Frances Bottenberg -- Report on my experience as a teaching post-doc
Elon University is known internationally as a center for scholarly work in teaching and learning,
and its Philosophy Department in particular is committed to innovative teaching founded on a
conception of philosophy as transformative practice. As Elon University’s first Post-doctoral
Fellow in the Teaching of Philosophy, I have been able to take advantage of an incredible
number of opportunities to hone my teaching of philosophy in a community deeply supportive of
teaching excellence and the scholarship of teaching.
My contributions to SOTL (the scholarship of teaching and learning) while a post-doc in the
Philosophy Department at Elon have included both conference presentations and publications in
peer-reviewed journals. Conference presentations have included, “Authoritative learning:
Reflections on an experiment in classroom power-sharing,” for the American Association of
Philosophy Teachers (St. John’s University, 2014) and “‘That’s just my opinion’: Coping with
classroom inquiry busters,” for the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and
Learning (Raleigh, 2013). “Power-sharing in the philosophy classroom: Prospects and pitfalls”
will be published in Teaching Philosophy Today, a peer-reviewed volume of collected SOTL
essays. In fall 2013, my colleague Anthony Weston and I co-designed and co-taught a
Philosophy of Education course. Out of that classroom collaboration a manuscript for a reader in
the subject has emerged, which we hope to see on bookstore shelves in the next two years.
The permanent faculty in Elon’s Philosophy Department represent a unique source of mentoring
and collaboration in thinking about and practicing teaching. I’ve enjoyed participating in the
department’s bi-weekly “pedagogy lunches,” where we share interesting issues and questions
coming directly out of our current teaching practice and scholarship. I have been welcomed to
visit my colleagues’ classes, which I have done numerous times, and they have provided me with
valuable feedback after sitting in on my classes. The Philosophy Department has, in other words,
a rare and genuine commitment to sharing and learning from one another in regards to the
teaching of philosophy.
Though there is expectation that the post-doc complete work in SOTL during his or her tenure at
Elon, the department very much encourages and supports research in disciplinary specializations.
My areas of specialization are philosophy of mind and phenomenology, with a focus on theories
of emotion and rationality, and I have been able to continue to develop a research agenda in
those fields while at Elon. I’ve received travel stipends to present at several conferences,
including Towards a Science of Consciousness at the Center for Consciousness Studies in
Arizona (2014), where I presented a poster titled “(e)motion: Towards a Kinetic View of
Embodied Valuing.” I also presented a paper titled “Actions expressing emotion and the
gendered body” for the Canadian Society for Women in Philosophy (Mount Royal University,
2012). Forthcoming publications representative of my disciplinary specialization include
“Judging inappropriateness in actions expressing emotion,” which will appear in a special issue
of PhaenEx: journal of existential and phenomenological theory and culture, “Emotion as the
animation of value,” an invited chapter in New Waves in Phenomenology, edited by Aaron
Simmons and Ed Hackett, and “A postphenomenological look at human-robot relations,” an
invited chapter in Postphenomenology and the Philosophy of Technology, edited by Robert
Rosenberger and Peter Paul Verbeek. In two consecutive summers I received a New Faculty
Summer Research Grant and Dean’s Office Summer Research Grant to support the completion
of these articles.
I’ve been given a remarkable degree of choice in the courses I have taught and the pedagogies I
have explored while at Elon. It is expected that the post-doc teach on a 3/2 or a 2/1/2 schedule,
where the second option includes teaching an intensive January term course. This has typically
meant that I teach two lower level courses in the fall, one January term course, and one upper
and one lower level course in the spring. I have taught introductory ethics and critical thinking
courses while at Elon, as well as four upper level courses, one of which – a hybrid philosophy of
mind and phenomenology course titled “Minds, Brains, Selves” – was my addition to the
catalogue. The other three upper levels were Modern Philosophy, Aesthetics, Philosophy of
Education. I also taught an independent study, for which I was compensated, which involved
mentoring a biology major interested in working through a reading list in care ethics.
It is hard to overemphasize how much I have enjoyed and benefitted from the freedom extended
to me to experiment pedagogically while at Elon. Here I have become convinced of the inherent
limitations in certain traditional approaches to teaching philosophy, notably lecturing, especially
for attaining worthwhile disciplinary goals such as authentic and imaginative student
questioning, critical and invested student reading and writing, and articulate and rewarding
classroom discussion. While short lectures or demonstrations continue to play an important role
in my teaching, as a post-doc I have especially explored practices that de-center the course
learning experience. For example, instead of taking a conventional instructor-designed short
answer and multiple choice exam in my Critical Thinking class, my students work in small
groups over the course of several weeks to produce and host murder mystery games (some
complete with costumes and stagings!), which must not only be interesting and fun for the class
to play, but in their documentation must also demonstrate the intentional and correct use of key
concepts and skills covered in the course, including deductive, inductive and abductive argument
forms, fallacies and degrees of evidential reliability.
In my Modern Philosophy course, my students and I ran four “salons,” inspired by the 17th and
18th century events that assembled intellectuals and artists for an evening of intense conversation
on the pressing philosophical questions of the day and helped give birth to the public sphere.
Four students were featured as invited experts at each of the salons, and they came prepared to
debate a position with one another and other participants on a particular issue in philosophy of
mind, epistemology, or political philosophy. The overarching question was always: Have we
progressed beyond the moderns in our understanding of this particular matter, or do we continue
to be deeply linked to their ideas and solutions (and, yes, the answer was often both)? For
instance, at the close of our module on the social contract theorists, the experts prepared position
responses to the provocative questions: Do we need (a federal) government? If so, for what and
why? Our salons were catered, held in non-classroom spaces, and open to the public. Each time I
was astounded at the level and the persistence of the conversations I witnessed between students
– as hard as it seems to get many students to take intellectual conversation seriously for more
than five minutes, on salon days they conversed excitedly for an hour and a half.
One more example: the Philosophy of Education course I co-taught with Anthony Weston
operated on a simple, but innovative twist. Students came to class having read the assigned
materials, whose pedagogical assumptions they then saw play out in a 45 minute enactment of a
particular teaching style or method – in which they were also active role-players. Critical
discussion followed each enactment, and as the models became more progressive (in the
Deweyan sense), Anthony and I moved from being organizers of the enactments to co-organizers
with the students. The course came to an apparent halt for two weeks when, about ten weeks in,
we invited students to take on equal authority in matters of course direction, preparation and
management as we instructors. The topic of fair grading was debated hotly for four class periods,
over online discussion boards, and in private conversations amongst students outside of class.
This result was far from a failure; students were suddenly in a position to draw authentically and
productively on the philosophical assumptions underlying the various pedagogies they had
explored earlier in the semester, and to apply them in making their cases for the re-design of
course experiences.
Aside from conference and research support, as a post-doc I have also been able to take
advantage of Elon’s generous support of course development and teacher training. I recently was
awarded a course development grant from Elon’s Center for Writing Excellence, which
supported my research on developing a more comprehensive assessment method for my
introductory ethics class. I was first introduced to some of that project’s key insights at one or
more of the regular workshops offered at Elon’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching and
Learning (CATL), which are all free to attend (and come with free lunch, too). While at Elon, I
have attended approximately two such workshops per semester, and have enjoyed talking with
colleagues from other departments about teaching. Some workshops I’ve attended include:
“Helping students think about their own learning: Simple tools that promote learning and
reflection,” “Teaching disciplinary thinking,” “Measuring teaching effectiveness, “Giving
effective feedback,” and “SAME=MORE: How to get better writing without extra work by you,”
which was offered by Elon’s Center for Writing Excellence.
Elon’s Post-doctoral Fellowship in the Teaching of Philosophy is designed to offer new Ph.Ds.
the space and the resources to turn seriously to developing their teaching craft, while also
remaining active researchers and scholars in their areas of specialization, as well as in SOTL. I
can sincerely endorse these aims as extremely valuable for a more complete and careful
preparation to enter and flourish in today’s academy. From my own experiences here at Elon, I
can’t recommend strongly enough that positions such as this one become more common, both
across the disciplines and across institutions.
FB
Elon, Fall 2014