Professor of Philosophy Russell Marcus gave the 2024 presidential address at the American Association of Philosophy Teachers biennial conference in July at Otterbein University (Ohio). His talk "Collaboration and Serious Engagement in the Philosophy Classroom" marked the second and final year of his presidency. Marcus has been an AAPT board member or committee chair since 2010, and served as vice president in 2021-22.
In the address, Marcus demonstrated how techniques from team-based learning (TBL) support classroom conversations across disagreement. “We face challenges, in both civil society and the philosophy classroom, to help students to learn to collaborate across differences. TBL structures scaffold productive conversations, allowing students to work more comfortably with their peers and even to embrace difficult conversations,” he said. Marcus demonstrated typical philosophy TBL activities, showing how they first encourage trust and interdependence and then can be leveraged to low-affect and even high-affect discussions.
The AAPT biennial meeting is called a workshop-conference to emphasize an interest in active engagement. Attendees were organized into heterogeneous groups and worked through three distinct activities, so they could experience the ways in which the design of TBL activities facilitates difficult conversations. Participants collaborated on activities with content on Descartes's Meditations, contemporary problems in education, and justifications of political violence.
