Teaching Philosophy

Second Life is a free, three-dimensional, multi-user, online virtual world program created in 2003 by Linden Research Inc. In this paper, I recount the Introduction to Philosophy course I taught in Second Life for the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and address five areas of interest: (1) traditional vs. non-traditional learning environments, (2) communication, (3) illustrative props, (4) student feedback, and (5) and potential concerns. My conclusion is that philosophy courses can be taught online in Second Life effectively and that philosophy instructors need to be more aware of the educational possibilities of Second Life as education becomes increasingly more digital.

Second Life, an on-line, interactive environment in which users create avatars through which they have virtual experiences, is a contemporary experiment in utopia. While most often it is used for social networking, it also is used for commercial and educational purposes, as well as for political activism. Here, we share the results from a course that uses Second Life as a tool for examining social justice. We examine the notion of utopia, present the results of a pre- and post-survey designed to measure the effectiveness of our Second Life course, and relate insights gleaned from the centerpiece assignment of the course that required students to construct proposals for how $200 best could be spent in Second Life to promote social justice. Finally, we demonstrate how Second Life can be a helpful classroom tool for examining John Rawls’s influential utopian work, A Theory of Justice.

In this paper I argue for the efficacy of scaffolded writing assignments in teaching critical thinking and writing in lower-division philosophy courses. Scaffolding involves converting the skills one expects students to display on a culminating assignment (in this case an argumentative paper) into a progressive series of smaller assignments, moving from papers that use relatively simple skills, such as summarizing small pieces of text, to much more complex skills, such as evaluating others’ positions, constructing their own judgments about an issue, and defending those claims. I use this technique in a course oriented around the idea of enlightenment, so that students see the writing assignments as part of the practice of intellectual maturity.

This is an exciting time for people working in pre-college philosophy in the United States, as the last decade has seen slow but steady growth in the field. As the field develops, there is an expanding need for high-quality resources in a variety of areas: (1) for philosophers and other philosophy educators working with teachers, graduate and undergraduate students, and other adults to train skilled pre-college philosophy teachers; (2) for philosophy educators teaching philosophy in K–12 classrooms; and (3) for pre-college teachers attempting to introduce philosophy into their own classrooms. This article evaluates five books that have been published in the last few years, all aimed at pre-college practitioners. Ranging from the very practical to the more theoretical, each of these books seeks to enhance the ability of philosophy educators to teach philosophy in pre-college classrooms.