Teaching and Technology Apprenticeships in Philosophy

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Teaching and Technology Apprenticeships in
Philosophy the Humanities
By Dr. Kay Picart FSU ENG HUM
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Aim

• to form a collaboration with invited students in
  the attempt to integrate technology with teaching
  by developing opportunities for students to train
  as teaching apprentices and to acquire relevant
  skills in the use and development of technology
  resources, which are germane to teaching and
  learning Philosophy.

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Requirements

• Such students had at least one class of
  Philosophy taught by the professor, and as such,
  had acquired and displayed a proficiency in the
  general subject matter and skills of critical
  thinking, reading, writing and argumentation that
  the professor finds essential to function
  effectively as a peer instructor.

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Tasks as a Teaching Apprentice

• leading weekly small group discussions that
  served as forums for clarifying possible
  confusions concerning the lectures for preparing
  for exams and simply for engaging in
  philosophical inquiry that contextualizes
  lectures taken up in class

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Tasks as a Teaching Apprentice

• monitoring, responding to, and grading weekly
  virtual threaded conversations and other
  web-based/interactive/virtual activities assigned
  outside the formal class time, based on
  guidelines given by the professor, who was
  monitoring the entire procedure

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Tasks as a Teaching Apprentice

• receiving instruction and supervision for
  checking short quizzes, objective sections
  short essay portions of the exam (or drafts and
  chapter summaries), with other student teaching
  and technology apprentices and the professor.

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Tasks as a Teaching Apprentice

• collaborating with the professor and other
  student apprentices in designing exams and
  checking drafts that lead to the production of
  the final paper

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Tasks as a Teaching Apprentice

• leading one or two sessions of the class, in
  which, after consultation with the professor, the
  student apprentice took over a selected topic
  (and used relevant technology in these
  presentations) and afterwards received detailed
  feedback regarding her/his performance

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Honors Status

• In addition to these tasks, student apprentices
  are required to hand in a short (10 pages, DS,
  minimum) paper related to the courses in which
  they have apprenticed, which will be used as raw
  material for conference presentation and possible
  undergraduate journal publication.

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Duties as a Technology Apprentice

• to update and post the syllabi of the courses
  the professor taught at St. Lawrence University,
  such as the Introduction to Philosophy Feminist
  Legal Theory and Philosophy and Film courses

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Duties as a Technology Apprentice

• to develop sections enhancing the presentation
  of the syllabi, which had frame grabs, powerpoint
  presentations, video clips, CD Rom clips, and
  brief audio and written excerpts that provided a
  succinct explanatory backbone or a series of
  guide questions that did not take the place of
  assigned texts to read in preparation for class,
  or the in-class lectures and discussions

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Duties as a Technology Apprentice

• design a venue (and maintain a site) for
  threaded conversations in which students, the
  teaching and technology apprentices, and the
  professor could extend discussions beyond
  classroom time

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Duties as a Technology Apprentice

• engage/assist the students in the stepwise
  development of their own course-related web
  projects, which present the results of their
  final projects.
• Feminist Legal Theory
• Basic Philosophical Issues
• Philosophy and Dance

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Duties as a Technology Apprentice

• For example, for the Philosophy and Film course,
  this entails the production of video shorts,
  which move in between the creative and the
  critical/analytic. For the Feminist Legal Theory
  course, this involves the creation of a webpage
  designed like a poster presentation for a
  conference that entails a theoretical analysis of
  the legal dynamics of this case (e.g. Links to
  Student Webpages)

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Additional Feature

• when possible, the use of technology also
  enabled the integration of virtual guest speakers
  to various lectures, through the use of
  conference call formats (e.g., Judge Richard
  Posner for Feminist Legal Theory, and Professors
  Janice Rushing Noel Carroll for Philosophy
  Film)

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Benefits/Results

• Students who wished to acquire training as
  teaching and technology apprentices had the
  benefit of rigorous feedback from the professor
  and extensive support from Information Technology
  staff

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Benefits/Results

• The use of peer teachers and technology
  assistants enhanced the atmosphere of learning
  and contributed to greater collegiality within
  and outside of class, while maintaining a
  professional sensibility

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Benefits/Results

• Students weighing whether or not to sign up for a
  class could simply print off a copy of the
  syllabus and have basic information on the class
  and its subject matter, methods and requirements
  available at any time

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Benefits/Results

• The development of an integrated website got rid
  of the need to set up multiple equipment, such as
  a slide projector, boombox, tv/vcr, powerpoint or
  net surfing presentations. The result was a
  formally neater and more coherent (not to mention
  convenient) arrangement. (e.g., ppt. lectures in
  WST 5934 or ENG 3014 or HUM 5253)

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Benefits/Results

• Students who (had to) miss a class could click on
  the site and start catching up on the basics of
  what they have missed so when they consulted with
  the professor or the apprentices, the time was
  better spent on questions, rather than a rote
  recapitulation of a lecture

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Benefits/Results

• Both the development of interactive activities
  and a forum for threaded conversations rendered
  the learning environment more dynamic and enabled
  discussions to extend beyond classroom time and
  physical confines (thus coordinating well with
  small group discussions, which were coordinated
  with virtual discussions in extending
  opportunities for conversation beyond formal
  classroom time)

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Quantitative SurveysScale 1-5, with 1 as
highest

• Integration of Technology
• PHIL 100 (N23) 1.41
• PHIL 336 (N13)
• 1.61
• PHIL 366 (N10)
• 1.6

• Integration of Apprentices
• PHIL 100 (N23)
• 1.35
• PHIL 336 (N13)
• 1.69
• PHIL 366 (N10)
• 2.25

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Latest Developments

• I modified this model for an FSU mixed
  undergraduate-graduate course called Gender,
  Authority and the Politics of Representation in
  Science and Art

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Applications in Graduate Pedagogical Training in
Multicultural Film

• I have also used this model to develop a training
  program for TAs in the multicultural film course
  of the Humanities Program here at FSU.