Designing a Philosophy Course for Relevance

My first semester as lead instructor of a philosophy course, I taught for laughs. I’d suffered through some painful core requirements as an undergrad, and my greatest fear was that my students would leave my course feeling like the material was completely irrelevant to their lives. So I treated short presentations in class like stand-up routines, and I thought of all kinds of quirky ways to get students involved. The strategy worked, in a way. There was never a dull moment in class, and the students told me every week how much they enjoyed showing up. But midway through the class I realized that I’d implicitly equated entertainment with relevance. When I tried to get the generally lively students to engage with course content the room went quiet. And on my end-of-year reviews, I repeatedly saw variations of a double-edged compliment: “This was one of my favorite classes, but I didn’t learn much philosophy.”

The course was an important learning experience, at least for me. And it inspired me to start thinking seriously about what it is for a philosophy course to be genuinely relevant, and about whether this quality is something that our courses — and especially our introductory courses — can be designed to achieve.

To start, I think it’s important to recognize that relevance, in this context, is directly tied up with the particular needs, interests, and goals of the students your course is meant to serve. I don’t think that there is an ideal form of Philosophy 101 that will be relevant to every college student. And for this reason, I think it’s a big mistake to try to perfectly replicate what we consider to be successful philosophy courses without paying serious attention to who is in the classroom. Instead of identifying a particular, replicable model, then, I’d like to offer a method that I’ve found extraordinarily fruitful: backward design.

I was introduced to “Backward Design” through the work of Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe. The basic idea is that learning design — at the level of the course, unit, and lesson — should be driven by learning goals, sometimes called “learning objectives”. Instead of asking yourself, “What am I going to cover in my course next semester?” or “What are we going to do in class tomorrow?” this method recommends asking yourself, “What do I want my students to walk away with? These learning goals might be knowledge based or skill based or somewhere in the gray area between the two. Importantly, the advocate of backward design doesn’t presuppose anything about your students, your course, or your institution. They just recommend using a design process structured in a certain way.  

Backward design is often broken down into three steps:

1. Identify outcomes (these are your learning goals)
2. Define evidence of success (which will help determine how you assess student work)
3. Plan learning experiences (this ranges from selecting course content to writing lessons or planning assignments)

I think it’s in rushing through the first step, if we even complete it at all, that we most often miss the opportunity to make our courses more relevant. We don’t often think hard about our students in building our syllabi, and for understandable reasons. For one thing, it’s actually quite difficult to acquire this information. Gathering and piecing it together is, in many organizations, a full-time job. And we certainly don’t want to just build in our prejudices or stereotypes about the sorts of students we think are likely to end up in our classes.

Still, there are strategies we can employ. “Empathy Mapping” is a simple technique we can use to organize and operationalize what we already know about our students. Giving surveys before or early in the semester, or using other tools that allow students to communicate with us, brings students directly into the design process. I often assign a simple, one-page reflection paper about two weeks into the semester where students articulate the goals they have coming into the class, and we revisit these in one-on-one meetings about halfway through. Making this effort, though, and learning from your experience each semester is, in my experience, lays the foundation for a genuinely relevant course.

The second step in the backward design process presents us with another opportunity to make our courses relevant. Elegant and well-calibrated learning goals will mean nothing to students if they don’t understand how to successfully achieve them. The key here is making sure that students know exactly what you expect of them, and whether and how their efforts will be assessed. This is much more difficult than it sounds, and I’ll offer a couple pieces of advice from my own experience.

The worst case scenario is one in which no expectations are articulated. “Write a five page research paper on a topic of your choice” will mean nothing to a novice in the discipline, and giving vague instructions sets both you and your students up for an unpleasant and unproductive exchange. Nearly as bad, though, is overarticulating, and I know this from experience. Early in my teaching career, in an attempt to make students maximally comfortable with the grading process, I designed intricate rubrics and corresponding checklists. I wrote up sample assignments, and then devoted multiple days to giving verbal instructions in workshops. In doing so, I completely overshot the mean. My students came away with the sense that I had veryparticular expectations, and tried as hard as they could to simply avoid losing any points.

To solve some of these problems, I’ve taken to writing up detailed one page instructions and attaching simple rubrics. I often have students turn in early drafts that receive credit simply for meeting the minimal requirements. We then discuss these in conversation, and I start pointing out — in areas defined by the rubric — where I think they could improve, given their goals in the class. Even in large classes — and especially in online classes taught at a distance — we’ve found that such personal interaction is the best way to encourage student effort and creative risk-taking, while making sure that they’re staying on track.

The third step in the backward design process is one that comes naturally to us as instructors, and is frequently the most enjoyable. And here I’ll simply point out that selecting course content, designing in-class activities and larger assignments, and planning out what you want to cover in a course, is even more enjoyable when you have clear goals in mind. We put our course-level learning goals on our website, include learning goals on our assignments, and even post them for each class period. This might be overkill, but it reminds us as instructors, and signals to our students, that learning is a goal directed process, and that we’re all ultimately rowing in the same direction.

Using the backward design method has improved my courses by every metric. I find my students are more engaged with the actual course material, more motivated to work on their assignments, and that their outcomes are generally much better than when I first started teaching. Although it’s only one imperfect measure, one indication that we’re succeeding in our attempts to make the course more relevant is simply the reports of our students. The number one comment I receive on course surveys is some variation of “I was surprised to find how applicable philosophy is to my everyday life.” And I’ll take that over the laughs any day.

Paul Blaschko

Paul Blaschko is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, where he teaches courses he’s designed on big questions and the philosophy of work. He recently co-authored a bookpublished by Penguin Press about how philosophy can help us live better lives, and his new book on work and the good life will be published by Princeton University Press in 2025. Blaschko directs a program in Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters devoted to exploring how the humanities can help us find meaning in work, and regularly consults with professors across the country about how to create better, more innovative philosophy courses. Embarrassingly, perhaps, he also does quite a bit of philosophy of TikTok.