Given that students get marks that count towards their degree for essays and not for seminars it is not unreasonable that the students could want to use the seminar to test out their ideas. One reason they might not want to do this is a fear that other students will steal their ideas. Ownership of ideas is something drummed into students through the horror in which plagiarism is held. If on the one hand the tutor says your essay must be all your own work and then says 'let's use the seminar to test out our ideas and improve on them through the crucible of discussion and debate' then we seem to have a mixed message. This mixed message is possibly rooted in the mixed message of the essay task itself. Essays are there to aid learning, we all know that being prompted to write something down throws up all kinds of problems that we hadn't anticipated when we just thought about, e.g., Searle's Chinese room argument. However, essays are also there as an aspect of summative assessment - they count. I want to suggest three possible ways around this:
1. separate the essay task and the seminar;
2. combine the essay task and the seminar;
3. the middle way.
1. Keeping essays and seminars separate allows us to think of the seminar as outside of any assessment process and this could free us up to seeing it as an experimental space where there is no danger in trying out wild ideas. If we take the task of seminars as a forum in which to explore philosophical ideas and practice philosophical skills perhaps this is a good way to go. We could treat the seminar as a place of safety where we can practise as opposed to the essay where we have to perform.
2. If the students are mainly concerned about essays, and writing essays is a good way of learning, then the best way to organise the seminars is to tap into those concerns and organise at least some of the seminars as essay workshops where students can bring along their plans and test them through a process of critical feedback. When there is a variety of questions for the modules this would also help towards exam revision as students would get something of the essay topics they didn't choose.
3. There must be a number of ways to chart a middle course through these options, but I will outline one that I have tried which seemed to work. This came about because of the rules that apply when teaching for the Open University. On the philosophy course there, as on most courses, the essay question was set centrally and associate lecturers were given guidance on what to look for in an answer. The questions were extremely well formulated to prompt the student to philosophise, to really think about the question and critically examine the responses to it in the texts, but discussing the essay question in tutorials was expressly forbidden. The problem was that the students really wanted to discuss the essay question and get as many 'clues' as possible about the 'right' way to answer it. To avoid both breaking the rules and disappointing the students I adopted a sideways strategy. If the essay question asked for an exposition of Singer on animal welfare and a critical analysis of his arguments, I would spend the session on giving an exposition of Regan on animal rights and getting the students to come up with a critical analysis of his arguments. In this way we could practice and understand the distinction between exposition and analysis and I could explain about what is important in each and we could explore in detail one of the main counter arguments to Singer. In this way I could get the students to practice what they had to do in the essay, but practice it on a related thinker and one was likely come up in the exam. They were happy because they got clear something that could be useful to the essay in hand. And I hadn't broken the rules.