Why are some students uninterested in philosophy and what can be done about it? That was the theme of our panel discussion at Oklahoma Philosophy Day, hosted by the University of Central Oklahoma and sponsored in part by the APA Berry Fund for Public Philosophy. The panelists were Jonathan Cox, who teaches 8th grade at Mayfield Middle School, Guy Crain, who is a professor at Rose State Community College, Jerry Green, who is an associate professor at the University of Central Oklahoma, and Violet Victoria, who is a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma. In this article, we offer important takeaways from our discussion about how to understand the underlying causes of student’s lack of interest or engagement, as well as strategies to increase interest and engagement.
Diagnosing Student Disengagement
Students can struggle to connect with a class for a variety of reasons that call for different approaches. As we discussed our own teaching experiences, we noticed disengaged students largely fall into one of three categories.
Type 1: They’re New to the World
Many students in a philosophy class have little knowledge of, or perhaps even misconceptions, about what philosophy is. Students in this category are new to the world of philosophy. This may also be true in the case of students opting to enroll merely for the sake of meeting a gen-ed requirement. Such students may enter the class with a sense of suspicion and perhaps even resentment. But it might also be true of students who have already taken a philosophy class where they were poorly introduced to the field. Either way, this is an exciting reason for student disengagement because it allows for the greatest opportunities. Philosophy instructors have the chance to introduce students to the field in a way that pleasantly surprises, shatters misconceptions, or even repairs previous damage.
Type 2: The World is Ending
The pandemic was the first time that many instructors recognized that students as a group were confronted with systematic obstacles to meeting previously set performance standards—standards that assume a baseline of ability to focus and allocate time to learning. Many instructors were encouraged to adjust expectations in light of these challenges to students.
We suggest there are other “world-ending” type events. Students belonging to certain groups, demographics, or identities can be impacted by events in ways not always visible to the instructor or even other students. Such events can include political attacks on core parts of some students’ identities like racialized police violence or legislation diminishing the rights or well-being of a marginalized group. Understandably, students in these situations can be distracted by non-academic matters and skeptical about the value of philosophy compared to these more pressing concerns. In such cases, it may be possible for instructors to use readings or assignments as a lens through which to make sense of the relevant events. But in cases where this is not possible (or perhaps not advisable), instructors can still acknowledge the pressure such less-engaged students are under.
Type 3: Their World is Ending
Students sometimes face challenges that might not occur to instructors. Students might be facing financial uncertainty after a lost job, the demands of working multiple jobs, increased responsibility for family care, or serious, sensitive health problems. If so, they are likely not coming to the classroom in the best mental, physical, or emotional state. The good news is that there are ways of increasing such students’ engagement levels that both maintain academic rigor and allow flexibility to students experiencing life turbulence.
Increasing Student Engagement
Because disengagement can have different causes, instructors need a repertoire of strategies to confront it. The following are methods our panelists have used effectively in their classrooms.
Reveal the Hidden Curriculum
The hidden curriculum is the set of unstated assumptions and expectations of academic life. Novice college students often do not know many things instructors take for granted, such as what ‘office hours’ are or how to use a learning management system. These problems are worse for first-generation or non-traditional students. Students might struggle to understand that different disciplines vary in more than just content: methods, standards, and values differ as well. (Consider, for example, students’ incredulity at being told in a philosophy class they are allowed to write in first-person or that they are expected to do more than merely summarize a position.) Instructors can often suffer from the curse of knowledge and thus forget how much is new to students.
I (Green) find it helps to identify and clarify elements of the hidden philosophy curriculum from the very beginning of class. Works like David Concepción’s “Reading Philosophy with Background Knowledge and Metacognition” or Olivia Bailey’s “But How Do I Participate?” are exemplars of revealing the hidden curriculum to students. In addition to discipline-specific knowledge and skills, there are social and ethical dimensions to attending college that many students struggle with. Jennifer Morton’s Moving Up Without Losing Your Way is an insightful discussion of some of these issues. Students are more likely to care about and commit to their classes if they can see that instructors are aware of their struggles and invested in their success.
Create Hands-On Experiences
Incorporating creative experiential learning-based lesson plans, especially early in the semester, can increase overall student engagement. In short, experiential learning is simply learning by doing. One such lesson plan that I (Crain) use involves a day in my critical reasoning class devoted to perception. Before class, I assign material covering the various ways in which minds contribute to perceptual experience. Once in class, students are given worksheets and move through four different learning stations in groups. Station #1 covers visual illusions. It consists of self-navigable PowerPoint slides that include illusions and guides them through questions on the worksheet. While the station includes the infamous dress and color constancy illusions, the most effective is a version of the invisible gorilla task in which students have to follow which of several upside-down cups is hiding candy. Most students fail to notice oddities in the video such as a duck or the cups changing colors. Teams are prompted at certain intervals to stop and discuss whether they saw things the same way and quite often find out there are blatant differences in their experiences. At the end of Station #1, groups discuss how what they experienced might affect the accuracy of eyewitness testimony.
Station #2 covers auditory illusions. While the station includes the yanny/laurel illusion and the tritone paradox, students find the McGurk effect jarring and even more so examples of sounds-you-can’t-unhear. For example, students first hear a distorted sentence they cannot understand. Next, they hear the clear, undistorted version. Last, they hear the distorted version again, though now they experience it as clearly intelligible. At the end of Station #2, groups learn about the role backward masking played in the 1980s Satanic Panic and discuss how what they experienced might affect how a 911 call functions as evidence in a criminal investigation.
Station #3 covers proprioception, consisting entirely of the rubber hand illusion. After using paint brushes to simultaneously stroke a student’s biological hand (hidden under a box) and a rubber hand (positioned under a cloth to look as though it protrudes from the student’s body), I use frozen water bottles and even a quick gesture with scissors to test the degree to which students experience ownership of the rubber hand. In one case, a student reported feeling the rubber hand strokes nearly 20 seconds after I’d stopped touching her biological hand.
Station #4 covers gustatory illusions. Students are presented with 3 plates of cheese each with a packaged block of cheese beside the plate. Groups are encouraged to examine the different cheese packages and to compare tasting notes as they sample from each plate. After completing the stations, the class reconvenes and discusses station-specific takeaways as well as a big reveal: much to their disbelief, all three plates of cheese were the same.
I have found this experiential learning approach makes students more like stakeholders in the material; they have “skin in the game” now that they, themselves, have fallen prey to what they, otherwise, likely would have thought only happens to others.
Let Students Class-craft
Students who get to craft elements of the class will likely be more engaged. For example, rather than assuming certain topics might be of more or less interest, I (Victoria) give students control over some of the course topics. Before the first day of class, I send my Business Ethics students a Google Form asking what they prefer to cover during the first class session. While some students express interest in topics like Twitter or Elon Musk, to my surprise a lot of students prefer devoting the entire period to the syllabus. I have used this survey method at various points in the semester but try to do it well in advance of when things are covered so students have a sense of what to expect. I also let students submit a contemporary moral issue they would like to discuss in class as well as reasons why they find it to be a compelling topic. I collect their submissions, arrange them in a table, and then require each student to choose the top three they would most like to cover. The winning topics are what I cover during the last week of class.
Make Course Policies Flexible
Simple coursework policies can affect student engagement. Recent research bears this out. As others have argued, students might disengage if they think being granted deadline extensions requires disclosing sensitive information to convince the instructor their extension request is reasonable. Recent research bears this out. Some research found that rigid coursework deadlines decrease student participation. Students in another study allowed to choose some of their deadlines reported less stress about and more interest in those assignments. Another study found that students given flexible deadlines academically outperformed students given rigid ones. And, contrary to many instructors’ worries, recent research found that students in classes with flexible deadline policies tend not to procrastinate, only use extensions as needed, and report less stress, greater satisfaction and learning, and an increased ability to hand in better quality work.
There are a variety of coursework policies that offer flexibility to students without necessarily increasing the instructor’s workload. Consider, for example, an “amnesty week” policy. While all assignments have set due dates, there’s a week near the semester’s end when any missed assignment is reopened. I (Crain) can report that students use and appreciate amnesty week and, if applied only to low-stakes assignments (such as, say, reading quizzes), requires little instructor effort. Another example is a rolling deadlines policy. Students are allowed to choose deadlines for certain assignments, but those choices come from a menu of deadlines set by the instructor. This allows some students to submit an assignment later than other students, but it staggers the rate at which instructors need to grade those assignments. Yet another example is a proactive extension policy. While students are given set deadlines for all or some assignments at the start of the semester, they’re told there is an automatic, no-questions-asked extension period for each of those assignments.
Schedule One-on-Ones
Office hours are also an effective tool for increasing student engagement. I (Victoria) have had great success with requiring students to schedule time with me during office hours. To make this feasible for students, I have them request appointments using Outlook calendar invites. To make this feasible for me, I also input my schedule into my Outlook calendar, so it reflects my availability. Further, as the resources at my institution allow, I have already required students to visit the writing center to receive feedback on drafts of assigned papers. This makes students aware of and engaged in resources their tuition dollars already pay for, and it also serves to level the playing field in lower-level courses where students might have a wide range of writing abilities.
Engaged Students, Better Classes
Not all students have winnable interest or engagement, but instructors likely have more influence over student interest and engagement than they might realize, especially when exercising that influence is guided by empathic concern for the potential underlying causes of student interest and engagement levels. It is also in instructors’ interests to experiment with various engagement-increasing methods since interested, engaged students tend to have better attitudes and submit better work, which in turn improves the class atmosphere and makes instructors’ jobs easier.
Jerry Green
Jerry Green is Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and Philosophy at the University of Central Oklahoma. His research is split between ancient philosophy, normative epistemology, and SoTL. He teaches classes on ancient philosophy, medieval philosophy, ethical theory, and philosophy of religion, as well as biblical Greek and New Testament humanities.
Violet Victoria
Violet Victoria is Associate Director for the Center for Ethics in Society at Saint Anselm, where she teaches philosophy. She is finishing her dissertation at the University of Oklahoma, where she also taught Business Ethics and Contemporary Moral Issues. She is developing a course on Financial Ethics for OU's M.S. in Finance program.
Guy Crain
Guy Crain is a professor and chair of the philosophy department at Rose State College in Midwest City, Oklahoma and has taught philosophy for over ten years. Guy received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Oklahoma. Guy’s area of specialization is ethics and the philosophy of social science. Guy’s dissertation concerned the ethics of interpersonal violence. Guy has written an open resource textbook for introductory philosophy classes and has been a guest on numerous panels covering topics such as voting behavior, the political ideology of community college students, the importance of liberal arts education, how science affects public policy, political polarization, and how technology affects individual liberty.
