September 10, 2025 • 44 mins
Imagine exploring alternative teaching methods in a classroom focused on learning and not grades. In this episode, Russell Marcus joins us to discuss how this occurs in a two-week philosophy summer program. He is the Christian A. Johnson Excellence in Teaching Professor of Philosophy at Hamilton College. Russell specializes in the philosophy of mathematics and the pedagogy of philosophy. He is a Past-President of the American Association of Philosophy Teachers. Since 2018, Russell has been running a philosophy summer camp at Hamilton College designed to help faculty develop more effective teaching practices while also benefiting students.
A transcript of this episode and show notes may be found at http://teaforteaching.com.
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Imagine exploring alternative teaching methods in a classroom focused on learning and not grades.
(00:07):
In this episode, we discuss how this occurs in a two-week philosophy summer program.
Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective
practices in teaching and learning. This podcast series is hosted by John Kane,
(00:28):
an economist... ...and Rebecca Mushtare,
a graphic designer......and features guests doing important research
and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.
Our guest today is Russell Marcus. He is the Christian A. Johnson Excellence in Teaching
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Professor of Philosophy at Hamilton College. Russell specializes in the philosophy of
mathematics and the pedagogy of philosophy. He is a Past-President of the American Association
of Philosophy Teachers. Since 2018, Russell has been running a philosophy summer camp at Hamilton
College designed to help faculty develop more effective teaching practices while also benefiting
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students. Welcome Russell.Thanks for having me.
We're very happy to talk to you today. Our teas today are:… Russell, are you drinking any tea?
I have peppermint tea. I don't do caffeine, so I'm all on herbal tea, and I have a box of
peppermint tea in my office… constantly. You can't go wrong with mint. I have English
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afternoon today, relying back on an old favorite, John.
And I am trying to cut back on caffeine, but not today. It's a busy time getting ready for
workshops next week, so I am drinking a black currant green tea from the Republic of Tea.
Nice.Lovely.
So we've invited you here today to discuss the Hamilton College summer program in philosophy,
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which we read about in the July 21st, 2025, article in the Chronicle of Higher
Ed. Can you tell us how you became interested in philosophy pedagogy?
Sure. So I started my career after college as a math teacher. I was a high school math teacher,
and then I did that in New York City for a couple of years, and I worked also in a
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high school in Costa Rica. I taught there, and what I discovered in my first years of teaching
was a real love of curriculum design. I taught something like 24 different classes in my five
years between college and graduate school. After about four or five years, I started feeling both
the pull of philosophy. I wanted to go back to graduate school, and I knew that I wanted to.
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I wasn't quite ready for it when I came out of college. I also saw a kind of waning ability for
me to be creative as a high school teacher. My first love in philosophy was mathematics,
but I found the community in philosophy of mathematics to be kind of disappointing and
frustrating as I started to develop as a scholar. And in 2008, I went to a meeting,
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this biennial workshop conference of the American Association of Philosophy Teachers, and there I
found my people. So, after I got tenure, which was like 2016, I really turned my attention more fully
to the scholarship of teaching and learning. I was kind of looking to teach some topics
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that students found naturally interesting, which was not the case with philosophy of mathematics.
I kind of had to convince students that those topics are interesting, but when I turned more
to teaching… I started teaching a philosophy of education class… I was connecting with students
where they were a little more closely.My experience was somewhat similar. I started
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teaching, and I was disappointed, though, with how much students were learning. So I started
reading more about what other people were doing, and attending sessions at conferences
related to pedagogy. And those are really great things for people to start getting involved in,
and I'm still very much involved in all of that. As noted before,
you began the summer camp at Hamilton. Could you tell us a little bit about how that came about?
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Well, I'm going to start by telling you that we have kind of a running joke at the HCSPiP
(That's our acronym. It's a terrible acronym, but anyway, we've embraced it.) It's a summer program,
not a summer camp. And so every time people call it a camp, I wince. I have to make a face, and
this is around leadership, because I think of this as a serious academic program, but the students
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discovered very quickly the first year, they're like, “Oh, it's philosophy camp.” So yes, it is
a summer camp, and they called it a summer camp at The Chronicle, but I'm calling it the summer
program in philosophy. When I started working with the American Association of Philosophy Teachers
and just getting involved in that organization very actively, I recognized that I had a lot of
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creative people around who had really interesting ideas about teaching and what they kind of wanted
to do with their teaching. I also recognized that a lot of them were in places that were not as
welcoming of pedagogical creativity as Hamilton was for me. I loved hanging out and talking,
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teaching with thoughtful and creative teachers, and when I talked with them, a lot of times,
they're like, “We can't really do this because my students are like in these certain ways, and I'm
not sure it would work,” or “my expectations of my department,” or “I'm not really allowed to do the
kinds of things I would like to do.” Of course, I worked with lots of contingent faculty in the
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organization who are really concerned about their abilities to be creative in the classroom, and
what happens if it doesn't work out, and what does that mean for them in their attempts to get jobs
or to get tenure, and so I thought, “wouldn't it be great to have a space where people could just
experiment, innovate in ways, and not ever have to worry about who's looking over their shoulder and
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who might be skeptical of the kinds of innovations that they're developing.” So I wanted to find a
way to encourage more creativity, and also to just bring folks to me, so I could just sit here where
I am and have folks bring creative pedagogy into my orbit. So that's really how it got started.
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We have a fund for philosophy at Hamilton College that supports the program, and when I
brought it to the department as an idea, they were enthusiastic to let me take it and run with it.
Sounds like some sneaky moves there to bring everyone to you?
Yeah, well, we have this money in the department, and I wanted to see how could
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I use it to support the community that had been so sustaining for me in my career.
Can you talk a little bit about who the students and faculty
are that participate in the program? The way the money works is such that we need
to have a certain complement of Hamilton College students in the program, and our current dean has
been a little more liberal than the previous Dean about that. The previous team was like,
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“you must have half the students be Hamilton College students.” This year, we had eight of the
20 students were Hamilton College students, and then the other students, the other half, or more
than half of the students, are from anywhere and everywhere. So we have an application,
we send out calls for students to come to the program, and we get applications from all over
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the country and world. Most of the students are thinking of themselves as potential graduate
students. They're all undergrads, of course, for the program. So they apply. We get quite a few
applications from students… again, all over the country and world… and our HR department has been
just wonderfully supportive in granting visas. So we usually have three or four international
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students. We're able to get visas to come in and do the program, so we really have a global
population. That's very exciting. But we actually start with the faculty. So the first thing we do
is send out a call for proposals from faculty to teach in the program, and that just goes through
regular like philosophy calls for papers or calls for conference presentations or something like
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that and we just send it out on the listservs and post it on the websites that are useful to get
philosophy teachers. And then some years we only have, let's say, 10 or 12 applications to teach
in the program. Some years, we've had as many as 50 applications from faculty all over the world
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to come and teach here. We offer three classes a year, so we're really looking for three creative,
interesting class proposals from folks who want to come here and how they fit together.
We have a committee that evaluates them, and so we get the three courses, and then once we
have the three courses down, then we advertise for student applicants. Usually in the fall,
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we get the courses settled, and then over the winter, we get the students coming in.
How large are the classes? And when students sign up, do they sign up for just one course
for the entire two-week session, or do they move from one course to another?
I'll just say a little more about the overall structure of the program. So the three courses
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run simultaneously every day for the two weeks, Monday through Friday. So there'll be 10 class
sessions for each of the three courses. All 20 student participants will be in each of the
three classes. So those classes are typically 90 minutes, sometimes we run them two hours. So the
students are in class a lot during the day. The program is not graded. They're not for credit,
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these classes. They're really just for the love of philosophy. The students, they're working hard,
but they are not typically doing a lot of outside work. There's not a lot of assessment
of their work during the program. So we exhaust them, but they kind of like it. They come here
because they love philosophy, they love trying to do it here. We warn them about it, “you're
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going to be exhausted, you gotta be careful.” But they're so excited to be with each other,
to just be in a community of people who want to do philosophy together. They push through.
Can you talk a little bit about the support available for faculty?
Because you mentioned that this is an opportunity for faculty to experiment. So,
can you talk about that aspect of the program?Absolutely. When I was designing this program,
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my fantasy was having three excited instructors coming in here, and we
would all talk about philosophy teaching all the time, and I would be in all the classes,
and we would go to each other's classes, and in the evenings, we would talk about
them and think about and work collaboratively on that. And then I discovered very quickly,
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as we started to run the program, that directing the program meant that I just had to be wandering
around with buckets of water putting out fires all the time, so I didn't have a lot of time to
sit and talk with the instructors about what they were doing. I got to go to some of the classes and
see what they were doing a little bit, but then we had a student bit by a bat one time, and then
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I had a run around Utica trying to find how to get her rabies shots. This year we had a power outage,
we had two tornadoes touched down locally, and then Hamilton College was out of power for the
first two days. It was 96 degrees, 98 degrees. There were no fans, let alone air conditioners,
and so we had to move everybody to a hotel for a couple of days. And these things happen when
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you bring these people together. And I thought we would just be sitting around talking teaching. In
terms of running the program, it's me, and I've always had an assistant director working with me.
That has changed over the years. It started as an undergraduate who I thought would just help me,
I don't know, make photocopies or something, and then that turned into a real leadership
role as well. This year, I had three assistant directors, an assistant director and two student
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assistant directors. So there's a lot of work running the program, just making sure people
can get to where they're going. And we're also ambitious about developing the program,
putting in extracurriculars and other kinds of activities that build community, activities that
expand on the work done in the classroom. We do field trips and have visiting speakers here,
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and there's all sorts of stuff that we have to arrange. So a few years ago, my assistant director
at the time said maybe we should hire someone to do that job. And so we put together a grant,
and we got a grant from the American Philosophical Association to hire what we call a pedagogy
resident, and that's someone who works with the instructors and the tutors. We haven't talked
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about the tutors yet, I should mention them, to develop the courses over the years. So by
November, we really have the courses picked, and we have a pedagogy resident who's an expert in
philosophical pedagogy. And this year and last year, we were very lucky to have Emily Esch, who
is a professor of philosophy at The College of St. Benedict and St. John's University in Minnesota,
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and she's been working with instructors and tutors in preparing the classes and thinking about what
kinds of classroom activities would be useful in this context, and refining them, and just thinking
about teaching in general. This year also, we sent around a new book on teaching philosophy called
The Art of Teaching Philosophy, and we sent that to all our leadership, our instructors and tutors
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and assistant directors and the pedagogy resident had conversations about that, rooted in that book,
just having them think more about pedagogy. So it's been a real learning experience for
everybody now that we've included the pedagogy resident every year. We had the grant for just the
first year, and then we got to include it in our budget. So on the run up, the time preparing for
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the program, as the instructors are refining their plans, they're working with the pedagogy resident,
as the tutors are preparing together with the instructors, they're working with the pedagogy
resident and some use the pedagogy resident more and some less. Once we get to campus,
the pedagogy resident is sitting in on classes and working with the instructors just to process
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what's happening and to think about how to take it back to their home institution.
When I saw a report on this, it reminded me of a couple of programs I've been working in. I taught
at the Duke Talent Identification Program for gifted high school students from 1987 up until
2020, and then I've been teaching in the Duke Pre-College program, and one of the things that
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I've done in both of those programs is I'd often experiment with things before I tried them in my
regular classes and it sounds like this is a great opportunity to do that, where the students aren't
really put at much risk, and they often appreciate the variety in the instruction, because they often
don't see that in their regular classes. Are faculty in this program often then taking what
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they've experimented with here and then going back and using it in the classes and perhaps sharing
it with other professors after this experience?John, you get us. That's exactly what we're hoping
will happen, and it seems like it's happening. Yeah, we have immodest aims. We want to change
the world of philosophy instruction, and we're hoping that people are going back to their
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home institutions and working, not only teaching their classes, but talking to other people about
the work that they've done here. We've also been encouraging our faculty to disseminate the work
that they do here and we've been successful in a couple of ways. We've had some people publish
the work that they've done at the HCSPiP in journals, teaching philosophy journals.
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I've had a piece coming out in December that I co-authored with one of the instructors here,
and one of the students who was here, who is now going on to graduate school at TC at Columbia. So
that's been very satisfying to see the work start to filter out from here. We also have been pretty
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successful because our student population is pretty ambitious, some of them do go to graduate
schools, and we have one student who was in the first year of the program in 2018, she's just
finishing up her PhD now, and she's got a position at Harvard, and she was at Wesleyan last year, and
I think she's at Harvard now, and bringing that kind of interest in pedagogical innovation to what
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is often… you know, philosophy classrooms tend to be kind of staid and stiff a lot, and we're trying
to really make them student centered and active learning experiences. So I think it's happening,
I don't really have good measures of how much it's happening, except that I know that I'm
in touch with a lot of the people who've come through the HCSPiP and I hear from them about
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what they're doing, and I know that I'm doing it myself. So this article that I just mentioned that
we're publishing, Ashley Pryor from University of Toledo came here, I think it was summer of ‘22,
and she taught a class on philosophy of comedy. So the class was, in the first place, some
philosophical theories of comedy. There was some dry stuff, but then she's also an improv artist,
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and she brought improv activities into the philosophy classroom. She had the students
outside just doing all sorts of activities. And I thought this was fun, the students loved it, and
it did have some philosophical content to it. And then the next year, I was teaching a philosophy of
education class, and I had as a course mentor for that class, one of the students who had gone to
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the HCSPiP, and now she was a senior at Hamilton, and she was working with me with the first- year
students. And she was like, “why don't we bring some of that improv into the classroom?” And I
was like, “Well, I'll try some!” And so she and I worked together on some activities that were
useful philosophically in the classroom, partly to build community in the classroom and partly
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to enable some quick thinking. In philosophy, we're often thinking very carefully and slowly,
but there are moments when it's useful to think more quickly. And so that was really great. I
noticed it was working just as I wanted it. Yeah, bring people in with ideas, and then I would steal
them. I'll say this, every good teacher is a thief. We see other people doing like,
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“I'm gonna steal that and make that mine.” So that's what I did. I started taking some of these
improv activities and making them my own, turning them into productive exercises that I think helped
to build trust in the classroom. And I think this is something that we've been thinking about a
lot over the past few instances of the HCSPiP is, how do you help students to dialog across
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disagreement? I know we're all thinking about this these days. How do we help students really engage
each other despite the worries they have about how they might be judged for what they say, and how
do we get them to speak honestly and really work out honestly their views? And I think that it's
important to build trust in the classroom, and so sometimes you have to build trust in various ways.
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So I found that the improv activities sort of helped to build a little trust in community that
then we could take advantage of that in having conversations that are more difficult. So anyway,
I do know that I'm not the only one who's learning from the program, but I don't know
that I have good ways of talking about how much that stuff gets used after they leave here.
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One of the things I really like about that is the fact that some of these students do go on,
and one of the things we talked about a lot on our podcast is how so many faculty come into teaching,
emulating the people they've just observed. And often in graduate school, in particular, there's
not always a lot of innovative teaching or very student-centered teaching approaches, at least in
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many disciplines. So it's really nice that there's this opportunity for students to see this before
they go on to grad school, and it sounds like it provides a wonderful experience, which could be
used as a basis for them getting started later.So I like to say the first error of teaching
is “I learned it this way, that's the way I'm going to teach it.” And I think we all have to
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recognize as instructors that we were typically exceptional learners, and our students won't
always be exceptional learners. So how do we reach our students in the most effective ways
possible? And that requires thinking in ways that we were not trained. And of course, in philosophy,
I'm sure this is true in other disciplines as well, there's very little incentive in graduate
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school and in the early stages of one's career to be creative and innovative about our teaching,
especially coming out of R1s. Most of us come out of R1s at graduate school by definition,
and then our student body isn't the ones that we've been trained to teach. So we have to look
in other ways. Let me say this more about the structure of the program. For every class we hire
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not just an instructor, but a teaching assistant or a resident assistant. These we call tutors, and
they play both a role in the classroom and outside of the classroom. All of the tutors are graduate
students in philosophy. Some of them are alums of the program. Some of them are alums of Hamilton
College. We try to use that tutor position as a way of helping continue with our network of
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folks. They get a lot out of the program. Part of it is just working with more experienced
instructors in the classroom. Part of it is just being around people who care about teaching,
which is not necessarily what they're getting in graduate school. And part of it is just being in
that context. Two years ago, we had an instructor pull out of the program at what was pretty close
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to the last minute. Maybe we had a month to go, and it was a personal problem, a family issue,
and it was perfectly understandable, but it left us sort of struggling, “what are we going to do
with this third class?” And the tutors said, “Why don't we teach the class! And we'll reconfigure
the class in a way that'll be useful for all the tutors,” and they were all so eager to take that
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on. I have, as a research interest of my own, team-based learning. I've been working a lot
on team-based learning in philosophy, and so we decided to run a team-based learning class
in philosophy. I kind of structured the class, and then the tutors took it over and taught the class,
and they learned how to design team-based learning activities. In team-based learning,
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there are specific ways in which activities are constructed, and so I taught them all about how to
do TBL activities, and they just took it and ran with it, and that turned out to be one of the most
successful classes we've ever had. The students loved it. In part, I think the instructors were
a little younger, a little closer to their age. They're very excited about philosophy,
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they're in graduate school. So the students were looking at these folks who are like in these
positions that they were imagining themselves going to be in soon. They were hoping to go to
graduate school, just like these folks. And then everybody was in there being a little vulnerable,
learning together, and it was a great context and one of the most successful classes we've had.
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I'm glad you picked up on talking about the tutors, because you had mentioned them earlier,
and I was finding that really interesting and it seems like that's actually an integral piece
to the project, because it's a conduit between the instructors, graduate school,
and undergrads who are looking toward graduate school. So they're kind of right in the middle
like a linchpin to the whole thing.Exactly. And as I said, they have roles
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in the classroom, and different instructors use the tutors in different ways, sometimes their
role in the classroom isn't as robust as it is in others. It depends on the class and each of
these classes is different. It's the brainchild of an instructor, and they may not have thought
about this in terms of how to use a tutor. And these are 20- person classes, so it's not like
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we need TAs to be managing the classroom. So they have classroom roles, but they also have community
roles, let's say, outside the classroom, in helping the students to prepare for classes,
to manage some questions the students might have about the readings or how to prepare, or what's
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expected. But also, this year it was very hot, and this year the tutors wanted to do a water balloon…
they called it a water balloon fight, I said, “I'm not going to endorse a fight, we'll do a water
balloon festival.” So this is a running joke this year, that they were having a festival. So I got a
hose and a bunch of water balloons, and they were out there just trying to beat the heat on campus,
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and the tutors played a big role in that. So there's some community building and some classroom
work. And also, one other thing we do with the tutors is, on the middle weekend, we have the
tutors run a session on philosophy after college and what it's like to apply to graduate school,
and how you might find philosophy in your lives other than graduate school, and we don't have any
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instructors or leadership go to that, that's just the tutors and the students. They have some open
conversation and some hard conversations about how difficult graduate school can be and how difficult
it can be to find an academic career. And sometimes students come away a little dispirited,
but I think they've gotten an honest view from some people who are in the middle of it.
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In a program like this, there are some costs for the support, for feeding the students,
for providing housing, for providing air conditioning when it works, or water balloons
when it doesn't. How is this program funded?So the Truax Fund for Philosophy. It was created
in the 1950s by some Hamilton alums. It was an Hamilton alum from class, I think,
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of 1907 in honor of his father, who had been class of 1875 and there's an endowed fund. And we are
very grateful for the largesse of our forebears to have given us this money. It's not easy to
spend money in philosophy, and the fund is quite robust, and so this is where the program started.
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We were just very lucky to have this money that we can support people. So let me say, not only
is it feeding them and buying water balloons, but we also pay for all travel for all participants,
and every participant gets a stipend, which we call a fellowship scholarship for the student
participants, because we want to make sure that the program is open to anybody, no matter their
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financial situation. We pay for all transportation from anywhere in the world and back, and we pay
everybody a fellowship scholarship for being here. So it's quite an attractive thing for
students if they have i nterest in philosophy, and they are very grateful, especially some of the
international students. That money, which is not a lot of money, the students get $750 for the two
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weeks of participation here. We see that money as salary replacement for the time that they're here.
But for some of the students, that's quite a lot of money for them and we heard from one student
that it really funded his studies for the next two years. So that was so exciting for us, that
he could be here and be such a great participant and also benefit, not just intellectually and
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pedagogically, but also financially from the program. I wish there were a better recipe
for other people to do it, because it is quite expensive, and finding the money to run a program
like this would be a little bit of a challenge, I know, for others. But I will say I think we could
run a great program without all the money. I mean, we need to feed them still, obviously,
but we're glad that we are able to be as inclusive and diverse as that money allows us to be.
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It's nice when you have the kind of funding that will let all that stress to go away and you can
focus really on the subject matter of the program. I really love all the layers of mentorship that
you've described in the program, the mentorship from the pedagogy expert, the mentorship from the
faculty, the mentorship from the tutors right to the students. There's so many layers there. Can
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you talk a little bit about some of the reactions students have had from the opportunity to interact
with so many folks in the discipline?I also hope that I have some
mentorship role as well. Yeah, I didn't mean to not include you.
No, it's very funny, because I really do, and sometimes the program, it feels like I'm just
working behind the scenes and I don't have an active role. But last year, not this past summer,
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the summer before this, I got COVID in the middle of the program, and I had to work remotely for
the second half of the program. And I think I have some role in trying to foster a kind of
supportive atmosphere that I think that's very helpful. But yeah, okay, this wasn't about me,
this question. This was about students and how they find their mentorship. Look,
one of the tutors said to me this year, this was his second year in the program, and he said he
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learned more in his two weeks with the program… the first time he was with it… about teaching,
then he had his whole life all put together. And that was such a rewarding comment for me to hear
how useful we've been. But Hamilton College, we typically send about three quarters of a
student to graduate school every year, in other words, less than one a year. And this past year,
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we had four students who were thinking about doing graduate school and are looking at it.
We've never had those kinds of numbers. And what happened was at the HCSPiP, they started seeing
how exciting philosophy could be, especially when taught creatively and thoughtfully, and
it just really was inspiring for them. So I see that in the increased interest in their classes
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when they come out of the HCSPiP and they come back. We had a rising sophomore a few years ago
who was interested in philosophy, but kind of not going anywhere. He wasn't the greatest student,
he had, the interest in philosophy, but not quite the skills. And we saw coming out of the HCSPiP,
how motivated he became and how sophisticated he became, especially being around some of the
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older students, not even the tutors and the faculty, but just some of the older students.
And that's one way in which we sell to our administration that we should use this money
for this summer program is because it really does benefit the Hamilton students who participate. We
can see the academic sophistication just grow by leaps and bounds in some of these students after
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they come back after the HCSPiP. We also had six students from last year's program in the fall,
they did their senior theses, and then they presented them at the APA at the eastern
divisional meeting of the American Philosophical Association in January. And we've never had that
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kind of interest in professional philosophy and real academic scholarship. So we see it with the
Hamilton students. For other students who come from wherever they're coming from, this year,
we had two students from Poland, we had a student from China, and we've had students from Indonesia
recently, Colombia. We certainly hear from them that this was an amazing experience. We do some
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assessment. We have a robust survey at the end of the program, and we ask some questions.
We're looking at these results longitudinally and thinking about the program and how to improve it.
But often we see them briefly, and off they go, and we hope to hear from them later, I will say,
at the APA this past January where we had all the Hamilton students there, I noticed that there were
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like a dozen, maybe 14, HCSPiP alums who were on the program at the eastern divisional meeting of
the APA, and so I found money to take them all out to lunch, and we had a little HCSPiP reunion
there. And we started hearing from people. where they were going and how they were using it and
how they were carrying in the hearts, the ideas about innovative, student-centered pedagogies.
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Now you've talked about a number of specific methods, team-based learning,
improv and so forth. What are some of the other interesting strategies that
faculty have tried exploring in this program?We've had some great classes. Not every class is
super successful, but we learn from every class. A couple of years ago, we had a class on Hobbes and
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Minecraft. So this is Hobbes’s political theory. All the students got Minecraft accounts, and the
class days basically took place on the Minecraft platform, and the instructor, Rebeccah Lieby,
was asking the students to test out Hobbes’s claims about the state of nature. I'm sure you've
heard the phrase that “life in a state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
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So she was like, “well, let's see what happens in the Minecraft environment, and test Hobbes’
claims about that.” And so that was super fun. And really, the students really rose to the nasty,
brutish, and short aspect of Hobbesian political theory. So I think there was some confirmation
there. Last year we had an instructor, Sara Uckelman, from Durham in the UK. She was
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testing fiction writing as a philosophical method. They read a little philosophy, but what they were
really doing in the class was writing fiction as a way of exploring philosophical themes, so that was
pretty cool. It's not a standard pedagogical tool to have students writing fiction in philosophy
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classes. One of our early very successful classes had students doing a lot of metacognition, so they
were reading some really difficult work. They were reading George Yancy’s Backlash book, I don't know
if you know George's “Dear White America” letter, that he ended up getting a lot of backlash,
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and he came to the program and visited with us and participated, and also Susan Brison's account
of her rape and assault. So they're really, really heavy, difficult material. And when you're reading
that kind of heavy, difficult material on racism and sexual violence, you have to be careful about
what you say in class, and students have to be careful. So the instructor was Ann Cahill
(34:43):
from Elon University in North Carolina, she had developed these both hand signals and little note
cards that allowed students to signal what kind of conversational move they were about to make
before they made it, and just helped students to process what they were saying and to help other
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people see, are you presenting an illustration of what someone else said? Are you presenting
more supporting arguments? Are you presenting a counter argument? Are you raising a question?
There are all these different kinds of moves that can be made in a philosophical conversation,
and sometimes it takes a while for students to understand what someone else is saying, because
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they don't understand what kind of conversational move they're going to make. So they had signals
for what kind of conversational move that was going to be. That was really an exciting class,
one of our most successful, not that I'm playing favorites or comparing, I'll say one more. The
first year we had someone who was a philosopher as well as an artist. Her name is Juli Thorson,
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she's emeritus at Ball State University, now she is, and she had drawing activities that were
related to questions about personal identity. So they were reading philosophy of personal
identity and then doing these drawing activities for students to use the other side of their brain
in processing these kinds of questions about themselves. I can tell you about more, but those
(36:13):
are pretty good examples of really exciting stuff that is not your typical philosophy lecture.
One of the things that was mentioned in The Chronicle article was that a
professor who had been participating in the program noted that in her regular classes,
she was struggling with students submitting AI-generated work, as we all are.
Yeah.Do you have any ideas of
(36:33):
some strategies that philosophy faculty have been using to discourage the use of AI as a substitute
of learning? With all this experimentation going around you, we're eager for ideas.
Look, I wish I had a secret key that would fix things, but here's the way I'm thinking about it,
and I think this is what I bring to my own classes, and that I'm trying to do at the HCSPiP:
(36:55):
learning is change, it's changing the way you're thinking, and change is hard,
and so we have to start by acknowledging that real learning, real honest learning,
done with real integrity, is not easy. I mean, some things are easy, but philosophy, not so much,
because we're asking students to really dig into their core beliefs and examine them,
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and that can be scary for people. On the other hand, philosophy, when done well, is a lot of
fun. It's a social activity, it's communicative. We have this image of philosophy as like the lone,
great man speaking words of wisdom, but that's not really how philosophy is done. Philosophy
is done in community, in dialog, hearing various perspectives and listening to them and allowing
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your own preconceptions to be challenged. And if it's done in a threatening way, or one in which
there's not trust in the community, then students will shut down, and then they're going to go on
and they're just going to do whatever they can to get their grades. And of course, they're going
to turn to whatever resources are rational, like these AIs. In some ways. I understand why students
(38:09):
do this. They're overworked and anxious, and it seems like a rational thing to do, but what
we're trying to do is make philosophy classes more interesting, more engaging, more student centered,
and more fun. And if we do that, we're hoping that students are going to respond by saying,
“Oh, yeah, this is fun stuff to do, and if I trust my community, I could really like grow” and look,
(38:35):
students are skeptical about received wisdom. I mean, we see this all over. They're skeptical
about being told what to do. And so if they're empowered to really think for themselves,
maybe they're really gonna actually try to think for themselves. So that's what we're trying to do
in this program, is to change the way people think about philosophy and humanities more generally,
(38:58):
from like, learning the received wisdom and regurgitating it to like, “Oh, here's a chance
for me to really think about these questions and to think about what people are telling me,
and to develop my own views about it.” And that's what student-centered pedagogy is all about. So
it's not a way of policing against the AIs, it's a way of undermining the motivation that students
(39:22):
have for turning to the AIs. We are very lucky at Hamilton College to have an open curriculum,
and what that means is that students do not have to take any classes they don't want to take.
We don't have a gen ed program. We don't have required classes. So on the first day of class,
almost all students there are a few exceptions, but almost all students are in classes they want
(39:45):
to be in, and so that's an opportunity for us to say, “Okay, you want to learn about this stuff,
let's do it in a way that is going to be useful and productive for you, so that when we give you
assignments, these are assignments about things that you want to learn, that you've committed to
trying to learn about, and they're going to help you, rather than just be assessments of did you
(40:08):
file away enough information and regurgitate it back to me.” It's about assignment design. Can you
make assignments in such a way that students see that they are for this student's benefits, rather
than just ways of policing and testing them.That's a challenge we're all working with,
(40:28):
we're all facing, and that's in general, the sort of approach we encourage people to use, giving
students more autonomy and being transparent about the benefits they get by engaging in
this themselves, rather than just outsourcing their assignments to some external tool.
Yeah, yeah.So we always wrap up by asking, what's next?
(40:50):
So this year, we broadened our program by having early arrival and orientation for our
international participants, and that was really productive. And every year we're thinking about
ways in which we can improve the program with trying not to extend ourselves financially or
too much personally. There are some sustainability questions, both the money and my own ability to
(41:16):
work over the summer on this project. It's a lot of work, so we're moving to an every other year
approach for sustainability reasons, but mostly the big project that we're going to work on this
year, while we're taking a year off, is to develop more courses led by graduate student tutors,
with help from the experienced faculty because I think that was the place where we realized that,
(41:41):
and you caught this, which was great, that that kind of mentorship of the graduate students was
something that we've done quite effectively, I think. And so we're going to be writing some
grants and thinking about, how do we expand the program in such a way that we can give a little
more space for graduate students to be developing their work? But I think the core of the program
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is really very good. We had a great year again this year, and we're just going to gather our
strength and do it again. I wish we could expand it to more people. And it's not even the money
that is the big barrier, It's just It would be so much more work and not sustainable.
It would be really nice if more disciplines had this. I'd love to
(42:25):
see something like this in economics.I would love to talk to people, if they're
thinking about developing these kinds of classes. I have a lot of resources. I've developed this
stuff ground up and anybody who wants to try something like this out, I'll say this,
several of our alums, that is, people who were students in the program have gone on to graduate
(42:46):
school and started summer programs in philosophy for high school students, and what a wonderful
testament that is to our success. They've taken from what we've done here, and they've sort of
applied it in different contexts. So I think the way in which we create a context for learning
that's not tied to grades and credits and just for the love of learning, that's been a real joy.
(43:12):
Well, thanks for sharing your program with us. It's always nice to hear about
these opportunities for learners to be excited about their discipline.
I really appreciate you inviting me on, and I'm always happy to talk about the HCSPiP,
so thanks for the time. Well, thank you. We really enjoyed
this conversation, and we look forward to talking to you at some point in the future as well.
Great. I'd be happy to come back and talk about team-based learning or something. I'm
(43:35):
writing a book on team-based learning this fall as I'm on leave, and that's my plan.
If you've enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes
or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on
(43:55):
our Tea for Teaching Facebook page. You can find show notes, transcripts and
other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.
Imagine exploring alternative teaching methods in a classroom focused on learning and not grades.
(00:07):
In this episode, we discuss how this occurs in a two-week philosophy summer program.
Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective
practices in teaching and learning. This podcast series is hosted by John Kane,
(00:28):
an economist... ...and Rebecca Mushtare,
a graphic designer......and features guests doing important research
and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.
Our guest today is Russell Marcus. He is the Christian A. Johnson Excellence in Teaching
(00:53):
Professor of Philosophy at Hamilton College. Russell specializes in the philosophy of
mathematics and the pedagogy of philosophy. He is a Past-President of the American Association
of Philosophy Teachers. Since 2018, Russell has been running a philosophy summer camp at Hamilton
College designed to help faculty develop more effective teaching practices while also benefiting
(01:15):
students. Welcome Russell.Thanks for having me.
We're very happy to talk to you today. Our teas today are:… Russell, are you drinking any tea?
I have peppermint tea. I don't do caffeine, so I'm all on herbal tea, and I have a box of
peppermint tea in my office… constantly. You can't go wrong with mint. I have English
(01:35):
afternoon today, relying back on an old favorite, John.
And I am trying to cut back on caffeine, but not today. It's a busy time getting ready for
workshops next week, so I am drinking a black currant green tea from the Republic of Tea.
Nice.Lovely.
So we've invited you here today to discuss the Hamilton College summer program in philosophy,
(01:55):
which we read about in the July 21st, 2025, article in the Chronicle of Higher
Ed. Can you tell us how you became interested in philosophy pedagogy?
Sure. So I started my career after college as a math teacher. I was a high school math teacher,
and then I did that in New York City for a couple of years, and I worked also in a
(02:16):
high school in Costa Rica. I taught there, and what I discovered in my first years of teaching
was a real love of curriculum design. I taught something like 24 different classes in my five
years between college and graduate school. After about four or five years, I started feeling both
the pull of philosophy. I wanted to go back to graduate school, and I knew that I wanted to.
(02:39):
I wasn't quite ready for it when I came out of college. I also saw a kind of waning ability for
me to be creative as a high school teacher. My first love in philosophy was mathematics,
but I found the community in philosophy of mathematics to be kind of disappointing and
frustrating as I started to develop as a scholar. And in 2008, I went to a meeting,
(03:04):
this biennial workshop conference of the American Association of Philosophy Teachers, and there I
found my people. So, after I got tenure, which was like 2016, I really turned my attention more fully
to the scholarship of teaching and learning. I was kind of looking to teach some topics
(03:26):
that students found naturally interesting, which was not the case with philosophy of mathematics.
I kind of had to convince students that those topics are interesting, but when I turned more
to teaching… I started teaching a philosophy of education class… I was connecting with students
where they were a little more closely.My experience was somewhat similar. I started
(03:47):
teaching, and I was disappointed, though, with how much students were learning. So I started
reading more about what other people were doing, and attending sessions at conferences
related to pedagogy. And those are really great things for people to start getting involved in,
and I'm still very much involved in all of that. As noted before,
you began the summer camp at Hamilton. Could you tell us a little bit about how that came about?
(04:11):
Well, I'm going to start by telling you that we have kind of a running joke at the HCSPiP
(That's our acronym. It's a terrible acronym, but anyway, we've embraced it.) It's a summer program,
not a summer camp. And so every time people call it a camp, I wince. I have to make a face, and
this is around leadership, because I think of this as a serious academic program, but the students
(04:34):
discovered very quickly the first year, they're like, “Oh, it's philosophy camp.” So yes, it is
a summer camp, and they called it a summer camp at The Chronicle, but I'm calling it the summer
program in philosophy. When I started working with the American Association of Philosophy Teachers
and just getting involved in that organization very actively, I recognized that I had a lot of
(04:55):
creative people around who had really interesting ideas about teaching and what they kind of wanted
to do with their teaching. I also recognized that a lot of them were in places that were not as
welcoming of pedagogical creativity as Hamilton was for me. I loved hanging out and talking,
(05:15):
teaching with thoughtful and creative teachers, and when I talked with them, a lot of times,
they're like, “We can't really do this because my students are like in these certain ways, and I'm
not sure it would work,” or “my expectations of my department,” or “I'm not really allowed to do the
kinds of things I would like to do.” Of course, I worked with lots of contingent faculty in the
(05:38):
organization who are really concerned about their abilities to be creative in the classroom, and
what happens if it doesn't work out, and what does that mean for them in their attempts to get jobs
or to get tenure, and so I thought, “wouldn't it be great to have a space where people could just
experiment, innovate in ways, and not ever have to worry about who's looking over their shoulder and
(06:01):
who might be skeptical of the kinds of innovations that they're developing.” So I wanted to find a
way to encourage more creativity, and also to just bring folks to me, so I could just sit here where
I am and have folks bring creative pedagogy into my orbit. So that's really how it got started.
(06:21):
We have a fund for philosophy at Hamilton College that supports the program, and when I
brought it to the department as an idea, they were enthusiastic to let me take it and run with it.
Sounds like some sneaky moves there to bring everyone to you?
Yeah, well, we have this money in the department, and I wanted to see how could
(06:43):
I use it to support the community that had been so sustaining for me in my career.
Can you talk a little bit about who the students and faculty
are that participate in the program? The way the money works is such that we need
to have a certain complement of Hamilton College students in the program, and our current dean has
been a little more liberal than the previous Dean about that. The previous team was like,
(07:06):
“you must have half the students be Hamilton College students.” This year, we had eight of the
20 students were Hamilton College students, and then the other students, the other half, or more
than half of the students, are from anywhere and everywhere. So we have an application,
we send out calls for students to come to the program, and we get applications from all over
(07:28):
the country and world. Most of the students are thinking of themselves as potential graduate
students. They're all undergrads, of course, for the program. So they apply. We get quite a few
applications from students… again, all over the country and world… and our HR department has been
just wonderfully supportive in granting visas. So we usually have three or four international
(07:52):
students. We're able to get visas to come in and do the program, so we really have a global
population. That's very exciting. But we actually start with the faculty. So the first thing we do
is send out a call for proposals from faculty to teach in the program, and that just goes through
regular like philosophy calls for papers or calls for conference presentations or something like
(08:16):
that and we just send it out on the listservs and post it on the websites that are useful to get
philosophy teachers. And then some years we only have, let's say, 10 or 12 applications to teach
in the program. Some years, we've had as many as 50 applications from faculty all over the world
(08:38):
to come and teach here. We offer three classes a year, so we're really looking for three creative,
interesting class proposals from folks who want to come here and how they fit together.
We have a committee that evaluates them, and so we get the three courses, and then once we
have the three courses down, then we advertise for student applicants. Usually in the fall,
(09:01):
we get the courses settled, and then over the winter, we get the students coming in.
How large are the classes? And when students sign up, do they sign up for just one course
for the entire two-week session, or do they move from one course to another?
I'll just say a little more about the overall structure of the program. So the three courses
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run simultaneously every day for the two weeks, Monday through Friday. So there'll be 10 class
sessions for each of the three courses. All 20 student participants will be in each of the
three classes. So those classes are typically 90 minutes, sometimes we run them two hours. So the
students are in class a lot during the day. The program is not graded. They're not for credit,
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these classes. They're really just for the love of philosophy. The students, they're working hard,
but they are not typically doing a lot of outside work. There's not a lot of assessment
of their work during the program. So we exhaust them, but they kind of like it. They come here
because they love philosophy, they love trying to do it here. We warn them about it, “you're
(10:10):
going to be exhausted, you gotta be careful.” But they're so excited to be with each other,
to just be in a community of people who want to do philosophy together. They push through.
Can you talk a little bit about the support available for faculty?
Because you mentioned that this is an opportunity for faculty to experiment. So,
can you talk about that aspect of the program?Absolutely. When I was designing this program,
(10:34):
my fantasy was having three excited instructors coming in here, and we
would all talk about philosophy teaching all the time, and I would be in all the classes,
and we would go to each other's classes, and in the evenings, we would talk about
them and think about and work collaboratively on that. And then I discovered very quickly,
(10:57):
as we started to run the program, that directing the program meant that I just had to be wandering
around with buckets of water putting out fires all the time, so I didn't have a lot of time to
sit and talk with the instructors about what they were doing. I got to go to some of the classes and
see what they were doing a little bit, but then we had a student bit by a bat one time, and then
(11:20):
I had a run around Utica trying to find how to get her rabies shots. This year we had a power outage,
we had two tornadoes touched down locally, and then Hamilton College was out of power for the
first two days. It was 96 degrees, 98 degrees. There were no fans, let alone air conditioners,
and so we had to move everybody to a hotel for a couple of days. And these things happen when
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you bring these people together. And I thought we would just be sitting around talking teaching. In
terms of running the program, it's me, and I've always had an assistant director working with me.
That has changed over the years. It started as an undergraduate who I thought would just help me,
I don't know, make photocopies or something, and then that turned into a real leadership
role as well. This year, I had three assistant directors, an assistant director and two student
(12:09):
assistant directors. So there's a lot of work running the program, just making sure people
can get to where they're going. And we're also ambitious about developing the program,
putting in extracurriculars and other kinds of activities that build community, activities that
expand on the work done in the classroom. We do field trips and have visiting speakers here,
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and there's all sorts of stuff that we have to arrange. So a few years ago, my assistant director
at the time said maybe we should hire someone to do that job. And so we put together a grant,
and we got a grant from the American Philosophical Association to hire what we call a pedagogy
resident, and that's someone who works with the instructors and the tutors. We haven't talked
(12:53):
about the tutors yet, I should mention them, to develop the courses over the years. So by
November, we really have the courses picked, and we have a pedagogy resident who's an expert in
philosophical pedagogy. And this year and last year, we were very lucky to have Emily Esch, who
is a professor of philosophy at The College of St. Benedict and St. John's University in Minnesota,
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and she's been working with instructors and tutors in preparing the classes and thinking about what
kinds of classroom activities would be useful in this context, and refining them, and just thinking
about teaching in general. This year also, we sent around a new book on teaching philosophy called
The Art of Teaching Philosophy, and we sent that to all our leadership, our instructors and tutors
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and assistant directors and the pedagogy resident had conversations about that, rooted in that book,
just having them think more about pedagogy. So it's been a real learning experience for
everybody now that we've included the pedagogy resident every year. We had the grant for just the
first year, and then we got to include it in our budget. So on the run up, the time preparing for
(14:06):
the program, as the instructors are refining their plans, they're working with the pedagogy resident,
as the tutors are preparing together with the instructors, they're working with the pedagogy
resident and some use the pedagogy resident more and some less. Once we get to campus,
the pedagogy resident is sitting in on classes and working with the instructors just to process
(14:30):
what's happening and to think about how to take it back to their home institution.
When I saw a report on this, it reminded me of a couple of programs I've been working in. I taught
at the Duke Talent Identification Program for gifted high school students from 1987 up until
2020, and then I've been teaching in the Duke Pre-College program, and one of the things that
(14:51):
I've done in both of those programs is I'd often experiment with things before I tried them in my
regular classes and it sounds like this is a great opportunity to do that, where the students aren't
really put at much risk, and they often appreciate the variety in the instruction, because they often
don't see that in their regular classes. Are faculty in this program often then taking what
(15:13):
they've experimented with here and then going back and using it in the classes and perhaps sharing
it with other professors after this experience?John, you get us. That's exactly what we're hoping
will happen, and it seems like it's happening. Yeah, we have immodest aims. We want to change
the world of philosophy instruction, and we're hoping that people are going back to their
(15:36):
home institutions and working, not only teaching their classes, but talking to other people about
the work that they've done here. We've also been encouraging our faculty to disseminate the work
that they do here and we've been successful in a couple of ways. We've had some people publish
the work that they've done at the HCSPiP in journals, teaching philosophy journals.
(15:59):
I've had a piece coming out in December that I co-authored with one of the instructors here,
and one of the students who was here, who is now going on to graduate school at TC at Columbia. So
that's been very satisfying to see the work start to filter out from here. We also have been pretty
(16:20):
successful because our student population is pretty ambitious, some of them do go to graduate
schools, and we have one student who was in the first year of the program in 2018, she's just
finishing up her PhD now, and she's got a position at Harvard, and she was at Wesleyan last year, and
I think she's at Harvard now, and bringing that kind of interest in pedagogical innovation to what
(16:43):
is often… you know, philosophy classrooms tend to be kind of staid and stiff a lot, and we're trying
to really make them student centered and active learning experiences. So I think it's happening,
I don't really have good measures of how much it's happening, except that I know that I'm
in touch with a lot of the people who've come through the HCSPiP and I hear from them about
(17:05):
what they're doing, and I know that I'm doing it myself. So this article that I just mentioned that
we're publishing, Ashley Pryor from University of Toledo came here, I think it was summer of ‘22,
and she taught a class on philosophy of comedy. So the class was, in the first place, some
philosophical theories of comedy. There was some dry stuff, but then she's also an improv artist,
(17:31):
and she brought improv activities into the philosophy classroom. She had the students
outside just doing all sorts of activities. And I thought this was fun, the students loved it, and
it did have some philosophical content to it. And then the next year, I was teaching a philosophy of
education class, and I had as a course mentor for that class, one of the students who had gone to
(17:53):
the HCSPiP, and now she was a senior at Hamilton, and she was working with me with the first- year
students. And she was like, “why don't we bring some of that improv into the classroom?” And I
was like, “Well, I'll try some!” And so she and I worked together on some activities that were
useful philosophically in the classroom, partly to build community in the classroom and partly
(18:17):
to enable some quick thinking. In philosophy, we're often thinking very carefully and slowly,
but there are moments when it's useful to think more quickly. And so that was really great. I
noticed it was working just as I wanted it. Yeah, bring people in with ideas, and then I would steal
them. I'll say this, every good teacher is a thief. We see other people doing like,
(18:38):
“I'm gonna steal that and make that mine.” So that's what I did. I started taking some of these
improv activities and making them my own, turning them into productive exercises that I think helped
to build trust in the classroom. And I think this is something that we've been thinking about a
lot over the past few instances of the HCSPiP is, how do you help students to dialog across
(19:05):
disagreement? I know we're all thinking about this these days. How do we help students really engage
each other despite the worries they have about how they might be judged for what they say, and how
do we get them to speak honestly and really work out honestly their views? And I think that it's
important to build trust in the classroom, and so sometimes you have to build trust in various ways.
(19:28):
So I found that the improv activities sort of helped to build a little trust in community that
then we could take advantage of that in having conversations that are more difficult. So anyway,
I do know that I'm not the only one who's learning from the program, but I don't know
that I have good ways of talking about how much that stuff gets used after they leave here.
(19:50):
One of the things I really like about that is the fact that some of these students do go on,
and one of the things we talked about a lot on our podcast is how so many faculty come into teaching,
emulating the people they've just observed. And often in graduate school, in particular, there's
not always a lot of innovative teaching or very student-centered teaching approaches, at least in
(20:11):
many disciplines. So it's really nice that there's this opportunity for students to see this before
they go on to grad school, and it sounds like it provides a wonderful experience, which could be
used as a basis for them getting started later.So I like to say the first error of teaching
is “I learned it this way, that's the way I'm going to teach it.” And I think we all have to
(20:34):
recognize as instructors that we were typically exceptional learners, and our students won't
always be exceptional learners. So how do we reach our students in the most effective ways
possible? And that requires thinking in ways that we were not trained. And of course, in philosophy,
I'm sure this is true in other disciplines as well, there's very little incentive in graduate
(20:58):
school and in the early stages of one's career to be creative and innovative about our teaching,
especially coming out of R1s. Most of us come out of R1s at graduate school by definition,
and then our student body isn't the ones that we've been trained to teach. So we have to look
in other ways. Let me say this more about the structure of the program. For every class we hire
(21:22):
not just an instructor, but a teaching assistant or a resident assistant. These we call tutors, and
they play both a role in the classroom and outside of the classroom. All of the tutors are graduate
students in philosophy. Some of them are alums of the program. Some of them are alums of Hamilton
College. We try to use that tutor position as a way of helping continue with our network of
(21:48):
folks. They get a lot out of the program. Part of it is just working with more experienced
instructors in the classroom. Part of it is just being around people who care about teaching,
which is not necessarily what they're getting in graduate school. And part of it is just being in
that context. Two years ago, we had an instructor pull out of the program at what was pretty close
(22:12):
to the last minute. Maybe we had a month to go, and it was a personal problem, a family issue,
and it was perfectly understandable, but it left us sort of struggling, “what are we going to do
with this third class?” And the tutors said, “Why don't we teach the class! And we'll reconfigure
the class in a way that'll be useful for all the tutors,” and they were all so eager to take that
(22:34):
on. I have, as a research interest of my own, team-based learning. I've been working a lot
on team-based learning in philosophy, and so we decided to run a team-based learning class
in philosophy. I kind of structured the class, and then the tutors took it over and taught the class,
and they learned how to design team-based learning activities. In team-based learning,
(22:56):
there are specific ways in which activities are constructed, and so I taught them all about how to
do TBL activities, and they just took it and ran with it, and that turned out to be one of the most
successful classes we've ever had. The students loved it. In part, I think the instructors were
a little younger, a little closer to their age. They're very excited about philosophy,
(23:18):
they're in graduate school. So the students were looking at these folks who are like in these
positions that they were imagining themselves going to be in soon. They were hoping to go to
graduate school, just like these folks. And then everybody was in there being a little vulnerable,
learning together, and it was a great context and one of the most successful classes we've had.
(23:38):
I'm glad you picked up on talking about the tutors, because you had mentioned them earlier,
and I was finding that really interesting and it seems like that's actually an integral piece
to the project, because it's a conduit between the instructors, graduate school,
and undergrads who are looking toward graduate school. So they're kind of right in the middle
like a linchpin to the whole thing.Exactly. And as I said, they have roles
(24:02):
in the classroom, and different instructors use the tutors in different ways, sometimes their
role in the classroom isn't as robust as it is in others. It depends on the class and each of
these classes is different. It's the brainchild of an instructor, and they may not have thought
about this in terms of how to use a tutor. And these are 20- person classes, so it's not like
(24:25):
we need TAs to be managing the classroom. So they have classroom roles, but they also have community
roles, let's say, outside the classroom, in helping the students to prepare for classes,
to manage some questions the students might have about the readings or how to prepare, or what's
(24:46):
expected. But also, this year it was very hot, and this year the tutors wanted to do a water balloon…
they called it a water balloon fight, I said, “I'm not going to endorse a fight, we'll do a water
balloon festival.” So this is a running joke this year, that they were having a festival. So I got a
hose and a bunch of water balloons, and they were out there just trying to beat the heat on campus,
(25:08):
and the tutors played a big role in that. So there's some community building and some classroom
work. And also, one other thing we do with the tutors is, on the middle weekend, we have the
tutors run a session on philosophy after college and what it's like to apply to graduate school,
and how you might find philosophy in your lives other than graduate school, and we don't have any
(25:32):
instructors or leadership go to that, that's just the tutors and the students. They have some open
conversation and some hard conversations about how difficult graduate school can be and how difficult
it can be to find an academic career. And sometimes students come away a little dispirited,
but I think they've gotten an honest view from some people who are in the middle of it.
(25:52):
In a program like this, there are some costs for the support, for feeding the students,
for providing housing, for providing air conditioning when it works, or water balloons
when it doesn't. How is this program funded?So the Truax Fund for Philosophy. It was created
in the 1950s by some Hamilton alums. It was an Hamilton alum from class, I think,
(26:16):
of 1907 in honor of his father, who had been class of 1875 and there's an endowed fund. And we are
very grateful for the largesse of our forebears to have given us this money. It's not easy to
spend money in philosophy, and the fund is quite robust, and so this is where the program started.
(26:42):
We were just very lucky to have this money that we can support people. So let me say, not only
is it feeding them and buying water balloons, but we also pay for all travel for all participants,
and every participant gets a stipend, which we call a fellowship scholarship for the student
participants, because we want to make sure that the program is open to anybody, no matter their
(27:06):
financial situation. We pay for all transportation from anywhere in the world and back, and we pay
everybody a fellowship scholarship for being here. So it's quite an attractive thing for
students if they have i nterest in philosophy, and they are very grateful, especially some of the
international students. That money, which is not a lot of money, the students get $750 for the two
(27:28):
weeks of participation here. We see that money as salary replacement for the time that they're here.
But for some of the students, that's quite a lot of money for them and we heard from one student
that it really funded his studies for the next two years. So that was so exciting for us, that
he could be here and be such a great participant and also benefit, not just intellectually and
(27:50):
pedagogically, but also financially from the program. I wish there were a better recipe
for other people to do it, because it is quite expensive, and finding the money to run a program
like this would be a little bit of a challenge, I know, for others. But I will say I think we could
run a great program without all the money. I mean, we need to feed them still, obviously,
but we're glad that we are able to be as inclusive and diverse as that money allows us to be.
(28:16):
It's nice when you have the kind of funding that will let all that stress to go away and you can
focus really on the subject matter of the program. I really love all the layers of mentorship that
you've described in the program, the mentorship from the pedagogy expert, the mentorship from the
faculty, the mentorship from the tutors right to the students. There's so many layers there. Can
(28:41):
you talk a little bit about some of the reactions students have had from the opportunity to interact
with so many folks in the discipline?I also hope that I have some
mentorship role as well. Yeah, I didn't mean to not include you.
No, it's very funny, because I really do, and sometimes the program, it feels like I'm just
working behind the scenes and I don't have an active role. But last year, not this past summer,
(29:05):
the summer before this, I got COVID in the middle of the program, and I had to work remotely for
the second half of the program. And I think I have some role in trying to foster a kind of
supportive atmosphere that I think that's very helpful. But yeah, okay, this wasn't about me,
this question. This was about students and how they find their mentorship. Look,
one of the tutors said to me this year, this was his second year in the program, and he said he
(29:29):
learned more in his two weeks with the program… the first time he was with it… about teaching,
then he had his whole life all put together. And that was such a rewarding comment for me to hear
how useful we've been. But Hamilton College, we typically send about three quarters of a
student to graduate school every year, in other words, less than one a year. And this past year,
(29:51):
we had four students who were thinking about doing graduate school and are looking at it.
We've never had those kinds of numbers. And what happened was at the HCSPiP, they started seeing
how exciting philosophy could be, especially when taught creatively and thoughtfully, and
it just really was inspiring for them. So I see that in the increased interest in their classes
(30:15):
when they come out of the HCSPiP and they come back. We had a rising sophomore a few years ago
who was interested in philosophy, but kind of not going anywhere. He wasn't the greatest student,
he had, the interest in philosophy, but not quite the skills. And we saw coming out of the HCSPiP,
how motivated he became and how sophisticated he became, especially being around some of the
(30:39):
older students, not even the tutors and the faculty, but just some of the older students.
And that's one way in which we sell to our administration that we should use this money
for this summer program is because it really does benefit the Hamilton students who participate. We
can see the academic sophistication just grow by leaps and bounds in some of these students after
(31:00):
they come back after the HCSPiP. We also had six students from last year's program in the fall,
they did their senior theses, and then they presented them at the APA at the eastern
divisional meeting of the American Philosophical Association in January. And we've never had that
(31:22):
kind of interest in professional philosophy and real academic scholarship. So we see it with the
Hamilton students. For other students who come from wherever they're coming from, this year,
we had two students from Poland, we had a student from China, and we've had students from Indonesia
recently, Colombia. We certainly hear from them that this was an amazing experience. We do some
(31:46):
assessment. We have a robust survey at the end of the program, and we ask some questions.
We're looking at these results longitudinally and thinking about the program and how to improve it.
But often we see them briefly, and off they go, and we hope to hear from them later, I will say,
at the APA this past January where we had all the Hamilton students there, I noticed that there were
(32:09):
like a dozen, maybe 14, HCSPiP alums who were on the program at the eastern divisional meeting of
the APA, and so I found money to take them all out to lunch, and we had a little HCSPiP reunion
there. And we started hearing from people. where they were going and how they were using it and
how they were carrying in the hearts, the ideas about innovative, student-centered pedagogies.
(32:31):
Now you've talked about a number of specific methods, team-based learning,
improv and so forth. What are some of the other interesting strategies that
faculty have tried exploring in this program?We've had some great classes. Not every class is
super successful, but we learn from every class. A couple of years ago, we had a class on Hobbes and
(32:53):
Minecraft. So this is Hobbes’s political theory. All the students got Minecraft accounts, and the
class days basically took place on the Minecraft platform, and the instructor, Rebeccah Lieby,
was asking the students to test out Hobbes’s claims about the state of nature. I'm sure you've
heard the phrase that “life in a state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
(33:15):
So she was like, “well, let's see what happens in the Minecraft environment, and test Hobbes’
claims about that.” And so that was super fun. And really, the students really rose to the nasty,
brutish, and short aspect of Hobbesian political theory. So I think there was some confirmation
there. Last year we had an instructor, Sara Uckelman, from Durham in the UK. She was
(33:41):
testing fiction writing as a philosophical method. They read a little philosophy, but what they were
really doing in the class was writing fiction as a way of exploring philosophical themes, so that was
pretty cool. It's not a standard pedagogical tool to have students writing fiction in philosophy
(34:01):
classes. One of our early very successful classes had students doing a lot of metacognition, so they
were reading some really difficult work. They were reading George Yancy’s Backlash book, I don't know
if you know George's “Dear White America” letter, that he ended up getting a lot of backlash,
(34:22):
and he came to the program and visited with us and participated, and also Susan Brison's account
of her rape and assault. So they're really, really heavy, difficult material. And when you're reading
that kind of heavy, difficult material on racism and sexual violence, you have to be careful about
what you say in class, and students have to be careful. So the instructor was Ann Cahill
(34:43):
from Elon University in North Carolina, she had developed these both hand signals and little note
cards that allowed students to signal what kind of conversational move they were about to make
before they made it, and just helped students to process what they were saying and to help other
(35:05):
people see, are you presenting an illustration of what someone else said? Are you presenting
more supporting arguments? Are you presenting a counter argument? Are you raising a question?
There are all these different kinds of moves that can be made in a philosophical conversation,
and sometimes it takes a while for students to understand what someone else is saying, because
(35:28):
they don't understand what kind of conversational move they're going to make. So they had signals
for what kind of conversational move that was going to be. That was really an exciting class,
one of our most successful, not that I'm playing favorites or comparing, I'll say one more. The
first year we had someone who was a philosopher as well as an artist. Her name is Juli Thorson,
(35:48):
she's emeritus at Ball State University, now she is, and she had drawing activities that were
related to questions about personal identity. So they were reading philosophy of personal
identity and then doing these drawing activities for students to use the other side of their brain
in processing these kinds of questions about themselves. I can tell you about more, but those
(36:13):
are pretty good examples of really exciting stuff that is not your typical philosophy lecture.
One of the things that was mentioned in The Chronicle article was that a
professor who had been participating in the program noted that in her regular classes,
she was struggling with students submitting AI-generated work, as we all are.
Yeah.Do you have any ideas of
(36:33):
some strategies that philosophy faculty have been using to discourage the use of AI as a substitute
of learning? With all this experimentation going around you, we're eager for ideas.
Look, I wish I had a secret key that would fix things, but here's the way I'm thinking about it,
and I think this is what I bring to my own classes, and that I'm trying to do at the HCSPiP:
(36:55):
learning is change, it's changing the way you're thinking, and change is hard,
and so we have to start by acknowledging that real learning, real honest learning,
done with real integrity, is not easy. I mean, some things are easy, but philosophy, not so much,
because we're asking students to really dig into their core beliefs and examine them,
(37:20):
and that can be scary for people. On the other hand, philosophy, when done well, is a lot of
fun. It's a social activity, it's communicative. We have this image of philosophy as like the lone,
great man speaking words of wisdom, but that's not really how philosophy is done. Philosophy
is done in community, in dialog, hearing various perspectives and listening to them and allowing
(37:46):
your own preconceptions to be challenged. And if it's done in a threatening way, or one in which
there's not trust in the community, then students will shut down, and then they're going to go on
and they're just going to do whatever they can to get their grades. And of course, they're going
to turn to whatever resources are rational, like these AIs. In some ways. I understand why students
(38:09):
do this. They're overworked and anxious, and it seems like a rational thing to do, but what
we're trying to do is make philosophy classes more interesting, more engaging, more student centered,
and more fun. And if we do that, we're hoping that students are going to respond by saying,
“Oh, yeah, this is fun stuff to do, and if I trust my community, I could really like grow” and look,
(38:35):
students are skeptical about received wisdom. I mean, we see this all over. They're skeptical
about being told what to do. And so if they're empowered to really think for themselves,
maybe they're really gonna actually try to think for themselves. So that's what we're trying to do
in this program, is to change the way people think about philosophy and humanities more generally,
(38:58):
from like, learning the received wisdom and regurgitating it to like, “Oh, here's a chance
for me to really think about these questions and to think about what people are telling me,
and to develop my own views about it.” And that's what student-centered pedagogy is all about. So
it's not a way of policing against the AIs, it's a way of undermining the motivation that students
(39:22):
have for turning to the AIs. We are very lucky at Hamilton College to have an open curriculum,
and what that means is that students do not have to take any classes they don't want to take.
We don't have a gen ed program. We don't have required classes. So on the first day of class,
almost all students there are a few exceptions, but almost all students are in classes they want
(39:45):
to be in, and so that's an opportunity for us to say, “Okay, you want to learn about this stuff,
let's do it in a way that is going to be useful and productive for you, so that when we give you
assignments, these are assignments about things that you want to learn, that you've committed to
trying to learn about, and they're going to help you, rather than just be assessments of did you
(40:08):
file away enough information and regurgitate it back to me.” It's about assignment design. Can you
make assignments in such a way that students see that they are for this student's benefits, rather
than just ways of policing and testing them.That's a challenge we're all working with,
(40:28):
we're all facing, and that's in general, the sort of approach we encourage people to use, giving
students more autonomy and being transparent about the benefits they get by engaging in
this themselves, rather than just outsourcing their assignments to some external tool.
Yeah, yeah.So we always wrap up by asking, what's next?
(40:50):
So this year, we broadened our program by having early arrival and orientation for our
international participants, and that was really productive. And every year we're thinking about
ways in which we can improve the program with trying not to extend ourselves financially or
too much personally. There are some sustainability questions, both the money and my own ability to
(41:16):
work over the summer on this project. It's a lot of work, so we're moving to an every other year
approach for sustainability reasons, but mostly the big project that we're going to work on this
year, while we're taking a year off, is to develop more courses led by graduate student tutors,
with help from the experienced faculty because I think that was the place where we realized that,
(41:41):
and you caught this, which was great, that that kind of mentorship of the graduate students was
something that we've done quite effectively, I think. And so we're going to be writing some
grants and thinking about, how do we expand the program in such a way that we can give a little
more space for graduate students to be developing their work? But I think the core of the program
(42:04):
is really very good. We had a great year again this year, and we're just going to gather our
strength and do it again. I wish we could expand it to more people. And it's not even the money
that is the big barrier, It's just It would be so much more work and not sustainable.
It would be really nice if more disciplines had this. I'd love to
(42:25):
see something like this in economics.I would love to talk to people, if they're
thinking about developing these kinds of classes. I have a lot of resources. I've developed this
stuff ground up and anybody who wants to try something like this out, I'll say this,
several of our alums, that is, people who were students in the program have gone on to graduate
(42:46):
school and started summer programs in philosophy for high school students, and what a wonderful
testament that is to our success. They've taken from what we've done here, and they've sort of
applied it in different contexts. So I think the way in which we create a context for learning
that's not tied to grades and credits and just for the love of learning, that's been a real joy.
(43:12):
Well, thanks for sharing your program with us. It's always nice to hear about
these opportunities for learners to be excited about their discipline.
I really appreciate you inviting me on, and I'm always happy to talk about the HCSPiP,
so thanks for the time. Well, thank you. We really enjoyed
this conversation, and we look forward to talking to you at some point in the future as well.
Great. I'd be happy to come back and talk about team-based learning or something. I'm
(43:35):
writing a book on team-based learning this fall as I'm on leave, and that's my plan.
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(43:55):
our Tea for Teaching Facebook page. You can find show notes, transcripts and
other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.
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