Innovation and Improvement
My recent innovation comes from successfully implementing backwards course design.
This fall, I was given the chance to teach an upper level philosophy course for the first time. The course, 19th Century Continental Philosophy, covers a period of exciting philosophical development including works from figures such as Fichte, Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche. When thinking about the course I took one important line from Nietzsche’s writings from the end of the 19th century and attempted to provide the historical foundation for that single quote. The quote was the infamous line from his Gay Science where he states that “God is dead.” I argued that, in order to understand what Nietzsche really meant by this quote, one would have to understand the radical shift in philosophical perspective that resulted from the scientific revolution, the enlightenment, and the development of evolutionary theory. I argued that this line could be traced backwards from Nietzsche through Marx and Feuerbach, to Hegel and Fichte and ultimately all the way back to Kant’s first Critique. With this narrative in view, I selected my readings to focus entirely on this path of thinking from Kant to Nietzsche. The result was that the course flowed nicely from beginning to end, and the students had a clear understanding of why we were reading every text that I assigned.
I also implemented backwards design into my assessment strategy. My goal was for my students to understand the deep and complicated philosophical history that inspired Nietzsche’s thinking, so I structured my course assessment around targeted reading questions, paraphrastic interpretation assignments, and cumulative tests. On day one, I communicated to my students the core tenets of the class structure. They understood that their homework was designed to help them identify crucial aspects of the reading, that their paraphrases were designed to teach them how to slow down and read complex philosophical texts, and that learning this material would be essential to doing well on the midterm and final because their knowledge in the beginning of the semester scaffolded nicely into the material they worked with by the end of the course.