Carolina Flores

Resources

Resources for Teaching Key Philosophical Skills

In my teaching, I am committed to explicitly teaching philosophical skills. I see this as part of inclusive pedagogy: students from marginalized backgrounds (especially low-income and first-generation students) are less likely to be familiar and comfortable with academic skills, and explicit guidelines and class discussion go a long way to leveling the playing field. A more obvious advantage is that students tend to hand in better work.

Here are some guidelines I have produced and used in my teaching, in conjunction with class activities to help students acquire the relevant skills:

• Classroom Discussions (produced in discussion with students in my Philosophical Aspects of Feminism course)

• Reading Philosophy

• Arguments: The Basics

• Argument Reconstruction

• Writing an Op-Ed

• Writing an Outline

• Writing Objections

• Writing a Philosophy Paper (in classes, I supplement this with other materials, including Jim Pryor’s guidelines on writing a philosophy paper and Sophie Horowitz’s scavenger-hunt peer review activity)

• Peer-Reviewing a Paper

• Sub-Fields of Philosophy (and which classes to take after introduction to philosophy)

Sample Course Materials

You can access all the materials I used for a unit on applied social epistemology unit that I taught in an introductory critical thinking class (Logic, Reasoning, and Persuasion) here.

For my classes on feminist philosophy and philosophy of cognitive science, I produced a number of handouts for active learning, including activities for in-class discussion. Some samples are below.

Philosophical Aspects of Cognitive Science:

• Handout on Peter Carruthers’s “On Being Simple Minded”

• Handout on Tenembaum et al.’s “How to Grow a Mind: Statistics, Structure, and Abstraction”

• Handout on Tamar Gendler’s “The Epistemic Costs of Implicit Bias”

Philosophical Aspects of Feminism:

• Handout on Elizabeth Anderson’s “Feminist Epistemology: an Explanation and Defense”

• Handout on Adrienne Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”

• Handout on Robin West’s “A Comment on Rape, Sex, and Consent”