We now have college students learn books and articles, write essays, reply check questions, and make displays. These all primarily contain phrases. Is it value fascinated about the way to educate philosophy in ways in which don’t contain phrases?
[image via Handling Ideas]
Martin Lenz (Groningen) thinks so. In a submit at his weblog, Dealing with Concepts, he says,
the mere try to remodel written ideas into photographs or to mix these two media can afford a extra holistic understanding of assorted points… Every so often I have been trying to encourage students to utilize drawings, tables, graphs or different types of instruments of their writing. We’re clearly inclined to make use of totally different types of reasoning consistent with our diverging skills or backgrounds. As Frege argued in his Begriffsschrift, we clearly see totally different elements of ideas when utilizing totally different graphic representations of logical inferences.
Right here’s a educating experiment he tried in his course, Medieval Theories of Considering:
I wrote to my college students a day earlier than class asking them to deliver colored pencils, then handed out sheets of drawing paper and requested them to arrange infographics on the spot. I divided the scholars in three teams. One needed to depict a conceptual distinction or downside, one other needed to depict a debate, and one more needed to depict a historic improvement. After chosing a subject, they’d about thirty minutes to supply their work after which current (a) on the subject depicted and (b) on the expertise afforded via the duty. The outcomes had been superb.
Some advantages of workouts like this, he notes, embrace:
- giving a set of scholars, apart from the extremely verbal, a possibility to shine at school
- forcing the scholars to indicate an understanding of the fabric with out having the ability to parrot again what they’ve learn or what the teacher has mentioned
- offering new methods for college students to attach with or anchor the concepts they’re studying about.
You possibly can learn extra from Professor Lenz on this here.
I’m curious if others have tried educating philosophy via photographs and different primarily non-linguistic media and assignments, what college students have considered them, how efficient you thought they had been, issues you may have about them, and so forth. Dialogue welcome.
