Asking What Philosophers are Asking: A Question-Focused Reading Strategy 

In this blog post, I describe a new assignment and reading strategy I am developing for upper-level classes. The pedagogy is a question-focused pedagogy and is an attempt to deepen students’ understanding of how questions—often hidden questions—shape philosophical thinking. In section 1, I highlight how I have come to center my work on question-focused pedagogies and give a bit of background about my teaching context and the specific context in which I have developed this pedagogy. In section 2, I offer the language from the syllabus that explains the purpose of the assignment and the assignment description that I gave to students. In section 3, I reflect on how the assignment went and what I learned from its initial use. 

Background:

Thanks in part to a research study I did, I have become focused on ways that philosophy faculty use questions, and the difference between how we use questions and how philosophy students (and other students) use questions. In that study, I asked faculty members and undergraduates to read and think aloud about the same text and got to see how different these two groups employ questions and question-strategies. Yet, from what I see, there is very little focus and research on teaching question-skills to students, particularly in philosophy.

I regularly talk to faculty, and to philosophers, who say that it is impossible to teach students how to ask good questions.

As I describe in the introduction to the Question-Focused Pedagogy series I edit for the Blog of the APA, I became 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.”

Since conducting that initial study, I have read all that I could find on how we can teach question-skills better and have worked with others to do so (more on that below). In this post, I would like to highlight one way that I have come to teach a question-based approach to reading in an upper-level Ancient Philosophy class.

First, some background. I teach at a small-to-mid-sized, somewhat selective, somewhat liberal arts school in the southeast. There are no prerequisites for any of the Philosophy classes, and it is not unusual to have a significant portion of non-majors in upper-level classes. The class on Ancient philosophy is typically on the smaller side for an upper-level Philosophy class at my university, averaging around fifteen students. I have taught the Ancient class twelve times, and for the first ten of them, I did not explicitly use a question-focused approach to teaching. For those, I asked students to do intense summaries (typically summarizing the text or large portion thereof in 57 words or fewer) and to write exegetical papers as the main assignments.

In my eleventh time teaching the class, I centered the writing assignments on questions. From the reading we were doing, I asked students to articulate three good questions, to articulate why those were good questions, and then to select one as the best of the questions they have asked, articulating why that one question was best. This method is very similar to a method my colleague Ryan Johnson uses, as he explains here.

In the last iteration, I changed things substantially, and I want to focus on that final iteration. The pedagogy I explore here is still early in development, and I know there are ways it could be strengthened, but I thought it was very promising and worth sharing.

The Assignment

From my work in The Scholarship of teaching and learning in Philosophy: A Research Collaborative (The SPaRC)—a year-long philosophy pedagogy research project that was beta-tested last summer—I developed an interpretive strategy wherein students write papers that ask: What question is the author of this text posing? What is the evidence that that is the question being posed?

This assignment was based loosely on Gadamer’s work (with the help of Eric Nathan Dickman and Giancarlo Tarantino—both real question-focused pedagogy and Gadamer scholars) and structures student assignments so that they must reverse engineer the question that the author was asking that led them to write the text they did write and to consider why the author asked the specific question that they did, instead of some other question.

I offered these explanations to students:

A. From the Syllabus

[Hans-Georg Gadamer] claims that we can understand a text by understanding what that text is asking, and how that text is answering the question.

Because of that, let me say something about Gadamerian hermeneutics.

Hermeneutics is the study of how to interpret and understand a text, that is, to come to have insight into what the text means. Often associated with the study of religious texts, Hans-Georg Gadamer was one of its most important thinkers to show the importance of hermeneutics for philosophy. We will be following one of his insights to guide our work, specifically, his idea that “we can understand a text only when we have understood the question to which it is an answer” (Vessey, p. 1). Gadamer is distinguished from others because “[M]ost everyone else focuses on grasping the claims of an author; Gadamer focuses on grasping the question to which the text provides an answer” (Vessey, p. 1). Of course, just because we can understand a text by identifying the question it is trying to answer, the question that frames it, it does not follow that the question is ever made explicit in the text. This syllabus, for example, answers a question without making the question it answers explicit. Namely, it answers the question “what are the goals and activities of the Ancient philosophy class and how will we know if we have been successful in meeting those goals?”

Additionally, it is important to see that for Gadamer, hermeneutics is about how the meaning of a text unfolds as one reads it. One starts with an unrefined “sense” for what the text is about as a whole (even if just based on prior bias or the cover or title or what you have heard about it), and as you read, you find details and specific elements of the text that lead you to refine (and sometimes radically revise) your initial sense for what the text means. And this process continues again and again: you have a sense for what the text means, you read more, and as you understand details, it changes your overall understanding of what the text means. But it is also the case that your understanding of the whole impacts how you understand, experience, and pay attention to the details. That is, you start with a framing that impacts how you see things within the frame, and as you do, you revise your frame and then read new details differently still. And then this changes how you view the frame. This is what it means that it is a “hermeneutic circle” for Gadamer: that it is a circle of deepening understanding, a revision and re-revision and re-re-revision process that moves from a sense of the whole to the details and back again, each informing the other. And that framing, even if we don’t typically think of it that way, is a question that the text is trying to answer.

B. Assignment:

Question Hermeneutic Papers (QHPs)

You will be writing a “Question Hermeneutics” paper for each text we read in two phases: first, a drafty phase, and then a more refined, formal phase. The goal is to articulate and then argue for your articulation of two things: 1. What is the question to which this text is an answer, and 2. Why does the author of the text believe that that is the right question to ask?

You should immediately notice that I am not asking here for answers to the question the text is asking… that is already found in the text. So the goal is not to answer the question, but to use the answer to reverse engineer the question, and to do so in a way that is explicit and precise.

Phase 1: An “early response” QH is due just about every other week. This is an in media res (in the middle of things) reflection on how the framing question of the text is emerging for you. You should have at least two articulations of the question: one from very early on, and one that revisits and revises the question you have.

The “early response” QH is a chance to practice and get feedback on how you are, early on in the text, thinking about the focal question for the text and why that is the focal question. Hermeneutics suggests that we start with inchoate views about what a text means and that we sharpen that, over time, through careful study; we don’t start from nothing, and we don’t move from nothing to a fully-formed understanding of the text. We start with something, through effort, come to deepen that initial understanding, and come to a better understanding which we can, again, through care and effort, come to deepen even more.

“Early response” QHs are due the class after the first day we talk about a text, and QHPs are due the day after we finish a text. Note: the “early responses” are due at the next class and need to be brought to class in hard copy so they can be shared.

Phase 2: The formal QHPs need to take into account the whole text we are reading, comments you have received on the early response “QHs,” and should be more formally written. They are submitted three days after we finish discussing the text. For example, with The Iliad, we start talking about it on Tuesday, August 26, and your first “early response” is due August 28^th in hard copy. We finish discussing The Iliad on September 4^th, and your QHP is due September 7^th to me via Moodle before 5 p.m.

There are seven sets of “early response” QHs and QHPs.

Early responses are worth 3.5% each (for a total of 17.5%), and each QHP is worth 5% of your grade (for a total of 35%).

Reflection:

This assignment was hard for students, and it was essential that they had a full semester and many opportunities to try it and get feedback as they learned this new way of reading, writing, and thinking. I was convinced that, by the end of the semester, many (though I am not sure it was true for everyone) were reading differently and paying attention as they read and discussed texts in class differently because of the structure of the assignments.

I did hear from some students that they were frustrated that they didn’t have a chance to write papers in which they got to say what they wanted, to discuss their own interests. It felt to them, at least for a while, like the language signifying that they were to identify the one question, rather than, say, “a question” or even “a question that is interesting to you,” was the focus. I had spoken with Dickman and Tarantino about this, and Dickman, in particular, had suggested that I make it seem more open.

My reasoning to my peers, and to the students, was the same: simply asking for “a question” would allow students to avoid trying to integrate the full text, and to, as much as possible, see things from the perspective of the text.

But also—and this is a common theme I see when talking to students about questions and about “good” questions—when students hear us talk about questions, and about good questions, in my experience, they take the phrase “good question” or, in this case, “the question” to be something objectively true. As if I knew THE question and was asking them to identify that question.

I don’t know what to make of it yet, but it is interesting to me that students, and philosophy students, see many of the issues as ones of opinion, interpretation, and judgment (though they often confuse those categories). But when it comes to questions, and good questions, they tend to fall back into thinking that the matter is objectively true.

To remedy this concern, I showed students excellent student work from others that proposed that the same text asked very different questions: that the Iliad, for example, asked about the value of human life, that it asked about honor, that it asked about what is worth dying for.

This helped.

I also found that students benefited from writing several iterations of their questions in their “early response” QHs. Some wrote three or even four. It helped to have them write either before reading a text or after reading just a tiny portion (for example, reading 1–2%) and then writing again after reading about half of the text. That helped them see, in their own writing, the way the hermeneutic process works, and how they came to refine and deepen their thinking, even if their original ideas were somewhere in the right ballpark.

Overall, the pedagogy did (or seemed to) attune students to questions, and hidden questions of authors. It got them out of the habit of wanting merely to write their own opinions, and disciplined them to the very precise way texts are shaped by their authors. That is my impression, at this point.

I am not sure I would change this pedagogy much for the next time I teach Ancient. What I want to do, moving forward, is be clearer about how to be successful in introducing and supporting students in doing this work, and to spend considerable time figuring out ways to learn to what extent and in what ways it is working, could work better, and should be restructured to work better.

If you are interested in learning more about question-focused pedagogies, please see the Question-Focused Pedagogy series of the Blog of the APA. I invite you to write for that series (if interested, please let me know: sschulman@elon.edu). Additionally, the first full iteration of The SPaRC (The Scholarship of teaching and learning in Philosophy: A Research Collective) begins in the summer of 2027 and is centered on question-focused pedagogies. I will be facilitating that with Giancarlo Tarantino and Melissa Jacquart. Please look for more information visit the  American Association of Philosophy Teachers and the APA Committee on Teaching.