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Archive for the ‘Teaching’ Category

This is the Life We Have Chosen

Posted in Argumentation, Discussion, Teaching on September 7, 2017| Leave a Comment »

Via The Non Sequitur, the blog of Scott Akin and John Casey:

School has started again. For some of us academics, this means shifting from reading professional literature to papers written by absolute beginners. Over the years this can wear on you, especially since you’ll encounter the same moves over and over and over. The sheer repetitiveness of it will cause you to ask whether you’re having any effect at all on their work. If you’re smart, you’ll vent about it to your trusted colleagues in the friendly confines of the faculty lounge. They will commiserate with you, and hopefully remind you of your obligations as a teacher. After a scotch or two and some quality time in a chesterfield chair, you’ll return to class refreshed, or maybe a bit buzzed, but nonetheless ready to do whatever it is you do.

Should you lack good mentors or quality whisky, you may be tempted to go online with a post about how stupid the kids are. Before you do this, you need to remind yourself of three critical things…

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Read the rest of this excellent post here.

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CFP: CSSR 2016

Posted in CFP, Communication, Connections, Rhetoric, Teaching, Uncategorized, tagged , , on January 5, 2016| Leave a Comment »

The Canadian Society for the Study of Rhetoric (CSSR / SCÉR) invites members to submit proposals for papers to be presented at its annual conference, to be held in conjunction with the Canadian Federation of Social Sciences and Humanities’ Congress 2016 (http://congress2016.ca) at the University of Calgary, Calgary, AB., May 31 – June 2, 2016.

The deadline for proposals is 10 January 2016. See the conference website for more information.

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CFR: Beyond Critical Thinking

Posted in Announcements, Argumentation, Critical Thinking, Symposium, Teaching, tagged , , on September 4, 2015| Leave a Comment »

Beyond Critical Thinking: A Symposium

Friday, 13 November 2015
York University

Over the past 50 years a great deal of work has been done in the young field of Argumentation Theory. Much of this work is highly relevant to traditional Critical Thinking and Critical Reasoning pedagogy. Nonetheless, it has been largely ignored by the many instructors of those courses who are not themselves working in Argumentation Theory. In this symposium each speaker will relate their work to uses in the classroom and discuss the impact it can have on students and their approach to argument. Following each speaker, all the invited speakers and several other qualified scholars will form a panel and answer questions and raise points of discussion.

There will be two speakers in the morning and two in the afternoon. The morning and afternoon sessions will followed by a panel consisting of all speakers and other qualified persons. The panel will be discussion-based and participant led.

Invited Speakers:

  • Catherine Hundleby, University of Windsor
  • Michael A. Gilbert, York University
  • Chris Tindale, University of Windsor
  • Harvey Siegel, University of Miami

The Symposium takes place on Friday, 13 November, 2015 at:

York University
4700 Keele St.
Department of Philosophy
Toronto, Canada M3J 1P3

Lunch will be provided to registrants.

To register, please click here: http://sgy.apps01.yorku.ca/machform/view.php?id=13165

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CFP: Special Issue of TOPOI: Reasoning, Argumentation, and Critical Thinking Instruction (RACT)

Posted in Argumentation, CFP, Critical Thinking, Teaching, tagged , , on September 4, 2015| Leave a Comment »

Special Issue of TOPOI: Reasoning, Argumentation, Critical Thinking Instruction

Submission Deadline: 30 OCTOBER 2015

Peer review stage: about 8 weeks; revised papers: January 2016; online-first: April 2016
 

Following the RACT2015 conference, held 25-27 FEB at Lund University, we invite submissions of papers for publication in a special issue of TOPOI (http://www.springer.com/philosophy/journal/11245). Papers must be in the order of 6000 to 8000 words (including references), and must address one or more of the conference themes (listed at http://ract2015.wordpress.com), whether from an empirical or a more conceptual perspective. Other than promoting rigor and quality of scholarship (as evidenced, for instance, by demonstrating, familiarity with the relevant literature), this special issue primarily seeks to inform readers who wish to reduce the distance between the research front and what is (falsely) presented to students as the state-of-the-art in critical thinking instruction. Therefore, papers should be of immediate relevance to those who teach or coordinate instruction in critical thinking as part of school or university education, either as dedicated courses or across the curriculum, or plan to do so. Of special relevance is the current trend to appropriate research on social, cognitive and other biases, as well as on two systems or two processes accounts of human reasoning.

 
Among those invited to submit to this special issue are the RACT keynote speakers: (more…)

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Tools for Teaching Logic: TTL 2015

Posted in Computation, Connections, Logic, Teaching, tagged on May 26, 2015| Leave a Comment »

Via loriweb.org:

The 4th International Conference on Tools for Teaching Logic

9-12 June 2015, Rennes, France

TOPICS: Tools for Teaching Logic seeks for original papers with a clear significance in the following topics (but are not limited to): teaching logic in sciences and humanities; teaching logic at different levels of instruction (secondary education, university level, and postgraduate); didactic software; facing some difficulties concerning what to teach; international postgraduate programs; resources and challenges for e­Learning Logic; teaching Argumentation Theory, Critical Thinking and Informal Logic; teaching specific topics, such as Modal Logic, Algebraic Logic, Knowledge Representation, Model Theory, Philosophy of Logic, and others; dissemination of logic courseware and logic textbooks; teaching Logic Thinking

For more information see the conference website: http://ttl2015.irisa.fr/

TTL 2015.

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Announcement: Rationale Online

Posted in Computation, Connections, Critical Thinking, Discussion, Teaching, tagged , , on September 28, 2013| Leave a Comment »

A screen shot of Rationale Online

A screen shot of Rationale Online, click for a larger view.

It’s no secret to regular readers here that I’m a big fan of argument mapping. I’ve written about it several times and it’s come to be a very important component of my teaching. That’s why I’m happy to have added Rationale Online, a web-based version of the Rationale software package, to the RAIL Resources page.  Beyond merely listing it there, though, I thought I’d put up a short post about it as I think it really does represent a positive step in the evolution of argument diagramming software for the classroom.

The diagramming system used in Rationale Online is a descendant of that pioneered by Tim van Gelder (some will remember Reason!Able), wherein one can diagram both arguments and various sorts of rebuttals, with or without incorporating various sorts of argument schemes from a number of different models. (more…)

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How Not to Save the Humanities

Posted in Connections, Critical Thinking, Discussion, Teaching, tagged , , , on August 25, 2013| 4 Comments »

Paul Gustav Fischer, "A fire on Kultorvet" c.1900

Paul Gustav Fischer, “A fire on Kultorvet” c.1900

Eric Schliesser, over at NewAPPS, has an interesting post up regarding a dispute between Marcus Arvan and Jason Brennan over the ethics of promoting the study of philosophy by citing empirical data about the success of philosophy majors. For those outside the discipline of philosophy this may seem a tempest in a teacup, but I think it warrants a closer look. For where one reads ‘philosophy’ in these discussions one could almost, in every case, substitute the name of another humanities discipline with no damage at all to the logic of the arguments in play. In the same way, I’m writing this post as a philosopher, but my guess is that a good deal of what I say here could probably be said just as well (if perhaps more eloquently) by my colleagues in, say, English or Communications. (more…)

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CFP: Critical Thinking in Higher Education

Posted in CFP, Critical Thinking, Teaching, tagged , , , on May 25, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Proposed New Book: Critical Thinking in Higher Education

Contributions are invited for an edited collection of papers for a book on the topic Critical Thinking in Higher Education,to be edited by Emeritus Professor Ronald Barnett (Institute of Education, University of London), Emeritus Professor Robert H. Ennis (University of Illinois), and Associate Professor Martin Davies (University of Melbourne).

Papers should be submitted by December 31st 2012. Please note that abstracts for papers (400 words maximum) should be sent to the editors for consideration first (see Submission Procedure below).

The book will include a number of previously published papers and original, previously un­published papers. Submissions can be comparative reviews, conceptual studies, empirically-based papers, reflective case studies or offer theoretical contributions. The book will combine new papers, commissioned articles, and excerpts from seminal papers in the field.

Contributions for the proposed book can cover, but are not limited to, the following areas: (more…)

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(Another) Fallacies Infographic

Posted in Connections, Critical Thinking, Discussion, Fallacies, Teaching, tagged , , on April 24, 2012| Leave a Comment »

My but these things are popular. This one comes to us via yourlogicalfallacyis.com and is free to download in three sizes. The graphic is also downloadable as vector art for those saavy and motivated enough to want to work with the image some more. In terms of design I think I like this one the best of all those shared on RAIL so far. (You can see the others here and here.) It also avoids the tricky business of classification and therefore might be more useful for teaching purposes. Below is a (crummy) screenshot. The files available for download are much higher quality.

Who are those three chaps in the middle there?

It is interesting that the fallacies seem to be bubbling up as a meme in the culture at large like this. I wonder if it’s a sign of sorts that people have had enough of the shoddy, transparently shortsighted and self-interested discourse that has come to characterize so much of public life and are starting to crave discourse of a different kind–perhaps more rational, thoughtful, and careful.  That would be nice…and timely too.

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Burden of proof and intellectual property

Posted in Connections, Discussion, Rhetoric, Teaching, tagged , , , , , , , on January 19, 2012| 1 Comment »

Do PIPA and SOPA threaten to reverse legal burden of proof in the US?  Clay Shirky argues they do.  I don’t know enough about the legal system, or the proposed legislation.  However, this is a serious allegation with implications far beyond the US.

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