I was going to spend my career teaching the history of philosophy. I was off to a good start when I landed a tenure track position at a small Catholic college outside of Boston almost 20 years ago.
Most of my teaching was in our 3-credit Introduction to philosophy course, required for all incoming students. Our students are usually more practical than philosophical (we have a growing business school!), so my first challenge is to get sufficient buy-in. If I can’t make that happen, nothing else matters much. To my delight, the great books worked. My students came in knowing nothing about philosophy, but they assumed that those weird old books were important. They read, discussed, reflected, and improved their critical thinking skills along the way. I loved it.
But it didn’t last. It got harder and harder to get my students interested in the classical texts. I felt myself losing that crucial buy-in.
It wasn’t me. The broader culture was changing:
- Students were less and less convinced that reading old books was worthwhile. They wanted relevance, contemporary readings, and materials by women and people of color.
- Students were less experienced readers. Every year’s incoming class struggled more just to get the basic sense of the reading. Instead of discussing big ideas, I was teaching reading comprehension and lecturing on content. I was bored—and so were they.
After a few frustrating semesters, I asked myself: Given where my students are in their intellectual development, what should my course goals be?
I decided that my most important tasks were to help my students continue improving as readers, to teach them to engage critically with deep questions, and to convince them that philosophy might be worthwhile and relevant to their own lives. To accomplish this, I made two big changes. First, I focused the course on using philosophy to help them live better lives and on topics that they tend to find intriguing. Embracing their practical bent, I began spending much more time in class discussing how we might do that concretely.
Second, I abandoned the idea of studying the great philosophers. Instead, I filled the reading list with religious leaders, social scientists, activists, and journalists. That allows my students to continue developing as readers by practicing on more accessible texts. I now use three criteria when I select texts for the class:
- Can my students read and understand it reasonably well?
- Will it challenge them to think philosophically about important matters?
- Will it interact well with other materials in the class?
I vary the course based on the interests of the students in the class, but here’s what I ended up teaching last semester:
Unit 1: Do smartphones make us unhappy? What is happiness anyway?
I love beginning the class by having the class reflect on what smartphones are doing to us, individually and collectively. It provides an accessible entry point into the course. They reflect on their own practices and on how their phones might harm their ability to do well in college. They discuss self-image, trouble focusing, depression, and cyberbullying—and they delight in teaching me about the latest apps and their generations’ struggles. We then transition into a discussion of happiness, starting from the Dalai Lama’s argument that the modern world is making people less happy. We try to define happiness, we consider whether attitude or circumstances are more important in making somebody happy, we ask what role money and status play, and we ask how our view of happiness should affect our life choices—like the choice of a major in college.
Materials:
- Jean M. Twenge, “Have smartphones destroyed a generation?”
- Brian Resnick, “Have phones really destroyed a generation?”
- Jonathan Haidt, “Facebook’s dangerous experiment on teenage girls”
- The Dalai Lama, chapters 1, 2, and 4 from Ethics for the new millennium
Unit 2: What should we do if we think our society is doing things wrong? Is it OK to disobey the law or to use violence for a good cause?
We then transition into a more traditional unit on philosophy and civil disobedience. We ask how we might know that a society is unjust, we consider our attitudes towards violence and ask whether it’s ever justified, we try to sort out why both King and Malcolm X were so frustrated with white moderates, and we draw parallels to what is going on right now.
Materials:
- Very brief selections from Plato’s Apology and Crito
- Martin Luther King, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and “Nonviolence: The only road to freedom”
- Malcolm X, “The ballot or the bullet” and selections on violence from his Autobiography
- Veena Cabreros-Sud, “Kicking ass”
Unit 3: Why do we suffer, is suffering bad, and how can we cope better with suffering?
I no longer teach a traditional unit on the problem of evil because so few of my current students are theists. Instead, I teach a unit on suffering. We do discuss why a good God would allow people to suffer, and we notice that reflecting on suffering makes some reject God while it inspires others to deepen their faith. We talk about how to make sense of suffering, we consider ways that people grow—or break—from suffering, and we try to articulate ways of coping better.
Materials:
- Jonathan Haidt, “The uses of adversity” (from the Happiness Hypothesis)
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, “Rebellion”
- John Hick, “Evil and soul-making.” This reading fails to meet my readability criteria. Since the idea of soul-making is perfect for the unit, I include it anyway, supplementing it with videos like this one.
- Meghan Sullivan, “Uneasy grace”
Unit 4: How do we navigate a world where we disagree so strongly about what is right and wrong?
Throughout the course, we practice ways of handling disagreement. I make clear that they don’t have to agree with any of the readings (or with me or each other) but that they have to listen generously and carefully and try to understand the other side. This unit more explicitly addresses the challenge of handling disagreements. We discuss traditional questions about cultural relativism, but we also consider psychological research about the ways in which our self-serving biases make disagreement more difficult to navigate and we think through the more and less productive ways in which people argue with each other.
Materials:
- Melville Herskovits, “A cross-cultural view of bias and values”
- James Rachels, “The challenge of cultural relativism”
- Jonathan Haidt, “The faults of others” (from The Happiness hypothesis)
- David Campt, “Message to White Allies from A Black Anti-Racism Expert”
Unit 5: In what ways are we biased, why does it matter and what can we do about it?
The Haidt reading from the previous unit sets us up perfectly for thinking about implicit bias because it introduces the idea of biases that we are not aware of. We take the implicit bias test and talk about how our results made us feel, we discuss what our results may or not mean, we try not to be so defensive, and we explore ways in which bias might be reduced. I teach this as the last unit of the semester, so I keep the readings as light as possible.
Materials:
- The Implicit association test
- Malcolm Gladwell, Blink (selections)
- Christine Hauser, “How professionals of color say they counter bias at work”
- Saleem Reshamwala, “Peanut butter, jelly and racism”
- Tom Bartlett, “Can we really measure implicit bias?”
- Keith Payne, “How to Think about ‘Implicit Bias’”
- Verna Myers, “How to overcome our biases”
Shifting my teaching in this way improved my classes dramatically. My students are intrigued by the new course materials. Sometimes, they are even excited! I consider that excitement a win in its own right. I also find it useful because it motivates students to do the hard work of thinking things through. And since most of the students can make it through the readings I select now instead of getting lost on page 1, I no longer have to spend so much time lecturing. Instead, we can discuss the materials, and that allows them to spend more time practicing reading and argumentation skills, articulating and defending their own views.
I count my intro classes as successes these days because they generally meet my course goals: The students improve as readers, they articulate and express their own views on big questions and discuss them with each other, and they come to think that philosophy might be worthwhile and relevant to their own lives.
But I can’t change the overall landscape. The students I work with today aren’t as strong academically as the ones I worked with 15 years ago. They arrive with much less experience reading, writing, and critical thinking, and that lack of experience shows throughout the course. They can only grow so much in a semester.
I sometimes miss my Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Nietzsche course. I feel guilty that my students get little or no exposure to the great philosophers, I worry that I’m obscuring the distinction between philosophy and other academic disciplines, and I suspect I should do more to alert them to the fact that not everybody considers Malcolm X a philosopher.
I stand my ground though. My students don’t read enough in high school and that means that they aren’t ready to read “real” philosophy in their first year of college. But they are ready to read about and discuss deep questions, and they are ready to articulate their own ideas. I’d rather have them practice reading and discussion skills than (try to) teach them ancient Greek philosophy because I believe that is more important at their stage of intellectual development. And because they enjoy this version of my course more, they are more likely to take another philosophy class—where they may encounter Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Nietzsche.
Anna Lännström
Anna Lännström is professor of philosophy at Stonehill College where she teaches philosophy of religion, Asian philosophies, and ethics, as well as courses which integrate yoga, mindfulness, and Indian philosophy. She’s the author of Loving the Fine, a book on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, as well as several articles on the religion of Socrates. More recently, her research interests have shifted towards the scholarship of teaching and learning: How can we broaden philosophy to include insights from other traditions and disciplines, and how will doing so change our understanding of ourselves and the world? She also writes popular philosophy, asking how we can better integrate theory and practice, using philosophy to live better lives. Why are we all increasingly stressed, distracted, lonely, and angry? Can techniques like yoga and meditation from the Hindu and Buddhist traditions help us live better lives, and if they can, how do we address the ethical challenges involved in borrowing such techniques? She blogs for The Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion, Medium and Thrive Global
