My institution, Regis University, is a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI). As such, our academic community is ethnically and economically diverse and welcomes students with a broad range of educational preparation. In 2024-2025, 52% of our enrolled first-year students identify as first-generation students, and 48% of those students identify as Hispanic or Latine. Regis is also a Jesuit Liberal Arts institution, and as part of our curriculum, every student must take an introductory course in philosophy. For traditional undergrads taking 16-week courses, this requirement is satisfied by Philosophical Explorations. Faculty teaching these courses serve (on average) 55-60% of our first-year students each year.
These conditions suggest an additional question-skill to those Stephen Bloch-Schumann enumerated in the inaugural post of this series: students should come to understand there are questions at work in philosophy in the first place. Because my intro classrooms are places where students are getting acquainted with college and its realities, it is important to me that they find some stability in the unfamiliar. Moreover, and given the diverse backgrounds our students bring to the classroom, it is rare that they’ve heard of philosophy. To address this shock of novelty, I build a course based entirely around questions philosophers ask; I also insist that these questions are ones my students both ask and are capable of answering.
On the first day of the semester, I initiate a timed “flash reflection,” which asks students to consider their own answers to questions like:
- What does it mean to think?
- What does it mean to pay attention?
- What makes an action courageous?
- What makes something true?
- What does it mean to love?
Students are prompted to write down their answers to these questions and the origins of these answers, including religious commitments (common at a Jesuit institution), family practices and traditions, social expectations, personal experiences, and other influences. The flash reflection grounds the first major writing assignment in class, Journal #1. Students develop their flash responses into a 6-10 paragraph submission at the end of week two; the assignment is graded according to completeness (i.e., did they answer the assigned questions and offer reasons for their answers?) and timely submission, and it accounts for 5% of the overall grade. This “first text” forms the students’ baseline for encountering answers to the selected questions in work by philosophers like Hannah Arendt, Plato, Michel Foucault, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Thoreau, Aristotle, George Yancy, Mariana Ortega, and bell hooks, whose ideas we engage over the course of the semester.
Students complete three subsequent Journal assignments (1000-1200 words) that ask them to consider their Journal #1 responses and whether these positions have changed, been challenged, or deepened by the encounters with philosophers. For example, students will return to the “What does it mean to think?” question after observing Socrates’ cross-examination of Meletus in the Apology. There, students have seen that Socrates believes thinking requires that one care for and care about the things they claim to know. Using Graff and Birkenstein’s “They say … I say …” framework, students stage a conversation between their own position on thinking and the one evident in Socrates’ cross-examination. Each Journal submission is evaluated according to its form, or the degree to which it follows the steps Graff and Birkenstein lay out to effectively enter an academic conversation.
The final Journal assignment is an invitation to write a philosophical autobiography that translates their work from the semester into affirmative statements like “I am a person who understands thinking as … and believes this is important because …” In this assignment, students call on texts, relevant class activities, and insights from structured discussions with classmates to support their responses. Half of the overall course grade is tied to Journal exercises, anchored to a student’s experience, knowledge, and their answers to those initial questions.
Take the question, “What does it mean to pay attention?” Students’ initial answers to this question often include things like making eye contact, listening, and minimizing distractions. These answers aren’t wrong by any stretch—we’d all agree that these are good habits associated with paying attention. When we read Hannah Arendt’s “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” students are acquainted with her idea of the “two-in-one,” or the self as a harmonious relationship of one’s conscious self-awareness and one’s conscience, or the way one reflects this self-awareness and modifies it according to living in a world with others. For Arendt, this interchange of consciousness and conscience is the practice of thinking; in my class, I emphasize the interchange itself as a precursor to thinking, a way of paying attention. Students see that their everyday practices of listening may be strengthened by understanding something about the person doing the listening (that is, themselves) and the attentional frameworks that underpin each of their initial answers. In encountering Arendt’s ideas, the students’ initial responses gain a philosophical valence that they may not have had prior.
The questions that form the backbone of the Journal have gotten simpler and more straightforward over time. The questions avoid jargon and use words that students know and can respond to immediately. I’ve also revised out sub-questions or multi-part questions. The question, “What does it mean to pay attention?” has been cut back from its prior iteration as “What does it mean to you to pay attention? What are the obstacles you encounter when it comes to paying attention?” This revision allows students to get to their point as soon as possible, and the initial ‘simplicity’ of the question’s presentation prevents students from getting stuck trying to discern some hidden philosophical meaning (that they don’t know and will get wrong). Moreover, a student’s engagement with philosophical text is motivated in a different way; students read to discover positions that amplify and/or challenge their own views, rather than reading for positions that accord with the interpretation of the instructor.
To be sure, the answers philosophers give are framed by the questions I’ve designed and the order of texts I’ve selected, so there is artifice in the exercise. However, I take this to be an appropriate expression of my expertise in this context; this approach allows me to serve as a guide and facilitator, a role I’ve learned to enjoy (and prefer) in my twenty years of teaching. It allows me to explain that the questions we engage together have answers that are far broader and more numerous than the few we’ve encountered in class, and that what they’re reading, discussing, and reflecting on may point them to other positions—even on the texts we are studying together. Emphasizing questions and the curiosity that these questions express also gives students a different framework for their expected or chosen disciplines; students are invited to consider the kinds of questions their Biology faculty or Sociology faculty ask, and this offers us an opportunity to re-frame their semester schedule in terms of questions.
Students enrolled in my Philosophical Explorations course benefit from an integrative orientation to pedagogy. Integrative pedagogy begins with the assumption that student experience “on arrival” to the introductory classroom is sufficient to engage with philosophy and its questions. This approach works from their lived experiences of thinking, taking care, telling the truth, loving, and living with others in the community as appropriate starting points for thinking philosophically and prioritizes reflecting on these lived experiences. In this way, an integrative approach amplifies asset-based and inclusive pedagogies, which each affirm knowledge that is either under-represented or altogether missing from our curricula or university structures. Integrative pedagogy accomplishes this by presenting questions the students are immediately capable of answering as philosophical. Initially, this comes down to framing—that is, the “container” of the introductory classroom does some work in making these questions philosophical ones. But as the semester progresses, students begin to see how philosophers approach these questions and how their answers interface with the students’ own.
Using questions that students have answers to allows me to structure my introductory classroom as a place to practice important and beneficial scholarly habits of rethinking, and reconsidering their personal experiences and views in light of the texts we read, topics we discuss, and diverse points of view they hear in conversation with their peers. This work also supports the sense that these practices and habits will serve them no matter where they find themselves after leaving my classroom, whether in their major course of study or in the workforce. Nurses, sports marketers, environmental educators, black maternal health advocates, lawyers, accountants, teachers—any one of these students that leaves my institution has taken a philosophy course, and even if it was a “one and done” exercise, these students insist that the questions we negotiated together helped them see the value in philosophical thinking and the significance of this work for their lives outside this encounter with philosophy.
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