Blog posts due November 22nd, 2024
Please submit them at sschulman@elon.edu.
Students have unique perspectives on teaching and learning that occur in philosophy classes. In addition, faculty have no monopoly on philosophic insight into the nature of questions, and how they are used, transmitted, shared, rejected, and revised.
With this in mind, the Question-Focused Pedagogy Series is inviting blog posts by current undergraduates to address questions about questions. Posts are typically between 1,200 and 3,000 words, though they might be longer or shorter, given the particular approach.
Topics:
Some questions you might want to address include (but are definitely not limited to):
- How have you seen questions used in class? Do people in different roles in a class ask different types of questions? If so, what should we think about these differences in their relation to power, privilege, ethics, and knowledge-gathering?
- Are there particular philosophers who offer valuable insight into the nature and use of questions?
- Are there more, and less, effective approaches to questions in a philosophy class?
- Are your skills in relation to questions—how you understand them, formulate them, etc.—improving? If so, to what do you attribute this improvement?
- Are philosophers teaching you how to understand, formulate, and address questions explicitly?
- Are there things that students know about how questions work in class that faculty do not seem to understand?
- Do you see evidence of question-privilege in class? What should be done to address it?
- Do you see evidence that questions get used differently in different disciplines and programs? How does reflecting on that difference shed light on what happens in philosophy classes?
How to Write a Blog Post:
While gathering evidence may be necessary (and experience is one powerful form of evidence, among others), that is not sufficient for philosophic work. Philosophy always moves beyond the merely factual to try to make sense of what is occurring. Thus, philosophical analysis is necessary, even if other things (like evidence from classes) might be essential starting points for this work. That analysis is also often done in conversation with the work of other philosophers you have read and/or spoken to. As one example: a student might compare how Socrates uses questions in one of his dialogues to what the student has seen in their classes.
One set of work you might engage with is the other blog posts in the series. We encourage you to look at the prior blog posts in the series both because they might be a good place to start (to agree with, to disagree with, or something else) and because they are a model for the kind of writing that is effective in a blog post on the APA blog, with a readership that is mostly made up of professional philosophy faculty. The writing, you will see, is well organized and careful, but is informal in tone. There are no citations, but there are hyperlinks to the sources used.
You will also notice that the authors of those blog posts situate themselves by talking about the particular context in which their teaching occurs: what kind of school, what they see as the goal of philosophy classes, and so on. Please do likewise for yourself and your experiences. You might well situate yourself in other ways as well if those are, as you see it, relevant to your experience. This might include talking about your racial, religious, able/disability identity, age, socioeconomic status, and more. Many things might be relevant to your experience and how questions are working within your context and your life.
The Review Process:
There is a special ad hoc board that I, as the editor of the blog series, have put together to review the blog posts and decide if they are suitable and helpful enough to be published on the APA blog. Each blog post will be anonymous to them, so they will not know who wrote which blog post.
All three are excellent teachers and exceptional pedagogical thinkers. They have experience—as students and as faculty—in a wide variety of settings, including at elite liberal arts schools, community colleges, high school philosophy programs, and large 4-year schools; these include having a lot of experience at schools that are Predominantly White Institutions and those that are Minority Serving Institutions.
The reviewers are:
Claire Lockard, Teaching Assistant Professor, Marquette University
Rebecca Scott, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Harper College
Giancarlo Tarantino, Clinical Associate Professor, Philosophy, Arrupe College
If you have questions or would like to run some potential ideas by me, please reach out to me (Stephen Bloch-Schulman) at sschulman@elon.edu.
