Recent years have seen an increasing pressure on university teachers to include new media in their teaching practices. I recently had a conversation with one of my colleagues in my department who was fond of having his students continue discussing, on Facebook, questions addressed in lectures. As teachers, I thought to myself, it would probably be a mistake to ignore entirely these new platforms, as it would be to ignore new ways of consuming content. In my own teaching experience as a lecturer in ancient philosophy I have started to use podcasts as teaching aids.
The idea came to me while teaching at a summer school in ancient philosophy at University College London (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/classics/outreach/summer-schools/ucl-summer-school-ancient-philosophy-2020). I teach, as part of the summer school, an intensive 5-day introduction to ancient ethics consisting of some 5 hours of teaching per day. It probably needs no saying that at the end of a rather long day spent discussing the ideas of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics on the good life I cannot really expect the students, hard-working though they may well be, to do any prep work for the next day. A couple of years ago I started to tell them to listen to a podcast from one day to the next in preparation for the next session. Since then, I have made the usage of podcast a constant feature of my teaching.
I have been using selected and scholarly reliable series of podcasts on philosophy to great benefit (e.g. History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, Philosophy Bites, In Our Time) to teach ancient philosophy to college students. I ask the students to listen attentively to one or two podcasts ahead of sessions. I have found that this approach has a number of benefits: first, students can be expected to do this type of preparatory work more willingly, and they can benefit significantly from listening multiple times to a lecture or an interview with an expert. Second, it has the benefit of sharpening their ability to select internet resources sensibly, a much-needed skill in the internet-dominated era.
I can imagine someone saying that this is too passive as it only requires one to listen to a script or an interview and does not engage students more actively. I don’t think we should be bothered by this so long as we make sure to put these podcasts to good use as a teaching tool in the hands of a lecturer or instructor. I for one see these podcasts as springboards for discussion and reflection on the problems at hand. For instance, I try to hone students’ skills to recognise controversial, interpretative claims made by the people on the podcast and, most importantly, further encourage them to assess these claims by themselves. Since the study of ancient philosophy always involves texts and our understanding of them, I encourage them to check the podcasts directly with the text in question, be it Plato’s Republic or Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. The idea is that these podcasts can be listened to, but also interrogated for clarification, questioned, disagreed with, or even dismissed as inaccurate if need be.
This perhaps suggests that there is a latent potential in new media when it comes to using them as auxiliary teaching tools. While the correct usage of these media is by no means an easy question to answer, I have found podcasts of surprising help in stimulating philosophy students to become critical listeners and independent enquirers.
Giulio Di Basilio
Giulio Di Basilio is an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. He specializes in ancient philosophy. His current project concerns Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics.
