“Wait… but Stephen… there are no bad questions.”
And there is it. Even as it has continued to happen, class after class, every time it does, I am taken aback. And, again, I am surprised by the tone: often a mixture of incredulity and insistence and it sometimes comes tinged with a bit of fervency.
We have been talking about how questions hide things: how they contain presuppositions that a person might not agree with. But even if they do agree, the presuppositions are not spoken and need to be teased out and brought to light to fully understand what the question means and what answering the question commits one to. Implications, too, are not named. Some are fairly obvious, but others lurk unforeseen without careful interrogation (and others, still, remain unforeseeable no matter how careful the thinking). And questions have sub-questions, those questions that need to be answered (or acknowledged and then bracketed) in order to be ready to answer the question that was asked, and these too are not self-evident.
In my experience and in a study I ran, I have found that philosophers are on high alert when questions show up because we know that questions can go terribly wrong. Questions presuppose false and harmful ideas, implications are unknowable, subquestions are unanswerable or, at the very least, need their own careful and time-intensive consideration. Even when they don’t obviously go wrong, questions can steer us off into unhelpful directions easily and in ways that are hard to detect.
I teach at a mid-sized school which the administration describes as a liberal arts-focused university, a description faculty are increasingly unconvinced by. There is, among the student body, some racial and ethnic diversity but little economic diversity. Students in the classes I teach are typical of the institution (as we have no prerequisites and a general education structure that brings many students to philosophy for a single class), and these students are often willing to follow along and acknowledge the importance of questions. Many are eager to describe ways that power and questions are intertwined. Though they don’t call it such, they see that there really is such a thing as question-privilege, a term I coined to describe how some people are able to ask what they want and can avoid questions without social penalty. And they see that other people, people who lack question-privilege, are asked questions that they cannot avoid and have questions they cannot ask without social penalty. That is, the students I work with see how question-privilege maps onto, emerges from, and furthers privilege.
I have found that, in class, we can talk about question-privilege and I can teach and have students practice question-skills (e.g., the skills of naming presuppositions, implications, sub-questions, and determining if a question is one that should be accepted, rejected, revised or deferred) without a hitch… but you can hear the record scratch and everyone acts like there has been a party-foul when someone voices the phrase that turns the mood….
“But there are no bad questions,” they say.
[I should be careful to note that I have not taken clear notice or counted or anything like that, but my memory points to this being voiced most often and most vociferously by students that identify as white women. That is something I will have to think through and see if my impression fits the experiences.]
No bad questions… oh, but really, there are, I think.
I have been intrigued by the meanings and uses of questions for some time and, in particular, by the gap between how students make meaning of questions and use them and how philosophy faculty make meaning and use questions. I find myself increasingly committed to understanding these differences in ways that will allow me to better uncover, for students, what philosophy faculty know that students are missing.
I want this blog series to focus on questions and how they play out in the classroom. I was motivated to study questions when I did a study that looked at how philosophy faculty read different types of texts and compared that to how other faculty and students (philosophy majors and not, from first to fourth-year students) read the same material.
Asking these different groups to read the same texts and then answer a question about the texts, I was expecting to find that philosophy faculty were more attuned to argument and uniquely attentive to the difference between argumentative writing and narrative writing. I did not find much evidence of a difference, in those regards. However, I did find clear evidence of just how different philosophy faculty’s reading and thinking habits are from the other faculty and from undergraduates in the ways questions were used and mattered. I was shocked (but not surprised) to see how much and how clear it is that we treat questions differently from others. Philosophy faculty 1. asked more questions throughout their reading than any other group, 2. stuck with these questions more (that is, they more often returned to questions to try to answer them later), and 3. alone refused the question that I asked as part of the prompt for the study. Where undergraduate students and faculty in other fields tried to answer the question asked to them, philosophers did not. Instead, philosophers questioned the question; instead of answering, they highlighted problems with the question, proposed other questions, and/or noted that they were not able to answer because they lacked essential knowledge. [Note: this was a small study and I do not want to suggest it is the last word on any of these matters. I highlight the findings because of how they set me off on this new direction of inquiry and, I hope, can infect you with some of the same questions that they raised for me.]
What emerged from this study was the way questions matter to philosophers, in practice. This attuned me to focus my pedagogical thinking on how much questions matter to philosophers and how we talk almost not at all about how to teach question-skills. In talking about my research, it is not unusual for me to find philosophy faculty who will explicitly say that we cannot teach students how to ask better questions. I want, and think we owe our students, more than that. I think we owe them a chance to develop a suite of question-skills, including (but not limited to) helping them improve in their abilities to: 1. know how to ask better questions, 2. understand what questions really mean, 3. use the knowledge of how questions work to better be able to answer questions, 4. know how and when they might refuse or refine or pause before answering a question rather than answer it as it was asked and quickly.
Doing this work is hard, in part, because of what psychologists call the “curse of expertise.” As an expert, we forget the struggles we had in learning our skills and are no longer conscious of the skills we deploy as we use our expertise. If we had to be conscious of all of these skills, we would be overwhelmed and unable to perform well. If this curse contributes to the problem that we face in teaching question-skills, then we must come to understand ourselves better before we can teach our students better.
I believe that much of the most important desiderata of inclusive pedagogy is to make visible, for students, these same skills we hide from ourselves as experts, to make the acquisition of these skills as accessible as possible, particularly for those students who are least likely to pick up those skills without that work on our part. Question-skills being high on that list.
At its core, therefore, this is a project intended to ask us, as philosophers, how we can better welcome students into our discipline by being more metacognitive about our own habits of mind and practice, so much of which revolves around questions: time spent developing and refining questions, analyzing questions, and our habits of attention which place questions so often at the forefront of our discussions. I want to uncover, for students, these habits in ways that can make it easier for students to be successful in philosophy classes and beyond.
By thinking and talking about questions, and noticing the almost complete lack of pedagogical scholarship around questions and how to teach question-skills, I have become convinced that the single largest gap between our practices as philosophers and pedagogues is the importance we place on questions in our own thinking and the thinking of other philosophers, on the one hand, and how little time and energy we spend thinking about and teaching question-skills to students, on the other.
The single largest gap between our practices as philosophers and pedagogues is the importance we place on questions
This series thus asks about questions at multiple levels:
- What skills do students need to understand how questions work and what to do with them?
- How can we teach them?
- How do we approach questions, how did we learn to approach them in the ways we do, and how can we make those visible to ourselves so that we can pass them on to others?
- How do questions structure our syllabi and how can we uncover for students the shape of those questions to reveal the hidden (to some students) map of a class?
- How can we help students see question-privilege as an important political phenomenon? To understand its causes and its effects and how it shapes injustice and inequality?
If you teach or think about questions, please let me know (email: sschulman@elon.edu). I would love to feature your reflections and pedagogies.
Stephen Bloch-Schulman
Stephen Bloch-Schulman, Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Elon University, works at the intersection of political theory, liberatory pedagogies, and the scholarship of teaching and learning. With Anthony Weston, he is author of Thinking Through Questions: A Concise Invitation to Critical, Expansive, and Philosophical Inquiry (Hackett Publishing, 2020) and is currently writing Philosophy for the Rest of Us, a book that introduces students to the most foundational skills in philosophy (Flip Publishing, expected in late 2024). He won the inaugural (2017) Prize for Excellence in Teaching Philosophy, awarded by the American Philosophical Association, the American Association of Philosophy Teachers and the Teaching Philosophy Association and has twice won the Mark Lenssen Prize, awarded by the American Association of Philosophy Teachers.
