David W. Concepción is professor of philosophy at Ball State University. He has received six university and two national teaching awards, as well as a national prize for his research on teaching. He is a past-president of the American Association of Philosophy Teachers [AAPT], past-chair of the American Philosophical Association Committee on Teaching, and editor-in-chief of AAPT Studies in Pedagogy. He teaches feminism, environmental ethics, and meta-ethics using inclusive pedagogy and many high impact practices.
How do you engage others around the improvement of philosophy teaching?
“Try and leave this world a little better than you found it.”
-Robert Baden Powell
There are a few specific ways I have helped to engage others in the improvement of philosophy teaching. Many years ago, I was sitting in a “group” session at a Central American Philosophical Association [APA] meeting at 10pm grumpily wondering two things: Why are there no sessions on teaching on the “main” program? And why are teaching sessions always given the 7pm to 10pm time slot? In that era, the APA Committee on Teaching would sometimes organize one session. Occasionally, other APA committees and other societies or groups would offer “group” sessions on teaching. And the American Association of Philosophy Teachers [AAPT] would always have one or two sessions. I thought, we should put all of the teaching and learning sessions in the same room, throughout the clock for two days. Betsy Decyk and I brainstormed some of the details that night. Later the new chair of the APA Committee on Teaching, Alexandra Bradner, and I garnered approval and started planning. Finally, Russell Marcus and his considerable get-it-done energy joined us, and we brought the vision to fruition. In January of 2018 the inaugural “Teaching Hub” took place in Baltimore. Each of the three APA meetings now has an AAPT/APA Teaching Hub. Already, thousands of attendees have benefited from access to the fantastic work presented in the Hubs. And now some other philosophical organizations add “Hubs” about teaching to their national conferences.
Another gap I noticed was the absence of any national teaching awards in the discipline of philosophy. I think there are problems with awards, but the benefits of having at least one seemed to me to outweigh the burdens. I gathered the funds necessary to endow the prize from the APA, the AAPT, the Teaching Philosophy Association [TPA] (the non-profit behind the journal Teaching Philosophy), and a number of individuals donors (most significantly Terry Bynum and Arnold Wilson). In 2017 the inaugural APA/AAPT/TPA Prize for Excellence in Philosophy Teaching was awarded.
Another innovation is the AAPT’s Talking Teaching, an online meeting space for informal discussion about matters of concern to teachers of philosophy. I was motivated to create this because I knew so many great philosophy teachers who were the only “teaching nut” at their school. They didn’t have an easy, regular way to talk about teaching, so I thought we should give them one. At each Talking Teaching session a facilitator introduces a topic and guides a conversation. My first pre-pandemic attempt didn’t go as smoothly as I had hoped. But now Sarah Donovan makes a very successful version of Talking Teaching happen by finding facilitators, publicizing the events, and handling a variety of logistics. We have about eight informal discussions per academic semester. My hope is that Talking Teaching does not succumb to research-creep and inadvertently become a place for presentation on scholarship of teaching and learning [SoTL]. Instead, I prefer the idea of an international space for spit-balling potentially cooky ideas with sharp colleagues. We can do the SoTL in other venues.
What motivates you to do this work?
I want as many students as possible to have as great of an experience in a philosophy class as possible.
When I was in graduate school a senior professor asked me: What mark do you want to make on the field of philosophy? I was surprised and stumped. I was too deep in the weeds of a dissertation and trying to become a better-than-incompetent teacher to think of legacy. I remember being surprised by the assumption that I would even have a career. As most philosophers of my age and older (and sadly a lot of younger folks too) will tell you, we had few ways to learn about teaching, and our “mentors” mostly discouraged us from putting energy into teaching.
Nevertheless, the question helped me realize that I get excited when I have an opportunity to be a positive force in the lives of the students I teach. But that is a mark on individuals, not the field. Additionally, I had been taught that the only way to make a mark on the field was through research, and I wasn’t interested in that. In the intervening years I’ve discovered that by supporting the students’ teachers, sometimes by teaching them how to teach, I can have a less direct but broader positive impact on the lives of philosophy students.
You teach the teachers?
In 2006 Donna Engelmann was empowered to revamp the American Association of Philosophy Teachers teaching and learning seminar. I can’t describe how fortunate I was to be allowed to work with Donna and Stephen Bloch-Schulman on this task. The aim of these programs is to improve the teaching of philosophy by empowering philosophy teachers with dynamic principles, and guidance in how to use them, so that teachers make impactful pedagogical choices. The seminar centers on ideas well capsulated in L. Dee Fink, Creating Significant Learning Experiences. Since 2008, just shy of 200 folks have gone through the multiday seminar. And just shy of 1000 have gone through one of the one-day versions of the program since their inception in 2011.
Stephen and I continue to lead some of these events. More importantly, we have trained, and continue to train, additional expert teachers to serve as facilitators of the seminar and workshops, including Sarah Donovan, Jerry Green, Melissa Jacquart, Mo Janzen, John Koolage, Alida Liberman, and Rebecca Scott, not to mention to original facilitators, Bill Anelli, Betsy Decyk, Emily Esch, Paul Green, and Andrew Mills (with apologies to the many I cannot mention here).
What advice do you wish someone had given you before you started creating teaching related opportunities in the field of philosophy?
Umm, cliches? Just do it?
When someone mentions, or worse tries to enforce, a barrier to your innovation, consider their objections carefully and keep your empathy high, but also keep the pursuit of your goal dogged. I’ve had lots of ideas about things we could do to improve the teaching of philosophy in the United States and beyond. I haven’t pursued most of them because when I mention them to a colleague, the colleague gives a good reason for thinking the idea isn’t a good one. Most of my ideas have been bad ones. But every once in a while I do have a good idea and I need to overcome initial “no”s. I spent over five years on my first attempt to get a national teaching award established, and eventually had to go a different route than the one that I thought made the most sense because the “no”s were unrelenting. Thankfully, I had good empathy even though I was very frustrated, and the people who said no remain friends. In another case, I let my empathy wane. I burned a bridge or two in my failed attempt to get the Journal of the American Philosophical Association to take seriously the idea of publishing scholarly work about teaching philosophy. I regret how, but not that, I tried to get the journal to change.
Any last thoughts?
Again, all I have are cliches. Once I gained the security of tenure, which I know so many people will never have, I was able to ask myself again the question the professor in my graduate program asked me. But I ask it in a different way: will you do something that might make someone think of you as a good ancestor? I’m positive I haven’t reached the good ancestor bar, but I do try to leave philosophy better than I found it with regard to teaching.
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