Are all happy classrooms alike? Probably not. But perhaps there’s some qualities common to many of them.
In the following guest post, Daniel Story, assistant professor of philosophy at California Polytechnic State University, suggests that among those qualities are care and connection.
His experiences teaching this semester push against the dominant pessimistic narrative about today’s college students and their ability and willingness to read, to think, to do the work.
Read on, and perhaps you’ll be inspired to take a different approach to your teaching.
All Happy Classrooms
by Daniel Story
Once a week, I sit in a circle with 20 students and participate in a discussion about the love lives of the rich and powerful.
I’m teaching a 10-week undergraduate philosophy seminar on love and care, and we’re reading Anna Karenina alongside several hundred pages of philosophical texts. On Karenina days, I listen and occasionally chime in. We talk about whether the adulterous Oblonsky loves his wife, how the teetotaling Levin can be friends with dissolute aristocrats, whether Anna’s husband drove her away with aloofness. We discuss to what extent the philosophers’ tidy accounts of love grip Tolstoy’s muddy intricacies. We imagine Vronsky on the apps. The conversation winds along circuitous paths.
This shouldn’t really be possible. We’ve all seen the headlines. Students can’t read books anymore. Students can’t read sentences anymore. Diagnoses vary, but everyone agrees that the central culprit is technology: “Reading books, even for pleasure, can’t compete with TikTok, Instagram, YouTube.”
Yet most of my students are reading well over one hundred pages per week. I know they are reading because of the character of our discussions, which are filled with interpretive disagreement, fixation on details, forgetfulness that brings us to our books. There is much speculation about how things will turn out. I know they are reading (and when they are not) because of the in-class writing assignments I give them. I know because I watch bookmarks and spine creases advance each week. I know because my colleagues report that their students are reading Tolstoy during class breaks. I know because I see my students read beside me on picnic blankets in the reading sessions I host on the campus lawn.
Either the headlines are misleading, or there’s something exceptional happening in this class. I think it’s both.
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If you want to learn something about yourself, tell your friends you’re going to teach a seminar on love and watch their eyebrows.
I do feel ridiculous teaching this topic, like Alcibiades stumbling impetuously into a dialogue he’s too crude to appreciate. Maybe I’m not unusual in this way. “Philosophers, although they are supposed to be lovers of a sort, tend to be all thumbs when it comes to handling love,” Annette Baier once wrote. “The ones who have told us most or most insightful things about love are poets and novelists.”
The idea to teach Tolstoy came from someone I love and respect. It was a rainy Sunday morning, and I was asking in a desultory way about what kind of non-philosophical works I should include in my seminar, which started the following week. My companion immediately suggested Anna Karenina. I immediately told her the suggestion felt ambitious and right. “You might start a lifelong practice of reading in them.” We talked smilingly in the pleasure of sudden concord.
It remains to be seen whether anyone will develop a lifelong practice. But I’m already glad for the suggestion. Several of the philosophers on my syllabus refer to Anna Karenina. Tolstoy depicts the interiority of love in exquisite detail. The book has proven to be a fecund source of conversation.
On top of this, I’m glad the idea did not originate with me. I feel there’s something precious about taking in something from someone else’s mind. To share an idea is to draw it from the abstract realm and incarnate it as connective tissue. Ideas acquire new significance within the relational realm. They become media of recognition and objects of responsibility. They give expression to togetherness, even love. Shared things are important.
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My students are coming of age as philosophers in a time when it is increasingly possible to go it alone. The lone philosopher has always been a myth. Yet if philosophy means things like understanding compatibilism and publishing in Ethics, this will not always be true; autodidactic vibe-philosophizing is coming.
For me, though, philosophy means something different. For me, philosophy is reflective inquiry about human experience that connects us in deep intellectual ways to both ourselves and other human beings. If I were the only person, I would not have the constitution for philosophy. I am too oriented in my philosophical practice towards relationships that are suffused with the connective tissue of philosophical thought.
One of my pedagogical aims is to share this orientation with my students. I want them to experience its pleasures and virtues. I want to bring them into a relational realm where, through their interpersonal responsibilities, they are (to modify an expression from Virginia Held) “compelled to congeal into an entity capable of intellectual agency.”
Concretely, in my class this involves a shared intention to investigate love through meaningful discussion of a Big Book. I believed we could do this, but I wasn’t sure. The pundits don’t seem to think students, especially “non-elite” ones, can read something like Anna Karenina. I invited my students to help me prove them wrong.
This framing has been successful. Many of my students want to be part of our experiment. They want to avoid letting me and their classmates down. To do this, they have to read. More than that, they have to congeal into agents with distinct intellectual perspectives from which they can contribute. Without this, our shared activity will not materialize. We will fail.
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Nel Noddings tells us that “the primary aim of every educational institution and of every educational effort must be the maintenance and enhancement of caring.” Teaching is about training the intellect through a cooperative dialogical practice that nurtures an ethical ideal. This ideal is communicated through the teacher’s engrossment in and care for her student and through the admirable image of the student that the teacher reflects back to him. “The teacher works with the student. He becomes her apprentice and gradually assumes greater responsibility in the tasks they undertake.” This shared activity “produces both joy in the relation and increasing competence in the cared-for.” It prepares the student for mature moral and intellectual life.
The shared activity in my classroom requires us to concern ourselves with one another’s actions. (Did enough of us get through the reading to sustain a two-hour discussion?) It renders us accountable to one another. (Is repeatedly passing the buck when called upon to summarize plot points justifiable?) It binds us through increasingly fibrous connective tissue. (What do we think of Anna this week?) And it contains incentives that align with the aims of pedagogy. Our shared activity gives me reason to be engrossed in my students’ intellectual perspectives, to encourage them when they struggle, and to affirm their successes.
There is another way in which our shared activity nurtures an ethical ideal. In the words of Martha Nussbaum, the richness of Tolstoy’s characters compels us to “actively care for their particularity.” As we become immersed in Tolstoy’s world, “we strain to be people on whom none of their subtleties are lost, in intellect and feeling.” We practice a kind of sustained and detailed attention that resembles the attention required for care. We mature ethically.
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Anna Karenina is a reflection on how love and care are constrained by the cultural systems in which they find expression. Anna and Vronsky’s love is born passionately within an illicit affair, and is later undone by elements—stigma, jealousy, paranoia—of that same social script. Levin’s capacity to care for his dying brother is compromised by his socialized inability to see Nikolai as a locus of needs.
As teachers, our ability to nurture students’ intellectual and moral faculties is constrained by cultural systems, too. Educational institutions are organized around efficiency and profit. The kinds of relations I have with the students in my seminar are hardly possible in a class of 30 or 300. They are hardly possible for my lecturer colleagues who are paid less to teach twice as much as I do.
Pedagogical care is also constrained by narratives about our students’ supposed degradation, which reflect back to them an unadmirable image of themselves. Consider how the Friends of Attention, an “attention activist” group, write about people in their book, Attensity: “Look around. See anything odd? Like, everyone staring at a device, and nobody talking? Nobody actually seeing each other? Or, for that matter, the world? Or anything but a stream of ‘content’ that is continuously monetizing their consciousness? Hmm.”
Narratives like this are sensational. They can be particularly discouraging to students outside elite institutions since they are often framed by saying something like “even in the most elite circles” people can’t read books anymore. This implies that non-elite students are somehow inherently less equipped for reading. I don’t believe this. I suspect that the grit required to be a non-elite student–a transfer, a first-gen, a nontraditional–means non-elite students are often better equipped for reading than students enveloped in privilege.
The framing also stings. I am a reader who started out at Bluegrass Community and Technical College and has never been in a particularly elite institution. I feel protective of and indignant for my students. They can be readers, just like me.
All this is to say that the narratives feel wrongheaded for multiple reasons. Yet wrongheaded cultural narratives have the power to shape reality and our relations to one another. They are insidious. If we want to nurture our students, we should reject them.
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Anecdotes are not statistics. I have not provided reason to think that students are generally willing and able to read long texts. I don’t doubt most students’ attentional habits and preferences have changed such that they read less than they used to. What I doubt is that this means we should assign less reading.
Teaching ought to be a care relation. Care is not a matter of conforming to principles or generalizations. Care is a matter of attending to the particular needs of the cared-for. Possibly, most students either can’t read over 100 pages per week or wouldn’t benefit from it. But that doesn’t mean that my students, or your students, can’t or wouldn’t. We have a responsibility to find out by attending to our students rather than pundits.
My own view is that the technocultural dynamics undermining reading provide reason to assign my students more reading, not less. I know my students can read. And I believe Nussbaum is right that novels are an important means of developing moral attention. To me, this suggests that it would be good to nurture an ethical ideal by providing my students with “attentional sanctuaries” (one worthwhile idea from Attensity) wherein they can partake in immersive textual experiences that, due to the technological landscape, they are increasingly unlikely to choose of their own volition.
There is no one-size-fits-all pedagogical method. But my experience, as well as that of others such as David Kishik, seems to indicate that introducing shared agency into the classroom through a shared intention with uncertain prospects and genuine buy-in from the teacher is a promising strategy for both motivating serious reading and fostering communities bound by the connective tissue of philosophical thought. Communities like this awaken students to the pleasures and virtues of a relational orientation in philosophical practice. Sharing this orientation, in whatever particular way each of us can, to me seems to be a caring pedagogical response to a technological world where it is increasingly possible to go it alone.
This is awesome, Daniel! And so very well put. Thank you for engaging with your students like this and for sharing your reflections on it with us. Hear hear!
I’m quite happy to hear such anecdotes of success. I hope they’re replicated beyond my wildest dreams.
And kudos to Story for calling out the soft bigotry of low expectations for non-elite students. Hear, hear!
But the most important sentence in this piece is the first one:
Twenty students. What so many of us who care until we’re empty wouldn’t give to be able to “attend to the particular needs” of twenty students per course.
Now, Story rightly acknowledges that
conditions which obtain, he suggests, because
And so I think Story is right: students are up to the task of setting aside their phones and AI for the sake of the educational experience. But most institutions aren’t arranged for it. (Indeed, our political economy largely isn’t arranged for it.) The top-down, outside-in imposition of AI is intensifying the effects of deformities long present.
Sure, teaching in any era is “constrained by the cultural system in which it finds expression.” But in the neoliberal institution of scaled content-delivery and credential-buying, especially in its newly intensified adjunctified form, trying to educate the individual persons we find in our classrooms is becoming, for too many of us, more and more like trying to give the experience of witnessing Winged Victory of Samothrace by describing it in 240 characters.
I think it’s misleading to frame the issue as educational institutions being “organized around efficiency and profit”, at least in the sense that people think of when they hear that sort of phrase. It is about efficiency, yes, but in the sense of trying to provide *some* sort of higher educational experience for hundreds of thousands of students of many different backgrounds every single year. To replace those 300-person classrooms with 20-person classrooms, we would either need to exclude a huge fraction of the people who are entering higher education every year, or we would have to divert a lot of human resources from other activities into higher education.
It’s certainly in our class interests, as workers in higher education, to do the latter. But I suspect this would increase costs so much that we would be excluding large numbers of potential students another way.
There really is a difficult tension between scaling things up to include more students in good higher educational opportunities, and scaling things down to the size that enables some of the greatest educational experiences possible.
Good points! Let me respond:
(1) I don’t think it’s that misleading of Story to describe higher ed institutions as being organized around efficiency and profit. What’s misleading is to suggest that — and I know you’re not suggesting this, but I want to make it clear that I’m not either — in their being so organized, they’re not responding to incentives offered by the surrounding political economy. Just like students, the institutions are incentivized to take shortcuts in order to achieve what they need to survive, or what the market tells them they need.
(2) Exclusion from higher education is bad only when those excluded are missing out. I’d love it if all those who wanted to be transformed by the college experience could do so. I can’t imagine not having experienced college. But I’d also love it if the political economy and the culture sustaining it did not make a college credential necessary for a dignified life, or at least did not present such a credential as necessary. What if vocational schools were more prevalent and subsidized? What if installing and repairing community infrastructure with your enminded hands were culturally recognized as the cognitive and ethical achievement it is? What if more firms committed themselves to paid on-the-job training for high-school graduates, or paid for truly necessary college-level courses? What if, as Richard Pettigrew recently wrote about, you could get a college education at any time during your life? If the demand for a college credential weren’t so high, the demand for college-before-jobs wouldn’t be, and there’d be more ways to ensure smaller class sizes without excluding those who really want or need to be there.
(3) All that said, you’re right, of course, that there will be tensions and trade-offs when a good that should not be commodified is commodified, standardized, and scaled. But higher ed institutions like to pretend there’s no trade-offs — “we had no choice.” And even if they acknowledge trade-offs, they don’t consider them. And even if they consider them, they do not discuss them with the faculty: it’s a discussion only for top-of-the-pyramid admins and boards of trustees. I’d kill for real deliberation about trade-offs with those who are actually materially affected by them.
Nicely said, Daniel Story! 🙂
For anyone who missed the reference in the title, the opening line of Anna Karenina is:
The one glaring problem with this Story is that, anecdotally speaking, I often find his students reading Karenina under the covers during my reading this book under the covers during my own classes.
It’s hard to believe that anyone would prefer Tolstoy to Kant 😛
this is a heartening piece that i’m very glad to see. thanks to prof. story.
i’d just point out that there’s an entire discipline in the humanities that reads literature closely together. and that same discipline has very recently been vilified in this very website’s comment section. in fact, it’s for decades been the object of persistent disdain in some anglo-american philosophical circles.
the point isn’t that there’s nothing to dislike in literary studies or that philosophy ought not to engage with literature because that’s another discipline’s domain. the point is that we’re all in this together and that we’d be a lot better off in times austerity and division making the attempt not just to practice grace outside of our disciplines but to make a reasonable effort to engage with what other disciplines do and why they do it than we are grinding axes and subtweeting those whose work we don’t love.
Could you share your syllabus for the course? Would love to teach AK & Philosophy, but even if that doesn’t come to pass, I love the novel and would enjoy seeing what philosophical issues and readings you’re relating to it.