April 8, 2019, by aeyifw

What is Teaching?: What Really Happens in a Philosophy Lecture at UoN

Hi everyone! I’m Ella, a student at the University of Nottingham studying Philosophy. To demonstrate what you might be able to expect in your philosophy lectures, I’m going to summarise one of my lectures that I had that was on what it means to teach, so you can judge whether you are being taught by your lecturers or not!

What is teaching?

It seems like a strange question to ask, and no doubt people will give different answers, but how does Philosophy define teaching? We looked at Fisher and Tallant’s paper that defines teaching in philosophical terms. They state that teaching is a judgement dependent concept. Doing a Philosophy degree means you get to learn cool new definitions!

Judgement dependent just means that something depends on what an individual judges it as. When it comes to teaching, Fisher and Tallant argue that something can be considered teaching if the person being taught judges it to be teaching.

 

Am I being taught in this lecture?

Learning about the philosophical definition of teaching was a strange thing to do in an environment where we were being taught. The lecturer asked us whether we thought we were being taught or not- and so as to not cause offence most people said they thought they were. “Good!” Said the lecturer, “than that’s enough to say that you are being taught”.

We also learnt that Ideal conditions play a role in the definition of teaching according to the paper. This means that you have to be in no conditions that may affect your judgement- if you’re sat in a 9 am lecture still feeling tipsy from the night before, you’re not going to have a good judgement!

If you have any views on what teaching is tweet us @nottsphilos to get involved!

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