I developed the content of Good Relationships when I was serving as the Beamer-Schneider Professor in Ethics at Case Western Reserve University with a mission to advance actual ethical learning across the undergraduate curriculum. I funded a qualitative study of undergraduate moral development at my institution and found that undergraduates felt that they were lacking opportunities to grow in their relationships reflectively. The course was meant to provide such an opportunity.
The form of the class came about through my interest in egalitarian education. I learned that work contracts were a good way for me to do anti-racist and anti-classist work in the classroom that prioritized what Rancière calls “the equality of intelligence,” something that focuses on will in trying to learn. In addition, I had been wrestling for some time with how to diffuse grade anxiety among CWRU students, and work contracts did this. We do not discuss grades at all in the classroom after week one. It frees everyone up. When my school changed its general education program, I moved the course into a communication-intensive focus which fits what I already did, signed it up for the moral reasoning component of the gen. ed. requirements, and stabilized enrollment at 18 as a cap, so far easily filled and with a sizable waitlist.
I love offering this course. The things that stand out for me are: (1) that the group decides on the order of readings collectively (I provide some suggestions for paths through the reading, but as a heuristic; the course of reading and discussion is organic to the group’s collective decision making); (2) that there are multiple ways to fulfill participation, including several creative and service opportunities and a range of more conventional participation assignments; and (3) that the core assignment for the class is a single, long-form written project that grows throughout the semester, including multiple staging assignments and an oral exam doubling as a revision and reflection opportunity.
Of note re.(2) is the office hours assignment that has made office hours into a kind of hang-out time for students on Friday afternoons. Students come and stay longer than they have to and even come back after the course is over. Sometimes, there are a dozen people during office hours. We talk philosophically for hours in a broad, non-technical way not allergic to technicalities as they arise. It’s a great way to end the week. It makes me happy to get to know students and to hear them talking together. Sometimes a student even takes a break and reads from my bookshelf while others talk — sometimes in languages that I do not understand!
I use the exact same format in all the rest of my seven standing courses (Moral Character, Becoming Oneself, People and Planet, Decolonization, and Climate Justice) with one exception, my intro. class (Introduction to Philosophy: As an Ocean). That one has mid-term and final exam options for people not wanting to write a paper across the semester (although a paper can still be done much as in the other classes).
As I settled into the work contract that centers on good enough work (i.e., what satisfies the criteria for the assignment), and as I stopped grading during the semester, I realized that grades had made me into something of a colonial administrator. In that role’s place, I now orient everything that I do in class through the cultivation of good relationships– concerned with our philosophical growing, shoulder to shoulder, trying to get everyone to realize what they have contracted to do. In this way, Good Relationships concerns a meta-educational perspective on all the courses that I offer. It’s useful for teachers to think about good relationships, too.
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Jeremy Bendik-Keymer
Professor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.A., land of many older nations
