A rchive Date
[ 09-06-2004 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Education ]
|
[http://www.philosophers.co.uk/current/teaching_through_activities.htm
Teaching Through Activities
A Classroom at a Further Education College
Gerald Jones and Jeremy Hayward
The TEACHER finishes her frenzied scribbling and turns from the whiteboard to face the class. A bead of sweat falls from her brow and hits the floor in slow motion, spilling into a thousand rainbows.
TEACHER: And in this case - does anyone think Leibniz's Law holds here?
A beat. Slowly one STUDENT raises his hand.
STUDENT: Do you mean…
TEACHER: Go on...
STUDENT: Do you mean that the Cartesian argument fails precisely because we cannot substitute co-designators salva veritate across referentially opaque contexts?
The TEACHER catches her breath. This was the moment she'd been dreaming of: a moment of clarity, a moment of purity, a moment of comprehension.
What is it about philosophy that makes it so hard to teach and so much harder to learn? You would be forgiven for thinking that after 2,500 years things had improved, but consider the standard lecture. A man [sic] stands at the front of a frosty hall; he sports wild hair, baggy trousers and fuzzy logic. He is giving a lecture on his specialist subject: 'the logical relations of somewhether and thether' and has no formal training, other than 'being at Oxbridge with Ryle'. The most basic factors of learning have been neglected: motivation, attention, heating - it's no wonder students find themselves drawn to the lurid inscriptions on their desks, evidence of the days before mobile text-messages.
It's a favourite ploy amongst philosophers to blame the subject not the lecturer for the difficulties that students have. Anthony Kenny once said that philosophy has no shallow end, and academics seem to take a certain pride in this. They are members of a mysterious club that only the brightest and bushiest minds can join. For Plato himself the study of philosophy should remain the preserve of the few. This would, he points out, prevent young men who've had their first taste of philosophy from contradicting people just for fun.
Plato, Kenny and others may be correct: the reason why it's so difficult to learn philosophy is because philosophy is difficult, period. In which case those of us at the sharp end, if not the shallow end of teaching should consider abandoning our Promethean task of rendering the ineffable unambiguous and the inscrutable perspicuous.
To understand why both teaching and learning philosophy are so difficult we need first to understand what philosophy is. This may seem strange to students, it's not as if geographers have frantic discussions in the staff-room over the nature of geography; they know what it's about: rocks, mud, clouds. But philosophy is different, it's not about anything in particular, at least nothing you can point to or roll around in.
Pop etymology does not clarify the subject either. A student who knows by rote that philosophers 'love wisdom' may still not understand what she's supposed to love, nor how trawling through the Nicomachean Ethics paragraph by deadly paragraph is going to help her get it. Is philosophy a skill, a method, an attitude or a body of knowledge? We cannot privilege one above the others because philosophy is all these things. No wonder students find philosophy difficult.
We can say that at the very least philosophy trades in questions that are of ultimate concern. The initial impulse to philosophise is universal, beginning, as they say, in wonder. Yet Kenny's words are words that contribute to the perception of philosophy as an elitist subject, fit only for philosopher-kings. Such an image is unacceptable to those of us who believe in inclusive, not exclusive learning. Phi losophy can and should be for everyone. If philosophy is difficult it is up to us to make it simpler, if philosophy is incomprehensible it is up to us to make it meaningful, if philosophy seems irrelevant it is up to us to make it real. The question is: how can we make this possible?
There seems to be a received wisdom amongst university lecturers that philosophy is best 'demonstrated' or 'enacted' in front of the students. The idea is that philosophy cannot be 'taught' but can only be grasped by the students themselves. The underlying message here is depressingly familiar: the onus is not on the teacher to teach, but the learner to learn. This model may suffice in higher education but the rest of us would do well to reject the standard academic pedagogy.
What follows is a tale of our attempt to make philosophy teachable.
When we began teaching philosophy we realised that we faced a problem. In the vicious world of adult education evening classes there is always some other course, usually in parapsycholinguistics, waiting ready in the corridor to pounce on your room. So naturally our concerns lay with the students - getting 'em in and keeping 'em in. And there was no way that this was going to happen by the traditional chalk & talk, screech & teach method.
To work out how best to teach philosophy we put ourselves in the mind of the beginner who encounters th subject for the first time. They find it is impractical, bearing no relationship to their lives; they find it is difficult and obscure, using polysyllabic technical terms to describe nonsensical concepts. And yet they often considered philosophy to be the most important subject in the world. We were, and still are, faced with students who desperately wanted to learn but found philosophy… well, dull.
Rejecting as naïve the pedagogical models of Vygotsky, Bruner and Ausubel we turned instead to Allen: 'What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case I have definitely overpaid for my carpet'. Allen spotted what few other educators have, the close connection of amusement and bemusement. Activity-Centred Teaching was our attempt to amuse and bemuse, to interest students emotionally and intellectually in philosophy.
Activity-Centred Teaching is just what it appears to be, teaching centred around activities. We developed exercises, 'opening gambits', simulations, demonstrations, questionnaires and full-blown games in an attempt to entertain and educate students. Our task was to convince students that philosophy was the best, most exciting and important thing that had ever happened to them. Every class was an unknown quantity, our games were random, untested, sometimes shallow, sometimes flippant. But they worked - we hooked people, pouring philosophy down their throat like a drug, and they left our classes thrilled and wanting more. We have now brought our method to thousands of students at conferences, in schools, in universities and in colleges all over London.
There are sound educational reasons why using activities in the classroom works, particularly when teaching philosophy. Philosophy is an abstract, reflective subject, at some remove from our daily lives. But the best philosophy teaching achieves what the best philosophers have achieved: grounding the concerns of philosophy in the concerns of everyday life. In Plato's dialogues there is constant progression from the specific to the general, the concrete to the abstract, the everyday to the philosophical, and all arising out of plausible conversation. In Descartes' meditations there is grounding in the immediacy of his thoughts. He writes in a confessional tone, immediately giving us a sense of urgency in his enquiry, and his doubts become real and significant.
How can we find the necessary grounding for philosophy? Some philosophical problems exist right there in the classroom, just lying beneath the surface of ordinary life, but most do not and need to be introduced artificially. To teach the primary/secondary qualities distinction we use property cards and a sheet divided into 'mind' and 'object' with students having to make decisions about whether the properties on the cards belong to the mind or the object. To teach Searle's Chinese Room we turn the students into a computer playing tick-tack-toe, each follows a specific set of obscure instructions, but they combine to make a winning programme. To introduce the philosophy of language students are given symbol cards and in teams construct their own tribal lan guage, devising meaningful and meaningless statements and translating the language of other tribes.
Such activities provide the necessary means of bringing philosophical issues alive and rendering them real and memorable to students. They allow room for both critical and creative thought, encouraging students to think in new and inventive ways. Whilst students practise critical and creative thinking, activities can also be used to make specific teaching points. A game that is prepared carefully in advance can be used to lead students in the discovery and evaluation of a particular thinker or theory.
From a pedagogical perspective the effectiveness of activities is well documented. Activities motivate, they have a goal and a purpose that intrigues students because it is unknown. Activities hold students' attention by requiring a variety of different tasks. Activities are ideal for inclusive learning, every student is involved and there are a number of different levels of complexity that appeal to students of different abilities.
It is not only in the affective domain that activity-centred teaching works but in the cognitive domain too. Activities are crucial to the meaningful learning of philosophy. For meaningful learning to take place the student must be able to form connections between what the teacher is saying, and what they already know. At the beginning of a lesson activities can be used as an advance organiser, a structure on which students will later hang the content. Activities turn abstract arguments and concepts into something concrete and familiar that students will understand. Meaningful learning also leads to more successful retrieval of knowledge by students - so they will do better in exams.
The claims of the academics may be right, philosophy is difficult, abstract and without immediate application, it has no shallow end. But we have found that Activity-Centred Teaching gives students water-wings - rendering philosophy simpler, more real and more relevant. As any good teacher will tell you, the simple, concrete and relevant is more meaningful and more memorable to students.
Suggested Reading
Teaching Philosophy (a journal published by the University of Miami, Ohio)
Philosophy in Practice, Adam Morton (Blackwell)
Exploring Ethics, Jeremy Hayward, Gerald Jones and Marilyn Mason (John Murray 2000) ]
|