Ian O’Loughlin is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Pacific University. Students in his junior research seminar organize a thriving undergraduate philosophy conference, giving them a chance to be part of the wider philosophy community.
Which of your courses get students out of the classroom? What project(s) do your students do?
My university has been hosting a large, thriving undergraduate philosophy conference for decades. I designed a junior research seminar in which, as a part of the class, the students organize this conference, and as a complement to this develop an existing paper of their own for submission to some other conference. In teams, the students facilitate every aspect of the conference—initial reviewing, coordinating chairs and presentations for 70-90 papers, designing and printing the conference program, and arranging meals, transportation, and lodging for scores of visitors. In preparation, I take the class to another philosophy conference early in the semester, and we spend some of the semester discussing how philosophy happens in the world, and what that looks like.
Give an example of a successful project.
April 2019 will be my third time running the class and conference in this way, and the past two conferences have both been great successes (the first one that was run by students, two years ago, admittedly being the slightly more chaotic success of the two). In particular, many of the student teams’ projects have gone off very well. Last year when the team in charge of food wanted to go outside university catering and opt for a favorite local Thai restaurant to do the catering instead, I was a bit nervous (leaving the coordination of meals, costs, and schedules for 100-120 visitors to a team of three undergraduates can already be an anxiety-inducing ordeal). However, the team put the whole thing together perfectly smoothly, and the meals ended up working out great. I ended up being glad that I had given them the autonomy even to make choices that seemed too risky to me.
What do you think students gain from doing this?
In getting a chance to be involved in the conference process, both as organizers and as authors who ultimately submit their own work elsewhere, the students come to understand the papers they are writing in classes as connected to a larger academic world. It can otherwise be difficult for students—even if they love philosophy and are enthusiastic about writing—to see what they do in the classroom as anything other than disconnected from the world at large. In addition, students also get exposure to and practice with a variety of real-world skills. From reviewing submissions and chairing sessions to facilitating catering and responding to presenters’ queries, the students take away experience that will position them to more capably interact in our world, both inside and outside academia.
What does this engagement offer to wider communities?
These particular projects only incidentally involve communities outside of philosophy—although I’d like to think that some of this incidental involvement might also be a good thing, even if only in passing—but it does involve communities outside of the classroom and our campus. The conference we organize is relatively unique, as a large, longstanding conference devoted entirely to undergraduates, and I have run into a surprising number of people who have told me that their very first experience of a philosophy conference was this one at Pacific, some years ago. Helping students everywhere to understand that philosophy is something that is happening actively in the world, rather than merely the study of long-dead ideas, seems really important (although I can enthuse about long-dead ideas, in the right contexts!).
Why do you choose to ask students to do these projects?
Here at Pacific we have a relatively small department, with only a handful of majors graduating each year. Most of our classes are composed of a variety of students: majors, minors, other interested parties. This has some really positive effects in the classroom—the psychology majors are a valuable presence in my philosophy of mind course, as are the physics majors in my philosophy of science course—but it also means that our philosophy majors don’t otherwise get to experience a room full of philosophers very often. This was a significant part of my original motivation; participating in my seminar gives these students a chance to become a part of the wider philosophy community, and to spend time thinking about philosophy as it happens in the world.
Ian welcomes conference attendees
What do you like about teaching this way?
It has been amazing to see the difference in the ways the students approach their own work when they are writing it for a reader other than just me. Knowing that they will be submitting their essay off to some conference, where people will pore over it and consider it the way that we do for the submissions for our conference, and then seeing the kind of active, engaged thought that happens at philosophy conferences, really transforms the students’ attitudes toward their own projects in ways I would not have foreseen. It’s also fantastic to see them coming into contact with philosophy outside of the classroom, finding that the ideas that had hitherto been contained to their classes have this whole life out in the world.
How does this work connect to your research?
I do some work in the philosophy of education, and I am interested in philosophical as well as empirical support for situated learning—and situated cognition more broadly. It isn’t easy to situate a discipline that is known for abstraction and a priori thought, but I end up seeing students decide whether a submitted paper belongs in an epistemology session or a philosophy of language session, or seeing them decide, not which objection an audience might offer, but which objection their audience will offer, when they present their own essay at a conference. In these moments, it sometimes becomes so clear how embedding the ideas they’re working with in a real-world situation helps to facilitate a learning experience far richer than it would otherwise be.
Students check in people as they arrive.
How does your engagement work inspire you?
Actually, the excitement of the students toward philosophy conferences reinvigorates my own excitement. Philosophy has this long tradition of dialogue and discussion, and importantly inhabits exactly that space. Yet it’s easy, I find, to lose sight of the luster of this in conference contexts. Just being in the presence of these students who think it is so incredibly amazing that people are coming together like this to talk about ideas and philosophy reminds one that—yes, it is amazing. At their best, the structured discourses at conferences exemplify the aims of our discipline. I often return from a conference field trip, or from hosting our own conference, absolutely exhausted and also inspired—finding myself suddenly checking for upcoming conferences, hoping to submit a paper and find some philosophy.
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