Experiential Learning in Philosophy

Julinna Oxley, Ramona Ilea, Julinna Oxley, Ramona Ilea

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317402763
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Enseignement des arts et des sciences humaines

In this volume, Julinna Oxley and Ramona Ilea bring together essays that examine and defend the use of experiential learning activities to teach philosophical terms, concepts, arguments, and practices. Experiential learning emphasizes the importance of student engagement outside the traditional classroom structure. Service learning, studying abroad, engaging in large-scale collaborative projects such as creating blogs, websites and videos, and practically applying knowledge in a reflective, creative and rigorous way are all forms of experiential learning. Taken together, the contributions to Experiential Learning in Philosophy argue that teaching philosophy is about doing philosophy with others. The book is divided into two sections: essays that engage in the philosophical debate about defining and implementing experiential learning, and essays that describe how to integrate experiential learning into the teaching of philosophy. Experiential Learning in Philosophy provides a timely reflection on best practices for teaching philosophical ideals and theories, an examination of the evolution of the discipline of philosophy and its adoption (or reclamation) of active modes of learning, and an anticipation of the ways in which pedagogical practices will continue to evolve in the 21st century.

1 Experiential Learning in Philosophy

Theory and Practice

Julinna Oxley and Ramona Ilea

I. Experiential Learning and Philosophy Education

Philosophers, like other professors in the humanities, have long used the “sage on the stage” model of higher education: lecturing to students, giving quizzes and tests, and assigning papers. This style of teaching encourages a learning style called “knowledge acquisition,” or didactic learning that involves the ability to practically apply theoretical knowledge to a specific question or situation. In addition, many philosophers use a kind of neo-Socratic method of classroom discussion, which involves engaging students in philosophical discussion of an issue or argument, and asking a wide range of questions as a way of getting them to think about the matter more carefully. Some philosophy teachers also use thought experiments to test intuitions and to get students invested and interested in understanding the relevance of philosophical questions and concerns to their lives and the world around them.¹ Students deliberate individually or in groups to consider and respond to a thought experiment, with the goal of developing critical thinking skills, as a form of active learning.

But in recent years, philosophers have begun exploring new and creative ways to teach abstract philosophical theories by seeking to incorporate experiential learning (EL) activities. EL is a pedagogy that encourages the instructor to direct and facilitate learning via practical activities, so the students apply what they are learning in the course to real-world problems or situations.² The goal of EL is to engage students in constructing new knowledge that impacts their lives and worldviews by creating opportunities for them to participate in events where they have a significant life experience. These experiences are generally sought out in activities that involve engaging in the world outside the classroom structure, such as service learning or travel abroad; practically applying knowledge in a reflective, creative, and rigorous way; or engaging in large-scale collaborative projects like organizing a fair or creating a website. EL is not merely about developing the skill of argumentation via active learning exercises or thought experiments; it involves carrying out complex, coordinated activities that require managing students and other stakeholders in an unpredictable environment.

Kolb’s (1984) cycle of learning nicely captures the distinguishing characteristics of the EL process: begin with knowledge, such as the concepts, facts, and information acquired through formal learning and past experience; engage in an activity by applying the knowledge to a “real world” setting; and then reflect on this application, such that the analysis and synthesis of knowledge and activity create new knowledge for the student. Reflection is a key feature of EL, because, by reflecting, the student forms beliefs about her own process of learning that provides a deeper level of personal meaningfulness. Reflection is not just journaling or describing what happened; rather, it is guided by deep and engaging questions so that reflection is an essential component of high-quality learning. It is important to understand, then, that EL is not meant to replace the activities of reading, writing, listening, thinking, and discussing as the basic foundation of a philosophical education. Rather, by supplementing these activities with tangible and practical activities, a student’s understanding of and commitment to the subject matter is augmented.

This approach to classroom learning has several advantages, which we will outline briefly here and examine in greater detail in the following sections. First, EL is one of the few instructional strategies that are considered “high impact educational practices,” along with first-year seminars, learning communities, and undergraduate research.³ Research on student learning reveals that students learn the most—in the sense that they achieve deep long-term learning, personal knowledge, and practical understanding—when they engage in EL activities that show the practical relevance of what they are learning in the classroom. Second, EL offers the opportunity for students to interact with their peers, which creates confidence and gets them used to speaking in front of others. They can develop relationships with students from different backgrounds and interact with professionals in the community. This enables students to navigate class and social norms as a way of developing practical social skills.

Finally, EL activities help to show that philosophy is not limited to analysis and abstraction.⁴ Incorporating EL into the philosophy classroom provides the opportunity to facilitate understanding of the context of one’s own life and the lives of others, and to think about action as grounded in theory.⁵ When students participate in projects with the wider campus community through civic engagement or service learning, engagement outside class offers students the impetus and the raw material to achieve this goal by providing “opportunities to engage in problem-solving by requiring participants to gain knowledge of the specific context of their [project] and community challenges, rather than only to draw upon generalized or abstract knowledge such as might come from a textbook” (Learn and Serve 2015). In this regard, EL provides an opportunity to show the relevance of philosophical reflection to some of the most important topics in the world today, such as global justice, the treatment of animals, gender equality, and our technological future.

II. The Theory and Practice of Experiential Learning in Philosophy

The field of EL has a rich philosophical history that is rooted in John Dewey’s educational theory, though some suggest that philosophers such as Aristotle and Rousseau are intellectual predecessors. Since several chapters in this book (e.g., Chapters 1, 3, and 5) provide comprehensive discussions of Dewey’s educational theory, we will not examine it in detail here. Briefly, Dewey’s contribution to experiential educational theory is to provide the intellectual framework for EL, by arguing that while traditional schooling involves “experiences,” those experiences are often the wrong kind: they are mis-educative, in the sense that they inhibit growth of further experience on the part of the student (Experience and Education, Chapter 2). Dewey instead recommends that experiences be “directed” to a particular goal that is thoughtfully set by an instructor or educational mission. This directed learning should include student interaction with the external environment (broadly conceived) to provide a context for the learning and to promote a greater understanding of the world outside of the classroom. Providing a specific context or framework from which to understand one’s purposes for learning will help to guarantee that the educational experience is genuinely educational (rather than mis-educative).

Dewey’s ideas spawned a new movement in education, and a number of variations on his ideas have emerged, including the newer experiential learning models discussed in Chapter 3 of this book. Dewey’s central views have remained intact, though, and EL has evolved into a pedagogy that can be taken in a number of directions, so that there is not just one way of doing EL. Rather, EL asks that instructors approach their courses backward and think about what the instructor would like for students to remember about the class a year or even five years from taking it. EL provides a novel approach to answering this question, by suggesting that, whatever the answer to this question is, engaging in an experiential learning activity will enable the student to do this more effectively—for example, to develop the skills and dispositions associated with that knowledge base.⁶ For students to experience transformative learning, instructors need to do more than give riveting lectures and rigorous tests. The students will need to engage in a practical activity that impacts them on a deeper, more personal level than a traditional philosophy class.

In this introduction, we identify six types of EL that are relevant to philosophy: service learning, teaching pre-college philosophy, social activism and civic engagement, collaborative group projects, study abroad programs, and the broad catch-all category of philosophical EL. For EL to be successful, (a) the instructor ensures that the EL experience is relevant to the class being taught, (b) the instructor explains why the students are engaging in EL, and (c) the EL experience connects to the course materials directly and in a way that allows for reflection. Each of the authors in this book does this by having a structure in place to facilitate the experience for students and to provide multiple points of accountability for the students during the semester to discourage procrastination and to help them achieve their goals. In what follows, we outline the different types of EL and state briefly which chapters discuss this type of experiential learning.

Service learning is one of the most popular types of EL, and this is true in philosophy classes as well. Service learning can help students develop “the disposition to reflect well on the relationship between a well-lived life and a good community” (Valentine 2000) or the kinds of concern, care, and sense of urgency that are vital to recognizing and responding to one’s duties as an ethical agent (Kirby 2009).⁷ When successful, service learning is, then, a powerful antidote to an undesirable consequence of typical teaching—the concern that students end up becoming unreflective moral skeptics:

[students] become overwhelmed when they have to face several seemingly plausible but incompatible approaches to moral issues. These students may conclude that we can never know the correct answer to a moral question or simply that there is no correct answer. Focusing exclusively on moral reasoning, then, runs the risk of creating clever moral casuists, jaded moralists, moral cowards, moral skeptics, or moral cynics. (Fitzgerald 254)

Cathy Ludlum Foos emphasizes that while service learning in public schools must follow liberal principles (thereby not endorsing a particular model of the good), it can still positively affect character by encouraging the traits of character associated with liberalism, increasing students’ sense of responsibility and emphasizing that they are community members (Foos 2000).

Pedagogical research suggests that traditional service learning assignments get the results they target. Fitzgerald cites numerous studies showing that traditional service learning:

improves academic learning…[and] social, psychological, and moral development: open-mindedness, personal responsibility, social responsibility, positive attitude toward others, a greater sense of efficacy, higher self-esteem, lower levels of alienation, moral development, and more controversially civic responsibility (251).

Similarly, H. M. Giebel references “a large study by Janet Eyler and Dwight Giles, using both surveys and interviews, which indicated that service learning had positive results for students in the areas of critical thinking, understanding and applying concepts, engagement and curiosity, personal development, and citizenship” (94). Haste and Hogan point to “abundant evidence that young people’s participation in community organizations predicts longer term involvement in civic life as well as leading more immediately to greater self-confidence and team-working skills” (479). Chapters in the book that address service learning are: Chapter 3, “Experiential Learning in Business Ethics” by Karen Hornsby and Wade Maki; Chapter 9, “Taking Animals Seriously: Ethics in Action” by Kathie Jenni; Chapter 12, “Internships: Experiential Learning in Global Justice,” by Ericka Tucker; and Chapter 15, “Minding Philosophy: Service Learning and Intellectual Disability” by Donna Turney.

Teaching pre-college philosophy is a type of experiential learning that is unique to the field of philosophy; it is when philosophy professors (or students) teach philosophy to people in elementary school through high school. Many graduate programs have philosophy outreach groups, and many universities, both large and small, do philosophy outreach in local schools, using the undergraduates or graduate students as the facilitators of the workshops with the target group. Doing philosophy with these populations is EL for the undergraduates and graduate students who participate; they learn to teach using basic examples and hone their knowledge of philosophy and their critical thinking skills in so doing. Chapter 2, “Experiential Learning and the Practice of Pre-College Philosophy” by Michael Burroughs, describes the connection between doing philosophy with young people and EL and articulates the benefit of these programs not just to the target group but to the college students who participate in the outreach programs.

Civic engagement and social activism are terms used to describe the individual students’ outreach projects related to moral, social, and political issues. The goal of civic engagement is to deepen student learning in the college setting, contribute respectfully to communities in which they become involved, and produce lifelong civic leaders. Social activism is one type of civic engagement, in that it involves campaigning for a particular social, moral, or legal outcome. There are several chapters in the book that provide examples of how to do activism and civic engagement with students: Chapter 8, “Assessing Student-Initiated Civic Engagement Projects in Philosophy Classes” by Susan Hawthorne, Monica Janzen, Ramona Ilea, and Chad Wiener; Chapter 11, “Experiential Learning in a Social Justice Course: Philosophy as Transformative Experience,” by Megan Halteman Zwart; and Chapter 12, “Feminist Philosophy and Civic Engagement: The Educational Fair” by Sharon Meagher.

Study abroad programs are also very popular EL courses because they involve traveling with students to sites associated with the course content (such as visiting museums, landmarks, battlefields, or religious sites). Study abroad has the dual function of providing students with cross-cultural experiences (where the majority of their education will take place, according to some), and providing them with educational content associated with the travel (Nguyen 2012). Students who participate in study abroad programs are highly satisfied with their experiences because they provide a way of culturally and socially situating the course materials. The chapters that explain how philosophers can organize study abroad classes are: Chapter 6 “Philosophy, Critical Pedagogy, and Experiential Learning” by Jeremy Wisnewski and Chapter 14, “Cultivating Responsible Global Citizenship: Philosophical Exploration & Service-Learning in Guyana” by Katherine Kirby.

Collaborative group projects involve learning by working together on a guided project. They are one way that doesn’t necessarily require interaction with the world outside the classroom. In these projects, EL methods are adapted to suit the classroom environment by enabling students to work together in groups and take on projects that have a goal but not a determinate outcome. In other words, risk is involved in these types of group projects. They require a substantial time investment and include guided reflections of the collaborative experience; in this regard, they are not just any kind of group work. Chapters in the book that articulate how to do collaborative group projects in the philosophy classroom include: Chapter 5, “Dewey and Collaborative...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Experiential Learning in Philosophy Theory and Practice
• Part I Philosophical Reflections on Experiential Learning
• 2 Practicing Philosophy Philosophy with Children and Experiential Learning
• 3 A Short History of Experiential Learning and Its Application to Business Ethics
• 4 Performing Care Ethics Empathy, Acting, and Embodied Learning
• 5 Dewey and Collaborative Experiential Learning Indoors
• 6 Philosophy, Critical Pedagogy, and Experiential Learning
• 7 Implicit Bias, Race, and Gender Experiential Learning and Dual-Process Cognition
• 8 Cultivating Citizenship Assessing Student-Designed Civic Engagement Projects in Philosophy Classes
• Part II Examples: Experiential Learning Courses
• A. Social Change through Philosophy
• 9 Emergent Learning in Independent Studies The Story of the Accessible Icon Project
• 10 Taking Animals Seriously Ethics in Action
• 11 Experiential Learning in a Social Justice Course Philosophy as Transformative Experience
• 12 Feminist Philosophy and Civic Engagement The Educational Fair
• B. Service-Learning and Community Engagement through Philosophy
• 13 Engaging with Global Justice through Internships
• 14 Cultivating Responsible Global Citizenship Philosophical Exploration & Service Learning in Guyana
• 15 Studying War and Contributing to the Community
• 16 Minding Philosophy Service Learning and Intellectual Disability
• C. New Directions in Experiential Learning in Philosophy
• 17 Collaborative Research Groups in the Experimental Philosophy Seminar
• 18 Philosophy as Practice Zen and Archery
• 19 Teaching Philosophy by Designing a Wikipedia Page
• 20 Museums as the Philosophy Lab Technology and Cognition Beyond the Brain
• Contributors
• Name Index
• Subject Index