Ethics and Education

• Touchy Subject: The History and Philosophy of Sex Education
  

Produced by Carrie Welsh, Anna Nelson, Teresa Nelson, and Jennifer McCord.

• Ethics & Education Teaching Guides

• Book: Can College Level the Playing Field?: Higher Education in an Unequal Society
• Episodes mentioned: The Plumber Episode, The Right to Higher Education, and The True Costs of College

Produced by Harry Brighouse, Hannah Bounds, and Carrie Welsh. Music by Fred Table and the Chairs.

Transcript

Website: https://ethicsandeducation.wceruw.org/podcast/can-college-level-the-playing-field/

This is the third episode in a miniseries co-produced by Rebecca M. Taylor and Ashley Floyd Kuntz. Rebecca and Ashley are the editors of Ethics in Higher Education: Promoting Equity and Inclusion Through Case-Based Inquiry.

This episode is about faculty using social media, hosted by Jacob Fay (Open Mind) and featuring the voices of Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (University of New Hampshire), TJ Stewart (Iowa State University), and Harry Brighouse (UW-Madison). 

Links:

• Teaching Guides
• Transcript

This episode was produced by Rebecca Taylor, Ashley Floyd Kuntz, Jessica Harless, and Carrie Welsh. Music is Physics by Ketsa. Used under a creative commons license.

This episode was made possible (in part) by a grant from the Spencer Foundation (#202000229) and support from the Campus Research Board at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Spencer Foundation or the University of Illinois.

This is the second episode in a miniseries co-produced by Rebecca M. Taylor and Ashley Floyd Kuntz. Rebecca and Ashley are the editors of Ethics in Higher Education: Promoting Equity and Inclusion Through Case-Based Inquiry.

This episode is about the ethical dilemmas that HBCUs face, featuring the voices of host John Torrey (Buffalo State) and guests Joyce E. King (Georgia State University), Felecia Commodore (Old Dominion University), and Corey Reed (Butler University). 

Links:

• Teaching Guides
• Transcript

This episode was produced by Rebecca Taylor, Ashley Floyd Kuntz, Jessica Harless, and Carrie Welsh. Music is "Test Case" by Ketsa, used under a creative commons license.

This episode was made possible (in part) by a grant from the Spencer Foundation (#202000229) and support from the Campus Research Board at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Spencer Foundation or the University of Illinois.

This is the first episode in a miniseries co-produced by Rebecca M. Taylor and Ashley Floyd Kuntz. Rebecca and Ashley are the editors of Ethics in Higher Education: Promoting Equity and Inclusion Through Case-Based Inquiry.

This episode is about "divisive concepts" and features Sigal Ben-Porath (University of Pennsylvania) and Laura Dinehart (Florida International University).

Links:

• Teaching Guides
• Transcript

This episode was produced by Rebecca Taylor, Ashley Floyd Kuntz, Jessica Harless, and Carrie Welsh. Music is No-Wing by Ketsa. Used under a creative commons license.

This episode was made possible (in part) by a grant from the Spencer Foundation (#202000229) and support from the Campus Research Board at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Spencer Foundation or the University of Illinois.

Introducing a miniseries about ethical issues in higher ed. Co-produced by Rebecca M. Taylor (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and Ashley Floyd Kuntz (Florida International University), this series is based on their new book, Ethics in Higher Education: Promoting Equity and Inclusion Through Case-Based Inquiry.

In this series, we cover "divisive concepts," HBCUs, and faculty use of social media. We also made teaching guides for each episode, based on chapters of the book.

Links:

• Teaching Guides: coming soon
• Transcript: 

This episode was produced by Rebecca M. Taylor, Ashley Floyd Kuntz, Jessica Harless, and Carrie Welsh. Music is Physics by Ketsa. Used under a creative commons license.

This episode was made possible (in part) by a grant from the Spencer Foundation (#202000229) and support from the Campus Research Board at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Spencer Foundation or the University of Illinois.

Featuring the voices of: philosophers John Fantuzzo, Jennifer Lackey, and Daniel Wodak; and brothers Freedom and Lee Horton. 

Links:

• PBS segment about Lee and Freedom: Brotherhood & Clemency Part 1: The Power of a Pardon, Ep. 4.
• John's paper: Recognizing human dignity behind bars: A moral justification for college-in-prison programs

Produced by John Fantuzzo, Téa Luckenbill, and Carrie Welsh.

Music is "Built From Nothing" by Ketsa, used under a creative commons license.

Interviews recorded remotely in 2022.

• The plumber essay ("Becoming a Better College Teacher (If You're Lucky)" by Harry Brighouse, Fall 2019, Daedalus)

Produced by Carrie Welsh, with editorial help from Anna Nelson, Hannah Bounds, Trinity Giese, and Harry Brighouse. 

Recorded in June 2021. 

Hosted by UW-Madison grad Natnael Shiferaw, this episode features a conversation with ethnographers Nancy Kendall and Matthew Wolfgram, two of the authors of the 2020 book, "The True Costs of College."

This is part of our series on higher education.

Transcript

Website

Conversation recorded remotely June 2021.

Music is "Wind It Up" by Ketsa from the Free Music Archive. Used under a creative commons license.

• Jon Boeckenstedt's Admissions Weblog
• Higher Ed Data Stories

This is part of our series on higher education.

Transcript

Website

Conversation recorded remotely July 2021.

Music is "Aced It" by Ketsa from the Free Music Archive. Used under a creative commons license. 

Do we have a right to higher education? A conversation between philosophers of education Harry Brighouse and Christopher Martin. 

• What is the point of higher education?
• Why is there a right to higher education?
• Should education be compulsory after 18?
• Should tuition be free?
• Plus: civic education, elite institutions, selection theatrics, and armchair sociology 

This is part of our series on the ethics of higher education.

Further reading:

• The Right to Higher Education: A Political Theory by Christopher Martin
• Reflections on the Transition from Elite to Mass to Universal Access: Forms and Phases of Higher Education in Modern Societies since WWII by Martin Trow

Transcript

Website

Recorded remotely in July 2021.

Music is "We Know" by Ketsa from the Free Music Archive, used under a creative commons license. 

Special thanks to UW-Madison philosophy majors Ria Dhingra and Anna Nelson, who collected responses from the 2022 NAAPE Conference (North American Association for Philosophy & Education) and with a few of their friends. And gratitude to everyone they talked to who shared their thoughts.

Transcript

Website

Music is "Dream Teachers" by Ketsa, used under a creative commons license.

Recorded in October 2022.

We invited labor scholar Eleni Schirmer into conversation with philosopher Tony Laden to talk about what makes successful teacher strikes successful, strikes as direct action, what the bargaining process does to trust, and a great chicken analogy. 

Transcript

Recorded remotely September 2021. Music is Wavy Glass by Ketsa, used under a creative commons license.

Why is it weird to talk about loving your students? A great conversation about love and teaching. Featuring philosopher Meghan Sullivan in conversation with Maria Salazar about what it means to bring love into the classroom and why more philosophers should study love.

Transcript

The Good Life Method book: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/624476/the-good-life-method-by-meghan-sullivan-and-paul-blaschko/

Conversation recorded remotely on December 15, 2021.

Music is Hip Hop Instrumental 2 by Ketsa from the Free Music Archive. Used under a creative commons license.

Study guide

Transcript

Web link

Article discussed in this episode: Jencks, Christopher. “Whom Must We Treat Equally for Educational Opportunity to Be Equal?” Ethics, vol. 98, no. 3, University of Chicago Press, 1988, pp. 518–33, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2380965.

Produced by Avra Reddy and Carrie Welsh. Interview recorded in September 2021. Music is "Frieden" by Ketsa, from the Free Music Archive.

How and why should we punish schoolchildren--if at all? That's the guiding question of the Pedagogies of Punishment project. This episode features the project's PIs, John Tillson (Liverpool Hope University) and Winston C. Thompson (The Ohio State University). 

Pedagogies of Punishment: https://www.pedagogiesofpunishment.com/

This project was a grantee of the Center for Ethics & Education! We're proud.

Transcript

Recorded July 2021.

Producer: Carrie Welsh. Music is "Wavy Glass" by Podington Bear and "Stay With Me" by Ketsa, used under a creative commons license.

What can we learn from conversation that we can't learn on our own? Agnes Callard (Philosophy, University of Chicago) talks about the paradox of learning through conversation, the secret to asking a good question, chatting with the ghost of Aristotle, and that time her lecture notes were stolen and it ended up being a good thing for her teaching. 

Mentioned in the episode:

• Boat thinking (Kant)
• Study guides

Transcript

Website

Pairs well with: Reasoning by Anthony Simon Laden

Recorded in Chicago, July 2021.

Thanks to Agnes Callard and Sol Miller.

Producer: Carrie Welsh. Music is "Wavy Glass" and "Good Times" by Podington Bear, used under a creative commons license. 

Find the study guides here: https://ethicsandeducation.wceruw.org/curricula/

If you have ideas for episodes, study guides, or just want to say hi, send us an email or leave us a voicemail.

Music is "Wavy Glass" by Podington Bear, used under a creative commons license.

Jen Kling is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and the director of the Center for Legal Studies at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs. She's also the Executive Director of Concerned Philosophers for Peace, the largest, most active group of philosophers in the US working on the causes of war and the prospects for peace.

In this episode, Jen touches on all the themes of our 2021 teaching series: philosophy as both a skillset and a disposition, finding an entry point for students new to philosophy, and using games to teach social contract theory. 

Jen has a lot of fun in the classroom. And her students do too! One student, Betty Varland, even adapted an Adele song to Aristotle. You'll get to hear that in the episode.

Jen says: "So much of what I do is just to make people laugh. I really think it's genuinely important. I think philosophy is very serious, it can be very important, heavy topics. You have to find your way in to these questions. And for me, humor and movement is the way to do that. And so I try to impart that to my students."

Episode transcript

Produced by Carrie Welsh. Interview recorded at APA Central, February 2020. Music is My Tribe by Ketsa and Cascades by Podington Bear. Special thanks to Betty Varland for permission to use her song.

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This is the last episode of our first season. We'd love your feedback on our next podcast season!

Survey link here: https://forms.gle/UBvQZo2qoYtRL9Jw6

Bailey Szustak is a PhD student at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In this episode, Bailey talks about teaching new philosophy students in a way that helps them feel at ease with and compelled by philosophy. After all, that's what the word 'philosophy' means--a love of knowledge. 

Bailey says: "How can I make my teaching something that every single student, or as many as possible...finds themselves in what we're doing in a way that is accessible to them? So not scaring them off by immediately throwing them into Kant... But asking questions and thinking about ideas that are relevant to their life. And then it turns out, they've been doing philosophy without realizing it."

Episode transcript

PS: Bailey is also a welder and a painter! Check out some of her art here: https://thefabulosopher.wordpress.com/art/

How do you engage your students? Do you teach "covert philosophy"? Send us an email or leave us a voice message.

Produced by Carrie Welsh. Interview recorded at APA Central, February 2020. Music is Blessed Horizons by Ketsa and Cascades by Podington Bear. 

W. John Koolage is a philosophy professor and the Director of General Education at Eastern Michigan University. John is a philosopher of education who thinks a lot about teaching and learning. In this piece, he talks about how to engage undergrad students in philosophy classes by giving them opportunities to practice skills like curiosity and argument. And he talks about engaging students outside of the classroom in high-impact learning projects like the EMU Undergraduate Conference in Philosophy, which now has an international attendance. 

John says: "You want students to use these things they learn in their general education programs inside their major and inside their lives." Argument and curiosity "can actually fit in anything you do. They might make you a better parent, they might make you a better manager, they might make you a better chemist. That's the sort of idea that you really want in your general education program, so that these things can infuse it."

Episode transcript

Links:

• EMU Undergraduate Conference in Philosophy: https://www.emuucip.com/
• Paper about the conference: https://www.pdcnet.org/teachphil/content/teachphil_2018_0999_8_28_90
• George Kuh's high impact practices (excerpt): https://www.aacu.org/node/4084

Interview recorded at APA Central, February 2020. Music by Ketsa and Podington Bear. Produced by Carrie Welsh.

Susan Kennedy is a postdoctoral fellow in philosophy at Harvard University, where she works with the Embedded EthiCS team to integrate ethical reasoning into the computer science curriculum. In this episode, Susan talks about teaching non-canonical texts, using games to teach feminist critiques of social contract theory, teaching students how to conference, and offers some advice for teaching STEM students.

Susan says: "I think their interest just goes through the roof when you can present the material in an interactive and engaging way, as opposed to just having a lesson plan, where I'm, you know, lecturing about feminist critiques or something like that."

If you’d like to learn more about the simulation or the conference guide, Susan invites you to contact her: https://www.susan-kennedy.com/

Episode transcript

How do you engage your philosophy students? Send us an email or leave us a voice message. 

Interview recorded at APA Central, February 2020. Music is Summer Melody by Ketsa and Cascades by Podington Bear. Produced by Carrie Welsh.

Episode transcript

Citations (and further reading!):

• Binder, Amy J., and Kate Wood. Becoming Right: How Campuses Shape Young Conservatives. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ Press, 2014.
• Brown, Adrienne M, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017.
• Jack, Anthony Abraham. The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019.
• Laden, Anthony. "Teaching, Indoctrination and Trust." (forthcoming in Academic Ethics Today, ed. by Steven Cahn (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022).
• Lao-tzu and Stephen Mitchell. Tao Te Ching: A New English Version. New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1994.
• Nguyen, C. Thi (forthcoming). "Trust as an Unquestioning Attitude." Oxford Studies in Epistemology.
• Westover, Tara, Educated: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 2018.

Special thanks to Grace Welsh, Carrie Peredo, and Natnael Shiferaw for reading the student excerpts. This episode was produced by Carrie Welsh, with help from Natnael Shiferaw, Harry Brighouse, and Tony Laden.

Recorded January 2021. Music is "Eye on Me" by Ketsa and "Cascades" by Podington Bear.

• Recommended reading: Dilemmas of Educational Ethics, edited by Meira Levinson and Jacob Fay.
• Episode Transcript

Recorded October 2019. Produced by Grace Gecewicz, Abby Beneke, and Carrie Welsh.

Music by Podington Bear and Ketsa.

This piece features two voices: sociologist Dr. Laura T. Hamilton (UC Merced) and philosopher Dr. Kathryn Joyce (Princeton University).

Educational Policy Studies PhD student Abby Beneke (UW-Madison) interviewed Laura when she came to UW in 2019 to give a talk on her book project, Broke: The Racial Consequences of Underfunding Universities, which she co-wrote with Kelly Nielsen.

Dr. Hamilton: “What I want people to understand is that the hierarchies that we see today are about racial resentment.”

We asked philosopher Kathryn Joyce to respond to Laura's interview from a lens of relational equality.

Dr. Joyce: "Addressing racial hierarchies is not primarily a matter of rooting out racists and removing them from positions of power. It's a matter of eliminating dominant racial ideologies.”

Transcript

Website

Study guide for this episode coming soon!

This episode was produced by Abby Beneke and Carrie Welsh, and mixed and edited by Kellen Sharp.

Professor Quentin Wheeler-Bell (Indiana University) discusses one of the driving questions of his work: what is liberatory education?

Transcript

Produced and edited by Kellen Sharp.

Recorded at the NAAPE Conference, October 2019.

This is a timely piece on informed consent and the ethics of doctoral admissions, featuring Center Fellow Professor Bryan Warnick, a philosopher at the Ohio State University. It's based on his paper, "The Ethics of Doctoral Admissions" (forthcoming). We also asked four PhD students their thoughts on grad school. Thanks to Pedro Monque (CUNY Graduate Center), Garry Mitchell (Harvard University), Kathryn Joyce (University of California San Diego), and Kirsten Welch (Columbia Teacher's College) for sharing their perspectives. 

Transcript

Recorded at APA Central in Denver, February 2019. Mixed and edited by Kellen Sharp. Produced by Grace Gecewicz and Carrie Welsh. 

Grace Gecewicz and Madeline Brighouse Glueck interview Jennifer S. Hirsch (Public Health, Columbia University) and Shamus Khan (Sociology, Princeton University) about their book, Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus. This conversation offers a hopeful vision for the future of sex education, preventing sexual assault, and developing an empathetic understanding of young people today.

Transcript

Study guide: The Ethics of Sexual Citizenship

Recorded in December 2020. Theme music by Podington Bear. Episode produced and edited by Carrie Welsh.

• Study Guide: Opting Out of State Assessments - with a Structured Academic Controversy activity
• Audio Transcript

Recorded at the American Philosophical Association Central Conference in Denver in 2019. Produced by Carrie Welsh and Grace Gecewicz and edited by Kellen Sharp. 

Theme music by Podington Bear.

• Paper by Brighouse and Schouten: "To Charter or Not to Charter: What Questions Should We Ask, and What Will the Answers Tell Us?"
• Study Guide: What is a Charter School?
• Transcript

Recorded in 2018 and 2019. Produced by Carrie Welsh and Grace Gecewicz. Edited by Kellen Sharp.

Music by Bad Snacks and Podington Bear.

What ethical compromises do students make when they seek upward mobility through education? We talk with Professor Jennifer Morton about her new book, Moving Up Without Losing Your Way: The Ethical Costs of Upward Mobility (2019). Morton is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and a senior fellow at the Center for Ethics and Education.

• Book: Moving Up Without Losing Your Way, by Jennifer Morton

This audio is paired with free, downloadable curricular materials to use in undergrad and graduate education classes. Visit our website for more info.

• Study Guide: Ethical Costs: The Case of Higher Education and Social Mobility

Audio Transcript

Recorded October 2019.

Produced by Carrie Welsh and Grace Gecewicz. Mixed and edited by Kellen Sharp. Theme music by Podington Bear.

We talk with Dr. Anthony Abraham Jack, an assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, about his new book, The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students (2019). Jack’s work examines the often-overlooked diversity of low-income college students.

• Book: The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students, by Anthony Abraham Jack 

This audio is paired with free, downloadable curricular materials to use in undergrad and graduate education classes. Visit our website for more info.

• Study Guide: Navigating Non-Ideal Institutions: The Case of the Privileged Poor
• Study Guide: Student Materials

Recorded in Toronto, April 2019.

• Audio Transcript

Produced by Carrie Welsh. Edited by Kellen Sharp. Theme music by Podington Bear. Study guide created by Harry Brighouse, Abby Beneke, Grace Gecewicz, and Carrie Welsh, with consultation from Anthony Jack.

Transcript

Written and produced by Kellen Sharp, May 2020.

Theme music by Podington Bear.

Transcript

Written and produced by Grace Gecewicz, May 2020. Theme music by Podington Bear.

Professors Lauren Gatti (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) and Paula McAvoy (North Carolina State University) talk about their book project, Just Teacher: Ethical Thinking in the Profession of Teaching.

Recorded in-person in February 2019 and over zoom in September 2020.

• Transcript

Produced by Carrie Welsh. Theme music by Podington Bear.

This is a short piece cut from the longer conversation with Professors Lauren Gatti (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) and Paula McAvoy (North Carolina State University) about their book project, Just Teacher: Ethical Thinking in the Profession of Teaching. Here, they talk about the unique challenges the pandemic poses to teachers. 

Recorded over zoom in September 2020. 

• Transcript

Produced by Carrie Welsh. Theme music by Podington Bear.