College of Liberal Arts

DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY

Daniel KellyLast Updated January 2021

Purdue Teaching Resources (Note: changes have been afoot in the CIE, so some of this may be dated by now – I will try to freshen it up soon – DRK)

The Purdue Center for Instructional Excellence offers a variety of resources to improve teaching, including many tailored specifically to graduate students. You are hereby strongly encouraged to take advantage of these, and especially to pursue a Graduate Teacher Certificate. Obtaining this certificate will not only help you think through how to be a better teacher, but will also certainly look good on a CV and signal that you take teaching seriously. This will in turn give you an advantage on the job market, making you a more attractive candidate, especially to departments that see teaching as a core part of their mission.

The American Association of Philosophy Teachers has a website that provides a variety of useful resources concerning philosophy in particular, including the In Socrates’ Wake blog. Other websites like Teach Philosophy 101 provide similar resources, you can buy a book length Graduate Student's Guide to Teaching, and I have some relevant stuff scattered across part of my website as well.

Early Modern Texts is particularly useful for several reasons. First, the texts are translated into modern English prose in a way that does as much as it can to remove barriers to comprehension standing between the philosophic content and Today’s Typical Undergraduate Mind: “versions of some classics of early modern philosophy, and a few from the 19th century, prepared with a view to making them easier to read while leaving intact the main arguments, doctrines, and lines of thought”. Second, it has electronic copies of texts, which are searchable, and in a format probably preferred by a large proportion of your electronic-device-addicted students.

Editorial comment on text and translation purity: You may have scholarly reasons for thinking that neither of these is a good thing in general, which: fair enough. Here’s the counterpoint: concern about this stuff is fine for advanced students, but the nuances of pure texts are lost on, and often turn off or inhibit the learning of, a lot of otherwise interested introductory students. Keep in mind one of your main aims here is to get your students to do the readings, and providing them with a modernized electronic option might increase the likelihood of that happening, and continuing to happen throughout the semester.

Beering Hall of Liberal Arts and Education, Room 7105 100 N. University Street West Lafayette, IN 47907-2098 (765) 494-4276 Fax (765) 496-1616 purduephilosophy@purdue.edu www.cla.purdue.edu/philosophy

Third, they’re free. The textbook industry is largely a racket and the prices for books can be absurd, especially given how much of the Western philosophic canon is already in the public domain.

Finally, Purdue has a nationally recognized Online Writing Lab. It will be helpful to direct your students to it at some point during the semester, given that for many of them your courses will be their first time writing philosophy. Moreover, for many of your students English will not be their first language. The OWL can help with some of the associated difficulties. These guidelines on how to write a philosophy paper in particular are good (if a bit prolix1), and useful for similar reasons.

Teaching Guidelines

Below are some strategies and best practices type thoughts about teaching introductory level philosophy courses to undergraduates that I’ve cobbled together over the years. You do not have to agree with or incorporate any of the suggestions, but please take the time to read through them, give some serious thought to how you run your courses, and reflect on how you can make them better and more effective. We’ve all sat through lots of classes, ranging from very good to (unless you are lucky) very bad. When you get there, try to put together courses and a pedagogical approach that use tricks and ideas from the good ones and avoid the pitfalls and mistakes of the bad.

Syllabus Construction

1) When creating a syllabus for a course, keep in mind this aphorism: copying parts of someone else’s research is plagiarism; copying parts of someone else’s course and syllabus is a compliment. With respect to the content of your syllabus, there is no need to reinvent the wheel with a first approximation to a square. Introductory level philosophy courses have been being taught for a long time now, in some cases for literally centuries. Google around, look through the resources linked to above, ask other people who’ve done it before, see what has and hasn’t worked in the past. Rather than starting from scratch building your own, use someone else’s syllabus as a template and tinker with it, add new readings and videos and podcasts, mix and match modules and chapters and assessment ideas from different syllabi, then re-calibrate those to suit your own needs. I TAed a couple of Introduction to Philosophy courses in grad school, which were vastly different in terms of quality and effectiveness; it’s evolved a bit since then, but mine remains broadly modeled on the one that was clearly superior.

1 Irony noted.

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If you’re looking for inspiration, or just to compare notes, here’s my standard syllabus for PHIL 110 Introduction to Philosophy. I’d be happy to send you the corresponding modifiable Word .docx to work with if you want. Feel free to poach with impunity. Purdue also has some resources and a template for constructing a syllabus.

2) With respect to the other, non-content parts of your syllabus: there’s an old joke about teaching to the top 10% of your students, assuming there is a top 10%. A useful addendum might be this: write your syllabus for the bottom 10% of your students, assuming it’s only 10%. I’d advise that in the course policies, rules, and assessment criteria parts of your syllabus, you make what is expected of your students as clear and explicit as possible. If you’re not accepting late papers, say so; if you are, say what the penalty for being late is. If you don’t want students using laptops in class, make this very clear, and tell them why.

Editorial Commentary on laptops in classrooms: I straight up don’t allow laptops in my classrooms. There’s a very good case for this. I’d suggest doing the same in your classes, maybe with exceptions for special cases when called for. That said, if you are going to allow them, I’d strongly suggest you have some way of making sure your students aren’t using them during class to continuously do what they too often do when left unmonitored: check email, text friends, live tweet your class, look at memes, surf Facebook and Instagram, shop online, or even watch sitcoms on Netflix—all of which is apparently not uncommon, and that I’ve actually witnessed while sitting in on classes and talks (and once it was Friends! The horror.) Obviously the surfers themselves are not dialed into your class, but, and maybe more importantly, it is immensely distracting in a second-hand smoke type of way to the other students near them. In general, also make the consequences for failing to meet your explicitly stated requirements as clear and straightforward as possible.

One reason to do these kinds of things is to install norms and expectations that will increase the pedagogical effectiveness of your class. But another is for your own protection. You don't want students, or their overly protective parents—I've had to deal with both—to be able to accuse you of being unfair or unclear about how they’re supposed to conduct themselves or how they will be assessed and held accountable. Stories about this kind of thing make up a recognizable, outrage-drenched genre that instructors like to one-up each other with at happy hours, but a unifying subtext is that they got stuck spending way too many hours and way too much emotional energy dealing with students agitating for grade changes and other

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kinds of special treatment. The upshot is that this kind of thing is not uncommon, so take precautions. More and more, your time will be your most precious resource, and you can prevent these types of draining, difficult situations from arising in the first place by clearly laying out requirements and consequences in the syllabus. If you spell those out explicitly, you can always exercise lenience in enforcing them down the road if you see fit or the situation calls for it. But it’s easier to back off when you deem it justified than it is to get entangled in exhausting arguments about grey areas, or impose a harsher penalty to a case that deserves one.

Finally, here is a useful rule of thumb on how to introduce and get into new chapters: Go where the excitement is! Students already have a well-developed sense of what's important and exciting. Start there. Once you’ve got them hooked, you can show them how it tracks back into things that are very important but that they originally might have been bored by.

Plagiarism

Related to course policies is the increasingly pressing problem of plagiarism. You should have something explicit, stark, and draconian sounding about on it in your syllabus, and you should jump up and down on it a couple of times during the semester, i.e. first day of class, the days before papers are due, in the written rubric for the papers, etc. I find that kids coming into college these days do not have the best grasp of what is out of bounds and what isn’t. Make sure they know. The reach of the internet and ease of the cut and paste function just increases the temptation and exacerbates the problem, which continues to sprout new and horrifying variations.

I think we all need to take it very seriously. My personal view is that imposing harsh penalties will at least make the incentive against plagiarism extreme enough to dissuade students from dabbling or even considering it as a course of action. No one is going to fight this if we don’t, and letting it slide sends the wrong message. Purdue itself has some boilerplate discussion of it, and the Online Writing Lab has some guidelines for students, too.

Whatever your policy is I again suggest you lay it out as precisely you can in your syllabus and paper rubrics. Students can refer back to them later in the semester for guidance, and, again, it’s easier to exercise lenience and back off of a rule than the alternative. You should all have access to Purdue's Ithenticate resources as well; if a situation comes up where you want to use that, let me know if you have any trouble navigating it.

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In the Classroom

1) Here is an observation, reinforced over the years of serving as a TA mentor: the single most common misstep I think graduate students (and some professors!) make in teaching introductory level philosophy courses is trying to do too much, or at least pitching things a bit (and sometimes *far*) over the heads of their students. Remember, for the typical student in an introductory course, it will be the first and often only systematic exposure to philosophy they will ever have. Moreover, most of your students will not be as enthralled by or devoted to the subject as you yourself were. Keep in mind that we have all made a major life decision to pursue philosophy, and were all good and pretty dedicated undergraduate students in general. From a statistical point of view, we are all huge, flaming outliers. So don’t take yourself, past or current version, to be a representative model of the typical student you’re trying to reach, sitting there for maybe the first time in a philosophy course.

The upshot of this is not that you should dumb things down. Rather it is that you should take the character of your audience into account, and make adjustments so that you can better get through to them. This includes being willing to select topics for emphasis wherein the motivating questions are clear and not overwhelmingly technical or abstract, so it will not be hard to convince students that the stakes are important enough, to them, in this day and age, that they are worth thinking hard about. And keep in mind, convincing them of this is an important part of your job! A non-trivial component of being a good teacher is getting students interested, illustrating for them the significance of the subject matter, awakening their own curiosity and showing them what to do with it.

2) Related to that point, whatever you are teaching, it is a good idea to take some time near the beginning of chapters to make sure the questions that animate the topic are themselves clear, graspable, and well-motivated. Grabbing their attention and then formulating explicit questions after you’ve got it is part of what should be a constant subcurrent of your class, namely making the case for why anyone today would be interested in this stuff. You can shape how they think about stuff they already have some thoughts about, and while you’re doing that you can be sure that the key philosophical terms of the debates you’re setting are understood at the outset. It is also a reliably effective pedagogical strategy to balance the abstraction of the concepts and theories with a couple of good, concrete, discussion-provoking examples, ideally ones that students are already familiar with and invested in, and so can connect to without much additional intellectual effort. This is often a way to usefully spend your class time, because it isn’t always done in the

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texts. And so it won’t be exegesis of what’s explicitly in a reading, but will provide an important kind of context for and entry into the philosophic texts that you’re teaching (many of which, remember, were originally written hundreds of years ago). Provide a pathway; if you first do some work to get your students to the key issues and arguments lurking therein, you’ll have an easier time guiding them through those arguments and issues once they get there. And they’ll be more likely to be invested in it all, too.

3) Speaking of stimulating discussion, I’ve taken to incorporating this technique suggested by Eric Schwitzgebel on his blog into my classes, and it works surprisingly well:

Encourage very-small-group discussion in the middle of class. (This sounds boring, but humor me for a few hundred words, because really it's magic!) Here's how to do it. Pause for 5-10 minutes in the middle of class. Have the students divide into groups of exactly 3 or 4 (not 2, not 5), and have them discuss one particular question from the lecture. To motivate discussion, require them to produce a simple written document, to be graded pass/fail. (For example, have each group produce what they think is the best consideration in favor of position P and the best consideration against position P.) Wander around during these 5-10 minutes, prodding groups that don't seem to be on task. Finally, reconvene and then have groups summarize the conclusions they came to.

I find that this exercise produces a pleasantly loud classroom, and that afterward a much broader range of people are willing to contribute to class discussion. Quiet people have finally got their mouths moving, and they probably found that what they said was respected by the 2-3 people they mentioned it to. This emboldens them to try it on the class as a whole. Also, the instructor can draw out normally quiet people by asking what their group thought. Individual students aren't as personally on the hook, since they can attribute the view to "the group", and they have already rehearsed the answer by talking it over with the group. If all else fails they can read what they've written down. This broadening of the range of people discussing philosophy in the classroom persists for the remainder of the period, often longer.

Here's why I think this exercise improves diversity: Philosophy classroom discussion is normally dominated by people with high academic/cultural capital. In the U.S. this means: rich, white, male, non-disabled, self-confident, parents with high educational attainment, fluent in highbrow English speaking styles. These

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are the students mostly likely to have the boldness to announce, in the second week of class, in front of their peers and professor, confident opinions about why Kant is wrong, or relativism is really the correct meta-ethical theory, or David Lewis's metaphysics is objectively better than Hilary Putnam's. (For an uncharitable version of the phenomenon, see this penetrating article.)  Others need to be drawn into the conversation. Very-small-group discussion, in this above format, is the best way I know how.

4) Developing your Teaching Persona: Teaching is obviously a thing apart from both thinking and writing. This platitude is also true of philosophy, and clearly being a good teacher of philosophy is not quite the same as being a good philosopher or being a good writer of philosophy. To begin, the audiences are typically very different (undergraduates sitting in a classroom versus e.g. other philosophers reading at home in their barcaloungers). Even if the desired effect is broadly similar—intellectual stimulation, convincing argumentation, and the clear transmission of information—the medium and set of tools the practitioner has at his or her disposal are quite different.

So it can help to think about good teaching not just as its own craft, but as a particular kind of performance. This perspective also suggests that you can think of what you’re doing while on stage in front of a classroom as performing a part, playing a role, inhabiting a character. You can customize your take on this genre of character, too: construct and make improvements to what I think of as your own personalized Teaching Persona. Model it on the best and most effective teachers you’ve had in the past, who drew you in and taught you the most and set your mind aflame. Incorporate elements that make you more effective—that capture and maintain attention, that stimulate participation, that help get points across—from wherever you find them. For my own part, I’ve taken on board, sometimes consciously, other times un, quirks and mannerisms and turns of phrase not just from other teachers, but from characters in books, magic shows, movies and TV, from (affiliative- and self-enhancing-humor-oriented) stand-up comics, and much more. Whatever kind of personalized Teaching Persona you are building and fine-tuning, continue to be alert for ways to improve it. Flat affect is generally: bad. Generally good is infectious enthusiasm; also, intangibles like presence and charisma. Keep your eye out for any tricks that will help you to connect with your class, to pull different types of students into discussions, and to command the room when the situation calls for it.

One of the virtues of this perspective is that it gives you a kind of critical distance from what you’re doing, and who you are when

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you’re doing it. You can inject as much or as little of what you take to be your True Self (if you think you have one of those) into your Teaching Persona. You can adopt a pose that is dorkier or sterner, or more gleefully oblivious, comically pedantic, or goofily exuberant than you usually are. Whatever helps make students pay attention and care more and speak up in class and generally learn better. Moreover, explicitly managing this kind of separation and compartmentalization can be helpful in psychologically protecting yourself from some of the unavoidable downsides of the gig: imposter syndrome (yes, we all wrestle with it sometimes; no, it doesn’t ever completely go away; yes, it most certainly gets better), the occasional nasty student, negative evaluations, or (maybe worst of all) bland indifference. It’s not really you they’re indifferent to, snarky comments aren’t assessments of you as a person—they apply to your Teaching Persona. If and when adjustments are called for, they won’t require angsty global self-doubt or major personality changes; they’ll just be tweaks to an (important!) character you sometimes play.

Beyond Your Course

Finally, and increasingly importantly: don’t be afraid to encourage talented students to take more philosophy courses! Pick up a major or a minor!

Point them to this page, and contains tons of data about how useful a philosophy degree is.

Tell them to check out Purdue College of Liberal Arts Degree+ program, which is excellent. It's basically an administrative hack that allows students to pick up a secondary major in philosophy to go with their primary major, and not have to satisfy any other College of Liberal Arts requirements (like, for instance, the language requirement.) This makes it significantly easier to do two majors where each major is housed in a different college.

More generally, take some time to lay out to your entire class the benefits of philosophy in general, and of picking up a major or minor, and maybe hit on that theme several times as you move through the semester. I take it we all agree that there’s value in what we're doing. It’d also be nice to have a larger percentage of the citizenry able to reason critically and spot bullshit when they see it. Reflection on and practice with the relevant toolkit is common across all of our courses; indeed, a general set of tools for thinking is a substantial part of what we as a discipline have to offer. Let’s get more students in the shop and install those tools in their young, spongey, impressionable minds.

In addition to all that, philosophy is fighting an uphill battle here at Purdue, an extremely pragmatic, engineering- and agriculture-oriented state school.

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Recent college realignments and revamped core curriculum have led to a dip in our enrollments, and the current historical moment and national economic climate is still not particularly conducive to pursuing philosophy, etc., etc., ad nauseum. In light of all this, I treat my Intro course as, among other things, a talent spotting and recruitment forum, and end each chapter by pointing students to the next step courses on that topic, i.e. giving specific titles, numbers, and instructors of courses we offer that they can take to learn more about the topics discussed in that chapter. Feel encouraged to do likewise. If you want to open the eyes of your students to the practical, career-oriented, financial, and other non-intrinsic benefits of philosophy—or perhaps just as importantly, help arm them with arguments against the economic concerns of their parents and the “philosophy-what-are-you-going-to-do-with-that” chiding they are liable to get from their engineering majors friends—you can also point them, again, to this page.

End of sermon. Now go out there use your teaching platform to be a force for good in the world.

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