For years now, every semester, regardless of which class I'm teaching, I spend the first couple of class periods asking the students to collaborate together on syllabus policy for attendance, late work, and overall assignment weighting for final grade calculation. I've done this with intro-level Philosophy, First Year Seminar, gen ed courses, upper-level courses--doesn't matter. I love it. The immediate benefits are:
- students actually know what the policies are and don't pretend ignorance throughout the semester as their first excuse and get-out-of-jail-free card;
- students generally don't ask me to just ignore or break our policy when they run afoul of it;
- the policies themselves are better: clear, comprehensive, student-friendly, incentive-based rather than punitive, and oriented toward achieving the real objective;
- the meta-understanding produced by forcing them to identify the real objective (learning together) and work to articulate a practical policy applications to achieve this (once they understand how hard it is to make these decisions, they respect the whole idea of a syllabus a whole lot more);
- this is an intentional invitation into scholarly community and a gesture of respect for their agency;
- they have to talk to each other, learn names, and work together on a common project for mutual benefit literally from Day 1.
I run this by putting students into small groups and giving them about 15 minutes to craft a policy proposal. It works best if you ask them to start with the question, "what is this for/what are we trying to achieve?" For example, attendance: what do we really want? We want everyone to come to class. What kind of policy will achieve this? Students are often stuck in the default "three excused absences and then x% of your final grade" mentality. First round results yield a lot of unimaginative variations on this kind of scheme. It is a great pleasure to listen to these and then say, "Nope. Not doing it. Not doing anything like that. Here's why: this doesn't achieve the objective. Are these policies going to motivate you to come to class? Hell no. We can do better. Back to the drawing board, get creative." Over the years, students have come up with all kinds of effective incentives: stickers, favorite junk food prizes, bonus points on the final grade for "streaks" of perfect attendance, possible exemption from the final exam for perfect attendance, bonus points for days of collective 100% attendance. These work because they are identifying actual motivators and along the way, getting the message that attendance is a prerequisite for real learning.
When I first started this, I really thought that the increase in attendance and reduction in student complaints/weaseling attempts were the main benefits--and honestly, that would be enough to keep me doing it. But the longer I've done this, the more important the last two items in my list above have begun to seem.
This semester, I decided to add another day for this process--this means we spent Week 1 (Thursday) and all of Week 2 (Tuesday and Thursday) on syllabus negotiation--and, because it's Women in Philosophy, I combined this with an assigned reading for Week 2, the Intro and Chapter 1 of bell hooks' Teaching to Transgress. Their regular Reading Response and in-class Written Reflection for this reading asked them to connect the dots between our first two weeks and the engaged pedagogy hooks describes.
The rest of the course is designed around providing maximum engagement and agency for the students. We begin Tuesdays with 15 minutes of small group discussion on the reading, which I do not monitor or participate in and is graded solely through periodic self- and peer-evaluation throughout the semester. They decided on the weighting for this component of their final grade. Their Term Project is wide open: who do you want to learn about? what sort of end result do you want to produce and share with the rest of us? do you want to team up or go it alone? We'll have a week of shared learning about various figures not already featured in our syllabus, that includes a participatory game show, two short creative film projects, a video essay, a professional Business presentation, a mood board, a scrapbook, ...you get the idea.
For the first time in about 3 years, I have zero anxiety about students cutting corners with AI.
These students didn't just sign up for the class, they have signed on. They're determined to get that 100% attendance because the bonus that motivates them is exemption from the final exam. They're excited about the Term Project because they designed it, and they want to do it, which means they won't be trying to cut the corners with a bullshit machine that undermines their learning process. They do the reading because they're curious, and because they're accountable to each other for showing up prepared for discussion.
We can try to "AI-proof" our syllabus and assignments with in-class writing and Blue Books, and while that's necessary, I think, it fails to address the really pernicious problem that the advent of the Bullshit Machine has exacerbated. The really pernicious problem is the default adversarial starting point of the classroom. We already existed in a not-great transactional default setting--students think they're in college to get a degree in order to get a job in order to maintain an existential illustion of socioeconomic security. Faculty put up with it because there's no other way to do the bits of our jobs that we do enjoy (research, teaching the handful of students who do actually want to learn). But the Bullshit Machine moves us from default transactional to default adversarial. Students are looking for ways to get away with it all right, and faculty are on high alert to prevent them. We're on opposing teams from the start, and the mutual suspicion forecloses any possibility of real learning happening. Because learning is collaborative.
So we can't solve this through syllabus policy, or assignment design. We have to solve the real problem, the perception that the classroom is a bullshit contest to see who can get away with what and who can catch who's trying to get away with it.
We have to learn how to trust our students to do the work, and students have to learn to trust their professor is asking them to do worthwhile work, and learn to trust themselves that they can in fact do it. And the only way to do that is make it as plain as possible that the work is the point, and that there's only one team in the classroom and we're all on it together.
That's what the syllabus policy negotiation does better than anything else, and making the theoretical underpinning of it explicit this semester cemented this for Women in Philosophy in a way I've not seen before. Would it work as well in a gen-ed class? Maybe not; but it can't hurt, and I think every classroom ought to be sending the message that we are taking the work seriously, taking students seriously, and intend to accomplish something worthwhile in our time together.
