Month: August 2020

Teaching online versus online teaching

Having heard many stories and tips about online teaching I was very apprehensive about teaching my first class of this term. How could I not fail? At the same time, I’m enormously grateful to all the people and my university for sharing great advice and best practice examples (see e.g. here). Thinking through the scenarios not only got me worried but also gave me a lot of headspace to anticipate and navigate through a number of (possible) obstacles before plunging into the unknown. What can I say? I went through all sorts of worries and finally came up with a decision that, so far, worked for me: I teach online rather than do online teaching. This means that I teach much in the same way I would have done offline, with the small exception that it’s happening online. What does this entail for students and myself?

Let me address students first. I’ve heard many people say that you, students, tend to keep your cameras and microphones off, and use the chat instead. Although I personally prefer to see people’s faces and hear their voices, I think this would be ok for at least some part of the interaction. The reason I recommend switching your gear on and making yourself heard and seen is that you should take your space. Online teaching is often presented as a challenge that deprives us of direct interaction which, in turn, has to be compensated with all sorts of “tools”. Yes, of course, we are used to physical cues in communication, the perception of which we now often simply miss out on. But what strikes me as crucial is that we participate. I don’t think any amount of online tools or refined environment makes up for your participation in the conversation. I find reading the chat more cumbersome than listening to you. I also prefer speaking over writing. But I’ll get used to the chat and learn to change my ways happily, as long as you participate. The crucial aspect is not how it’s done, online or offline, but that you do it. Make your contributions, ask you questions etc. as before.

That said, I also think that you can participate more fully if you use all the devices available. The online space is not just a toolbox or learning environment. It’s first of all a political space with all the power imbalances and hierarchies that we have offline. It’s at least partly our choice whether we want to amplify or adjust the old space as we’re moving online. This is why I’d recommend using all the resources that enhance your presence for participation. You’re not a passive receptor and instructors are not emulating youtube. We’re still at the university, a public and democratic space for academic exchange.

This morning, I was quite nervous whether my “strategy” would work. It’s way too early to assess this, but what I find worth reporting is that, for me at least, teaching this course online was much the same experience as teaching it offline. I thought it would be awkward to be talking to a screen, but then people who know me also know that I often speak with my eyes closed… The silence after asking a question might be slightly longer, but we all know that the situation is special, so it’s fine. Of course, I miss cues, but I noticed I can ask for them more often, if need be.

For the time being, I have also decided not to record my teaching events. If someone misses a class, they will miss it. More importantly, I know that recording the stuff would change the stakes for the students and myself. Over and above the well-known privacy issues and unintended misuse of recorded material, watching a lecture is different even from silently participating in it, let alone giving it. (The fancy word for this is “synchronous” teaching, I guess. But that would be misleading. Even if the lectures cannot be viewed later on, students will still experience “asynchronous” teaching. That is, they will still have to do the reading, thinking and discussing before and after. Of course, there is nothing wrong with the “flipped classroom”, but to my mind this is different from actually teaching students.)

Is that so? On the face of it, one might think there is not much difference between watching a recorded lecture and silently taking part in an online lecture, especially if the audience is rather large. I beg to differ. Even if you don’t want to join in, participating in an actual lecture still gives you the opportunity to interfere. At least for me, such an opportinity changes the level and quality of attention, even if (or especially when) I decide not to raise my hand. Seen this way, recording lectures is a way of providing material on top of other material, such as readings, videos and podcasts. It goes without saying that we shouldn’t underestimate the value of such materials. After all, teaching is no replacement for learning, that is: independent self-study is still a, sometimes underestimated, component of the educational process. But the moments of interaction, the so-called contact hours, remain special: they come and go. And with them the opportunities for participation, for noticing others in relation to yourself come and go. My hunch is that these moments thrive on the fact that they cannot be repeated. In this sense, watching a recorded class is not the same as taking part in a given class.

All that said, this is in no way dismissing the fantastic ideas and tools for proper online teaching. Yet it is crucial to be reminded that, at this moment, most of us teach online (if they have this liberty, that is) because the pandemic causes an emergency. But just as new social media competence is rooted in old-fashioned reading and writing, the quality of teaching is rooted in our resources of offline thinking and interaction.

In any case, I wish everyone a happy and safe beginning of term.

Are philosophical classics too difficult for students?

Say you would like to learn something about Kant, should you start by reading one of his books or rather get a good introduction to Kant? Personally, I think it’s good to start with primary texts, get confused, ask questions, and then look at the introductions to see some of your questions discussed. Why? Well, I guess it’s better to have a genuine question before looking for answers. However, even before the latest controversy on Twitter (amongst others between Zena Hitz and Kevin Zollman) took off, I have been confronted with quite different views. Taken as an opposition between extreme views, you could ask whether you want to make philosophy about ideas or people (and their writings). It’s probably inevitable that philosophy ends up being about both, but there is still the question of what we should prioritise.

Arguably, if you expose students to the difficult original texts, you might frighten them off. Thus, Kevin Zollman writes: “If I wanted someone to learn about Kant, I would not send them to read Kant first. Kant is a terrible writer, and is impossible for a novice to understand.” Accordingly, he argues that what should be prioritised is the ideas. In response Zena Hitz raises a different educational worry: “You’re telling young people (and others) that serious reading is not for them, but only for special experts.” Accordingly, she argues for prioritising the original texts. As Jef Delvaux shows in an extensive reflection, both views touch on deeper problems relating to epistemic justice. A crucial point in his discussion is that we never come purely or unprepared to a primary text anyway. So an emphasis on the primary literature might be prone to a sort of givenism about original texts.

I think that all sides have a point, but when it comes to students wanting to learn about historical texts, there is no way around looking at the original. Let me illustrate my point with a little analogy:

Imagine you want to study music and your main instrument is guitar. It is with great excitement that you attend courses on the music of Bach whom you adore. The first part is supposed to be on his organ works, but already the first day is a disappointment. Your instructor tells you that you shouldn’t listen to Bach’s organ pieces themselves, since they might be far too difficult. Instead you’re presented with a transcription for guitar. Well, that’s actually quite nice because this is indeed more accessible even if it sounds a bit odd. (Taken as an analogy to reading philosophy, this could be a translation of an original source.) But then you look at he sheets. What is this? “Well”, the instructor goes on, “I’ve reduced the accompaniment to the three basic chords. That makes it easier to reproduce it in the exam, too. And we’ll only look at the main melodic motif. In fact, let’s focus on the little motif around the tonic chord. So, if you can reproduce the C major arpeggio, that will be good enough. And it will be a good preparation for my master class on tonic chords in the pre-classic period.” Leaving this music school, you’ll never have listened to any Bach pieces, but you have wonderful three-chord transcriptions for guitar, and after your degree you can set out on writing three-chord pieces yourself. If only there were still people interested in Punk!

Of course, this is a bit hyperbolic. But the main point is that too much focus on cutting things to ‘student size’ will create an artificial entity that has no relation to anything outside the lecture hall. But while I thus agree with Zena Hitz that shunning the texts because of their difficulties sends all sorts of odd messages, I also think that this depends on the purpose at hand. If you want to learn about Kant, you should read Kant just like you should listen to Bach himself. But what if you’re not really interested in Kant, but in a sort of Kantianism under discussion in a current debate? In this case, the purpose is not to study Kant, but some concepts deriving from a certain tradition.  In this case, you might be more like a jazz player who is interested in building a vocabulary. Then you might be interested, for instance, in how Bach dealt with phrases over diminished chords and focus on this aspect first. Of course, philosophical education should comprise both a focus on texts and on ideas, but I’d prioritise them in accordance with different purposes.

That said, everything in philosophy is quite difficult. As I see it, a crucial point in teaching is to convey means to find out where exactly the difficulties lie and why they arise. That requires all sorts of texts, primary, secondary, tertiary etc.

Why we shouldn’t study what we love

I recognize that I could only start to write about this … once I related to it. I dislike myself for this; my scholarly pride likes to think I can write about the unrelatable, too. Eric Schliesser

Philosophy students often receive the advice that they should focus on topics that they have a passion for. So if you have fallen for Sartre, ancient scepticism or theories of justice, the general advice is to go for one of those. On the face of it, this seems quite reasonable. A strong motivation might predict good results which, in turn, might motivate you further. However, I think that you might actually learn more by exposing yourself to material, topics and questions that you initially find remote, unwieldy or even boring. In what follows, I’d like to counter the common idea that you should follow your passions and interests, and try to explain why it might help to study things that feel remote.

Let me begin by admitting that this approach is partly motivated by my own experience as a student. I loved and still love to read Nietzsche, especially his aphorisms in The Gay Science. There is something about his prose that just clicks. Yet, I was always sure that I couldn’t write anything interesting about his work. Instead, I began to study Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and works from the Vienna Circle. During my first year, most of these writings didn’t make sense to me: I didn’t see why they found what they said significant; most of the terminology and writing style was unfamiliar. In my second year, I made things worse by diving into medieval philosophy, especially Ockham’s Summa Logicae and Quodlibeta. Again, not because I loved these works. In fact, I found them unwieldy and sometimes outright boring. So why would I expose myself to these things? Already at the time, I felt that I was actually learning something: I began to understand concerns that were alien to me; I learned new terminology; I learned to read Latin. Moreover, I needed to use tools, secondary literature and dictionaries. And for Ockham’s technical terms, there often were no translations. So I learned moving around in the dark. There was no passion for the topics or texts. But speaking with hindsight (and ignoring a lot of frustration along the way), I think I discovered techniques and ultimately even a passion for learning, for familiarising myself with stuff that didn’t resonate with me in the least. (In a way, it seemed to turn out that it’s a lot easier to say interesting things about boring texts than to say even boring things about interesting texts.)

Looking back at these early years of study, I’d now say that I discovered a certain form of scholarly explanation. While reading works I liked was based on a largely unquestioned understanding, reading these unwieldy new texts required me to explain them to myself. This in turn, prompted two things: To explain these texts (to myself), I needed to learn about the new terminology etc. Additionally, I began to learn something new about myself. Discovering that certain things felt unfamiliar to me, while others seemed familiar meant that I belonged to one kind of tradition rather than another. Make no mistake: Although I read Nietzsche with an unquestioned familiarity, this doesn’t mean that I could have explained, say, his aphorisms any better than the strange lines of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. The fact that I thought I understood Nietzsche didn’t give me any scholarly insights about his work. So on top of my newly discovered form of explanation I also found myself in a new relation to myself or to my preferences. I began to learn that it was one thing to like Nietzsche and quite another to explain Nietzsche’s work, and still another to explain one’s own liking (perhaps as being part of a tradition).

So my point about not studying what you like is a point about learning, learning to get oneself into a certain mode of reading. Put more fancily: learning to do a certain way of (history of) philosophy. Being passionate about some work or way of thinking is something that is in need of explanation, just as much as not being passionate and feeling unfamiliar about something needs explaining. Such explanations are greatly aided by alienation. As I said in an earlier post, a crucial effect of alienation is a shift of focus. You can concentrate on things that normally escape your attention: the logical or conceptual structures for instance, ambiguities, things that seemed clear get blurred and vice versa. In this sense, logical formalisation or translation are great tools of alienation that help you to raise questions, and generally take an explanatory stance, even to your most cherished texts.

As a student, discovering this mode of scholarly explanation instilled pride, a pride that can be hurt when explanations fail or evade us. It was remembering this kind of pain, described in the motto of this post, that prompted these musings. There is a lot to be said for aloof scholarship and the pride that comes with it, but sometimes it just doesn’t add up. Because there are some texts that require a more passionate or intuitive relation before we can attain a scholarly stance towards them. If the passion can’t be found, it might have to be sought. Just like our ears have to be trained before we can appreciate some forms of, say, very modern music “intuitively”.

Must we claim what we say? A quick way of revising essays

When writing papers, students and advanced philosophers alike are often expected to take a position within a debate and to argue for or against a particular claim. But what if we merely wish to explore positions and look for hidden assumptions, rather than defend a claim? Let’s say you look at a debate and then identify an unaddressed but nevertheless important issue, a commitment left implicit in the debate, let’s call it ‘X’. Writing up your findings, the paper might take the shape of a description of that debate plus an identification of the implicit X. But the typical feedback to such an exploration can be discouraging: It’s often pointed out that the thesis could have been more substantive and that a paper written this way is not publishable unless supplemented with an argument for or against X. Such comments all boil down to the same problem: You should have taken a position within the debate you were describing, but you have failed to do so.

But hang on! We’re all learning together, right? So why is it not ok to have one paper do the work of describing and analysing a debate, highlighting, for instance, some unaddressed X, so that another paper may attempt an answer to the questions about X and come up with a position? Why must we all do the same thing and, for instance, defend an answer on top of everything else? Discussing this issue, we* wondered what this dissatisfaction meant and how to react to it. Is it true? Should you always take a position in a debate when writing a paper? Or is there a way of giving more space to other approaches, such as identifying an unaddressed X?

One way of responding to these worries is to dissect and extend the paper model, for instance, by having students try other genres, such as commentaries, annotated translations, reviews, or structured questions. (A number of posts on this blog are devoted to this.) However, for the purposes of this post, we’d like to suggest and illustrate a different idea. We assume that the current paper model (defending a position) does not differ substantially from other genres of scholarly inquiry. Rather, the difference between, say, a commentary or the description of a debate, on the one hand, and the argument for a claim, on the other, is merely a stylistic one. Now our aim is not to present an elaborate defense of this idea, but to try out how this might help in practice.

To test and illustrate the idea (below), we have dug out some papers and rewritten sections of them. Before presenting one sample, let’s provide a brief manual. The idea rests on the, admittedly somewhat contentious, tenets that

  • any description or analysis can be reformulated as a claim,
  • the evidence provided in a description can be dressed up as an argument for the claim.

But how do you go about it? In describing a debate, you typically identify a number of positions. So what if you don’t want to adopt and argue for one of them? There is something to be said for just picking a side anyway, but if that feels too random, here is a different approach:

(a) One thing you can always do is defend a claim about the nature of the disagreement in the debate. Taken this way, the summary of your description or analysis becomes the claim about the nature of the disagreement, while the analysis of the individual positions functions as an argument / evidence for this claim. This is not a cheap trick; it’s just a pointed way of presenting your material.

(b) A second step consists in actually labelling steps as claims, arguments, evaluations etc. Using such words doesn’t change the content, but it signals even to a hasty reader where your crucial steps begin and end.

Let’s now look at a passage from the conclusion of a paper. Please abstract away from the content of discussion. We’re just interested in identifying pertinent steps. Here is the initial text:

“… Thus, I have dedicated this essay to underscoring the importance of this problem. I have first discussed two of the most prominent levels accounts, namely O&P’s layer-cake account, and Craver and Bechtel’s mechanistic levels, and shown that they both provide radically different levels accounts. I addressed the problems with each account, and it became clear that what is considered to be a problem by some, is considered to be a virtue by others. This led us to uncover a deeper disagreement, namely about what the function of a levels account is supposed to be and what the term “level” means.”

Here is the rewritten version (underlined sections indicate more severe changes or additions):

“… But why is this problem significant? I have first discussed two of the most prominent levels accounts, namely O&P’s layer-cake account, and Craver and Bechtel’s mechanistic levels, and shown that they both provide radically different levels accounts. I addressed the problems with each account, and it became clear that what is considered to be a problem by some, is considered to be a virtue by others. This is in keeping with my second-order thesis that the dispute is less about content but rather about defining criteria. However, this raises the question of what to make of levels on any set of criteria. Answering this question led me to defend my main (first-order) thesis: If we look at the different sets of criteria, we uncover a deeper disagreement, namely about what the function of a levels account is supposed to be and what the term “level” means. Accordingly, I claim that disparate accounts of levels indicate different functions of levels.“

We consider neither passage a piece of beauty. The point is merely to take some work in progress and see what happens if you follow the two steps suggested above: (a) articulate claims; (b) label items as such. – What can we learn from this small exercise? We think that the contrast between these two versions shows just how big of an impact the manner of presentation can have, not least on the perceived strength of a text. The desired effect would be that a reader can easily identify what is at stake for the author. Content-wise, both versions say the same thing. However, the first version strikes us as a bit detached and descriptive in character, whereas the second version seems more engaged and embracing a position. What used to be a text about a debate has now become a text partaking in a debate.  (Of course, your impressions might differ. So we’d be interested to hear about them!) Another thing we saw confirmed in this exercise is that you always already have a position, because you end up highlighting what matters to you. Having something to say about a debate still amounts a position. Arguably, it’s also worth to be presented as such.

Where do we go from here? Once you have reformulated such a chunk and labelled some of your ideas (say, as first and second order claims etc.), you can rewrite the rest of your text accordingly. Identify these items in the introduction, and clarify which of those items you argue for in the individual sections of your paper, such that they lead up to these final paragraphs. That will probably allow you (and the reader) to highlight the rough argumentative structure of your paper. Once this is established, it will be much easier to polish individual sections.

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*Co-authored by Sabine van Haaren and Martin Lenz