APA
Committee on the
Teaching of Philosophy
Committee Report
1998
The following appeared in Volume 72,
Number 5 (May, 1999) of The Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical
Association
Rosalind Ladd, Chair
The Committee has sponsored a number of
programs this year designed to fulfill its charge to assess trends and needs and to
undertake programs for the improvement of teaching.
The open Call for Proposals has succeeded
in generating good ideas from a broad representation of APA members for presentations at
the divisional meetings. This year at the Eastern Division a panel of three authors and
three publishers participated in an informative and lively session on textbook publishing.
The session at the Pacific meetings featured a report and discussion of several
institutions’ projects to teach non-philosophy faculty to teach ethics.
At the Central Division meetings, in
cooperation with the American Association of Philosophy Teachers, the Committee again
sponsored a special pre-conference series of workshops on teaching. Workshops will be
offered again next year, and we are exploring changes in format and publicity to try to
increase the number of participants.
This past summer, again in co-sponsorship
with AAPT, 13 graduate students were partially funded to attend a 5 half-days Seminar on
Teaching Philosophy taught by Martin Benjamin. This is the third time this seminar was
sponsored and the evaluations from participants suggest that this format is a very
effective way to help sharpen the skills they will need to make the transition from
student to teacher.
We have welcomed the publication this
year of In the Socratic Tradition: Essays on Teaching Philosophy, selections from
the Newsletter on Teaching Philosophy, edited by Tziporah Kasachkoff and published by
Rowman and Littlefield. Professor Kasachkoff has generously designated the APA as the
recipient of royalties from the sale of the book, to be used for the support of teaching.
The practice of giving recognition to APA
members who have received teaching awards from their home institutions will be resumed
next year and we encourage members to send in relevant information about themselves and
colleagues.
The Committee is actively pursuing the
idea of trying to gain outside financial support for a strong national initiative to
increase training in the teaching of philosophy for graduate students and to provide
on-going support for all teachers of philosophy. As the challenges of teaching increase,
with a changing student population and the down-sizing of Humanities departments,
excellence in teaching becomes critical to the careers of individuals and the health of
the profession.
We envision a Planning Conference to
bring together representatives of different kinds of institutions to assess needs and
brain-storm effective methods of training, specific to philosophy. The planning will lead
to a series of workshops which will train not only graduate students directly, but also
graduate department mentors who will then continue a focus on teaching in the graduate
curriculum. A final outcome should be the creation of a Philosophy Teaching Resources
Center at the national office to coordinate and support teaching for all members.
To assess the present state of teacher
training, a short survey was mailed to all graduate programs. This brought responses from
58 institutions, 41 of which reported some program in place for TA training, ranging from
informal mentoring to courses that earn graduate credit. Many programs, however, are
offered on a university-wide basis with little or no attention to discipline-specific
issues. In addition to providing information, each institution was asked to name one
faculty member and one current graduate student who can serve as liasons to the Committee
as the project develops.
A number of APA members have been very
generous in contributing their time and expertise in helping develop the proposal to this
point, and the national board has allocated a small sum for a stipend to someone who will
help finalize the writing of a formal grant proposal.
It is clear that a number of issues
related to teaching are also of high concern to other APA committees, and this Committee
looks forward to cooperating more closely with other groups concerned with such things as
the use and misuse of adjunct faculty, the role of graduate students as TA’s, and in
general, the future and health of the profession.
The Committee welcomes ideas,
suggestions, and communications from all members.
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