When college goes well, students graduate prepared to pursue meaningful lives and enter the adult spheres of work, politics, and civil society. When it does not, they leave with inadequate preparation for some or all of these things. Whether or not the members of our society live meaningful lives and are capable of contributing successfully to our important collective projects impacts all of us, so everyone has a stake in the quality of education that students receive. But, as teachers, we are actually in a position to make decisions that directly impact how well college goes for our students.
In my classrooms, two goals, but certainly not the only two, that I am committed to are as follows: I want my students to get better at listening to, understanding, and interacting civilly with others with whom they disagree; and I want them to get better at reasoning carefully about important issues. Call the first, collective engagement and the second, critical engagement. There are many ways to argue for the importance of collective and critical engagement, but I value them because both are crucial for the functioning of a democratic society where citizens from all walks of life deliberate together, and on terms of equality, about matters of public concern.
Some school environments detract from the realization of a democratic society. A classroom in which students stare at screens while a professor gives an uninspired reading from a recycled slideshow, for example, is not an environment that fosters collaborative or critical engagement. In fact, it is, most likely, an environment in which little, if any, learning will take place at all. What we should pursue instead is a repertoire of teaching practices that includes opportunities for students to work together to solve important puzzles that they find genuinely meaningful.
When it comes to such puzzles, those involving sex rank high on the list. Discussions of sexual ethics on campus often concern sexual assault, and there is a good reason for this: sexual assault is a common enough occurrence on college campuses to qualify as a matter of public concern for students. In a recent study, Claude Mellins et al. (2017) found that 23.6% of college women and 11% of college men experienced unwanted sexualized touching, 11.1% of college women and 3.8% of college men experienced attempted penetrative sexual assault, and 13.6% of women and 5.3% of men experienced penetrative sexual assault.
Avoiding and not subjecting others to unwanted sexual encounters is one issue that should be discussed in a sexual ethics curriculum, but it is by no means the only one. Christian Smith’s (2011) research shows that student are often poorly equipped to navigate the overwhelming, and potentially dangerous, hookup culture that exists on many college campuses, and this situation often leads to “a lot of pain and regret, if not serious suffering and long-term damage.” Moreover, as Rebecca Kukla (2018) has argued, university programs that focus solely on consent (including enthusiastic consent) fail to account for the nuanced, complex, and often non-verbal exchange of invitations and gifts that typically characterize how sex is initiated, conducted, and concluded in the real world. (I’ve discussed this in greater length here). A sexual ethics curriculum should expose students to a wide variety of issues that bear on the regulation of sexual conduct and the place of sex in a good life.
On Thursday, February 21, at 12:10 PM, my collaborator Ariel Sykes and I will present an interactive workshop at the AAPT Teaching Hub at the Central APA Conference in Denver, CO. If you attend this workshop, you will come away with two new tools. The first is a dialogue-based teaching method, which fosters collaborative and critical engagement, that you can introduce into your classroom: the Community of Philosophical Inquiry (CPI). In a CPI, students work together to find the most reasonable answer to a question that they find meaningful to their lives. The role of the facilitator is to use content-light, but procedure-rich, talk-moves to gently guide the students so that they use caring, creative, and critical thinking. The second tool is a sample sexual ethics unit that goes far beyond the narrow focus on consent found in many university programs. This unit can be modified or incorporated as-is into an intermediate-level college philosophy course (such as an ethics course), and it accomplishes a variety of significant learning outcomes by integrating the CPI method with other assignments, lectures, activities, and readings.
I am going to end with a brief story that, though fictional, is based on conversations I have had with undergraduate students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison over the past few years. I would invite you to read it while reflecting on the tools that you would use to help make college go well for the student in the story and on whether you think the CPI method might help. I hope to see you in Denver!
On a stifling, August afternoon in Wisconsin, you watch as a dark, green Subaru hesitates before leaving your new dorm’s parking lot, merging into the street traffic, and disappearing abruptly beyond a turn. Over the past few months, you have applied for colleges, waited for results, visited schools, accepted an offer of admission, graduated from high school, picked first-semester classes, joined your closest friends for one last hurrah, packed your most important belongings, watched the only home you have ever known disappear through the car window, and said goodbye to your parents. The whirlwind is now over and you finally have a moment to stand still. You take in your new surroundings: an intimidating assemblage of buildings representing seemingly random architectural styles. In the bright, afternoon light, the months of excitement and anticipation seem like things you watched in a movie rather than participated in personally. You aren’t at home anymore: you’re here, but you don’t yet fully understand what this new ‘here’ entails.
A few days later, you take your seat in the large lecture hall where your first college class ever is about to begin. You text, “gotta go, c u 2nite” to the chat group you’ve set up with your new friends and silence your phone. Other students around you retrieve laptops from backpacks, and you follow suit. You can’t remember the last time you’ve been so eager–or even eager at all–for class to start. At this point, your professor walks on stage and begins to read unenthusiastically from slides projected onto a large screen. With each uninspired syllable, your excitement dies until there is nothing left. You look around: the majority of your classmates have chat windows open, some are openly conversing with one another out loud, and one is even watching Netflix! What? Does the professor know? Do they care? Suddenly you remember the lecture. Fear sets in as you look back towards the slideshow and find that you are completely lost: what if you’re called on? But when the class ends you realize that your fear was entirely misguided: the only person whom your professor planned to have talk that day was herself. You might as well have been watching a video.
As you leave the hall, you remember your chat group conversation from before. You pull out your phone and note the plan for tonight: a party at a frat house. This will be your first real college party. You’re excited, but anxious at the same time. It’s kind of silly, you think to yourself, but you’re worried about the hooking up part. You know that people hook up at college parties–you’ve seen the movies and heard the stories–and it’s totally no big deal so long as it’s consensual and safe, or something like that, right? (You vaguely remember some presentation at orientation that went over these sorts of things, but the past few days have been such a blur that your memory is a little hazy). It’ll be okay, you tell yourself; just feel it out.
Aaron J. Yarmel
Aaron Yarmel is currently writing a dissertation at the University of Wisconsin-Madison about civic education. His research interests span political philosophy, philosophy of education, applied ethics, and normative ethics. He is also the Director of Madison Public Philosophy, which shares philosophy with the Madison community through public performances and Philosophy for Children programs.
