My project is about trying to do a flipped classroom
in a humanities context.
I was really excited by it, because it gave me
an opportunity to make my pedagogy align
with my stated goals of what learning about and teaching
philosophy is.
Because it is not a body of subtle doctrine
that the students are supposed to simply internalize
and perhaps admire.
It's supposed to be a tool for learning
and a tool for self-development.
And students can only do that if they are actually
actively engaged in the classroom, as opposed
to being the passive recipients of some knowledge
from the professor.
The big challenge for people in the humanities
is that, of course, there are no clear answers
to any of the questions that we investigate.
And so it's very challenging to try
to identify tasks or activities that the students
can perform in class that are directed enough so that they
make progress but do not misrepresent the subject
matter so that everything seems to be much more
clear-cut than it actually is.
So I've always been really interested
in the idea of a flipped classroom in the humanities.
Because-- this is certainly true in philosophy,
but I imagine that this is true of other humanities fields
as well--
we do not want the students to simply
be passive recipients of settled knowledge,
or to simply think of what we can convey
to them as a number of doctrines that they can repeat back
to us.
Instead, we want these materials to be things and artifacts
that they can engage with actively
to shape their own thinking and to develop
as thinkers in their own right.
But, of course, it's very hard to do this
if the students aren't actively engaged in the classroom.
So I've always been very excited about this very general idea.
But I've always also been very scared
of trying to implement it in the classroom,
because in the humanities, our questions
don't have clear-cut answers, which
makes it very hard to generate activities that students can
pursue in a classroom, get feedback on,
and still not misrepresent our fields as being much more
clear-cut, or much more simpleminded,
than they actually are.
The HILT grant gave me an opportunity
to pursue a pedagogical strategy that I'd
learned about at a conference and thought
had a lot of potential.
But I couldn't quite see how to implement it in my class.
So with the funds that HILT gave me,
I was able to go to some training workshops that
allowed me to look in detail at how that kind of strategy
had been implemented in other areas and at other schools.
And it allowed me to hire some graduate students
to work with me on developing a course with this methodology.
I taught the course that I designed as a classroom twice.
I taught it once in the summer school.
And then I'm just about to finish
teaching it for the first time in the college.
And going through the course twice in detail with students
in the classroom under real conditions
was incredibly informative.
It gave me many points for me to focus on moving forward.
Not just if, but when I teach this course again
next fall, there will be a lot of changes
that I'll be able to make because I've
gone through the process.
The other thing that has done really
well is I've been able to work very closely with some
of my graduate students.
And that's been great.
I also believe that the course on its own terms
has been quite successful.
Students are much more engaged with the course materials.
They report on mid-term evaluations,
for instance, that the methodology that
asks them to perform tasks in class as teams
incentivizes them to actually do the readings.
Sometimes they say this with a note of surprise.
I can also tell, just from my own perspective
in grading students' papers, that their level
of understanding is much deeper than it
was in past iterations of the course, where the students were
simply there as an audience for a lecture.
One change that I think is absolutely essential
is that when students go through a classroom
and through class experience from day-to-day where
the class is broken up into many small parts, where
the professor might present material for 5 to 10 minutes,
they perform a task.
There's a debrief of that task.
Then there is, again, the professor presenting
something else, another task, another debrief.
It's sometimes hard for students to see
exactly what the point of each element of the lecture is.
Whereas, if a person simply gives a 53-minute lecture,
or a 60- or 70-minute lecture, there
is a natural arc in the narrative.
One of the things that I didn't emphasize enough this time
around, and that I want to make sure I emphasize next time,
is always showing the students what the narrative is.
What did we learn from this task?
Especially given that, as I mentioned before,
the tasks themselves don't issue any clear verdicts
on any matter of philosophical importance.
So in general, in philosophy, there's always the question,
what are we getting out of this, since we're not
settling the issue of what the best way to live is,
for instance?
And I think this is only exacerbated
by this kind of methodology.
Correspondingly, if I want to spend time on giving students
a sense of what the narrative of a single class
session or of a module of the course or the course as a whole
is, it means that something else has to go.
And I think, even though I tried to be
very aware of the trade-off between covering
in-depth and covering a lot of material
by exposing students to it, I still
think I went too far in trying to cover too much material.
So I sometimes ran out of time.
I didn't give enough time to the students, or to myself,
to do this kind of meta cognitive work.
I proposed the project to HILT. There
was a certain kind of outcome.
Teach a class in a certain way.
But one thing that allowed me to make consistent progress on it,
and to make sure that something would come out
of this experience, was to stop thinking about the outcome
and only focus on the process.
And so it would be totally OK if it turned out,
for instance, that in the course of designing the class
and redesigning it to be a flipped classroom, if it turned
out that that process led to really insuperable
difficulties, that itself would be
a really interesting result and an important result to share.