I’ve been teaching Introduction to Philosophy at Tuskegee University for approximately five years. The course helps fulfill a general education requirement and, while we have a small (and growing) philosophy minor, we don’t offer a major. My course may be the only philosophy course many of my students ever take. As such, I want to introduce students to a sampling of philosophical issues while also helping them recognize and gain excitement for engaging with philosophy outside our classroom. I largely try to achieve this through my assignments and the narrative I create for my students. So, you might miss some of the techniques I’ve used if you focus solely on the assigned readings.
From my vantage point, the best decision I made was redesigning the course as a flipped classroom. Students are assigned short videos (between 10 and 15 minutes) as homework before our class meetings. I use Playposit to embed questions directly in the videos. These questions help ensure that students pay attention and engage with the videos; so, most questions are straightforward and pop-up almost immediately after being discussed in the video. I cannot emphasize enough how much this opened our class meetings. Now, I rarely introduce any new material to students during our class meetings. Instead, I can dedicate class meetings almost entirely to engaging in discussion and creative class activities.
I also try to expose students to different mediums for engaging with philosophy. I already mentioned videos. Some videos focus on introducing a topic or argument—I created many of videos on my own, but I also use freely available videos such as those at www.wi-phi.com. Other videos show student interviews with philosophers. Still other videos provide examples for discussion. For instance, during our free will unit, I assign a video demonstration of a Libet-style experiment. However, students are also introduced to philosophy in dialogue form, short encyclopedia-style articles, one more robust (but still relatively short) book treatment, podcasts, and a few online news articles. I hope students leave the course with the impression that there are several ways to engage with philosophy beyond just historical texts or academic articles.
The narrative I aim to weave throughout the course aims to connect traditional abstract philosophical topics to concrete and contemporary issues. One example is that I wrap up our free will unit with a Hi-Phi Nation podcast episode “Willful Acts” to illustrate how questions about free will connect to questions about moral (and legal) responsibility within the context of addiction. However, I think my epistemology unit is where I best connect traditional and contemporary concerns. We start with Descartes’ 1st and 2nd Meditations. I focus on the idea of Descartes attempting to use doubt as a useful tool for gaining knowledge to contrast this with the next part of the unit that identifies potential epistemic risks of doubt. We read Thi C. Nguyen’s Aeon piece on echo chambers. I frame our discussion again in terms of raising doubts, but this time as doubts about the trustworthiness of outsiders. Next, we read selections from Miranda Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice and discuss how doubts can be the result of prejudice. Lastly, we read a Nation article by Melissa Harris-Perry about bad epistemic practices within discussions of race. We discuss her examples as cases of epistemic injustice and how they seem to involve people abusing the practice of raising doubts. Class meetings focus on discussions and activities where students creatively engage with their own suggestions for distinguishing productive uses of doubt and how doubt can be misused. Many students bring up the idea that Descartes (ostensibly) focuses on raising doubts about his own beliefs while many examples of echo chambers and epistemic injustice involve raising doubts about other people’s beliefs. Other students quickly point out the limits of this distinction, but this is the kind of creative and exploratory discussion I aim to encourage.
I also aim to help students make philosophical ideas relevant to their lived experiences. Much of this is done through in-class activities, but these are often smaller versions of activities that form the basis of a larger journal/reflection assignment they submit near the semester’s end. This larger assignment has students engage in an activity inspired by a philosophical idea, keep journal entries on their experience, and then use this material to reflect on the assigned texts. Students are given several options for this. One option asks students to use Descartes’ method of doubt as inspiration for creating their own methods for identifying online misinformation, applying that method to their own social media feeds over a few days, and journaling about their experience. A second option asks students to analyze important decisions from their own lives, to reflect on situational factors that may have influenced those decisions, and then relate this to our readings on free will. A third (and more recent option) asks students to journal their own experiences interacting with artificial intelligence programs such as ChatGPT or Dall-E and relating this back to our discussion of AI and AI bias.
However, there are weaknesses in the course that I’m still working to address. First, I can still better incorporate less traditional philosophical mediums. For instance, in my ethics course, I recently started including Audre Lorde’s poetry with much success. I would like to do something similar in my Intro. to Philosophy. Second, my philosophy of religion unit needs the most work to achieve my stated goals. It’s currently a rather traditional unit focused on arguments for a traditional conception of God and the problem of evil; there is more novel, interesting, and inclusive work being done within the philosophy of religion today. I repeatedly tell myself that I’ll replace this unit but, when I survey my students, a large portion tell me this was one of their favorites. Moreover, many of my students come from religious backgrounds making this topic feel more familiar and easier to jump into for them. And, so, I continue to debate what I should do with this unit.
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Samuel Taylor
Samuel Taylor is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Tuskegee University. Before starting at Tuskegee, he was previously a visiting assistant professor at the University of Minnesota - Duluth and an instructor at Auburn University. His research and publications focus on issues in epistemology such as introspective justification, inference, and skepticism. In his teaching he focuses on creating an inclusive learning environment and emphasizes the ways that philosophical thinking is applicable to student's lives outside the classroom.
