Most students at the University of Memphis come from within the state, and most of those students come from high schools in the same county as the University. According to a 2022 report, less than a quarter of K-12 students in Memphis-Shelby County tested at grade level for English Language Arts. Given that Memphis is a majority-Black and impoverished city, this educational deficit is an issue of civil rights. I decided to make education the theme of my ethics course, giving it a “meta” quality through which students grapple with the ethically problematic structure of the very thing we are doing together.
During the pandemic, I came across a body of literature about the need to decolonize syllabus practices. Traditional syllabi tend to be high stakes, prioritize certain skills over others, and favor the subjectivity of the grader, without much input from students about their own interests and goals in taking the course. These drawbacks only compound in the context of educational deficit.
After surveying this literature, I decided to fuse specifications grading with the menu approach to assignments. The result is a course with two parallel assignment tracks, “Standard” and “Culled.” Standard Assignments add up to 100% of the course grade and are graded qualitatively, whereas Culled Assignments are graded pass/fail. If all of the minimum requirements for the assignment type are met, the student gains 100% of its value toward their final grade (I use a token economy as a ledger for revision attempts). Students can complete any number of Culled Assignments so long as they submit them during the period in which they are “culled” (which correlates to the time we cover them in class so that students do not fall behind or leave all work until the end of the semester). I backward-designed these two tracks from course objectives: whereas Standard Assignments correspond to the minimum learning outcomes, Culled Assignments target ancillary skills that include or surpass the basic expectations for an introductory philosophy course.
Students have to adjust to these unconventional policies, but their efforts to do so are rewarded. I provide space for comments and approval on the final version of the syllabus, and students can complete a quiz to ensure their comprehension of the affordances the syllabus provides. These actions are rewarded with tokens, which can be used to revise or extend deadlines for Culled Assignments. This encourages students to think about and take responsibility for their grade expectations and their corresponding assignment plan at the beginning of the course, contributing to their developing sense of agency and autonomy as learners.
In my experience, students always focus on the Standard track and only sometimes supplement with Culled Assignments. Nevertheless, students overwhelmingly welcome the option to deviate from the Standard track. It allows them (in principle) to choose the final grade they want, without needing to contest their grades on Standard Assignments. Culled Assignments can focus on any of the course’s material, which allows students to allocate their efforts towards deepening their understanding of the material they are actually interested in, and the different types of Culled Assignments allow students to play to their strengths. The dual track also provides a way to make up for those weeks that were difficult for academic or personal reasons, accommodating students like those in Memphis whose studies are hindered by full-time jobs, family obligations, and educational deficits.
The theme of education frames the ethical theories usually covered in ethics courses so that critical thinking about them can arise pretty naturally within class time. The course begins by setting up the terms of the ethical problems relevant to education. We investigate the political significance of education by analyzing Aristotle’s natural slavery argument according to which certain people need to support the leisure of others who then have the space to develop knowledge and engage in political life. I also present the case of forced residential schooling that devastated the cultures and lives of indigenous peoples in recent history. Education is revealed to be an ethically mixed phenomenon and a site of political significance. This allows students to be amenable to Rancière’s counterintuitive argument that undoing the sociopolitical hierarchy that results from educational stratification requires considering the possibility that the ignorant teacher might be more effective than the learned one. We then assess Aristotle, Mill, and Kant’s ethical theories according to their educational requirements as well as their potential to solve the ethical problems education poses. The education frame allows certain unusual insights from these well-trodden theories to come to light, such as the fact that Mill sees utilitarianism as being inextricable from a tradition of education that focuses on the history of what human beings have found to provide them with utility. The rest of the semester focuses on the dynamics of oppression and freedom as educational problems. Since I structured the same education-themed ethics content in the traditional way before I developed this syllabus, I can say confidently that this syllabus reinforces the significance of the ethics material by emphasizing students’ agency and autonomy. It contextualizes the course’s textual material in a practical way, contributing to a sense of stakes for the cooperative study of ethics. The use of the learning platform Perusall also hits home the fact that learning occurs through others, and it makes texts less intimidating to underdeveloped readers by making reading a collaborative task. The result is that students begin to think about why they are in college in the first place, as well as what they stand to gain from their experience of reflective thinking when they center themselves as ethical beings in the educational process.
The Syllabus Showcase of the APA Blog is designed to share insights into the syllabi of philosophy educators. We include syllabi in their original, unedited format that showcase a wide variety of philosophy classes. We would love for you to be a part of this project. Please contact Series Editor, Cara S. Greene via cara.greene@coloradocollege.edu, or Editor of the Teaching Beat, Dr. Smrutipriya Pattnaik via smrutipriya23@gmail.com with potential submissions.
Steph Butera
Steph Butera recently defended a dissertation on Deleuze and Badiou’s systematic philosophies at the University of Memphis. Their research focuses on how explanations of radical change are situated with regards to the history of dialectical philosophy. They live in Toronto, Ontario.
