What virtues are central to a meaningful and transformative teaching philosophy? I suggest that it is the virtues of love, justice, and responsibility.
Let me explain by telling you a few stories from my teaching career.
My teaching philosophy is the kind of philosophy that can change someone from a wasp-killer to a wasp-liberator.
One fall, several years ago in my ethics class, a few wasps invaded our classroom.
My first instinct was to kill these wasps, and this immediately provoked a discuss of the ethics of killing wasps.
Picture by Duncan Sanchez, courtesy of Unsplash.
Through the discussion, my students’ view on the matter changed my mind.
I now liberate wasps out the classroom window, whenever I can, rather than killing them.
A key component of my ethics class is a group project.
In this project, students work with one another to solve ethical dilemmas, like the wasp one, drawing on the ethical traditions we cover in class.
They present their group dilemma to the class and suggest the best ethical solution to it. Then they use their group project to write their own ethical code.
I remember one student in my ethics class who told me that he had never thought about his ethical code before class, but now he thought about it all the time.
He went on to take business ethics with me.
And he wrote a thoughtful, creative business code in which he discussed how he planned to work for the good of his future employees.
Picture by Adeolu Eletu, courtesy of Unsplash.
One of my main teaching goals, which this ethical code helps to achieve, is that students learn how to care for themselves and others (both the human and more-than-human world), treating everyone with dignity.
That is the practical expression of love.
My teaching philosophy is the kind of philosophy that may lead professors and students to juggle, hula-hoop, and roll down hills, laughing and giggling together at the absurdity of the situation.
A few springs ago I taught a philosophy of play class in which my students and I explored the connection between play, the good life, and the good society.
We read various philosophical excerpts on play from thinkers like Aristotle, Aquinas, and Friedrich Schiller.
And we also played a lot.
Friedrich Schiller, picture courtesy of Unsplash.
At the of the semester, my students developed a presentation on their philosophy of play and applied it to a practical area of their choosing.
One student, who was about to get married, wrote about the importance of play in healthy marriages.
Another student, who is studying to be a teacher, presented on the importance of play, especially in recess, for robust child development.
Friedrich Schiller, a key philosopher of play we read in class, would have been delighted with these presentations.
In his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, Friedrich Schiller argues
“Man plays only when he is a man in the full sense of the word, and he is only a complete man when he plays.”[1]
You can find Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man at your local library or bookstore or on Amazon.
One of my primary teaching goals is to help students develop a sense of play, along with connected attitudes like curiosity, wonder, and imagination.
Such attitudes help them understand how to cultivate a good and happy life and society.
Understanding how to do this helps us acknowledge our shared good, a goal with is central to justice.
After all, if we do not care about our shared good, it’s hard to be just to one another.
My teaching philosophy is the kind of philosophy that may lead someone to cry with her students over hopeless-seeming situations in the world and then forge a path towards hope together.
A few years ago, two of my ethics students, both black women, requested to do an independent study on Africana philosophy.
I had previously done such a study with another student who later went on to study philosophy at the PhD level, writing her PhD on the philosophy of Kant and W.E.B. Dubois.
She recently graduated and is now a philosophy professor.
In my study of Africana philosophy with these two women, we read authors like W.E.B. Dubois, Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrume, and Cornell West.
My students shared with me how these authors helped them articulate the pain they often experienced living as black women in the United States.
At the end of the semester, we watched together the movie Judas and the Black Messiah.
This movie chronicles, among other things, the CIA’s assassination of Black Panther Fred Hampton and some of his friends.
Fred Hampton, picture courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
After the movie finished, I ended up crying during my attempts to discuss the movie with them.
I often feel hopeless about the ongoing racism that still exists in our country.
And I feel deeply grieved about how it affects people I love, such as the young people I teach in my classroom.
My students took the discussion over and told me about things that made them feel hopeless and also things that gave them hope.
These studies with my black students gave me hope that we can learn to have what Gregory C. Ellison refers to as “fearless dialogues”.
And in having such fearless dialogues, we can better work together to create a more just society.
This is how we take responsibility.
My pedagogy can best be described as biophilic pedagogy.
It is a theory of education written about explicitly by Eric Fromm and Paulo Freire and implicitly by earlier theorists like Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Herbert Marcuse.
Biophilic pedagogy helps students develop all their positive capacities to cultivate a life and society that is both moral and happy.
Cultivating our positive capacities together helps us become more resilient individually and also together as a society.
I am especially interested in exploring key virtues connected with biophilic pedagogy such as love, justice, and responsibility, along with related virtues like curiosity, play, and hope.
This work matters.
Drawing and painting by Shelly P. Johnson
I have been a teacher or professor for over thirty years.
And the reason I am so committed to teaching is because I believe education can make a profound difference in students’ lives.
It empowers them by helping them cultivate a sense of their own dignity, as well as that of others: love.
And it also empowers them to imagine the common good: justice.
It empowers them find creative solutions to important problems, cultivating rational hope that they can cultivate a good and happy life: responsibility.
It can help them become Resilient and More.
If I can succeed in empowering students in this way, I believe I have taught well and lived well.
You might also like this post: Fromm on Authoritarian vs Biophilic Leaders (and Why It Matters)
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1] Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man. Keith Tribe, trans. Penguin Classics. UK. 2016, pgs. 56-57.
