or reasoned. I ended up unknowingly lowering my expectations.

I am now contemplating not given out review questions before essay exams. My concern is that students wait for the review questions and then only read and study what they think they need to in order to answer the questions. I have had students ask me for review questions at the start of the semester so they can focus their studies. Unfortunately, I have found, as I mentioned earlier, that many times their answers are not as well-developed and reasoned as I had expected. I have come to believe that this is because they did not adequately study certain pertinent material because they did not see the relevance of this material to the question. Maybe they did not pay close attention in class, or participate in discussions of the material because they thought that they had (or would get) the information in the form of the questions that they needed to be successful.

When I was a student back in the 60’s and 70’s, professors did not give out as much, if any, assistance to students other then having office hours. Their argument was that if we studied the material adequately we should be able to answer any reasonable question asked. They expected that if we had any issues with the material we would raise them in class or take advantage of their office hours.

So, I am wondering what your take is on this issue. Should we demand more of our students and give them less assistance? I am probably going to discontinue this practice.

Some of you are probably following the case of Kenneth Howell, an adjunct religious instructor at the University of Illinois, who's been dismissed after he e-mailed his students an articulation (and defense) of Catholic natural law views of sexual morality.  A student complained that the e-mail amounted to hate speech (not a credible claim, in my opinion).

His case raises questions we've wrestled with in the past at ISW, including academic freedom and whether to advocate for one's own views in the classroom. I'm curious to know other people's take on the situation: Unsurprisingly, Howell is claiming that his academic freedom was violated. But as some commenters at Philosophy Smoker have noted, Howell's ability to represent objectively and accurately positions that are not his own is seriously questionable. In the e-mail, Howell unsympathetically characterizes utilitarianism, relies on a good many speculative assertions, and seems not to get the point of thinking about homosexuality in terms of moral sentimentalism. Add to that the e-mail's imperious and didactic tone, and I can well imagine that students find it difficult to interact with Howell. Whether his academic freedom was violated, I'd be reluctant to have Howell teaching ethics at my institution.

The Philosophy Smoker's Mr. Zero reports that students perform better in his introductory ethics courses than in straight intro to philosophy:

I've noticed a general trend in my teaching whereby my Intro Ethics students generally do almost a full letter grade better on average than my regular Intro students (e.g. a B+ to the Intro's B-). I don't think it's because my Ethics class is easier, because the pattern extends to individual test questions concerning material that I include in both classes, such as the meaning of the word 'valid.' 
Have others noted the same trend? Zero and his commenters consider some possible explanations. Is this the case, and if so, what does it tell us about how these seminal introductory courses should be approached?

This article from the Chronicle, "Tenure, RIP" is just chock full of stuff to talk about and discuss, so I'll just post the link here without comment and let you all have at it. Something tells me this thread might be a doozy. Type the rest of your post here.

ISW reader Jennifer McCrickerd offers the following query about the 'grading ceiling' if students are graded by effort:
 
In my 15 years of teaching, I've always given my students a set of grading criteria so they could see the criteria I use to assess work as deserving different grades.

After reading a significant amount about the perils of grading performance (namely that students focus on performing well instead of learning and in so focusing become very risk averse).  One idea I'm toying with (because some folks I respect have used it) is to grade students based on effort (and I'll give them a set of what I take to be indicative of A effort throughout the semester, B effort, etc. and also give them an opportunity a number of times to make the case to me that they are putting in X amount of effort).

My question, then, is if students belong in a class (i.e., aren't in a class too difficult for them) what minimum grade should they be able to get in the course with 100% effort assuming that the teacher is doing a good job teaching.  That is,if a student puts in 100% effort (rewriting, working with teacher, working with classmates outside of class, pays attention to and works with comments, etc) and gets less, say, than an A (or B?) is this grade an indication that the teacher is failing?
Put another way, what grade, minimum (if any), would be reasonable to guarantee a student if the student can demonstrate putting in 100% effort (however one might choose to measure it).

Put yet another way, assuming the teacher isn't at fault, at what point is a certain grade due to the student not putting in the effort and to what extent is it due to something else (since I don't really believe in 'raw ability' much I don't know what that something else might be but others may have a good case for 'raw ability' - and then there's the question of whether it's fair to grade based on 'raw ability' but then we've moved to a different concern)

The motivation in all of this is to enhance student learning and, thus, performance in the long run with the logic being that grading performance does not, in fact, enhance performance in the long run.Grading on factors besides 'end products' (attitudes, behaviors, etc.) has attracted our interest before here at ISW (Chris on "comportment," Mike on in-class behavior, me on pass/fail writing assignments). I've got my own thoughts on Jennifer's proposal and question, but do other readers have some thoughts as to how much 'effort' should count, if it is to count at all?

During the past academic year, I participated in a professional learning community centered around faculty ethics. We read and discussed Rights and Wrongs in the College Classroom: Ethical Issues in Postsecondary Teaching, by Jordy Roucheleau (Philosophy) and Bruce Speck (English). The book is concerned with academic ethics in the classroom. The book deals with a variety of ethical issues, including academic freedom, neutrality and advocacy in the classroom, grading, faculty-student relationships, conflicts of interest, and professional conduct. One thing that struck me as correct in the book is that the majority of responsibility for ensuring that faculty fulfill their responsibilities as teachers falls on the individual faculty member. But when someone is failing to fulfill their responsibilities, it is the professional obligation of others to address the issue. Such "self-policing" is one of the obligations we have in our professional role, and we would rather do this than grant oversight to administrators, legislatures, or the public, primarily because we are the experts in our field and know what it means to fulfill our professional responsibilities. As the authors put it in their conclusion:
Laws and university policies are not suitable means for addressing most ethical concerns in college teaching, such as the fairness of grades, the appropriateness of assignments, the amount of energy dedicated to course preparation, or the quality of faculty relationships with students...Because teaching does not lend itself to external regulation, instructors have a particular duty to observe ethical principles in their teaching (p. 169-170).The problem is that many things are hinderances to the reflection and effort required to observe such principles. Heavy teaching loads, increased research demands, increased use of adjunct faculty, and other factors make this more difficult.

There are many things that can and should be done to help faculty fulfill their obligations. One that often arose in the context of our professional learning community was the need for faculty to address this personally and to take responsibility for helping one another deal with our deficiencies. All of the members of our community knew of cases (directly or indirectly) in which faculty were failing to fulfill their teaching obligations in an adequate manner. And many of these were going under the radar, so to speak.

Do readers (i) believe they have a professional responsibility to address cases in which other faculty members are failing to fulfill their classroom obligations?; and (ii) have suggestions for cultivating a commitment to ethical practices in the classroom on a campus?

Yes, believe it or not, ISW is now a whopping three years old. Happy birthday to us!

Needless to say, I wasn't sure back when I did the first post here whether this endeavor would succeed. But I think by any measure, we have reason to be proud of what's happened at ISW:

• 330 total posts by our 11 contributors, eliciting over 1,400 comments
• over 4,000 unique visitors, with an average of 100 visits per week
• visitors from 124 countries
• 70+ followers, plus over 400 RSS and e-mail subscribers

And here's our 'greatest hits' (or at least those posts that have drawn the most comments!):

1. Evaluating teaching credentials (September 2007, me )
2. Business and ethics: A disconnect — Part One (July 2007, by John Alexander)
3. Does philosophy provide any answers? (October 2007, by Mike Austin)
4. Teaching pre-college philosophy (March 2009, by Jason Nicholson)
5. Recommending students do what they shouldn't do (February 2008, me)
6. A frustration: Evaluating reasoning vs. evaluating premises (January 2010, me)
7. The reading brain (February 2008, by Becko Copenhaver)
8. On Course, #1: Before the Beginning (The Syllabus) (October 2008, me)
9. Reading student e-mails (January 2010, by Chris Panza)
10. What's philosophy for, anywho? (September 2008, by Chris Panza)

Thanks to all our readers and our contributors!

ISW readers may remember that last year we did an online reading group here on James Lang's book On Course. We've decided to reprise that format, but this time the text is Martha Nussbaum's Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Nussbaum's book is not directly related to teaching philosophy, but the ISW contributors thought that, with so much pressure being put on philosophy departments to justify their existence in this period of economic stress, a discussion of the larger aims of humanities pedagogy is opportune.

So here's our plan: Each ISW contributor will be posting a long-ish entry on the book, with posts Mondays and Thursdays of each week, starting August 30. Please pick up Nussbaum's book and join our conversation! 

This summer I've volunteered to do a few lectures for a summer scholar program (in its third year) at my university. The program basically invites to campus a number of local middle school students (7th and 8th grade) who (a) come from disadvantaged backgrounds and (b) have been identified as having solid academic promise. This is the first time I've worked with the program, so I'm starting from the ground up on how to approach the lectures and discussions. I've never worked with students of this age, so I'm looking for any suggestions any of you might have on a few key questions (I list two specific ones below the fold).



The first question concerns the advance reading. I'm slated to give lectures on the topic of authenticity from a philosophical perspective. A cool topic, no doubt, but I'm having a hard time thinking of a suitable short advance reading for students of this age to tackle. Does anyone have any ideas? Really anything will do - it will be pretty easy to construct a good discussion about the key themes on this topic starting from pretty much any advance reading source. I just can't think of any good sources! It doesn't have to be straight philosophy - could be anything, an editorial, a comic book, a short story, it doesn't matter. As long as it sets up the basic issue.

The second question concerns approach. These are 7th and 8th grade students. I've never worked with this age group. How would you approach a philosophical discussion with 7th and 8th graders? I have a 90 minute time slot to play with (I'll be giving the same talk/discussion four times, once with each boy/girl group from the two age groups), so time really isn't an issue (if anything, I might have too much of it!).

Of course, I'd be happy to hear any suggestions or thoughts you might have on those two specific questions, or anything else on the general topic.

Jane Robbins has a gratifying piece about using universities themselves as ethics labs. In a professional ethics course, Robbins used UC Berkeley's recent decision to take DNA samples from their students as part of a 'first year experience program' as a case study.  Robbins had her students consider issues such as the possible conflicts of interest among actors within the university, the educational value of this program, student privacy, and the quality of the university's reasoning in defending the program. Robbins:


We tried to identify the university’s ethical stance, and to reason about what the ethical issues were. For example, did the university owe a duty of care to a vulnerable population -- 18-year-olds leaving home for the first time, a kind of in loco parentis -- or were these “adults” who had the maturity and knowledge as the well as the legal right to determine their choice themselves? This was one of many cases that provided the opportunity to discuss the difference between legality and morality. Did the decision represent what I call “structural immorality” -- misaligned organizational conditions or processes that put institutional integrity at risk? We examined the objections raised by external observers, and the language of Berkeley’s responses, for evidence and quality of reasoning. Berkeley did not fare well on this rhetorical analysis in its early defenses. No doubt this was a rewarding learning experience for students. Robbins notes that student interest only intensified as UC Berkeley modified the program in the face of criticism.

Robbins found a great example, one that students are likely to relate to and intuitively understand. I had a similar experience several years ago when I assigned students an essay in which they had to describe the university's policies concerning the privacy of student information. I asked students to investigate what rights they had with respect to their educational and enrollment records, their disciplinary and/or campus police records, their Internet usage and searches, their medical or psychological services records, etc. As I recall, students were sharply divided about the university's policies, with some thinking the university's policies were much too lenient in who could access this information and why, whereas others thought the university went overboard in trying to protect student privacy.

This suggests that universities themselves are excellent 'ethics labs,' chock full of interesting questions that students are likely to be motivated to think about. Here are some others I thought of:

• information technology ethics: using university servers to download illegal material, create entrepreneurial content, etc.
• sexual ethics: acquaintance rape, tolerance of gays and lesbians on campus, etc.
• distributive justice: how should scarce campus goods (parking spaces, spots in prestigious academic majors, etc.) be distributed 
• environmental ethics: the university's carbon footprint, etc.
• academic ethics: plagiarism, research use of human subjects, etc.

That seems to me just to scratch the surface of how the university is itself an ethics lab. You could probably do a whole course just on these topics! (Maybe someday I shall...) Has anyone used their own institutions as sources of ethical questions in this way, and what were your experiences?

Thanks to Michael for the kind, and humbling, introduction. I hope it won't seem like a cheat, but I thought I'd devote my opening post to a reading recommendation. The reason is that Tony Wagner's The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don't Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need--and What We Can Do About It is one of a handful of books that I'd like everyone in my profession to read, and frankly if I hadn't read it I probably wouldn't have accepted ISW's invitation to join up.

The reason I read Wagner's book has nothing to do with what I found so valuable about it. I was preparing a talk for teachers at a local high school on educational equity, and I knew that one of the teachers was obsessed with the "achievement gap" between American and foreign students, so wanted to learn more about it. And, indeed, Wagner is very clear about the kinds of things that our schools (and colleges) could be doing better for even our most advantaged students -- in particular failing to create opportunities for higher order cognition, and structuring their learning to produce the traits and skills that will serve them well in a global  economy (in this, and other respects, it is a nice complement to Martha Nussbaum's Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities which we'll be discussing later). He includes a nice, and in my experience quite accurate, critique of the AP History exams (I don't think my colleagues in English all agree with me, but AP English seems much better at eliciting the kind of curriculum in which students learn things that are valuable).

But what really grabbed my attention was his description of what he does at the Change Leadership Group at Harvard.
The Harvard program is focused on k-12 teaching. At its core is a workshop, in which groups of teachers (most of whom are unacquainted with one another previously) discuss videos of other teachers teaching in the classroom, led by Wagner or one of his colleagues. The aim is to develop a language for discussing instruction -- and to come to some sort of interpersonal agreement on standards of practice. Like most teachers, his participants have spent very little time observing other teachers do what they do, and are not practiced in rigorous detail-oriented discussion of what works and what doesn't. Initially the reactions to what they are observing are very diverse -- there is no agreement about whether what is being done is good or bad teaching. But over the course of the workshop the participants develop a common understanding, and a language for expressing it.

The idea is simple. If teachers were engaged in mutual observation and had resources to discuss what they were seeing and doing, they could begin to learn from one another, thus improving their practice. To use an analogy that Wagner doesn't use, it's like learning a musical instrument. You learn by watching and listening to others, noting what they do, mimicking it, practicing endlessly, subjecting your practice to your own critique and that of others, in the light of continued observations of others who are better than you are (or who are better in some particular way that you can improve). I suppose there are musical geniuses who learn some other way, and no doubt there's a handful of teachers who are so naturally gifted that mutual observation wouldn't improve things, but that's not most of us. Reading Wagner, for the first time, I started to see how it could be that we could improve our teaching collectively, by deploying the kind of inter-subjective scrutiny of our efforts that we already apply to our research (you never publish anything unless it has been scrutinized by at least one other person, and you aim to get it scrutinized by as many people as feasible before committing it to publication).

My wife consistently points out to me that the schools which actually adopt Wagner's process as part of their ongoing professional development are quite unusual -- they tend to be schools in which teachers have a fair amount of discretionary time, and which are pretty well run. Not like most. But research universities with undergraduate colleges within them, and small liberal arts colleges do seem to me to have the conditions in which a program like this could profitably be adopted.

The other natural worry about the Wagner method is whether the group is, in fact, learning the right things. Are they harnessing individual insights to develop group wisdom, or individual prejudice to develop an unquestioned orthodoxy? What they are not observing within the group is whether any students are actually learning anything which is, after all, what actually constitutes success in teaching.

Learning is hard to measure, and it's especially hard to measure the aspects of learning which really matter (the development of skills, enthusiasm for, and long-term retention of the material). In college, at least in the humanities, we make no effort at all to gauge learning --- we reward students for and celebrate their performance rather than their learning. We don't even have common interpersonal standards for what counts as quality performance -- we grade our own students' work, not one another's, and rarely sit down with a set of papers and discuss with one another what we value in the papers (and what we don't).

So there's a leap of faith in adopting a model like Wagner's, based on confidence in i) the capacity of the people involved for judgment and ii) the deliberative value of interpersonal discussion. I'd like to see something like Wagner's model adopted in a few places, ideally alongside some experiments in aligning standards and curriculum across classes within particular departments. Anyway, I'm recommending the book, and curious whether anyone knows similar models operating in higher education. I'm aiming to pilot a program not completely unlike Wagner's among a multidisciplinary group of faculty this coming Fall (see here) and will report on what we do.

(Cross-posted, as many of my posts will be, at CT)

Been a while since the ISW contributor list expanded, but we're very pleased to welcome Harry Brighouse to our roster of contributors. Harry's a name that is probably well known to many of our readers: He contributes over at Crooked Timber, and I've made mention before of his contributions on grade inflation, advising students about law school, how philosophy is perceived by other disciplines, and some in-class exercises about justice and the family. These contributions only scratch the surface of Harry's work. He's written some fascinating work on democratic theory, educational reform, educational privatization, and school choice. I anticipate he'll bring a most welcome 'big picture' perspective on philosophy teaching to our humble blog.

Web cheers for Harry!

This informative article by Joan Goodman got me thinking about respect. I think most philosophy instructors would agree that they teach (and teach about) respect. In ethics courses, respect might be an explicit target of philosophical inquiry: what is respect? What sorts of conduct display it, etc.? Is it earned or inherent? More generally, respect is a kind of intellectual virtue, and even if we don't make it explicit, we attempt to model it and teach it by example.

But Goodman's article reminds me of a conception of respect that students sometimes have and which is problematic in teaching: intellectually at least, respect involves agreement with another's view (or short of that, praising another's view regardless of its actual coherence, persuasiveness, or other intellectual merits). Anything that doesn't exhibit this respect amounts to "dissing."

I came face to face with this conception of respect three years ago when a student came to office and asserted that his C- grade on a paper about Peter Singer's argument for a duty to alleviate global poverty was evidence I didn't 'respect' him. The paper had many familiar shortcomings in student writing: some misunderstandings of Singer's reasoning, objections that were weak or irrelevant, too much heated rhetoric instead of careful argumentation. But the student insisted that in criticizing his work, I failed to show him adequate respect. I had 'dissed' him.


What ensued was a very challenging, but ultimately rewarding, discussion about respect. I pointed out to the student that I was not disagreeing with the conclusion of his paper, but taking issue with its understanding of the relevant material and how it defended its thesis. (This of course is another common student misunderstanding: assuming that any criticism of their written work is a rejection of its conclusion(s) rather than a critique of its methods and arguments, but that's a topic for another time.) Moreover, to deviate from my own grading criteria and award him a higher grade would (1) fail to show integrity and hence to show respect for my own evaluative standards, and (2) in effect condescend to him. I underscored that by taking his work as an attempt to make a serious contribution to philosophical understanding, I was showing him the ultimate form of intellectual respect, namely, assuming (regardless of any evidence to the contrary) that he could master an intellectual task and participate in the larger philosophical conversation.

This particular interaction ended fairly well, but I fear that the view of 'respect' wherein I had 'dissed' the student is not respect, but a perversion of it, and one that is detrimental to student learning and intellectual development. I'm curious if others have had similar experiences and how you handled them. More broadly, how should we teach in light of this (in my estimation) distorted and ego-driven picture of respect?

Brian Leiter reports the following from a correspondent of his:
“Teaching counts for nothing.”  It was a shock to me how dishonest research schools are about teaching: on the brochures, to parents, in official pronouncements the line is that we care about teaching deeply.  But in private all my colleagues, even at the official orientation, have said teaching counts for virtually nothing for tenure purposes, for merit raises, etc.  (Exception: if your student evaluations are truly awful that might hurt a bit.)  In other words, there is hardly any institutional concern for teaching, i.e. concern that manifests itself in aligning incentive structures with good teaching.  It’s not 50-50 research/teaching, it’s 100-0 or maybe 90-10.  Experiment: try explaining to your non-academic friends, neighbors, legislators that our top universities basically ignore teaching in their evaluation of teachers.  I often wonder whether our actual policies could survive publicity.
The comments that follow contest the correspondent's claim, but also manifest some ambiguity about how exactly 'teaching counts' for tenure and promotion purposes about various institutions.

Just for the sake of data gathering then: How — and how significantly — does teaching count in the tenure and promotion process at the institution with which you are affiliated?

I recently skimmed through parts of James Zull's The Art of Changing the Brain, a book that makes use of contemporary neuroscience to investigate issues in teaching and learning. One of its main ideas is that learning is the process of building and enriching neural networks. But doing so must begin from existing neural networks. Hence, effective teaching requires that we build from what students already know.

This seems correct, even obvious, to me. But I think those who teach philosophy are somewhat handicapped in building from what students know.

The U.S. history instructor (at the college level at least) can work from her students' prior knowledge of the subject. Admittedly, such knowledge may be very sparse or may not be 'knowledge' in a very robust sense; it may be superficial or simply mistaken. A science instructor can work from his students' prior experience of the natural world. Indeed, it seems that a lot of innovative science teaching happens when instructors get students to confront the contradictions and oddities found in their naive physical worldview.

Now of course few students come to the college philosophy classroom with any awareness of the discipline. That would seem to suggest that teaching philosophy starts from nowhere, which (if Zull is correct) means that philosophy pedagogy is destined to fail. (Let's hope that's not true.) But that's obviously too pessimistic. Even if the word 'philosophy' rings no bells and excites no neural networks, we can hope that some of the things we attempt to teach (reasoning, say) or teach about (religion, ethics) might find fertile ground among students' existing knowledge and neural networks.

But I have to say that my own experience makes me feel discouraged. I often do sense that teaching philosophy is trying to work from a neural tabula rasa. For instance, when teaching ethics, pumping intuitions doesn't seem as effective as it should be. In many cases, students have so little familiarity with various ethical issues and questions that they have no intuitions to be pumped!

I still sense, though, that if I could tap into those neural networks lodged in my students' brains, then an abundance of learning could happen.  So here's my query: When teaching philosophy, how do we build from students' prior knowledge? Does anyone have examples where you've successfully taught by drawing out students' prior knowledge? What general principles or techniques do we need to use in order to "start from what they know"?