Thursday, July 26, Scott Samuelson

Scott Samuelson studied philosophy at Grinnell College (BA, 1995) and Emory University (PhD, 2001). Since 2000 he has taught at Kirkwood Community College in Iowa. Inspired by his students, he wrote his first book The Deepest Human Life: An Introduction to Philosophy for Everyone (University of Chicago Press, 2014), which has been well received not just by prominent reviewers but by numerous non-philosophers who found their philosophical voice with its help. The book has just come out in Chinese and is currently being translated into Portuguese.

Samuelson has also worked as a movie critic, a sous chef at a French restaurant, and a Sunday-morning talk show about ethics. He’s published articles in the Wall Street Journal, the Huffington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Chronicle of Higher Education, The Philosopher’s Magazine, and Christian Century. His article “Why I Teach Plato to Plumbers” in The Atlantic has been widely circulated. He’s been interviewed on NPR and given various public lectures and talks, including a TEDx talk “How Philosophy Can Save Your Life.” In 2014 he was named Distinguished Humanities Educator by the Community College Humanities Association.

In 2015 he won the Hiett Prize in the Humanities, “an annual award aimed at identifying candidates who are in the early stages of careers devoted to the humanities and whose work shows extraordinary promise and has a significant public component related to contemporary culture.” On top of his job at Kirkwood, he has volunteered as a teacher of philosophy at the Iowa Medical and Classification Center (a.k.a. Oakdale Prison). His new book, in part inspired by his time teaching in prison, is Seven Ways of Looking at Pointless Suffering: What Philosophy Can Tell Us about the Hardest Mystery of All.

Friday, July 27, Michael Sweet

Dr. Michael Sweet is Director of Design and Development at the Center for Integrative Learning at Northeastern University. He has published and presented widely on team-based learning and critical thinking, including the volume Team-Based Learning in the Social Sciences and Humanities: Group Work that Works to Generate Critical Thinking and Engagement.

He has served as President of the international Team-Based Learning Collaborative and as its Executive Editor of Publications. The online resources he developed to support critical thinking instruction and team-based learning have achieved international adoption. Previously, he was Director of Faculty and Graduate Student Engagement in the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Texas at Austin, and led the Teaching Effectiveness Program’s instructional technology support services at the University of Oregon.​