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Tagged: teaching

Academia / General / Pedagogy / Teaching / Teaching Philosophy

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Teaching Freedom: Revisiting Berlin’s Two Concepts

A photograph showing a tiled wall with an ornate pattern. A poster is stuck on the wall, with a drawing of a hand with a broken chain on it. The text reads "Libertad es Sagrada".
A poster on a wall. Photo provided by author.

This is a guest post by Nick Boden (University of Bristol)

Teachers and academics face questions relating to freedom each day. How will students engage with the material? How should students be in the learning environment? Are students free to choose tasks or are their choices constrained by the practitioners preferred methods? These questions place instructors at the centre of an ongoing debate about freedom. Is freedom simply the absence of constraints? Or is there more going on?

At first glance, Isaiah Berlin’s (1958) idea of positive and negative freedom offers a useful framework. Positive freedom can be thought of as “the freedom to”. Rules or regulations are put into place to increase the options available to you. Negative freedom is explained as “freedom from” constraints. Barriers are removed and options are available to you. For example, advocates of negative freedom would explain being left alone to make decisions and choices increases freedom. Whereas advocates of positive freedom would welcome things like welfare funding, taking away the “freedom from” taxes, to “provide freedom to” buy basic goods whilst unemployed. A form of collective freedom.

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Beyond the Ivory Tower / Public Philosophy / Reflections on Ukraine / Teaching Philosophy / War

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Beyond the Ivory Tower Interview with Orysya Bila

Of course, history is important, but it is not decisive. As we are not slaves to the current conditions, we are not slaves to our history. We are not really defined by what was said. We are creators of ourselves. I think it is in the dialogue, in thinking and in the exchange of thoughts that we can decide what we want to be, what is really important to us. And that is the moment where philosophical thinking becomes not just a matter of academia but a matter of public strength.

This is the latest interview in the Beyond the Ivory Tower series and part of our series dedicated to the war in Ukraine. Costanza Porro spoke with Professor Orysya Bila about the value of teaching philosophy and her experience of teaching in wartime Ukraine. Bila is the director of the philosophy department at the Ukrainian Catholic University. She holds degrees from Ukrainian Catholic University and a PhD from the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. Her research interests include the philosophical legacy of Michel Foucault, ethics and global political theory, the ethics of memory, as well as Christian theology in a postmodern context. Together with Joshua Duclos, she wrote an essay on teaching philosophy, originally published in a special issue of Studia Philosophica Estonica dedicated to the war in Ukraine, which we published in an edited form as part of our ongoing series on the Russia-Ukraine War.

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Academia / Democracy / Education / Pedagogy / Reflections on Ukraine / Teaching Philosophy / War

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Utopia, Dystopia, and Democracy: Teaching Philosophy in Wartime Ukraine

A photograph of a large multistorey building destroyed by shelling.
Karazin Business School, Kharkiv, July 2022. Photography by Aaron J. Wendland.

This is a guest post by Orysya Bila (Ukrainian Catholic University) and Joshua Duclos (St Paul’s School), as part of the Reflections on the Russia-Ukraine War series, organized by Aaron James Wendland. This is an edited version of an article published in Studia Philosophica Estonica. Justice Everywhere will publish edited versions of several of the papers from this special issue over the next few weeks.

Why teach philosophy in wartime Ukraine? It’s a fair question. It’s a necessary question. Given the variety and gravity of Ukraine’s urgent needs, few will think to themselves: “But what about philosophy? Is Ukraine getting enough philosophy?” As two scholars committed to teaching philosophy in wartime Ukraine – one American, one Ukrainian – we believe an explanation is in order. 

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Academia / Children / Education / General / Pedagogy / Teaching / Teaching Philosophy

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Modern education systems erode trust – this may be a big problem.

Photo by lauren lulu taylor on Unsplash

As teachers, our work is inescapably affected by a range of structural features such as the marketisation and commodification of higher education, the erosion of benefits and of pay, and more. Many of these have been amply studied and debated, including on this blog. Today, however, I want to discuss a relatively underexplored dimension of all this – the slow erosion of trust between staff and students.

In a (higher) education setting, trust is an important value, for several reasons. For one, students are typically young adults and being given responsibility – and being trusted with that responsibility – is an important part of the process of growing up. I’m specifically inspired here by an approach to assessment known as ‘ungrading’. Regardless of the merits of the method, Jesse Stommel’s summary of the core philosophy of ungrading is something that needs to be taken extremely seriously: ‘start by trusting students’.

But it’s also a principled point. From a broadly Kantian perspective, one important aspect of ethical behaviour is respect for others as ‘ends in themselves’. While we all may occasionally jokingly remind each other that students’ brains haven’t fully developed yet, it is important to remember that this does not mean that they lack the capacity for autonomy. Indeed, because of their age, it is perhaps more important than ever to allow them to practice, or exercise autonomy.

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