Ever since I was offered a teaching position as an adjunct junior faculty of Philosophy a couple of months after graduation, I have always handled the undergraduate general education courses that students are required to take regardless of their degree majors. In my four years of teaching so far, I have encountered many different kinds of students; I am lucky to have had students who, regardless of their major and home departments, are excited to learn about Philosophy—curious and wanting to know more about what we do in Philosophy and to hear more of the conversations that happen inside a Philosophy classroom. On the other hand, I also had students who were just there for unit completion—the semester is just about fourteen to fifteen weeks long after all, so might as well bear with it.
Honestly, when I was still an undergraduate Philosophy student, I did not have this understanding and awareness of the demographics of students in a Philosophy classroom and their attitude toward Philosophy. But now, being a Philosophy educator myself, this reality about students and how they engage in and with the class has been at the forefront of my considerations whenever I prepare my syllabus for the semester. I ask myself, as both a Philosophy student and a Philosophy educator: what is philosophical education and how can I effectively facilitate that in my classroom?
To the question of philosophical education, I always find myself gravitating towards an answer that I found reading Plato’s dialogues: Theaetetus and Republic. Compared to our common understanding of education as a purposeful activity directed at achieving certain aims such as transmitting knowledge or fostering skills and character traits which traditionally takes the form of teacher-focused classroom instruction and lectures, Plato—through Socrates—argued that education is not teacher-centered and learning is not something that comes from the teacher; for the power to learn is present in everyone. Framed this way, education, therefore, is more about eliciting or bringing something out of the students; letting ideas come from the student’s own intellectual effort, supervised and guided by the teacher. This makes education akin to midwifery and educators play the role of scholarly midwives who assist the student’s intellectual labor.
I have always found this Platonic take on education humbling as an educator and this has since shaped my attitude in teaching Philosophy; fortunately, I am not the only one with this approach. In an online workshop on teaching Philosophy that I attended last August, fellow presenters Nathan “Eric” Dickman and John Brittingham pointed out that “teaching Philosophy is not a boot-strap rescue mission” i.e., we are not the prisoners in Plato’s cave who are ignorant of the world—we all do Philosophy when we ask questions about events, institutions, and practices in our lived experience. This is true of our students as well, our students have their own embodied experiences about the world and the concepts that operate within it, and these lived and embodied experiences play a huge part in how and what they learn. This re-affirms my attitude and approach in teaching Philosophy as earlier mentioned.
I make space for my students’ cultural, intellectual, and experiential milieu by using and incorporating pop-culture materials in the course syllabus and our discussions. I often give my students movies, TV shows, internet trends, etc. to analyze aiming and hoping that they realize the presence of Philosophy in their lives. Aware that Academic Philosophy prides itself on being an intellectually rigorous and high-stakes field of study and profession that only the best and brightest minds can enter and do (effectively creating a gap between new students, casual readers, and the general public overall), making Philosophy relatable, approachable, and accessible in my classes is my top priority. I contend that while pop culture is traditionally viewed as non-academic, it does not mean that pop culture materials cannot contribute to fruitful academic discussions. Using pop culture in explaining and teaching Philosophy is a “methodologically-viable approach to reach a broad range of readers with diverse informational preferences and educational backgrounds.”
Referencing pop culture in class makes lectures more approachable to students; opening up intelligent conversations—just look at the impact of Barbenheimer! Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (2023) movie opens up social and philosophical discussions on gender and feminism, the patriarchy, and how it victimizes even its patrons (i.e., the Kens, men); while Christopher Nolan’s biopic Oppenheimer (2023) sparks historical studies as to what actually happened with Oppenheimer and the atomic bomb; discussing its moral repercussions and lasting effects on people. Pop culture presents itself to students and the general public to consume and in their consumption, audiences are able to form their own opinions and position on these issues—so why not capitalize on that? Why are we, as academics, so opposed to using pop culture when, in relating it to the theoretical paradigms we teach, people—our students—seem to actively engage and grasp it more?
By providing materials that are approachable, available, and relatable to them and their everyday lived experiences, students of Philosophy—even lay people who are interested in engaging in philosophical discussions—can do their own intellectual labor and analyses. Our task as educators and teachers, therefore, is to assist them as scholarly midwives who challenge and help them to further flesh out their discussions and lend rigor to their intellectual labor that is meaningful to them and helpful for their state of educational and intellectual development.
As I conclude, I would like us to think about our understanding of education and the materials we use to facilitate learning keeping in mind the kind of students we have and the culture they are brought up in. Finally, I close with bell hooks’ remarks that accurately sum up my point: “Popular culture is where the pedagogy is, it’s where learning is… largely because of the impact it [has] as the primary pedagogical medium for the masses of people globally who want to, in some way, understand.”
Ingrid Mae De Jesus
Ingrid Mae De Jesus (she/they) is a junior faculty member of the Department of Philosophy at the University of the Philippines - Diliman. She is currently finishing her MA Philosophy degree in the same university. Their research interests include Philosophy in Media and Popular Culture, Gender and Feminist Studies, and Ancient Philosophy.
