As I suspect is often the case, most of my students in Introduction to Philosophy are there to fulfill a general education requirement rather than because of any pre-existing desire to study philosophy. As a result, “selling” students on the value of the discipline is one of my tasks. As a result, I always teach this course with an eye toward giving a brief overview of a range of sub-disciplines. I try to make sure there’s something for everyone. Interested in justice? Great. Let’s talk about it. Fascinated by the Dream Argument? Neat, let’s hang out there for a while. Want to resolve every initial puzzle by pointing to free will? Cool! Let’s talk about that for a minute. I typically end on questions of justice and applied ethics both because those are squarely within my areas, but also because one of my goals is to get them to see the way this style of thinking can be beneficial beyond the classroom.
There are two elements of this syllabus that are relatively new in my teaching style, both of which I found that I really enjoyed and the students seemed to really appreciate. The first is Packback Questions. Packback is a discussion platform that focuses on encouraging students to ask thoughtful discussion questions and engage with those questions. It costs between $18 and $30 (waterfall pricing for students who have used it before), but they reserve a percentage of scholarships in each class that allow some students to access the platform without paying so long as they complete a few surveys throughout the semester. For me, Packback allows things that my LMS simply does not.
I’m happy to answer any questions about how I use it. For now, I will note only a few features that make it useful in a class like this. First, it’s social-media-esque in its appearance. Students can “spark” questions or responses they find interesting, they can categorize their responses as counterpoints or supporting points, and they can receive (surprisingly good but not infallible) real-time feedback on their writing style. Second, it allows me to do things like pin posts or feature them. When I teach on a MWF schedule, then, I often have “Packback Fridays.” Prior to Friday, I’ve featured posts I’d like us all to be thinking about, and when we come to class, I project the featured posts onto the screen. Third, to say it makes grading easier is an understatement. I’m happy to answer any questions about how I use Packback in grading via email. Most importantly, it allows me to encourage students to get into the rhythm of philosophical thinking. Before class meets but after they’ve read, they ask a question. Then we have class. Then, they go back to the discussion board. They answer peers (the number changes each semester), and then they revisit their initial post. I tell them it is part of a pattern: read, ask, listen, revisit. Students are much more engaged than they had been in the semesters before I began using Packback. While I don’t generally consider this to be a meaningful consideration, it is also worth noting that my evaluations in this class are now about as high as evaluations for upper-level courses with majors, so there seems to be some counteracting the pre-existing annoyance about general education requirements.
The other change to this syllabus is content. I think we would do well to rethink not only which voices we cover but which questions we ask. As a result, I have tried to structure this class so that students are exposed to what might be traditionally covered in an introductory course, but then not only are they presented with a piece by someone whose voice is traditionally missing from textbooks and courses, but they are presented with the following question: what if we’ve been doing it all wrong? That is, these aren’t merely different answers to philosophical questions we’re covering, such as “What is knowledge?” These are different questions. Now, we cover Gettier cases and the Dream Argument, but we also step back and ask “Why did we care? And does answering that question change how we look for answers to the other questions?” Similarly, toward the end of the semester, we cover traditional views of justice: Nozick, Rawls, etc. But now, we also introduce Okin, Coates, Held, de Beauvoir, and Young, each of them asking in a different way “What if we’ve been doing this all wrong from the beginning?” What if, as Okin suggests, we had to consider justice as it applies to the social institution of the family? What if, as Young suggests, we have to think of oppression in terms much more insidious and much less-policy-responsive than Nozick and Rawls might prefer? How do we conceive of a theory of justice if, as de Beauvoir says, the first thing I have to say about myself is that I am a woman? Is that a world in which the veil of ignorance is useful? Ultimately, my goal is two-fold: first, expose students to authors who are not White men, and second, to show that we not only raise specific philosophical questions but that there is room to question even the methodology we use to answer them. Is the methodology sound? What, if anything, should we change?
I admit I was quite nervous to run this course. Ultimately, the students responded incredibly well. We had some of the best discussions I can remember having in class, and the teaching evaluations were incredibly high. I do, though, have a lingering concern: I am concerned that this syllabus structure replicates a pattern or behavior I find deeply troubling within the discipline. Specifically, attempts to incorporate historically underrepresented voices often amount to tacking on a new article at the end of a unit from a previous textbook edition. (The same, I should note, is true of the text I use in this class, and indeed the editor’s introduction to the excerpt from Simone de Beauvoir focuses heavily on her relationship with Sartre.) The result is that these voices often look like commentators on philosophy rather than like philosophers themselves. I worked closely with a student who was completing something akin to an internship with me that semester, and we played with the structure as much as we could. Ultimately, we ended up with a structure that for a few topics, but particularly at the end, was something like this: canonical philosophy followed by a voice from an historically underrepresented group saying “Wait, you guys are doing it wrong.” My concern, then, is that my class ultimately did the same thing I find problematic: it treated those voices as commentators rather than as philosophers in their own right.
In the short run, to resolve that, I had a class discussion about it. We talked about the textbook’s Table of Contents, the editor’s introduction to de Beauvoir’s piece, my concerns there and whether and to what extent my syllabus generates those concerns as well. I do not feel that this was enough, but in the absence of seeing a better structure, an open discussion about this challenge in the midst of discussing methodology felt necessary. Students engaged thoughtfully and if nothing else, they began to see syllabus design as a moral enterprise.
I’ll conclude by pointing out something a now-major says about what he learned in that class. Discussing Held’s distinction between the separative self and the relational self, he said, “I’m not sure I think the self is relational because last week, I didn’t know about a relational self, so maybe there’s some other kind of self I still don’t know about.” That seemed to me the best endorsement of this strategy that I can imagine.
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Brynn Welch
- Bio: Brynn Welch is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She has received several teaching awards during her career, including the Excellence in Teaching Award (Emory & Henry College), the Outstanding Faculty Award from Disability Support Services (UAB), and the Dean’s Excellence in Teaching Award (UAB). She is the editor of The Art of Teaching Philosophy, available August 2024 (Bloomsbury).
