A critique of methods in the scholarship of teaching and learning in philosophy

Abstract

The goal in this article is to offer a vision for a scholarship of philosophical learning that philosophers find plausible and helpful and that utilizes our disciplinary skills and knowledge to produce useful insights into how students learn philosophy. Doing so is a challenge because philosophers typically and historically conceive of our work as being properly done in the proverbial armchair, that is, done without being tied to empirical data. To begin, I look at three common types of philosophy pedagogy research and I show ways that each can be done well and the limitations of each. Ultimately, I argue that, while useful and revealing in some ways, the techniques typically fail to illuminate where philosophy students are in learning the habits, dispositions and skills that are most typically associated with the discipline. Arguing that to understand students in these ways requires observation, and thus, non-armchair methods, I briefly explore the use of think alouds, arguing that they offer one viable path to a scholarship of learning in philosophy that would allow philosophers to both observe and to use our own disciplinary skills to make the thinking of our students visible in ways that will help us be clearer about how student and expert thinking differs so we can better determine how to help them improve.