Welcome to a new season of the Ethics & Education podcast!

Here are some snippets of episodes we'll share this fall, featuring the voices of Agnes Callard, Lindsey Schwartz, Winston Thompson, John Tillson, Jaime Ahlberg, and Quentin Wheeler-Bell. 

Stay tuned for more episodes starting in September. In the meantime, we’ll keep making study guides for you to use in your classes to teach philosophy of education.

Find the study guides here: https://ethicsandeducation.wceruw.org/curricula/

If you have ideas for episodes, study guides, or just want to say hi, send us an email or leave us a voicemail.

Music is "Wavy Glass" by Podington Bear, used under a creative commons license.

At CEE, we think a lot about good teaching. This is the fourth episode in our 2021 Teaching Series. And it's the last episode of our first season!

Jen Kling is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and the director of the Center for Legal Studies at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs. She's also the Executive Director of Concerned Philosophers for Peace, the largest, most active group of philosophers in the US working on the causes of war and the prospects for peace.

In this episode, Jen touches on all the themes of our 2021 teaching series: philosophy as both a skillset and a disposition, finding an entry point for students new to philosophy, and using games to teach social contract theory. 

Jen has a lot of fun in the classroom. And her students do too! One student, Betty Varland, even adapted an Adele song to Aristotle. You'll get to hear that in the episode.

Jen says: "So much of what I do is just to make people laugh. I really think it's genuinely important. I think philosophy is very serious, it can be very important, heavy topics. You have to find your way in to these questions. And for me, humor and movement is the way to do that. And so I try to impart that to my students."

Episode transcript

Produced by Carrie Welsh. Interview recorded at APA Central, February 2020. Music is My Tribe by Ketsa and Cascades by Podington Bear. Special thanks to Betty Varland for permission to use her song.

----

This is the last episode of our first season. We'd love your feedback on our next podcast season!

Survey link here: https://forms.gle/UBvQZo2qoYtRL9Jw6

At CEE, we think a lot about good teaching. This is the third episode in our 2021 Teaching Series.

Bailey Szustak is a PhD student at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In this episode, Bailey talks about teaching new philosophy students in a way that helps them feel at ease with and compelled by philosophy. After all, that's what the word 'philosophy' means--a love of knowledge. 

Bailey says: "How can I make my teaching something that every single student, or as many as possible...finds themselves in what we're doing in a way that is accessible to them? So not scaring them off by immediately throwing them into Kant... But asking questions and thinking about ideas that are relevant to their life. And then it turns out, they've been doing philosophy without realizing it."

Episode transcript

PS: Bailey is also a welder and a painter! Check out some of her art here: https://thefabulosopher.wordpress.com/art/

How do you engage your students? Do you teach "covert philosophy"? Send us an email or leave us a voice message.

Produced by Carrie Welsh. Interview recorded at APA Central, February 2020. Music is Blessed Horizons by Ketsa and Cascades by Podington Bear. 

At CEE, we think a lot about philosophical skills and good teaching. This is the first episode in our 2021 Teaching Series.

W. John Koolage is a philosophy professor and the Director of General Education at Eastern Michigan University. John is a philosopher of education who thinks a lot about teaching and learning. In this piece, he talks about how to engage undergrad students in philosophy classes by giving them opportunities to practice skills like curiosity and argument. And he talks about engaging students outside of the classroom in high-impact learning projects like the EMU Undergraduate Conference in Philosophy, which now has an international attendance. 

John says: "You want students to use these things they learn in their general education programs inside their major and inside their lives." Argument and curiosity "can actually fit in anything you do. They might make you a better parent, they might make you a better manager, they might make you a better chemist. That's the sort of idea that you really want in your general education program, so that these things can infuse it."

Episode transcript

Links:

Interview recorded at APA Central, February 2020. Music by Ketsa and Podington Bear. Produced by Carrie Welsh.

At CEE, we think a lot about good teaching. This is the second episode in our 2021 Teaching Series.

Susan Kennedy is a postdoctoral fellow in philosophy at Harvard University, where she works with the Embedded EthiCS team to integrate ethical reasoning into the computer science curriculum. In this episode, Susan talks about teaching non-canonical texts, using games to teach feminist critiques of social contract theory, teaching students how to conference, and offers some advice for teaching STEM students.

Susan says: "I think their interest just goes through the roof when you can present the material in an interactive and engaging way, as opposed to just having a lesson plan, where I'm, you know, lecturing about feminist critiques or something like that."

If you’d like to learn more about the simulation or the conference guide, Susan invites you to contact her: https://www.susan-kennedy.com/

Episode transcript

How do you engage your philosophy students? Send us an email or leave us a voice message. 

Interview recorded at APA Central, February 2020. Music is Summer Melody by Ketsa and Cascades by Podington Bear. Produced by Carrie Welsh.

Who do you trust? Are universities trustworthy? Professors? What about students? Philosopher Tony Laden (UIC Chicago) is writing a book about democracy. He sees higher ed as a way to think about trust networks and broader questions about how we talk to each other.

Episode transcript

Citations (and further reading!):

Special thanks to Grace Welsh, Carrie Peredo, and Natnael Shiferaw for reading the student excerpts. This episode was produced by Carrie Welsh, with help from Natnael Shiferaw, Harry Brighouse, and Tony Laden.

Recorded January 2021. Music is "Eye on Me" by Ketsa and "Cascades" by Podington Bear.

Principles are your pal. They offer both theory and a diagnosis to help you figure out what the problem is. But on their own, they're not enough. Where do they fit in decision-making? Plus a burning question about relativism.

At the NAAPE Conference in 2019, Grace Gecewicz (UW Madison Philosophy undergrad, '20) and Abby Beneke (UW Madison Educational Policy Studies PhD student) interviewed Professor Jaime Ahlberg (Philosophy, University of Florida). This is a great piece for understanding principles and decision-making.

Recorded October 2019. Produced by Grace Gecewicz, Abby Beneke, and Carrie Welsh.

Music by Podington Bear and Ketsa.

This piece features two voices: sociologist Dr. Laura T. Hamilton (UC Merced) and philosopher Dr. Kathryn Joyce (Princeton University).

Educational Policy Studies PhD student Abby Beneke (UW-Madison) interviewed Laura when she came to UW in 2019 to give a talk on her book project, Broke: The Racial Consequences of Underfunding Universities, which she co-wrote with Kelly Nielsen.

Dr. Hamilton: “What I want people to understand is that the hierarchies that we see today are about racial resentment.”

We asked philosopher Kathryn Joyce to respond to Laura's interview from a lens of relational equality.

Dr. Joyce: "Addressing racial hierarchies is not primarily a matter of rooting out racists and removing them from positions of power. It's a matter of eliminating dominant racial ideologies.”

Transcript

Website

Study guide for this episode coming soon!

This episode was produced by Abby Beneke and Carrie Welsh, and mixed and edited by Kellen Sharp.

"Education doesn't always need to start with an answer. It starts, sometimes, with a question."

Professor Quentin Wheeler-Bell (Indiana University) discusses one of the driving questions of his work: what is liberatory education?

Transcript

Produced and edited by Kellen Sharp.

Recorded at the NAAPE Conference, October 2019.

It’s late January, which means snowstorms (here in Wisconsin, anyway), the start of the spring semester, and grad school application deadlines. Universities will be making admission decisions over the next few months, and then applicants will decide where to go. But who really knows what they're getting into when they apply to grad school??

This is a timely piece on informed consent and the ethics of doctoral admissions, featuring Center Fellow Professor Bryan Warnick, a philosopher at the Ohio State University. It's based on his paper, "The Ethics of Doctoral Admissions" (forthcoming). We also asked four PhD students their thoughts on grad school. Thanks to Pedro Monque (CUNY Graduate Center), Garry Mitchell (Harvard University), Kathryn Joyce (University of California San Diego), and Kirsten Welch (Columbia Teacher's College) for sharing their perspectives. 

Transcript

Recorded at APA Central in Denver, February 2019. Mixed and edited by Kellen Sharp. Produced by Grace Gecewicz and Carrie Welsh.