Hello everyone
I've followed this discussion with interest. There are a number of
unanswered questions that contributers have raised. One is: how long has
this been around? I've been awarding PPs for about 15 years, maybe
others have been doing it for longer. Another contributor mentioned the
difficulty of getting Asian students to contribute since they are so
respectful of instructors. A friend of mine who teaches in Singapore - a
philosopher, like me - tells me that it is is very difficult to get the
students to see that the point of philosophy is for the students to
evaluate rival philosophical theories rather than to learn from the
instructor what the "right" theory is. I have to say that I have found
management/business students, initially at least, to be similarly
reluctant to engage in discussion of issues, unlike arts students.
More generally, my own experience with PPs is with quite large undergrad
course of 100 - 250 (I don't use them with my much smaller grad classes)
in applied ethics. Because of the size of these classes I take the
lectures and the students have discussion groups of about 15-20
(tutorials, we call them in NZ) led by what N Americans would call TAs.
Because different personnel are involved we have to have clear criteria
for allocating PPs: a combination of attendance (you can't participate
unless you show up) and the quality of the contributions. We also
believe it is our responsibity to make sure that students do each make a
contribution. Rather than calling on students individually to answer
questions etc, we regularly break up the tutorial group into groups of
three or four and observe their discussions. We've also experimented
with expecting students to introduce the set reading for the tutorial on
one occasion during the course. BTW, all our tutors have to attend
training sessions conducted by the university's central Teaching and
Learning Development Unit, they work in teams, and for each course, one
of the tutors is the coordinator. There is also a faculty member who
coordinates all the tutors in the department and produces and updates a
tutors' handbook. The students all anonymously evaluate the performance
of each tutor at the end of each course (as well as mine, of course).
Why do we award PPS? Philosophy is a very verbal topic! We regard
tutorials as the heart of a course and I tell my students at the
beginning of the very first lecture that they are *doing* philosophy noy
just being taught about it. I tell them that the only way to find out
what anything is about, and why it's worth doing, is to *do* it.(I give
as an example swimming or dancing. No doubt you can all think of more
obvious, if less suitable for classroom use, examples of activities that
only those who have done them, know what they're like and what fun they
are). Thus, when we evaluate their contributions to discussion, we are
evaluating their ability to do ethics.
There is another more mundane reason. Courses in the Faculty of Art and
Social Sciences (where Philosophy is located) here are not allowed to
require attendance at any classes except for compulsory field trips and
labs. Thus, PPs provide an incentive to show up for tutorials. Of
course, we try to ensure that they are attractive and interesting enough
for students to want to attend them anyway once they've tried them out.
I also have some distance education students in some of these courses,
and they have both synchronous and bulletin board electronic discussion
groups for which they also receive PPs.
Best to all
Alastair
"Don't look back. Something might be gaining on you."
Leroy "Satchel" Paige
Dr Alastair S. Gunn
Department of Philosophy
University of Waikato
Private Bag
Hamilton, New Zealand
Ph 64 7 8562889 X8441
Fax 64 7 8384047
Email
alastair@waikato.ac.nz
Qualia Consultants, Applied Ethics
PO Box 13085
Hamilton, New Zealand
Ph/Fax 64 7 8563073
Email
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