My Teaching Methodology
I see philosophy less as a subject matter and more as a set of tools to employ in our interactions with the world around us. While these tools can be used toward different ends—a therapeutic understanding, a more critical engagement with public discourse, a more meaningful and virtuous life—in my teaching I aim to execute an effective and cohesive pedagogical methodology that imparts both the right tools and the proper skills for their use in everyday life. My methodology consists of four pillars: backwards design, student-centered design, student engagement, and community.
No matter what tools or skills we wish to impart, to be successful in teaching requires an ongoing assessment of ends and means (or in pedagogical lingo, an ongoing commitment to backwards design). Backwards design takes place at different layers of specificity—the course, the unit, the class period, the activity. At each layer, we set goals, develop methods, implement, and iterate. These layers inform one another in turn: what we do in our class periods should serve the goals of our units, and what we do in our units should serve the goals of our course as a whole. I approach every course, every assignment, every discussion, and every activity with this methodology in mind. For instance, I want my students in Environmental Ethics to recognize their own relation to structural ethical responses to climate change. I thus need to make sure my students learn the basics of climate science, learn how analyze a complex system of ethical obligations, learn how to map their own agency onto that system, and find, in the first place, some way of conceiving of their own, specific form of agency. I then must find different units, different activities, different assignments where students can practice these skills discretely, iterate them, and slowly combine them into more complex activities, all without presuming at any point in the semester a skill that is yet unlearned or under-practiced.
An exceedingly small fraction of our undergraduate students will go on to become academic philosophers. Our goals when teaching undergraduate philosophy should therefore not begin and end with developing the skills required to be an academic philosopher. Philosophical tools are in most cases tools for the everyday, and as such we must think of how we can teach the everyday use of these tools. This may vary from course to course—it may take one set of skills to become an ethically responsible technologist, and a very different set of skills to be an epistemologically responsible physicist. Our learning goals must be tailored to the students in our courses, and true to the breadth and kind of skills required for our students to weave philosophical tools into their own lives. Understanding of theories and the ability to argue for them is rarely sufficient. For instance, in my courses in technology ethics, we practice analyzing socio-technical systems, assessing and revising conceptions of privacy and autonomy depending on complex features of real-world contexts, recognizing the limitations of our standpoint, and so on. These are, in short, the sorts of skills that someone who designs, builds, regulates, or uses technology must learn in order to play their role responsibly.
We are more successful in imparting to our students the tools of philosophy to the extent that what we do together is imminently engaging. We fail to reach our learning objectives if our students are bored or checked out. The more active we can make their brains, the better. This means using technology, varying up “readings” with podcasts, video clips, blog posts, and documentaries. It means creating activities and assignments that are visual, auditory, tactile, social, and creative (see examples in my teaching portfolio). Even a simple activity, like making paper airplanes and flying them across the classroom, can foster such rich and vivid conversations about the connection between the goodness of the plane and the plane fulfilling its function, that would otherwise lie heavy and dormant in abstractness.
Finally, students learn best when they are fully present, and this sort of presence is predicated upon a feeling of safety and comfort within our learning community. Building a community that engenders such feelings requires, in part, familiar virtues like kindness, empathy, and respect (not to mention some food and a chance, here and there, to talk about something other than philosophy). And yet, no learning community is insular. Students will carry into the classroom what they have experienced outside of it—whether that is hope and curiosity, or depression, anxiety, and trauma. Unjust social structures will insert themselves within the walls of our classroom whether we want them to or not. My role as a teacher thus includes maintaining a mindful awareness of these structures and of the diversity of experience students bring with them. I cannot fix or dispel anything, but I can show students that I care about them as individuals; I can listen to them and show them that I believe them; I can push back against instances of injustice within the classroom; and I can foster a conversation in the classroom that is as inclusive and balanced as the social and time constraints allow.
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Email me and I'd be happy to send you syllabi from my courses.