I have so many questions. And it feels as though, at least in philosophy, as soon as I start to answer one, another three arise. One can of worms contains another two cans of worms, which themselves contain more cans of worms, in a seemingly never-ending sequence of worms all the way down.
I’m Lauren. Over the last few years, I’ve been both a teaching assistant and an adjunct instructor for a large R1 university. The classes I teach typically have students from a range of cultures and academic backgrounds, with a variety of different kinds of experience in philosophy. I’ve taught intro classes for students who are encountering philosophy for the first time, and who are really just trying to meet a distribution requirement. I’ve taught classes that have philosophical prerequisites, and had students majoring in philosophy writing an honors thesis on a topic that they might know more about than me. Engaging with these different groups, I’ve had to adjust my teaching accordingly. In intro classes, I find that students are often troubled by the idea that I’m not leading them to a set destination, where everyone agrees on what the solution to the problem should be and there are no further questions left to be addressed. In those classes, I’ve needed to emphasize why and how the philosophers we’re studying disagree with each other. I’ve often had to clarify that when something is confusing, it’s most often the case that there’s an open question of how to understand what’s happening. Almost never is it true that there’s something simple everybody else understands that some particular student is missing. I’ve tried to teach these students to welcome uncertainty, to see their questions as opportunities, and to challenge what they’re learning even as they are internalising it.
In classes that require at least one previous philosophy class as a prerequisite, the difficulties are strikingly different. What I’m questioned on is often not what the right answer to a particular puzzle is, but how the various different texts and ideas we’re engaging with relate and fit together. The students are less concerned about the “correct” outcome, and more interested in the structure and progression of the debate. In contrast to my experience with intro students, with more advanced students I often find myself emphasising the agreement we do have, and pulling them gently back from the temptation to say that there is no right answer, and it’s all a mere matter of opinion. Instead, I encourage them to think about what an answer might look like, which further questions we might ask to advance our understanding, and how we might work out where exactly we need further clarification.
I’m also a PhD student in philosophy, with research interests in metaethics and metaepistemology. This places me in an interesting position. I’m simultaneously learning how to be a philosopher, producing philosophy, and trying to teach those skills to others. Indeed, as I have pursued my own philosophical research, one of the things I’ve struggled most with is how to choose which cans of worms are worth opening and which are best put back in the cupboard, at least for the time being. This is often not obvious. Just as with reading comprehension and other kinds of critical thinking, selecting questions is a skill that develops with practice. But in my own experience both as teacher and student, very little of what we teach in philosophy is explicitly framed as such. I’ve taught and been taught how to isolate premises, come up with objections to those premises, and to consider whether objections provided by other writers are genuinely responsive. But I’ve not, or not explicitly, taught or been taught how to do things like evaluate different investigative hypotheses, choose a question of an appropriate scope given the available time and space, or level of expertise, discriminate between which further questions must be asked in order to effectively ask our original question, and which would take us hopelessly and unhelpfully off-topic.
So, why don’t we explicitly teach these skills? Are they importantly different from the other kinds of critical thinking skills that get more explicit attention? How can we best give our students the resources they need to learn how to ask questions and which questions to ask? How can we encourage students to use their understanding of the question a text is responding to as a way to better understand what it is saying? How can we best empower students to speak up with their questions, to see the philosophy classroom as a space in which asking questions is critical to the class’s success, not just something one does when they’re confused about what an instructor has said? Are there systematic factors that make it easier or more difficult for members of particular groups to ask their questions? How can we reframe asking questions in terms of critical thinking and curiosity, rather than ignorance and confusion? Interest in these (and related) questions is what motivated me to join Stephen Bloch-Schulman as series-editor for the question-focused pedagogy series.
Contributions from all kinds of perspectives are welcome. Have you implemented a teaching strategy focused on helping students develop question-skills? Did it work? How could it be improved? Are/were you a student who experienced an approach to teaching that you thought was particularly helpful or harmful in these respects? How have you made space for teaching question-skills in courses for which you are not the primary instructor? How can we do this better? How have you found that question-skills developed in the context of philosophy have made a difference outside of that scholarly context? Has your experience as a philosophy student informed your approach to teaching others? Our contributions so far have been primarily from faculty, but we’re especially interested in the perspectives of graduate students. We’d love to hear from you.
I’d be particularly delighted to read reflections that connect questions-skills to developing technologies. Have you noticed a difference in the kind, quality, or quantity of questions students are asking since the widespread uptake of LLMs and other kinds of generative AI? How can we best frame the difference between what philosophers are doing when they ask and try to answer a question and what a chatbot does when it responds to a question entered as a prompt? In what ways, if any, can we use generative AI to deepen our students’ understanding of question-skills? Does the development of these technologies change anything about which question-skills are most important, inside and outside of the philosophy classroom?
Please contact either me (ls5678@nyu.edu) or Stephen Bloch-Schulman (sschulman@elon.edu)—if you’ve thought about these issues and would like to contribute. We’d love to feature your reflections and pedagogies.
Lauren Somers
Lauren Somers is a PhD student in the Philosophy Department at New York University. She came to NYU in 2021, after completing her BA in philosophy at Cambridge University. Her current research is concerned with constructivist approaches to normativity, and how contemporary insights into the nature of inquiry might be used to develop those views. She has research interests in metanormativity, ethics, epistemology, and 20th Century Analytic philosophy, particularly the work of C.S. Peirce and his intellectual descendants.
