Can the penny drop too late? Unrecognised slowness in (teaching) philosophy

Non scholae sed vitae discimus.

Once upon a time I received a flattering mail from a student, thanking me for teaching him to ask structured questions. “Although I really hated it at the time,” the student wrote, “I realised I could make great use of the technique some years later, especially since the pandemic started.” It goes without saying that this mail made me very happy, but what I’d like to point out is not that the penny dropped, but that it dropped too late. Too late, that is, to make it into the student evaluations. What we should conclude is that perhaps many of the crucial effects of teaching and learning manifest themselves much later in life than is standardly assumed. At least assumed when we design and assess tests of what has been learned. – Now that the murmur about hopes and worries about the coming academic year is all around, I often think of this mail and related experiences. What the student emphasised was that he could now make use of something he had learned so much earlier that it seemed almost disconnected to the course work. The lesson that I learned from this mail is that I have come to plan my teaching with way too much focus on goals that are supposed to be achievable within the time span of a course, visible at the latest in the assignments, visible ideally to the students, too, so that they can assess their “learning experience” accordingly. In what follows, I want to argue for a different timing in teaching philosophy. I’m a slow reader, thinker, and writer – and I have come, after a long time, to think that’s a good thing after all, so please bear with me. 

Student evaluations. ­– Although it is well known that student evaluations reflect biases rather than educational progress, they are still often taken as a legitimate form of feedback. “Well, of course, they’re bad, but they tell us at least something about the level of satisfaction,” is a line I often hear. The common response is to improve the questions on evaluation forms and think twice about using them too much in hiring and promotion. But as I see it, the problem is that both criticisms and refinements obscure the fact many effects of learning manifest themselves much later. When we advise students and teachers to focus on skills that afford employability, we pretend that the things we teach can be recognised as skills of that kind. Learning to ask questions or, as some prefer to say, “the right questions” certainly means acquiring a skill, but it’s clear that the student didn’t recognise this as something valuable at the time. The upshot is: Many learning goals might not be recognised as such during the time of instruction.

Learning outcomes. ­– What do you do if learning goals might not be recognised as such during the course. Well, you might just tell your students: “trust me, I’m a philosopher”! But that is not good enough when it comes to values such as accountability. So the alternative is to formulate different learning goals or outcomes, ones that are recognisable. Reading up on some of the pertinent literature, I was impressed to begin with. The fact that students cannot relate their performance to verbs such as “understand” or “analyse” in learning outcomes was met with the advice to formulate goals that can be recognised. So we are encouraged to use verbs such as “being able to present”, “respond to” etc. No doubt it’s easier to recognise that you’ve presented something rather than recognising whether you actually understood something. “Presenting” is a success verb, you can tell when it has been done. “Understanding” might seem to be a success verb, too, but arguably it’s an ongoing process. So it’s less clear what constitutes an understanding. While the advice to reformulate learning outcomes accordingly made sense to me when I read it, I have come to doubt it again. I’m expected to teach philosophy, not how to present. Of course, I also care deeply about how philosophy is presented, but does that mean that I can teach philosophical skills best by confining the goals of the course to something recognisable? I doubt that the answer is a clear ‘either-or’. But I think it’s problematic to give up on goals that we deem essential to philosophy. It’s not problematic because it’s simplistic; it’s problematic because it makes a false promise. “Doing philosophy”, “understanding” or “philosophising” are not success verbs. If anything it’s a coming-of-age kind of thing. Arguably, then, we don’t do our students a favour if we mainly aspire to “teach to the test”.

Some politics behind it. – Of course, it would be too simplistic to decry the status quo and glorify the olden days. But it’s important to see where much of this mind-set (aiming at recognisable goals in teaching) might come from. At least in many parts of Europe, an important turn was taken with the introduction of the so-called Bologna reform. While many aims struck me as noble back then, the way this reform has been carried out entails a number of consequences in line with the thinking criticised above. But whatever might drive this development, it’s not a law of nature that philosophy is taught as an easily reconisable skill set. At the same time, I am aware that the current zeitgeist will not allow for a straightforward acknowledgement of the slowness and indeed uselessness that doing philosophy might require. This is why I’d like to close with a quote by Richard Rorty that we might want to bear in mind when flying under the radar:

“So the real social function of the humanistic intellectuals is to instil doubts in the students about the students’ own self-images, and about the society to which they belong. … Somewhere deep down, everybody – even the average taxpayer – knows that this is one of the things colleges and universities are for. But nobody can afford to make this fully explicit and public. … This tension between public rhetoric and private sense of mission leaves the academy in general, and the intellectual humanists in particular, vulnerable to heresy hunters.” (Richard Rorty)