Hi Everyone, Here is a proposal for a workshop panel for the upcoming Lilly Conference on Teaching in Austin. It is based on the class I chose to rework for the Baylor Fellows experience last fall.
Producing Philosophy Teachers: Using A Graduate Seminar as Pedagogical Training
I report on an innovative approach to teaching a graduate Plato seminar. It focuses both on the content of the Platonic dialogues and on preparing graduate students to become better classroom teachers. I teach in a graduate program where the primary research interests of the faculty and the graduate students are in metaphysics and epistemology. The students often approach texts quite differently than I do as a historian of philosophy. In previous years, I have tried to bridge this pedagogical gap by encouraging students to write papers on aspects dialogues that bear directly on the contemporary subfield of philosophy that interests them. While I was reasonably happy with that approach, I still felt like students did not develop an intrinsic appreciation for the Platonic dialogues.
Most philosophers, regardless of research specialization, teach Plato in a variety of undergraduate contexts. Virtually every introduction to philosophy class includes Plato. Plato figures prominently in Introduction to Ethics courses and even Philosophy of Religion and Critical thinking courses. Beyond that, in small liberal arts colleges, faculty will be called upon to teach survey courses in Ancient Philosophy. I decided to capitalize on this dimension of the profession of philosophy. I developing a competency in teaching Plato a sub goal of the course. I
Unfortunately, there is almost no research on effective graduate level teaching and learning in the philosophy classroom. The journal Teaching Philosophy is almost exclusively geared toward the undergraduate teaching experience. I have found some interest in preparing the next generation of faculty in the work of Austin 2002 and Kreber 2001. Their work motivated me to think about how to restructure the Plato seminar as a professional development opportunity. After reading their work, I realized that most philosophers, regardless of research specialization, teach Plato in a variety of undergraduate contexts. Virtually every introduction to philosophy class deals with Plato in some way. Plato also figures prominently in Introduction to Ethics courses and even Philosophy of Religion and Critical thinking courses. Beyond that in small liberal arts colleges, faculty will be called upon to teach survey courses in Ancient Philosophy. I decided to capitalize on this dimension of the profession of philosophy. I developing a competency in teaching Plato a sub goal of the course. I did this is six ways.
1. I drew our attention to pedagogical content of the dialogues
2. I also explored the pedagogical style of the dialogues.
3. I modeled how I taught various aspects of the Dialogues to undergraduates.
4. I shared how the Socratic model influences my own teaching persona and my classroom strategies.
5. I repeatedly asked the grad students to reflect on how they would teach Plato to undergraduates.
6. If they were already teaching, I asked them to share their experiences with the other members of the seminar.
These practices made our engagement with the texts was significantly richer. We read the texts differently because we were reading them together as teachers and students of Plato rather than as a professor leading a class of students teaching them how to read Plato.
For the interaction dimension of this presentation, I will use a short segment from Plato’s Protagoras as the basis for a small engaged reading exercise so that seminar participants can experience the value in uncovering the pedagogical dimensions of the dialogues for themselves. I believe this pedagogical focus in a graduate seminar would be applicable to many disciplines besides philosophy.
