Learning
I thought I would start with this because I was really struck by what one of the students said about seminars. She distinguished between lectures, where you learnt things, and seminars, where you didn't. It emerged in the discussion that she was distinguishing between formal learning and informal learning. Although the informal was seen as enriching understanding, developing familiarity with, and even ownership of, ideas, and developing philosophical skills it wasn't seen as learning.
This seems to suggest that one problem with seminars is not that we don't know how to get the most out of them, but that we don't know how to value what we do get out of them. It could be that we compare the activity or product of the seminar with a model of learning that doesn't suit seminars and that, according to almost all current models of adult learning, is also not how adults learn (Dewey, 1938, Knowles, 1980. Mezirow, 1991, Jarvis, 1992).
Having a go at philosophising
As a subject philosophy is particularly well suited to seminar style learning. The model of learning where you are told stuff, you remember it, and you recall it in essays and exams just doesn't work well when it comes to learning to philosophise. You can remember names, dates, and concepts in that way, and getting some of those in place and understood is important, but then what? The aim of philosophy is not to learn stuff by rote, but to be able to evaluate ideas and construct reasoned arguments for yourself. Looking at how famous philosophers have done that is a good way into the practice of philosophy. And the kind of questions they were addressing are in many cases the same questions the discipline is still addressing: what does it mean to be good?; how do we know what we know?; are values created by us or are we responding to qualities in the things we value? So reading texts and getting clear in your own mind the argument they are presenting is good, then you might read other philosophers presenting counter arguments and get those clear, then comes the more tricky bit (as if reading Hegel isn't hard enough already): you need to decide who has the more convincing argument, or even, come up with a completely new one. Seminars are great as a way of engaging with all of those parts of the process, but particularly the tricky stuff at the end.Return to Seminar Guide // Return to Collaborative Learning in Philosophy page