My primary aim as an instructor is to help students view philosophy as a way of life: an ongoing process of asking "why" questions and refusing to accept "because I said so!" answers. To this end, I teach with an expose-and-assess approach, one that exposes the philosophical assumptions that people simply take for granted and equips students with the skills needed to assess those assumptions. ...
Consider the assumption that it is morally permissible to spend one's money on luxuries and frills. When covering the ethics of poverty, I begin with a news clip about five Florida teens who taunted a man as he drowned to death. Even though these teens were never convicted of a crime, my students agree that their failure to help the drowning man was seriously wrong. But how do students feel about their own failure to prevent suffering and death around the world? Rather than just asking them, I have them write down three unnecessary purchases they've made in the last month. Recently, this prompted one student to confess that he spent seven hundred dollars on a pair of designer boots. I use students' volunteered examples to enter dollar amounts into the website, The Life You Can Save, so that they can visualize the potential impact of their money around the world. This helps them see that their spending habits reflect an assumption about their moral obligations to the poor.
Or consider the view that life begins at conception. When covering the abortion debate, I play media clips to expose the assumption that we are biological organisms. According to substance dualism, however, we aren’t biological organisms at all: we are immaterial souls. After introducing this view, I have students get into groups to consider how a dualist might answer the question of when we begin to exist. This helps them realize that different theories of personal identity may have different implications for the moral status of the fetus, and it equips them with the concepts needed to adjudicate these issues. As one student put it, "[I] learned that many of the issues today that are branded as 'scientific issues' or 'government issues' are actually philosophical issues that must first be answered on the philosophical side of the debate before any common ground might be found."
In order to assess philosophical assumptions, I believe that students must first learn to identify, evaluate, and construct arguments. However, many students enter my courses without a clear understanding of what an argument even is. As a result, I devote an entire unit to distinguishing argument from rhetoric and introducing basic argumentative strategies, which I reinforce throughout the semester. For instance, I recently introduced my students to the optimistic induction from the success of science to the truth of physicalism. One of my students observed that the argument resembles an induction from the sun's having risen every day in the past to the conclusion that it will rise again tomorrow—an example that we discussed the second week of class. Validating her observation helped my students understand that their task is to assess these arguments for cogency.
I have students put these argumentative strategies into practice by completing a variety of writing assignments throughout the semester. For example, when teaching applied ethics, I require students to complete a "find-a-flaw" assignment that tasks them with summarizing an argument for a position on an ethical issue that they encountered outside of class and explaining why the reasoning is flawed. This habituates them into identifying arguments in their daily lives and evaluating them for validity or inductive strength. It led one student to argue that a fellow DJ committed a hasty generalization fallacy in concluding that people who listen to morally corrupt artists are apathetic and bad; another to expose the non-sequiturs in a former high school teacher's Facebook post condemning anger and incivility in politics; and several others to discuss the arguments they encountered over Thanksgiving dinner on topics such as gun control, anti-vaccination advocacy, and political protests within the National Football League.
I also require students to complete several "reading response" assignments, which task them with either summarizing an argument from an assigned reading or critically evaluating a philosophical claim. This ensures that they already have some experience writing the major components of an argumentative paper before they have to write one for the course. Moreover, I have them write their final paper in stages by developing a thesis statement and writing an outline explaining how they plan to support it; submitting a rough draft for feedback; and revising and resubmitting their paper with a cover letter explaining where, how, and why they revised it. This approach enables me to assess students' progress over time and help them make specific improvements at different stages of the writing process. For example, many of my students begin with a thesis that is too broad to support within the page limit. By having them develop a thesis first, I'm able to help them fix this mistake far in advance.
To further assess students' progress, I administer a mid-semester evaluation, which is designed to prompt students to reflect on their own role in the course and to enable me to adjust my teaching methods to their unique educational needs. For instance, when some of my students commented that they sometimes found it difficult to focus when I would respond to students' questions, I began using students' questions to solicit answers from other students for the rest of the class to assess. This method kept my students much more engaged. Even if my methods change, however, my primary objective in teaching remains constant: to empower students to question the world around them.
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You can tell the Professor is passionate about what he does! I liked this class!
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