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21. American Association of Philosophy Teachers Studies in Pedagogy: Volume > 5
Russell Marcus Scaffolding for Fine Philosophical Skills
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Philosophy students often struggle to master the complex skills needed to succeed in their work, especially in writing thesis-driven essays. Research over the past forty years on instructional scaffolding, both generally and as applied in philosophy, has helped teachers to refine both instruction and assignment design to improve students’ performance on complex philosophical tasks. This essay reviews the fundamentals of scaffolding in order to motivate and support some innovative in-class exercises and writing assignments that can help students develop even finer-grained skills. These skills are useful both intrinsically and for their transfer to longer-form essays, to other philosophical work, and to the general academic and intellectual development of our students.
22. American Association of Philosophy Teachers Studies in Pedagogy: Volume > 6
Jane Drexler, Ryan J. Johnson Teaching Philosophy as a Way of Life
23. American Association of Philosophy Teachers Studies in Pedagogy: Volume > 6
Jane Drexler, Ryan J. Johnson Annotated Bibliography
24. American Association of Philosophy Teachers Studies in Pedagogy: Volume > 6
Notes on Contributors
25. American Association of Philosophy Teachers Studies in Pedagogy: Volume > 6
Alexander V. Stehn Orcid-ID American Philosophy as a Way of Life: A Course in Self-Culture
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This essay fills in some historical, conceptual, and pedagogical gaps that appear in the most visible and recent professional efforts to “revive” Philosophy as a Way of Life (PWOL). I present “American Philosophy and Self-Culture” as an advanced undergraduate seminar that broadens who counts in and what counts as philosophy by immersing us in the lives, writings, and practices of seven representative U.S.-American philosophers of self-culture, community-building, and world-changing: Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), William Ellery Channing (1780–1842), Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), Margaret Fuller (1810-1850), Henry Bugbee (1915–1999), and Gloria Anzaldúa (1942–2004). Students enter the class with preconceptions about who philosophers are, what they do, how they write, and the languages in which they write. Students walk out with new senses of self, place, and language that emerge through new ways of seeing, doing, and writing philosophy.
26. American Association of Philosophy Teachers Studies in Pedagogy: Volume > 6
Carissa Phillips-Garrett Orcid-ID Moral Transformation, Identity, and Practice
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Standard ways of conceptualizing moral development and measuring pedagogical interventions in ethics classes privilege the growth of moral judgment over moral sensitivity, moral motivation, and moral habits by too often conflating improvement in moral judgment with holistic moral development. I argue here that if we care about students’ construction and cultivation of their ethical selves, our assessment design principles ought to take seriously the transformative possibilities of philosophy as a way of life and be based on a more robust and holistic account of moral development. I illustrate these principles of assessment design through an examination of the Character Project, which I created to help students engage in their own deliberate ethical transformation through self-directed, individualized, and concentrated practice. Finally, I conclude with a discussion about how to appropriately and fairly assess this kind of deeply personal learning.
27. American Association of Philosophy Teachers Studies in Pedagogy: Volume > 6
Gaia Ferrari, Samantha Dragar PWOL as Situated Pedagogy: Adapting Hadot’s Model for Today’s Classroom
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This article pursues the goal of articulating a pedagogical paradigm of philosophy as a way of life that can effectively re-invigorate the teaching of philosophy in today’s academic world. This re-invigoration should take direct inspiration from Hadot’s hermeneutical framework of how to live philosophically, while still recognizing the intrinsic limitations that his model presents when applied to the modern educational practices of academia. In particular, we maintain that a literal application of Hadot’s model would require we turn the teaching of philosophy as a way of life into a systemic affair that demands from students a full commitment to particular schools of thought. Conversely, we argue for a pedagogical paradigm of philosophy as a way of life (“PWOL-as-Situated-Pedagogy”) that enacts a triple balancing between theory and practice, progress and assessment, and depth and breadth. In this way, the problem of self-cultivation is tackled by engaging students with a broader consideration of philosophies and spiritual exercises.
28. American Association of Philosophy Teachers Studies in Pedagogy: Volume > 6
Jacob Stump Moving and Looking
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There is a way of teaching philosophy as a way of life that is focused on delivering content. It is focused on giving students information about the topic. In this paper, I consider a different way. It is focused on giving students the experience of philosophy as a way of life—in particular, the experience of being in love with wisdom. The main question of my paper is what it might be to teach philosophy in a way that prioritizes giving students the chance to fall in love with wisdom. I do not so much argue for an answer as invite the reader to follow me along a path of metaphor, reflections on teaching philosophy, and quotations.
29. American Association of Philosophy Teachers Studies in Pedagogy: Volume > 6
Jake Wright Orcid-ID Transforming Our Classrooms and Ourselves: Philosophy as a Way of Life as Radical Pedagogy
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I argue that Philosophy as a Way of Life (PWOL) represents a distinct pedagogy that differs from philosophy’s signature pedagogy because of PWOL’s differing views of what philosophy is and how it is successfully practiced. I further argue that this pedagogy is radical in two senses. First, PWOL is technically radical because it naturally incorporates cutting-edge pedagogical techniques that promote student success. Second, I argue that PWOL is transformatively radical because it seeks to transform students’ understanding of themselves and the world around them. Following this argument, I discuss my own experiences implementing a PWOL-based course as a case study of PWOL’s radical nature.
30. American Association of Philosophy Teachers Studies in Pedagogy: Volume > 6
Jane Drexler Philosophy as a Way of Teaching: A Handbook
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In this essay, Drexler reflects broadly on our practices as philosophy teachers: how we think of our classrooms and design students’ learning experiences, how we evaluate ourselves and our teaching, and generally, how we keep walking into the classroom each semester. Based on a talk she delivered in 2020, Drexler’s contribution to this issue presents a series of “chapters” of an “enchiridion” for teaching: a handbook of loosely-connected reflections, principles, and strategies for teaching Philosophy as a Way of Life, and for teaching (philosophy) as a way of life.
31. American Association of Philosophy Teachers Studies in Pedagogy: Volume > 6
Laura J. Mueller, Eli Kramer Orcid-ID Let’s Be Frank: Revitalizing Frank Friendship in the Contemporary Philosophy Classroom
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Philodemus’s On Frank Criticism offers a unique conception of friendship that relies on frank speech, or truth-telling. The ability to have frank conversations with one another is the heart of a conception of friendship in which we are seen, heard, and acknowledged. This is the friendship through which we become better citizens and better selves. In particular, Philodemus is offering this truth-based friendship to students and their mentors. Yet, one would be hard put to find such trust and deep friendship in the university philosophy classrooms of today. Our professionalized and content acquisition focused culture in the academy all too often inhibits fostering these kinds of relationships with our students. We begin the essay by tracing the roots of this kind of frank friendship in Plato’s Lysis, and then contextualize its emerging role in the ancient philosophical classroom by exploring its place in Philodemus’ Epicurean philosophical community at Herculaneum. We do so to see how such friendship moves beyond discourse and into practice. Next, we use Arendt and Foucault to unpack the public and private dimensions of frank friendship in the philosophical learning environment and its role in a good life and good politics. Finally, we show how the classroom practice of Modern Socratic Dialogue (MSD) can re-enliven frank friendship as a spiritual exercise in the contemporary university-philosophy classroom. Specifically, we argue that MSD is a particular method of dialogue suited for the public realm of friendship and that it contributes to the care of one’s soul, thus modeling in our classrooms a method of dialogue for both the public and private dimensions of life.
32. American Association of Philosophy Teachers Studies in Pedagogy: Volume > 6
Marisa Diaz-Waian, David Nowakowski Talking Shop: Invitations to a Philosophical Life
33. American Association of Philosophy Teachers Studies in Pedagogy: Volume > 6
Matthew Sharpe Orcid-ID PWL for the Twenty-First Century Academic Philosopher
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In this essay, I sketch a third possibility between teaching PWL solely as history of philosophy (which seems to inescapably pull against its own conception of philosophizing), and the fascinating recent attempts by scholars to experiment with introducing modes of teaching and assessment which would reactivate ancient spiritual exercises within the modern university. This third way takes for granted that, for the foreseeable future (and if academic philosophy widely survives the twenty-first century’s recalibration of the university), it will do so as a primarily theoretical discipline. Nevertheless, it proposes that insights from PWL’s re-conception of philosophy as a situated, social as well as ethical activity can and ideally should be integrated into such modern syllabi. This can be done by introducing and teaching (a) capstone unit(s) for advanced students which would reflect critically on what it is to be an academic philosopher today and the ways that the fact that philosophy is institutionalized as a professional discipline in neoliberal universities creates pressures towards particular forms of intellectual and ethical vice and sophistry. Based on a course taught at the author’s home university, it examines how Plato’s Republic, Bacon’s Novum Organum, and Kivisto’s Vices of Learning prompt students, respectively, to consider the place of the philosopher in the “city,” their own (and everyone’s) propensities towards forms of epistemic bias and partiality, and the ways that institutionalized competition for status can promote forms of pride, vanity, and misanthropy in scholars. Encountering and discussing these texts, it is argued, can prepare students for the realities of philosophizing in the professional universities of the twenty-first century, helping them to identify ways philosophers can go wrong, and helping them to identify chastened, more Socratically self-aware ways of thinking, reading, arguing, and understanding what philosophers do.
34. American Association of Philosophy Teachers Studies in Pedagogy: Volume > 6
Monica Janzen, Benjamin Hole, Orcid-ID Ramona Ilea Civically Engaged Philosophy as a Way of Life
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Teachers committed to seeing philosophy as a way of life (PWOL) often focus on assignments that help students develop personal practices, so they experience peace of mind, independence, and a cure from anguish. While we applaud these goals, our work highlights another important aspect of philosophy as a way of life that sometimes is overlooked. We want our students to experience a transformation toward seeing themselves as moral agents, growing in civic virtues, and developing “cosmic consciousness.” To reach this end, we utilize a civic engagement (CE) project that we call the “Experiments in Ethics.” This CE project consists of a series of small, interrelated assignments or “experiments” that help students develop habits and certain civic dispositions. While students complete the experiments throughout the semester, we argue that civically engaged philosophy as a way of life extends beyond the confines of the classroom and the semester as our students cultivate the ability to see themselves as ethical agents capable of making changes in their own lives and the communities in which they live.
35. American Association of Philosophy Teachers Studies in Pedagogy: Volume > 6
Sharon Mason, Benjamin Rider Philosophy for Living: Exploring Diversity and Immersive Assignments in a PWOL Approach
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In this article, we reflect on our experiences teaching a PWOL course called Philosophy for Living. The course uses modules focused on different historical philosophical ways of life (Epicureanism, Stoicism, Confucianism, Existentialism, etc.) to engage students in exploring how philosophy can be a way of life and how its methods, virtues, and ideas can improve their own lives. We describe and compare our experiences with two central aspects of our approach: engagement with diversity and the use of immersive experiences and assignments. In particular, we discuss how we recognize and center various forms of diversity in philosophy—cultural and gender diversity, but also diversity in how and in what forms philosophy can be done and what “philosophy as a way of life” can be. We also examine how the experimental and experiential aspects of immersive assignments promote deeper understanding and create possibilities for personal transformation.
36. American Association of Philosophy Teachers Studies in Pedagogy: Volume > 8
Jake Wright Orcid-ID Welcoming Newcomers: Teaching for Novice Philosophy Students
37. American Association of Philosophy Teachers Studies in Pedagogy: Volume > 8
Jake Wright Orcid-ID Annotated Bibliography: Extant Work on Introductory Philosophy Teaching in Context
38. American Association of Philosophy Teachers Studies in Pedagogy: Volume > 8
Notes on Contributors
39. American Association of Philosophy Teachers Studies in Pedagogy: Volume > 8
Zachary Odermatt, Orcid-ID Robert Weston Siscoe Orcid-ID Philosophical Dialogue for Beginners: Using PWOL Dialogues to Introduce Students to the Philosophy of Race and Gender
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Inspired by the practice of dialogue in ancient philosophical schools, the Philosophy as a Way of Life (PWOL) Project at the University of Notre Dame has sought to put dialogue back at the center of philosophical pedagogy. Impromptu philosophical dialogue, however, can be challenging for students who are new to philosophy. Anticipating this challenge, the Project has created a series of manuals to help instructors conduct dialogue groups with novice philosophy students. Using these guidelines, we incorporated PWOL-style dialogue groups into our Spring 2021 course “The Philosophy of Race, Class, and Gender” with the hope that, through having conversations about these challenging topics, our students would both be able to practice having philosophical dialogues as well as form their views on race and gender in light of contributions from their diverse peers. This article examines several strategies for how instructors can seek to incorporate similar dialogues into their own introductory classroom.
40. American Association of Philosophy Teachers Studies in Pedagogy: Volume > 8
Amy Collins-Warfield Orcid-ID Considerations for Teaching Introductory Philosophy to First-Generation College Students
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First-generation college students are a unique population of undergraduates with different backgrounds, strengths, and challenges compared to their continuing generation (not first-generation) peers. These students have the potential to perform well as novice philosophers but may require some additional supports. First-generation students are especially at risk for not being retained by their university at the end of their first year. Given that introductory philosophy courses tend to be taken by first-year students, instructors of these courses can impact student retention, both at the institution and within the discipline. This essay outlines the characteristics of first-generation students, the role instructors play in their success, and specific considerations for working with this undergraduate population in introductory philosophy classrooms.