The Count-Down has started: In less than a week I will be standing in front of students, welcoming and introducing them to Phil 127 – Introduction to (Social) Epistemology. The first course that I am teaching on my own. Last semester I got to practice teaching in a co-teaching structure together with one of my amazing professors. I learned a lot and I think it prepared me as much as possibly can. Eventually I found my calling in teaching. But, as it is with all big and important things: I am also extremely nervous about it.
With my course being a freshmen seminar, I am in a position where I can potentially set the tone for their future relationship to both philosophy and academia. They might leave my seminar feeling intimidated. Scared. Doubtful. Shocked. Wonderous. Enamored. Fascinated. I am way too familiar with these feelings as I went through all of them myself throughout my undergrad studies (and sometimes they still hit me during graduate studies as well). The negative emotions, the seeds Imposter Syndrome – I could easily have done without them. „If only“ some more confidence was installed in me and my thinking, my academic path might have looked very differently. It definitely would have been less nerve-wrecking. But as always when complaining about the work of others, one very German saying comes to my mind:

Mach’s besser. (Engl. Do better.)

And that, of course, is the goal.

With this post I want to start thinking about what exactly „better“ here means. I first want to look at methods of instruction and engagement, and take stock. What digital tools have I encountered in my studies so far? What was helpful? What not? Where is room for improvement? From there on, prospectively, I want to move towards questions like: What tools can I see myself incorporate into my own teaching? What student-needs still remain unmet and how can we address them?

Whiteboard

(Or rather the Blackboard in Germany. Which isn’t actually black, but dark green. And apparently I also have to make clear that I am talking about the physical object and not the educational online platform).

The Good Ol‘ Reliable that every classroom has, and with markers that are always almost empty. Nothing really „digital“ about it, but nonetheless a great starting point. I learned to always put the outline of the current seminar meeting on it so that students know what to expect and are able to keep track of where we currently are in the material and the discussion. It also became a great aid for me with regards to time-management. I knew how much was still left to cover, could assess if I should rather wrap up a topic or can allow myself some more minutes on it and insert an example. Plus, I myself enjoy visualizing things and students have told me that my little illustrations and weird, clumsy drawings of timelines and diagrams have helped them a lot.

It is also a quick and easy way to collect and capture students‘ contributions. My professor once asked me: What is the point in collecting various and distinct inputs from the students if you don’t actively continue working with them? Sure, there is no one-fits-all-way of going about students‘ input. But he advised me to at least write them down. It’s a simple way of letting students know that their thoughts are heard and matter. And to be honest, I always enjoyed looking at the blackboard at the end of a seminar, be it after I taught or after having been taught. Seeing it full with ideas written all over the place, oftentimes mixed in with funny drawings always filled me with a sense of accomplishment. Be it: We all produced that! Or: Wow, this is so much that we just learned and worked our way through to understand!

But then the sad moment inevitably came: It got all erased at the end of class. THAT, on the other hand, oftentimes left me feeling empty, as if I just lost something. Sure, most of it is in my/our heads. But I think every presentation and visualization of information is quite an achievement. Luckily there is always the option of just taking a photo. This way, the whiteboard’s content can be made accessible to those that missed class or that didn’t manage to keep up. (For example because one was too busy making one’s notes look pretty… I see you, StudyGrams and Studyblrs!)

Powerpoint

The powerhouse of the university classroom. Or something like that. Versatile, flexible. Great for presenting quotes, argument structures, diagrams and timelines. Clean and sleek most of the times, but with a tendency to become dry, sterile, unengaging and an invitation for a nap. Speaking from experience.

I remember that at the beginning I was very eager to write almost everything down from those presentations. Unfortunately, it were often the teacher’s extemporaneous comments that were truly important, and sometimes I missed them. It is quite a challenge to properly allocate your attention and manage all of them: listening to the professor, following along the presentation, having an eye on the text, taking notes AND think along (critically, in the best case).

But, while a badly designed powerpoint presentation certainly does hold the potential to be off-putting, it also allows to easily insert and display images, illustrations, audio recordings and videos. Especially videos were highly appreciated during a lecture on the philosophy of childhood: Since a lot of our material addressed experiments on the psychological development of babies and primates, we got to watch a couple of adorable and funny videos and got a good impression of just how those experiments were done and what the material was from which the conclusions were drawn.

I can definitely see myself using a powerpoint presentation here and there throughout my own course. But keeping in mind that creating engaging, informative presentations that neither overwhelm nor under-challenge students is an acquired skill that demands time and practice, I honestly cannot assess yet just how much additional time I will be able to allocate to that. After all, before I am a teacher, I am a student myself.

Youtube

Youtube is a very interesting case. I can totally see its appeal to the natural sciences, maths, psychology, many arts and humanities – but what can it contribute to philosophy? How do you visualize critical thought? Thought experiments and illustrative examples certainly harbor the biggest potential to be turned into a fun, informative and engaging video. Logic and logic fallacies can also be treated like maths – instead of numbers, you have letters and symbols to look at and watch them move around. But except for presenting quotes and providing examples, how else would one go about making a video on e.g. Kants’s Critique of Pure Reason? Such that it doesn’t just turn into an elaborate recording of a powerpoint presentation, polemically speaking?

Years ago, The School of Life managed to hit that sweet spot and created amazing introductory videos to western philosophy:

(Luckily, my question for now is not so much about how to create Philosophy content on Youtube, but rather what the already existing content can do for both me and my students)

Something one also often comes across are recordings of someone lecturing – but this is the job that I want to be doing myself, not? And as expected, there are so many readings of texts and from time to time I am realizing that I have developed my own readings, which sometimes significantly differ. So obviously, I wouldn’t want to present my students with material that potentially contradicts what I am saying totally out of the blue, and in their Freshmen year. But for more advanced semesters this would actually present a great opportunity to practice critical thinking and taking a stance towards two opposing approaches.

But hey, it is undeniable that sometimes just hearing the content in a different style and with slightly different vocabulary can definitely help someone better understand. That certainly is my relationship to Deleuze’s readers. No matter which medium, Deleuze scholars to me are always more intelligible than his original work. So I think with regards to helping students understand the material itself, it definitely can be helpful to offer them slightly alternative readings or have some nice explanatory videos to draw on. But it can be a supplement at best and cannot replace thoughtful teaching (that does both lecturing AND actively engages students)

I can totally see myself using Youtube as a means to introduce a topic: finding relatable content to show the students, have them excited about watching a video and probably (or hopefully?) also have them wonder about what this has to do with class. But once they do catch up on how video and class content relate to each other, so many follow-up thoughts are potentially being kicked off. One of the most significant ones probably being: Does a philosophical approach, that starts off with an example or a description of a certain situation, actually capture said situation properly? Or did philosophy, the great discipline of abstract thinking, create abstract and sterilized starting points and just runs with it?

Part 2 coming soon.