Fall 2023 Talking/Teaching Schedule Update
Talking/Teaching is a series of one hour, facilitator-led online conversations about a topic in teaching philosophy. Participation is free, and you need not be an AAPT member to attend. We’d love to see you at any of the three remaining sessions this semester. And keep an eye out for the CFP for the Spring 2024 series, which will be coming soon.
Register here for the Fall 2023 series. Once registered, you can attend any of the remaining sessions: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEpde-rqzsqEtEv_H0LtPY2e1wcogzqdwmt
11/20/23 3:00 p.m. (Eastern), Marcus Schultz-Bergin, Cleveland State University, “Developing Student Metacognition through Specifications Grading”
How do we help students improve their internal standards for writing and philosophical thinking? Eventually, our students will be out in the world without any teacher to “verify” the quality of their thinking or writing. They’ll have to evaluate it themselves, and they’ll need to have internalized relevant standards to do so.
My goal is to introduce a set of techniques oriented around specifications grading and self-evaluation that, together, promote student metacognition: their ability to think about their own thinking and thus the standards they are applying when engaging in a thinking or writing activity.
A bonus of these techniques is that it can greatly diminish time spent grading while increasing the amount and quality of feedback students receive on their work.
11/27/23 noon (Eastern), James Lincoln, Lasell Univerity, “Welcoming beyond words”
In my paper “On the Practice of Welcoming” (https://doi.org/10.5840/aaptstudies202382382), I observe that we, instructors, undermine our students’ sense of security in a classroom when we merely present our courses as ‘welcoming’ when certain aspects of their lived experiences are, in reality, made unmentionable or erased by our classroom communication norms, course policies, assignments, and curricula. Utilizing the idea that welcomings are a subcategory of Iris Marion Young’s notion of greetings (everyday communicative gestures which amount to acts of public acknowledgment), I argue that sustained forms of welcoming in the classroom are particularly important because they signal a continued invitation to engage in and be a part of a community of practice. In addition to meeting the greeted’ s basic need for recognition, I suggest that we have good reasons to think that recognition enhancing forms of welcoming are essential to student success and thereby obligate us to adapt our classroom communication norms, policies, assignments, and curricula in important ways that attend to the student as a knower of their own lives. In this teaching talk, I want to invite people to a conversation about what we think welcoming philosophical communities of practice look like. To focus the discussion, I’d like us to consider how we would like students to participate (using Olivia Bailey’s “How Do I participate?” as a conversational prompt), the social nature of Socratic Questioning, and to think about potential barriers that we encounter when trying to create welcoming philosophical learning environments.
12/04/23, 3:00 p.m. (Eastern), Kevin Gannon, Queens University of Charolotte, “What the heck are we doing with ChatGPT?”
