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1. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 40 > Issue: 4
Tracy Bowell, Justine Kingsbury

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Part of the job of the philosophy teacher, and in particular the critical thinking teacher, is to encourage students to critically examine their own beliefs. There are some beliefs that are difficult to think critically about, even for those who have critical thinking skills and are committed to applying them to their own beliefs. These resistant beliefs are not all of a kind, and so a range of different strategies may be needed to get students to think critically about them. In this paper we suggest some such strategies.
2. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 40 > Issue: 4
Paul J. D'Ambrosio

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In recent years, universities throughout the People’s Republic of China have begun actively seeking foreign professors to work full-time in their philosophy departments. This, coupled with the decrease in the number of job openings in philosophy across western Europe and North America, might very well lead to a sharp rise in the number of foreign faculty members in philosophy departments across mainland China. In this article I will outline three of the major difficulties facing philosophy teachers who have little or no experience in the Chinese education system, and provide suggestions for dealing with them. The first two are general and apply to a broad range of courses; namely, initiating class discussion and teaching students how to understand philosophical arguments. The third is specifically related to those who teach or engage with Chinese thought. These professors should be prepared to encounter a surmountable but pronounced skepticism among many Chinese students (and professors) against the ability of foreigners to truly comprehend Chinese philosophy.
3. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 40 > Issue: 4
Jennifer Wilson Mulnix, Alida Liberman

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This paper discusses an exercise that Alida Liberman facilitated among participants at a Teaching and Learning workshop sponsored by the American Association of Philosophy Teachers (AAPT) aimed at helping instructors become more learner-centered in their pedagogy. The exercise was designed to place participants in the role of inadequately supported learners by asking them to fold an origami crane with varying levels of instruction and feedback. The failure of many participants to successfully fold cranes functioned as a striking analogy for student failures to learn without explicit how-to instruction, goal-directed practice, and frequent, targeted feedback. In reflecting on the activity, participants developed strategies to become more learner-centered and to better support student success. This paper explains the origami exercise and the lessons it illustrates, and discusses how the lessons learned from the exercise can translate into specific tangible strategies for the classroom.
4. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 40 > Issue: 4
Ian Schnee

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In this paper I develop a version of Bloom’s taxonomy applicable to philosophy, and I use it to create a tool for categorizing the Bloom level of assessment items in formal logic classes. I then show how to use the tool to improve the alignment of teaching and assessment in one’s courses. Alignment means we are assessing students on what we are actually teaching them. One dimension of alignment is cognitive levels, such as lower-level factual knowledge or higher-level critical reasoning skills. By using the tool to graph the Bloom level of one’s assessment items, one can better understand how well one’s assessment aligns with one’s teaching. Doing so allows instructors to make informed changes to both teaching and assessment, and, ultimately, to provide the right level of challenge to the majority of students.

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5. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 40 > Issue: 4
Edmund F. Byrne

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6. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 40 > Issue: 4
Joshua D. Crabill

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7. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 40 > Issue: 4
Mark C. Navin

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8. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 40 > Issue: 4
Robert C. Robinson

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9. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 40 > Issue: 4
William R. Schroeder

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10. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 40 > Issue: 4

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11. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 40 > Issue: 3
Sharon Bailin, Mark Battersby

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“How do I figure out what to believe?” In the face of competing views, conflicting claims, distrust of expertise, and disdain for facts, this question is both understandable and pertinent. The perennial educational task of helping people to evaluate claims and compare arguments in order to engage in reasoned discourse and make reasoned judgments takes on particular urgency in the contemporary context. An obvious venue for such an endeavor is a course in critical thinking, but the way critical thinking is usually taught, with its focus on individual arguments, does not get us to that goal. The approach which we have developed focuses, instead, on inquiry, which has as its goal to provide students with the tools necessary for engaging in reasoned discourse and making reasoned judgments in real contexts. We describe this approach, argue for its advantages, and describe what a course would look like following an inquiry approach.

12. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 40 > Issue: 3
Anne Burkard

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This article discusses strategies for responding to students’ metaphilosophical scepticism. It includes responses to a survey which asked philosophy teachers about their experiences with various forms of scepticism in their classrooms. In specifying the phenomenon, I point out features which often characterise introductory philosophy courses both in secondary schools and at the university level. I argue that these features make student scepticism particularly challenging. Secondly, I describe a central objective of doing philosophy, and highlight three basic pedagogical principles. I argue that this objective and these principles should function as criteria for assessing strategies which teachers might adopt in reaction to metaphilosophical scepticism. Thirdly, I discuss several such strategies with reference to the proposed principles and the features which are characteristic of introductory courses. I argue that especially strategies which encourage students to philosophise themselves are recommendable. Furthermore, I point out some opportunities which student scepticism offers for enriching classroom discussions and for deepening students’ understanding of philosophy.

13. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 40 > Issue: 3
Paul J. D'Ambrosio, Timothy Connolly

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A number of recent scholarly works in Chinese philosophy approach Chinese texts and thinkers by incorporating them into longstanding issues and debates in the Western philosophical tradition. While the merits of this approach have received much discussion among those working in Chinese philosophy, it also has the potential to reach those outside the field whose research or teaching focuses on the debates and issues. In this article we look at the issue of using Chinese philosophy in courses on contemporary philosophical topics for non-specialists. We give the justification for this pedagogical approach, put forth a “syllabus” of preparatory readings, and finally, discuss its limitations and possibilities.

14. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 40 > Issue: 3
Mark Walker, David Trafimow, Jamie Bronstein

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The notion of Socratic Note Taking (SNT) is introduced to enhance students’ learning from assigned readings. SNT features students asking questions and answering their own questions while doing the readings. To test the effectiveness of SNT, half the students from two sections of a philosophy course were assigned SNT on alternating weeks. Quizzes each week alternated between the two classes as either high or low stakes in a counterbalanced format. The design was a 2 (Notes: SNT or not) x 2 (Stakes: high or low) x 2 (Replication: first or second replication of a Notes x Stakes cell) within-participants factorial. On ten-point quizzes, SNT made an average difference of 1.22 points (more than a letter grade). Furthermore, the results indicate that SNT is particularly effective with weaker students, e.g., we found a nearly three-point increase on ten-point quizzes for the weakest students.

15. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 40 > Issue: 3
Jan Willem Wieland, Matthijs Endt

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Philosophers such as Gettier, Frankfurt, and Thomson are famous for their thought experiments. This makes one wonder: how did they invent their cases? Were they just lucky to devise a good case, or did they follow some basic rules that are available to all of us? In this paper, we argue for the latter answer by presenting a guidebook for analysing thought experiments. Our guidebook clearly specifies which factors should be included in a thought experiment, and which factors should be left out. This will help students to see through the fantastical elements of TEs, to learn the practice, and to check whether philosophers are doing things right. We illustrate our account in some detail using examples from Thomson’s thought experiments.

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16. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 40 > Issue: 3
David Boersema

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17. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 40 > Issue: 3
Paul J. D'Ambrosio

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18. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 40 > Issue: 3
Dana Delibovi

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articles

19. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 40 > Issue: 2
Melissa Jacquart, Jessey Wright

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The problem of inadequate professional training for graduate students in teaching and pedagogy has recently come into sharp relief. Providing teacher training for philosophy graduate students through for-credit courses has been recommended as a solution to this problem. This paper provides an overview of the problem, identifies several aims such a course should have, and provides a detailed overview of a course satisfying those aims. By providing a detailed outline of the course, this paper can act as a resource for faculty tasked with teaching such a course. Finally, we justify the pedagogical decisions made in the design of this course to prepare facilitators to more effectively teach it, to allow facilitators to make informed and intentional decisions when adapting the course to their program, and as a demonstration of what we take to be some of the best practices in teaching and pedagogy. That is, the design of the course is informed by the very material covered in the course.
20. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 40 > Issue: 2
Jeremiah Joven Joaquin, Robert James M. Boyles

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In elementary logic textbooks, Venn diagrams are used to analyze and evaluate the validity of syllogistic arguments. Although the method of Venn diagrams is shown to be a powerful analytical tool in these textbooks, it still has limitations. On the one hand, such method fails to represent singular statements of the form, “a is F.” On the other hand, it also fails to represent identity statements of the form, “a is b.” Because of this, it also fails to give an account of the validity of some obviously valid arguments that contain these types of statements as constituents. In this paper, owing to the developments in the literature on Venn diagrams, we offer a way of supplementing the rules of the Venn diagram found in textbooks, and show how this retooled Venn diagram technique could account for the problem cases.