Teaching Philosophy – Justice Everywhere

While Justice Everywhere takes a short break over the summer, we recall some of the highlights from our 2021-22 season.

Justice Everywhere has several special series that explore philosophical issues relating to an important theme. Here are links to those that ran in 2021-22 with a flavour of the topics their posts address:

In our Beyond the Ivory Tower series, organised by Aveek Bhattacharya, which speaks to researchers about their engagement with “real world” politics:

An interview on theory, politics, and socialism with Paul Magnette by Pierre-Etienne Vandamme
An interview on linking philosophy with public and political affairs with Philippe van Parijs by Diana Popescu

In our Teaching Philosophy series, organised by Sara Van Goozen, which interviews scholars on ethics issues involved designing and delivering university courses in philosophy:

A discussion about jettisoning the philosophical canon with Liam Kofi Bright
A discussion about deprioritising grading with Marcus Schultz-Bergin

In our series on fatigue, organised by Zsuzsanna Chappell, which explores the political and social consequences of fatigue that have come to the fore in recent years:

Lisa Herzog’s post on how exhausting citizens poses a danger to democracy
Zsuzsanna Chappell’s post on the need for policies that ensure everyone in society has the energy for personal flourishing and social and political participation

Stay tuned for even more in these series in our 2022-23 season!

***

Justice Everywhere will return in full swing on 1st September with fresh weekly posts by our cooperative of regular authors (published on Mondays), in addition to our Journal of Applied Philosophy series (published on Thursdays). If you have a suggestion for a topic or would like to contribute a guest post on a topical subject in political philosophy (broadly construed), please feel free to get in touch with us at justice.everywhere.blog@gmail.com.

An interview with Ciaran Thapar (Beyond the Ivory Tower series)

By Aveek Bhattacharya

On 9 May, 2022

In Academia, Beyond the Ivory Tower, Education, General, Public Philosophy, Teaching Philosophy

This is the latest interview in our Beyond the Ivory Tower series (you can read previous interviews here). Back in February, Aveek Bhattacharya sat down with Ciaran Thapar, a youth worker, educational consultant and author of the recent book Cut Short, which draws on his experience working with young people in London to analyse violence, inequality and criminal justice among other issues. Through the youth organisation, Roadworks, he delivers PATTERN, a storytelling workshop programme based on the themes of Cut Short. Thapar began mentoring young people as a Master’s student in Political Theory at the London School of Economics, and our interview explored the relevance of academic philosophy and the realities of disadvantaged young people’s lives.

Should we deprioritize grades? Or not grade at all?

By Sara Van Goozen

On 4 April, 2022

In Academia, Education, General, Pedagogy, Teaching, Teaching Philosophy

If you have any experience teaching, you likely have experience grading. Grades are often considered an important part of teaching, for example because they are thought to motivate students. However, while grading, ranking and classifying has become the norm in many places (a development which only really kicked off in the late 19^th century), many teachers are trying to move away from crude metrics. Some even go as far as doing away with grades completely. For this post in our series on teaching philosophy, Justice Everywhere spoke to Dr Marcus Schultz-Bergin (Cleveland State University), about his attempts to deprioritize grading and his experience with going completely gradeless in one Philosophy of Law course. He has detailed his experience on his blog, and a version of his reflections on gradeless teaching has also been published in a new book about “ungrading”.

Teaching Philosophy “Outside the Walls”

By Sara Van Goozen

On 6 December, 2021

In Academia, General, Pedagogy, Teaching, Teaching Philosophy

A photograph depicting an audience listening to a lecture in a traditional lecture hall

An audience in a lecture hall

How do you get undergraduate students excited about philosophy? How do you show students that studying philosophy isn’t just about reading complex discussions about the nature of reality? Philosophy teachers the world over are increasingly facing external pressures – from Rate my Professor to government funding bodies and everything in between – to make their courses popular, engaging, or “useful”. Many are also aware of other factors that may encourage re-thinking the way in which we teach philosophy and to move away from traditional styles of teaching, for instance concerns about accessibility or Western-centrism. One of the things this series, Teaching Philosophy in the 21st Century, sets out to do is to canvas different ways of teaching philosophy. We hope that these discussions serve to inspire and provide ideas for those considering adopting different ways of teaching and assessing students.

For this post, we spoke to Dr Sjoerd Griffioen and Dr Merel Semeijn from the University of Groningen (Netherlands). They run a module called Buiten de Muren (Outside the Walls), which is a required module for second year BA Philosophy students. In the module, students identify a societal issue they want to tackle, a relevant ethical theory or concept (broadly construed), and create a creative final product. ‘We really ask them not to write a standard academic paper about it, or do a standard presentation, but to really come up with something else – because it will probably be the only time in their academic career that they can do that’, Griffioen says. ‘Of course we supervise them very intensively. Because it does happen that students start with a brilliant idea but then they run into problems and we have to turn them towards something that might be a bit more pragmatic. But the principle is that we give them a lot of freedom to come up with something other than a standard academic paper. “Outside the Walls” means to think outside the walls of academia – outside the box, if you will.’

“What I would like is for people to come at the world with lots of different ways of seeing things”; Dr Liam Kofi Bright on the philosophical canon

By Sara Van Goozen

On 4 October, 2021

In Academia, Education, General, Pedagogy, Teaching, Teaching Philosophy

Detail of Raphael's The School of Athens

Detail of Raphael’s fresco, The School of Athens, depicting among others Plato and Aristotle

In 2020, Dr Liam Kofi Bright (LSE) was interviewed by the Dutch newspaper Trouw [in Dutch]. In that interview, he outlined his case for getting rid of philosophical canons. “The Dutch far right got very angry with me on Twitter,” Bright says. “A quite prominent far-right politician said what a terrible person I am, and a bunch of her followers agreed.” But much of this anger was based on a misunderstanding of Bright’s argument. “They assumed without really reading what I was saying that my objection was to the particular people on the canon, so say Descartes, because he was a white guy from Europe. And they, being the far right, didn’t like that. But actually my objection isn’t really to any particular items on the canon at all.”

To start off our new series of posts about teaching philosophy – titled, unimaginatively, “Teaching Philosophy in the 21st Century” – we caught up with Dr Bright in August 2021 to discuss his argument, and to learn more about what teaching philosophy without teaching to the philosophy canon might look like.

Justice Everywhere

a blog about philosophy in public affairs

Category: Teaching Philosophy

From the Vault: Philosophy in Teaching and Public Life

An interview with Ciaran Thapar (Beyond the Ivory Tower series)

Should we deprioritize grades? Or not grade at all?

Read More

Teaching Philosophy “Outside the Walls”

“What I would like is for people to come at the world with lots of different ways of seeing things”; Dr Liam Kofi Bright on the philosophical canon

About us

Social Media

Subscribe via email

Categories

Blogs we like