Graduate Student ReflectionGraduate Student Reflection Series: The Value of Group Work

Graduate Student Reflection Series: The Value of Group Work

The Graduate Student Reflection Series invites current students to share reflections on their experience in a philosophy graduate program. Reflections should focus on a course taken during a student’s graduate education, a teaching methodology which the student found particularly effective, or on some other aspect of their educational experience. The Graduate Student Reflection Series strives to represent a diverse group of graduate students from a wide array of educational backgrounds. If you are interested in submitting to the series, please contact us via this submission form.

“Alright. Let’s get into groups.”

This is something I have said myself as an instructor. Whether I want my students to work on a logic problem or to reconstruct an argument together, I like to get them talking to one another about what they are learning. However, I rarely heard this in my graduate seminars. Which is why I was surprised when Ben Caplan said it.

I was in a graduate seminar as part of my Ph.D. program at The Ohio State University. It was on Fictional Realism and we were reading Anthony Everett’s The Nonexistent at the moment. Overall, the seminar was structured like a lot of the seminars I had as a graduate student. This was before the pandemic, so we met in the department’s seminar room with chairs in the round. Each week we would spend a few hours talking about a particular portion of the reading and a final paper served as the main assessment. And in my experience, these weekly meetings were mostly a free-wheeling conversation, not the time for working in groups.

I experienced seminars as anxiety-inducing pressure cookers. Sometimes my stomach would audibly churn. With each new contribution or question from my peers, I kept doubting my comprehension of the literature and whether or not my next thought was worth expressing. In my mind, my peers were operating at a different level than me and my attempts to participate would only drag the conversation down.

As an instructor, I know this is not true. I know that clever-sounding comments in class do not always correlate to well-crafted arguments. I also know that some of the most productive contributions are questions that come from confusion or ignorance. But I struggled to apply what I learned as an instructor to how I acted as a student. So, I tended to sit there, make perplexed faces, and keep my contributions to a minimum.

But when Caplan asked us to get in groups, this completely shifted. The need to impress dissipated and I opened up. My attention shifted to the task at hand and how we could do what was asked of us.

He asked us to take a look at a particular passage. If I remember correctly, we were looking at a counterexample Everett raised against a particular theory of fictional objects. He wrote out specific questions in a handout for our group to answer. Roughly, our task was to understand how the counterexample was designed to work and whether one could respond to it.

Working in that group felt completely different from a normal seminar. I was less focused on whether my thoughts were as good as someone else’s and more on answering these questions. And I realized I vastly overestimated the level at which others were engaging with the text. People were throwing out inchoate ideas, taking back their thoughts mid-sentence, and asking one another to explain things. We wrote things up on the chalkboard, erased things, and wrote over each other. Seminars normally felt like a chance to perform, either for my fellow grad students or for the faculty, and be judged. This felt like problem solving.

In my current role as an Instructional Designer, I ought to be able to explain exactly why this activity had this effect. But I am not sure. Perhaps it was simply the change of pace, perhaps it was the specific questions, perhaps it was the smaller group size, or perhaps that the final product was collectively owned. What I do suspect was that this activity better aligned with what we are supposed to get out of seminars. I left with a better sense of how the example was supposed to work, what the next moves were, and the merits of those moves.

I do not think anyone ever explicitly told me what the purpose of a seminar is. But I have to assume that philosophy seminars are supposed to be an environment where we hone our skills and become more familiar with the relevant literature. But as suggested above, I experienced seminars as a forum to showcase that one already had such skills and familiarity, not one in which one was developing them.

This exercise of working in groups removed this expectation for me. There was room to not be quite sure, to build off what others said, and to wrestle with the text. And to the extent it did that, it was an experience that better aimed at the unstated goals of a seminar.

As an instructor, this personal experience confirmed for me the role collaborative and active learning experiences can play in helping my students achieve learning outcomes in our courses. I plan to use such learning activities so my students can better calibrate their performance, have opportunities for trial and error, and take advantage of alternative avenues for participation. And I can talk about my own experience the next time I say, “Alright. Let’s get into groups.”

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Eric de Araujo

Eric de Araujo is an Instructional Designer in Teaching and Learning Technologies with Purdue Online and part-time lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at Purdue University. He received his PhD from The Ohio State University in 2021. His research in metaphysics focuses on non-standard views of identity and on ontological and identity pluralisms.

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