In December 2013, I defended my dissertation. As joyous as it was, it was most notable for sparking the beginning of a pedagogical transformation. Up until then, I was focused solely on finishing my degree, which forced my love of teaching and learning to the side. But with the dissertation over, my focus returned fully to the classroom. Soon, I found myself reading a stack of books that would change everything—Jacques Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster, bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress, Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and others. The more I read, the more I questioned every pedagogical “given”—especially grading.
As much as I love the vibrancy and intensity of in-class discussions, I dreaded reading dozens of papers every few weeks. Why, I assumed, were they so tedious? Could I avoid grading altogether, I wondered? Then I had an embarrassingly simple realization: students submitted tedious assignments because I assigned tedium. If I did not, students would not have written them. Ergo: I was the cause of my own pain. So, I had the power to change it. If I dared.
In 2015 I started teaching at Elon University, a liberal arts/pre-professional university in the American South. Since most of our students take only one philosophy class, long ago our department decided to aim our introductory classes at the majority of our students, rather than the extremely rare student who wants to become a professional philosopher. Since then, our department has thought continuously, broadly, and creatively about what it would mean for our philosophy courses to be meaningful for the “one-off” philosophy student and build therefrom. Key to this are questions. But which questions? Or: whose questions matter?
As my Elon colleague, Stephen Bloch-Schulman, says, “philosophy teachers are very good at answering questions that students do not care about.” Rather than dictating to students the questions they should be interested in answering because that’s what the discipline values, I construct assignments, filtered through a shared text, that are meant to make their questions, the ones they care about, into the heart of the class. Today, all my classes are about their questions.
With my Department’s full support and encouragement, I started experimenting wildly with increasingly nontraditional writing assignments. As experiments ensued, I started to craft daily writing assignments and exams as various forms of question formulation and evaluation. Here’s the latest variation.
Three Stages
Typically, I divide a semester into three stages, usually anchored in three texts. Each lasts about a month, which allows us to sink our teeth into a larger conversation and hone question-making skills corresponding to those themes. Each stage brings increasingly sophisticated writing assignments.
Overall, here’s the gist.
Every day, students write about a page (417 words) based on the text. They print off a copy of that and bring it to class, along with the physical text and a pen/pencil. There is no technology in my class. As described in this blog and this podcast interview, I only teach outside.
In Stage One, they write this assignment. First: While reading, students attune to passages (1-3 sentences) that speak to them, grab them, provoke a movement in their mind or body, and they mark those directly in the text. After finishing the whole reading, they select three of their marked passages at which to aim three questions. Second: They formulate three questions that come from three different passages in the reading—one from the beginning, middle, and end. Third: Corresponding to each question, students write 3-4 sentences explaining how each question emerges out of and engages the passages they selected. This assignment is meant to habituate a general practice of producing questions, identifying philosophical questions, while resisting the temptation to answer them. I urge students to tarry with and savor philosophical questions, and begin to see questioning as a form of thinking.
In Stage Two, the assignment becomes more sophisticated. First: They do the same thing as in the last, but on just one section rather than three. Second: Reflecting on the question just formulated, I ask them to re-write it to make it better, followed by a paragraph explaining why it is better. Third: Then they re-write that re-written question to make it even better, followed by a short paragraph explaining why it is the best so far. Once they are used to producing lots of questions and tarrying with them, I ask then them to produce better and better questions, always with an eye to understanding what makes a better philosophical question.
In Stage Three, the assignment gets even more sophisticated. First: They read the assigned text, again noting passages they want to think about more. When finished, they select one of those passages and rewrite it at the top of the page. Second: They formulate the question to which that passage is a response. Rather than throwing questions at the text, now they seek to go behind and within the text. That is, they imagine what is written on the page as the result of an interrogative force that produced it. They do not formulate their own questions but strive to unearth the author’s question, the interrogative condition that inspired (explicitly or implicitly) the author to write. Third: They then rewrite that question to make it even more philosophical. Fourth: Finally, they answer that rewritten question in a short paragraph. This type of assignment is quite challenging, and I’ve only had partial success with it. So, I’d love to hear about ways to reformulate it.
Co-Questioning
Every assignment is designed to structure and seed our in-class discussions. Here’s how they usually go.
First, we divide into groups of 3-6. In turns, each person walks the rest of the group through their process of formulating their question(s) based on the selected passage. From there, others build on it, asking probing questions, connecting to other questions (in their group or the whole class), synthesizing with old questions, playing devil’s advocate, and so on. As they see their peers formulating questions, they see what else is possible and begin to hone their interrogative skills.
After forty minutes, I bring the class back together. Each small group tells the others about the trajectory (or genealogy) of their questions, how their individual questions blended together or conflicted, and the new questions emerged during their discussion. These larger conversations then lead to even more questions, which often embody the collective interests and values of the learning community we are cultivating and nurturing during our semester together.
Conclusion
This is just one (among many) variation(s) in an ongoing pedagogical transformation launched by reading Rancière, hooks, and Freire, supported by my Elon colleagues, and which will likely never end. That’s the thing about philosophical questions—they never really end. Even as Socrates held that fateful cup of hemlock, he was still asking and sharing questions.
So far, the above type of assignment has worked well. But I’m not satisfied. I want more. So, the variations will vary forth. I will keep experimenting, unconcerned by what the discipline says are the worthwhile questions. And I hope you do, too.
Ryan J. Johnson
Ryan J. Johnson is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Elon University in North Carolina. Ryan’s early work focused on 20th-century French and ancient Hellenistic philosophy – such as The Deleuze-Lucretius Encounter (2016) and Deleuze, A Stoic (2020) – and his recent work focused on the German tradition and Black Thought – including his co-written Phenomenology of Black Spirit (2023) and Three American Hegels (2024). His current projects take up the radical abolitionist John Brown as well as a project on Spinoza and Black Radicalism. He also loves trains and John Coltrane.
