One of the joys of teaching at San Diego City College, the oldest community college in San Diego, is the lived experience the students bring to the classroom. It’s those experiences and the students’ willingness to apply them to the material that make my Philosophy of Women class a rich, intellectual practice for myself and the students.
The first time I taught this course as an adjunct instructor, it was offered to me just one week prior to the start of the semester. Fortunately, I was gifted my colleague’s materials and with so little time for prep, simply taught the historically-oriented course he had designed. It was a well-designed course…for my colleague, but did not play to my strengths! However, teaching his course helped me see that I preferred a topical approach, with a focus on contemporary applications of historical philosophy.
After multiple modifications, the latest iteration of the course focuses on the current condition of women in the United States by tracing historical constructions of gender. As a lower-division course, my goals are three-fold: to guide students as they discover how (largely) unquestioned contemporary constructions of gender and knowledge are embedded in historical constructions of gender, to assist them as they apply the historical constructions to their experiences of gender and to ethical issues women currently face, and to prepare them for upper-division philosophy courses by honing their critical thinking and writing skills.
The class is divided into four parts: an introduction, metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. For the introduction in the first week, I hold a free form discussion. I’ve found that if students can “get their yayas out,” that is, if they have the space to talk about their intuitions and experiences first, they are better able to entertain new concepts and set aside and/or integrate the intellectual into their personal understanding and experiences.
Assignments for each module include discussion boards where students practice their exegetical skills and application of concepts to practice, lecture video quizzes or in-class discussions, and summative assessments, such as group projects, exams, or papers.
The metaphysics and epistemology modules begin with historical concepts to ground the understanding of contemporary concepts. Students read primary and tertiary sources that cover Ancient Athens, Judaism and early Christianity, Ancient and Greco-Roman Egypt, the Roman Empire, and the 20th & 21st century. As we move through each module, and from one module to the next, I encourage the students to make connections between the historical and contemporary, and between metaphysical constructions of gender, and gendered epistemologies.
Similarly, when we begin the module on ethics, the topics are approached with the historical and contemporary knowledge of how gender itself, and gendered epistemology, has been constructed. In previous iterations of the course, I covered a host of contemporary ethical issues that impact women: women in combat, pregnancy termination, pay equity, parenting and the 2nd shift, etc.
Last year, as classes were fully online, I decided to use a role-immersion game and focus only on pregnancy termination. For those who are unfamiliar with role-immersion games as pedagogy, “Justice: A Role-Immersion Game for Teaching Political Philosophy” by Noel Martin, Matthew Draper and Andy Lamey from the University of California San Diego is a great resource. Inspired by Reacting to the Past, I created my own game, Garcia v. Arkansas.
Set in an alternate, possibly not so distant future, Garcia v. Arkansas is a Supreme Court role immersion game. Unlike actual Supreme Court cases which are argued on matters of law, in this game, students debate the moral permissibility of abortion. The ultimate goal of the game is to persuade The Supremes to issue a majority opinion (paper) that aligns with/supports the argument you present.
There are three teams: Team Garcia, Team Arkansas, and The Supremes. Each team is composed of three groups, each with their own particular agenda. For example, Team Garcia’s groups are the lawyers, Planned Parenthood, and NARAL. Each group gets a role sheet that provides some background on their group, core beliefs, goals, tips & strategies, and an ethical theory that will ground their argument/paper. At all times, students’ choices are guided by the principles outlined in the role sheet. They collaborate with their groups to construct their arguments which will be presented before the Supremes as either amicus briefs or an oral argument.
Students both collaborate with their groups and their teams to develop their papers and lobby the Supremes prior to and after oral arguments (remember: alternate universe!). The Supremes’ groups are conservative, liberal and swing. The goal of the conservative and liberal groups is to persuade the swing group to vote with them. Each student is responsible for posting two substantive comments (arguments or rebuttals) on a chat platform for each week of the game. Each group presents their case to the Supremes during a Zoom class, and then the Supremes vote and present the majority and dissenting opinion in the last Zoom class of the semester.
Students began the game by taking an assessment that allowed me to assign them to teams and roles that would challenge them, yet play to their strengths and interests. Some students, especially those that were planning to major in philosophy(!), were deliberately assigned to teams or roles that were the exact opposite of their personal positions on abortion. Knowing that the class as a whole was largely pro-choice, I thought that students would likely “fall out” of their roles and start to argue for their personal positions. To my delighted surprise, students really inhabited their roles! So much so that The Supremes handed the decision to Arkansas because “Garcia’s lawyers ultimately did not provide any evidence that the fetus was not a person” and the “Arkansas lawyers presented a stronger argument.”
While I was incredibly pleased with how the students interacted and the arguments they developed for their positions, there are some aspects of the game that I’ll modify. I was also able to get some great feedback from students on how to make the game more user-friendly.
At the end of every semester, I have students reflect on the course. And because I believe that my work begins and ends with students, I’ll let Jessica, a philosophy major, have the last word here: “I liked the Role Immersion Game the best. It was honestly very fun and super interactive – something that I had missed a lot since going virtual. The RIG gave me a chance to practice my argumentation skills, and I got to play a role I would have never imagined I would.”
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