When You and Your Students Write the Book of Your Course (guest post)

Some people have the ability to look at a mess and see the makings of something beautiful.

I don’t know David Kishik personally, but judging from what he is doing in the classroom, it seems like he is one of those people. A professor of philosophy at Emerson College, he looked at contemporary college courses and observed, as many have, that, owing to technological and cultural changes, “both reading and writing no longer function properly.”

So how is one supposed to teach today?

In what follows, Professor Kishik shares how he has made use of some of today’s technology to enable students to engage in a classic form of learning and ultimately produce a treasure for them to revisit for years to come.

His method won’t work for every kind of course, nor for especially large ones, but it would probably work for many, and I think many readers will be tempted to try something like it.

(A version of this post first appeared at Professor Kishik’s site.)

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When You and Your Students Write the Book of Your Course
by David Kishik

Chat says that there are already thousands of articles about AI in the classroom. Besides those that simply bemoan its arrival, many of the ones offering solutions use the Back to the Future tactic: to secure our pedagogic destiny, we need to go back to how things were, so no laptops, yes blue books, and so on. Then there are the Blade Runner professors, devising ingenious tricks to catch their students in the digital act. And finally there’s the Dr. Strangelove camp, who will tell us how they learned to stop worrying and love Claude.

This report is neither, though I agree that the contemporary classroom is like a computer with faulty input and output devices. Both reading and writing no longer function properly. While writing exercises were compromised only recently, reading capabilities were degrading long before the rise of large language models. But we also all know that a good classroom experience is founded on four, not two, basic skills. For decades, reading and writing took the front seats. What if they simply switch places with listening and speaking, which traditionally occupied the back seat?

Addressing these concerns is easier said than done, so I am happy to report that I’ve figured out a new way to teach a liberal arts college course from start to finish that withstands the dual onslaught of online distraction and artificial intelligence. I have devised and tested a holistic method that I am now ready to share with the esteemed members of the academy.

The strategy is to fight fire with fire, by integrating into my class two AI-powered technologies: text-to-speech and speech-to-text. As of late, these two related tools have become widely available and ridiculously good. Any written text can be read by lifelike automated voices with near-perfect intonation and pronunciation. Any spoken word can be accurately transcribed with minimal stumbles on accents or mumbles. Up to now these digital prostheses were offered to students with various disabilities. I have witnessed how they can make the classroom more accessible and valuable to everybody.

The first part of how it’s done is the easy one. All readings for the class are fed to a text-to-speech system that produces simple audio files. Students have three options: read with their eyes, listen with their ears, or do both simultaneously. The last is called immersive reading, and is the path I recommend to maximize attention and retention. Faculty love to complain that students barely do the reading and rarely finish a full book. My experience tells me that listeners to texts can become voracious and focused readers. As students are embracing this technology, they even become more serious readers than their teachers, who are far from being immune to distractions.

The second part is the challenging one. Sixty minutes of every class, measured with an hourglass placed in the middle of the room, are dedicated to a discussion in the round, informed and inspired by the day’s reading. The open dialogue is recorded with a state-of-the-art microphone placed beside the old-fashioned timepiece. After class, the audio file is fed to the speech-to-text system that transcribes our exchange. The written version becomes immediately available as a digital document to all participants, who are asked to edit their respective contributions for clarity and coherence. By the end of the semester the polished conversations are collected into a collaborative book. All students get a complimentary printed copy. There are no other requirements or assignments, written or otherwise.

Despite the focus on oral and aural mastery, and despite the reliance on advanced technology, our semester begins with a text (the class reader) and ends with a text (the book of dialogues). These traditional forms of input and output were designed to be nearly identical in length: more than two hundred thousand written words feed our conversations, and a similar amount results from them. The elaborate process leading to this imposing 450-page tome was painstaking but ultimately worthwhile. It felt like a delicate machine that got fine-tuned from week to week.

Twenty students and one teacher sit in a circle on the floor with the overhead fluorescents turned off. The sand sifting through the hourglass and the red light of the microphone signal that we are in session. Everybody is committed to stay in the room during this full hour, with no bathroom breaks, no electronic devices, but also no pens or papers. The sense of presence is heightened. Attention is elevated. Those who are more reticent to speak up can add their contributions later to the written dialogue. More talkative participants can trim overlong passages. The raw transcript is treated as a rough draft that then goes through comprehensive editorial transformation. The written outcome doesn’t simply mirror the exchange in class but seeks literary merit in its own right.

I’ve been guiding open-ended conversations in all my classes for two decades. Most professors who question the effectiveness of lectures and presentations revert to this tried and true approach. I simply discovered a neat way to pivot the entire class around its natural core. To be honest, I am not an unusually good teacher, this was not an extraordinarily brilliant group of students, and the material was not remarkably riveting. It was the novel setup of the seminar that pushed us all to perform the better versions of ourselves and made this class unlike any other.

The specific course in which my experiment took place was, quite appropriately and not coincidentally, dedicated to the philosophy of education. However, what was being taught, who we read, but also who was teaching and who was studying, are secondary concerns. For the past decades the academy has been embroiled in the “canon wars” and consequent debates about identity and representation. This emphasis on the what and the who questions has left higher education woefully unprepared to rethink the how: not only how to teach, but also how to keep the conversation going.

That being said, here is a link to the class reader the students obtain before the semester begins, and here is a link to the collaborative softcover book they receive after it ends. Given my involvement as an active participant in this pedagogical experiment, I cannot be its objective final judge at the conclusion of this report. But I believe that the massive book of Socratic dialogues available for your examination speaks for itself.