by Russell Marcus
This past summer, the philosophy department at Hamilton College hosted a new two-week program for undergraduate students. In developing the program, we had two primary goals: to encourage innovative undergraduate philosophy teaching and to provide a space in which undergraduates from a broad range of backgrounds and institutions could come together to think about philosophy. The experience was thrilling, beyond our expectations, and we are doing it again next summer, June 23–July 9, 2019.
I had been intrigued by the possibility of running a summer program in philosophy for a long time. Hamilton students who attended other summer programs reported, on their return, having had great times and learning a lot. But they were mainly happy to be hanging around other students who enjoyed philosophy. Their classroom experiences tended to be secondary to their extra-curricular, intellectual engagement with other young philosophers, even when the work was rigorous and exciting. This makes some sense. Most other summer programs are designed to prepare students for graduate school, where pedagogy tends to take the back seat to content delivery. Hamilton College is an undergraduate institution with an emphasis on excellent undergraduate teaching. So, I thought that it would be useful to run a summer program that highlights our strengths in both good philosophy and innovative teaching. I wanted to develop a program in which creative pedagogy could spur students to even greater learning, and in which students and faculty shared in the excitement of exploring new territory, both philosophically and pedagogically, while maintaining or even improving on the social and collaborative appeals of other programs.
We started with the teachers. I am fortunate and grateful to teach at Hamilton, with our open curriculum and a departmental ethos of instructor autonomy. Students choose their classes freely, with no distribution requirements, and I am free to experiment with both the pedagogy and the course content of every course I choose to teach. We wanted the program to exemplify these virtues: freedom for instructors and students to study and explore as they wish.
For students, we wanted to create an environment of excitement and intrinsic love for philosophy. We wanted a diverse group of students chosen only for their shared philosophical interests, and we offered no college credit. So we knew that we had to provide stipends and some travel support so that the program would be open to any student, even if they had to earn money over the summer to continue their education.
Having secured funding from an internal grant at Hamilton, we sent out a call for proposals for three courses. We were pleasantly surprised to receive many viable and exciting submissions and we probably could have picked eight totally different sets of proposals and come out with a very good program. We selected the following three:
Juli Thorson (Ball State University) taught “Drawing Your Identity,” in which she used drawing exercises and techniques to develop complex ways of thinking, remembering, and problem solving about notions of personal identity.
Shoshana Brassfield (Frostburg State University) taught “Democracy in Athens,” using a Reacting to the Past role-playing game called The Threshold of Democracy: Athens in 403 B.C.E. and in which Socrates was re-tried (and exonerated!).
Charles Rathkopf (formerly of Iona College, now of the Jülich Research Center), taught “Mapping Moral Reasoning,” using argument-mapping software called MindMup to analyze and evaluate arguments about complex contemporary moral topics.
In the winter, we solicited applications for students and received inquires from an enthusiastic and diverse group, from around the country and around the world, from small colleges and large universities. We were sad that we couldn’t have invited more students to join us, but we ended up with a thoughtful and highly engaged cohort, all pleased to be selected. They came together in June like iron to a magnet. They had all three classes every day for two weeks, and some extracurricular activities including a visiting speaker and a day trip up to the Adirondacks. We brought in an assistant director, Sara Purinton (Hamilton ‘17), and three excellent graduate students to assist the students and the instructors and to provide voices and visions of the most junior members of our profession: Austin Heath (Hamilton ‘15 and Johns Hopkins); Mandy Long (Connecticut); and Amit Singh (Toronto). Students talked all day and into the wee hours about almost nothing but philosophy. Classes were intense at times. There were some disagreements and some strong emotions. But the mood was constructive and collegial. We could not have been more pleased and the students seemed to share our view. The program culminated, for faculty, in a one-day conference on the work they did and how to adapt it into other classes. We recorded the talks and will post them soon.
Our long-term goals for the program were modest. We hoped to create some inter-college networks of undergraduates interested in philosophy, to encourage students to work collaboratively, and to create a space for innovation in philosophical pedagogy. We expected that some of our students will go to graduate school, and it’s always good to start making professional connections. But also, it was just a pleasure to bring a group of young, thoughtful people together to live the life of the mind for a couple of weeks, to let their philosophical freak flags fly.
Now, thanks to more generosity from Hamilton’s Truax Fund for Philosophy, we get to do it again! The call for course proposals is out, with a deadline of September 16, 2018. You can find it here, where you can also see more about the program. We’re open to innovations in both pedagogy and course content and would be glad to read your proposal!
We are grateful to the Blog of the APA for this space to describe what we’ve done and to encourage readers to submit proposals to participate next year.
Russell Marcus is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Hamilton College, where he specializes in philosophy of mathematics and philosophical pedagogy. His recent publications include Introduction to Formal Logic with Philosophical Applications (OUP); “Teaching as a Humanism,” in Philosophers in the Classroom (Hackett, edited by Cahn, Bradner and Mills); and Autonomy Platonism and the Indispensability Argument (Lexington). A teacher for thirty years, he is a long-time member, and now board member, of the American Association of Philosophy Teachers.
