Carolina Flores

Resources

Here I’ve collected resources I’ve produced for teaching key philosophical skills, as well as handouts with active learning exercises for teaching material in epistemology and other fields. Feel free to use or adapt for your own purposes as you see fit, and let me know how it goes!

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 at Rutgers, Spring 2019)

• 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)

Applied epistemology activities

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. And here are all the handouts I used for this course on social and political epistemology, containing both brief explanations of the material and active learning exercises.

Other handouts for active learning

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”