1. Pedagogy Statement Spring 2023
2. Phil 127: Pedagogy
3. Phil 127: Reflections

1: Pedagogy Statement Spring 2023

In Spring 2023, as part of our pedagogy seminar, we were required to formulate a teaching statement. This first attempt was supposed to be our foundation that we can build on, adjust, and further develop over time. In it, I speak on my approach to teaching and have also added a group work assignment to reflect how I translate my approach into practice. You can read it here.

2: Phil 127: Pedagogy

In Fall 2023 I taught:

Phil 127: Introduction to (Social) Epistemology.

You can find the syllabus here!

Since this class is a first year seminar for students who are new to both academia and philosophy, I placed the the focus of the class on the following points:

• Habitualzing students into philosophical thinking and questioning.
  Philosophy, unlike other disciplines, has a fairly limited corpus of „itemized‘ knowledge that students need to memorize and be able to reproduce from memory. Instead, it demands and encourages critical thinking, which is anything but an easy task and a skill that needs to be refined in an ongoing, open ended process. In order to facilitate and practice critical thinking, I employ a combination of lectures and discussion, with Fridays being designated Discussion Days.
  
• Focus on problems as opposed to history.
  This is not a seminar on the history of philosophy. We will discuss some important authors of the past (Socrates/Plato, Descartes, Hume), but mainly in order to establish some baseline acquaintance with their work. What is more important are the questions these authors addressed and the way they attempted to solve, for their work had a major impact on the following philosophical traditions. The idea of the Cartesian Subject for example still resonates within contemporary epistemology, with some being adamant proponents and others being harsh critiques. Neither development can be properly understood without having engaged with Descartes as well. Nonetheless, the majority of texts we discuss are contemporary works in epistemology, especially in social epistemology, as it allows for more aspects of knowledge to be taken into account than would be possible through the historical figures alone.
  
• Philosophy, and especially epistemology, is not just about reading texts. Its problems and question have significance for our lives outside of the classroom.
  The majority of our texts are from contemporary authors, some of which respond to very recent developments and challenges in society. This opens up the possibility to bring in examples and problems from our own lived experiences, so that we can examine and reflect on our lives and the problems we have to respond to. After all, Socrates reminds us that philosophy was done in conversation, in the streets, long before Plato founded the Academy. Philosophy should thus be always tied back to one’s own life and not be confined to the ivory tower of academia. For this reason, I have an eye on students‘ specific interests and have not yet chosen texts for the last 4 weeks of class. Instead of dictating topics, I want to cater to their interests and select texts or potential movies to discuss that spark their curiosity.
  
• Quality over Quantity.
  While class 3 times a week sounds like a lot, the classes themselves are only 50 minutes long and we will have a couple of Mondays off due to holidays. I’d rather use this limited time to stick with a text for a little longer and really dive into central arguments, as opposed to merely getting and overview and glossing over the specifics. I deem this appropriate precisely because this is a problem-oriented class, so there is no canon that we have to have covered.

3: Phil 127: Reflections

Find my blog posts on teaching Phil 127 here.