PEDAGOGY
Effective teaching is a function of effective communication — and communication is a process. The process requires effort, preparation, rumination, patience, an ability to listen, a recognition of failure, and a desire to improve. Actively listening to students in the process of teaching can often be overlooked, so I pay just as much attention to what students don’t ask as to what they do. This technique helps me to steer how and what I teach so that missing or incorrect knowledge is appropriately resolved. Recognising gaps in a student’s knowledge accumulation lets me know where I need to focus my attention and when I need to teach more slowly or carefully.
Learning is also a process, and it is now well understood that adopting active learning techniques helps students increase their retention of concepts and their ability to excel in assessments. My syllabi indicate, rather flippantly (but quite accurately), that philosophy is a ‘participation gig’. I say this because philosophy is the process of learning — and for a student to be an active learner they need to become a part of the learning experience. There are many ways to achieve this: one technique I have tried recently is to set campus-wide philosophical ‘scavenger hunts’ targeted at a particular philosophical topic; after the hunts, the students and I sit down on a grassy knoll to discuss their thoughts and perspectives in elenctic debate. This immersive learning tool has proved popular, and in an unsolicited e-mail one of the students remarked:
“Sitting around in a circle and talking about deeper philosophical ideas in that little green area was probably my favourite part of the course, like you said, that is what philosophy is all about. Out of the 3 years I've already spent doing a multitude of courses, this one was by far my favourite. I liked coming to classes again after a long time and I thank you for that.”
Philosophy is not a dry and dusty subject of abstraction, but a rich, fecund, and lived way of perceiving and interpreting the world around us and our place in it. Enlivening the subject so that students look forward to coming to class is not just part of our job — it is pivotal in both preparing students for the world and securing in it a place for philosophy.
Active learning, however, is only one half of effective teaching: one must also seek to limit passive listening. To bolster students’ attention, I incorporate in-class activities so that they become involved in the content rather than the subject of it. This is perhaps harder to do in philosophy than in some other disciplines — but not impossible. When teaching Divine Command Theory, for example, I split Plato’s Euthyphro into three acts, and ask for volunteers to act it as a play rather than read it as a discourse (there’s a low-key competition for who can play the best Socrates, enticing students to learn more about Socrates himself). The Euthyphro ‘play’ garnered such enthusiasm from my students at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT) that they took it upon themselves to make mock-togas to wear while playing the parts of Socrates, Euthyphro, and Meletus — one student even brought in a prop nose for their portrayal of Socrates.
Class demographics in my courses at Calgary reflect both the city’s vibrant and diverse community and the institutions’ large international student intakes. This intersectionality offers a manifold opportunity to incorporate multicultural content that reflects students’ perspectives. While teaching at SAIT I introduced topics such as Japanese virtual companion technologies and Otaku into my courses. This content was extremely popular with Japanese students and anime fans, who added depth and realness to the topic by contributing their personal experiences. Taking an interest in students’ interests helps them feel included:
“…I submitted a response for something completely irrelevant to [an] assignment but still [on] a philosophical topic from one of my games, and it was responded to with such seriousness and care. That is something I have noticed, appreciated and found beneficial.”
The process of teaching is not static, and in addition to trying new approaches to course design and assessment, I continually work towards greater representation of indigenous materials and perspectives in both the course and classroom.
Assessment of student learning is contentious, complex, and needs continual adjustment to suit both the institution and the students. I have experimented with a number of assessment strategies, including formal exams and quizzes, mind maps, journals, LMS blogs and debates, video submissions, mini-quizzes, bingo, Pecha Kuchas, mini-questions, capstone projects, and term papers. On average, my students seem to prefer five or six lower-weighted activities to two or three higher-weighted projects; very few students like exams. My courses reflect those preferences and have coalesced around five gradable elements: a pecha kucha (PK), participation, reading/viewing questions, a ‘reverse ChatGPT’ midterm, and a blended-response take-home exam. Students have identified PKs and reading questions as their most popular assignments (though more introverted students can find PKs challenging), and though I find mind-maps challenging to grade, they are perennially popular. I continue to seek better ways to evaluate them because I believe that they help students to visually situate their learning in ways rarely afforded by other assessment tools.
Students vary in how well they are able to complete certain assignment types, so I deploy multiple assignment modalities to ensure students are able to submit at least one assignment in a style in which they excel. The most useful tool I have found to evaluate the progression of a student’s learning is a weekly reading/viewing question. These questions are directed at key concepts or learning points, require a few key words to be quoted from the source, and occasionally involve personal reflection or interpretation; answers can be no more than two sentences long. Accounting for twenty percent of the grade, this assignment achieves a number of teaching goals: it encourages a student to read/watch the course material (ensuring they do so before class), enables students to complete an assignment quickly, and distributes twenty percent of the course credit into bite-sized pieces spread across the course. The assignment provides both formative and summative analysis, and as the student’s answer acts as an immediate guide to their comprehension of the material, it also helps me to evaluate whether or not more time is needed on a given concept or topic.
Paraphrasing Seneca, I am honoured to teach because it affords me the opportunity to learn. One such learning opportunity occurred in my last course, in which an autistic student permitted me to develop new tools to better respond to their learning needs. Not all teaching is straight-forward, and the test anxieties experienced by the student generated challenges for both the student and myself. Responding to those challenges by working together with a very strong accommodations office helped me develop new ways of supporting and encouraging students with more diverse learning needs. I continually evaluate my teaching performance throughout the semester and encourage student feedback during and at the end of the course. Both approbation and criticism are invaluable: positive feedback lets you know what you are getting right, and negative feedback helps guide skill development. Growing as an instructor requires that I continually adapt my teaching to provide the educational experience that students want and deserve.
I thrive on the experience of teaching and have built and taught multiple courses at various levels. Though my most recent course at the University of Calgary was taught at the second year level, I have also taught courses at the first, third, and fourth year levels. In addition to teaching and evaluating full course loads, I have taught and evaluated individual graduate-level lectures and have TA’d a wide variety of courses at the undergraduate level, including Medical Sociology, Ancient Philosophy, Social and Political Philosophy, and four separate sections of Introduction to Philosophy.
Finally, I operate an open door policy. There are several reasons that I do this: Firstly, and most importantly, because I want students to know that I am an accessible resource. Secondly, because I understand how frustrating it can be to struggle with some problem or concept and not have the opportunity to talk it out. Thirdly, students never ask the questions they should in class because they are too worried that they might sound ‘silly’ (these questions are often pivotal teaching moments and should be encouraged and facilitated). And finally, departments thrive when their students become a part of it, rather than take courses from it. Physically being at the department enlivens the space, encouraging students to ‘hang around’ it — to be part of a philosophical community. This is important because living philosophy is the point of philosophy.