Through the creation of an equitable space for student voices through a clear, communicative structure, I cultivate an environment where, as one student put it, students can forget that they’re in a class, and simply learn. I position students as co-creators of knowledge from our first interaction. Co-creation requires vulnerability and trust, and so I aim to foster a classroom atmosphere—geographic and affective—where students feel safe and encouraged to reflect on their own thinking as part of the course. This means rearranging tables to create either a collective space for conversation, or smaller circles for more intimate discussion, depending on the goal. It means positioning myself in the classroom to diminish my occasionally intimidating height, sitting quietly in small-group discussions to let them teach me what matters to them.
I am explicit about how assignments are scaffolded, why we do each assessment, and how my lectures and discussion-leading model the work they will do in their own writing. Students learn best when they know why and how they are learning, not simply what they are meant to learn. The first step in guiding students to understand themselves as co-creators in this classroom starts in the syllabus, where I am already introducing them to the practices of philosophy: attention to definitions and how we deploy them, and interrogating what we assume and why we assume it.
Writing is one of the central sites of this interrogation in my syllabus and assignments. We collaborate on our aims and goals around the writing assignments, so that students readily connect the assessments with their own professional, academic, and personal intentions. For philosophy, writing requires close attention to the assumptions and modes of thinking that drive our reflection and critical analysis. I encourage students to think of essay-writing as a conversation with others and a challenge to uncover their own coherent voice. In my Introduction to Ethics course, we begin each essay with a Thesis Statement assignment. The assignment opens by inviting students to make uncritical reflections on which normative stance we think “best” describes a situation, or whether an action is uncritically right or wrong. The point here is not to stop with these intuitions, or even to use them as a basis for the essay, but rather, to help students confront their intuition and biases. Through the Thesis Statement assignment, students gradually scale that intuition up into an analytical claim with a set of scaffolded questions. I encourage them to see how each of these levels requires more context, more robust definitions, and essentially more words and sentences. By the time they finish, they have constructed their introductory paragraph out of the information required for a reader to understand the terms and concepts of their thesis. This formative piece is the foundation for any paper that we write in my courses.
The greatest challenge of writing philosophy, I tell students, is to take the complex amalgam of logic, intuition, and conversation with sources in our heads and put them in our readers’ heads. Source engagement is a particularly difficult place to do this. We practice reading through philosopher’s arguments on the board in class, and unpack them together in an order directed by students, but guided by a list of keywords and concepts assigned to each piece, which I distribute with the syllabus. By the time students arrive at writing their own ideas, the philosophers are familiar friends and sparring partners—no longer either a last-minute addition or take over the argument, they become a way for students to act as co-creators of knowledge in their work.