VON DMITRY ANANIEV (BIELEFELD)
Dieser Beitrag erscheint als Teil des Themenschwerpunkts „A view from elsewhere“.
This post is a reflection on my experience teaching at universities in the UK and in Germany. Despite the substantial differences in how teaching is organised, the experience of the core form of interaction between teachers and students, the seminar, whose focus is a live discussion, is not all that different. I would like to argue that this both provides reason for modest optimism and helps one see what adjustments might be desirable.
I’ll start with some background. I have been teaching at universities for about six years now, and my time has been pretty evenly divided between the London School of Economics (LSE) and Bielefeld University. From 2019 to 2023, I worked as a Graduate Teaching Assistant at the LSE while completing my PhD, and moved to Bielefeld in 2023, where I’ve since taught my own courses as a postdoctoral researcher. As a graduate teaching assistant, I was fully responsible for leading seminars for several groups of students, holding office hours, and marking written assignments such as essays and exams. I did not, however, take part in developing the courses, selecting the readings, or giving lectures. These roles, at the LSE, are reserved for the professors. As a postdoc at Bielefeld University, each semester I lead weekly seminars whose content and format, including assessment, I develop myself within the rather liberal constraints of the German system.
Since I’ve only taught at one university in each country, and also for a relatively short time, I am not suggesting that my experience is sufficient for making thoroughgoing comparisons between the British and the German higher education systems. Nevertheless, I believe that my experience is instructive in certain respects.
Seminars form an integral part of teaching at both the LSE and Bielefeld philosophy departments. While there are administrative differences in what seminars amount to in the UK and Germany, the core form of the event is the same. By „seminar,“ I only mean a type of a discussion-based teaching event, often taking place on a weekly basis.
My experience in running seminars at the two universities has been remarkably similar. At their best, the seminars at the LSE and at Bielefeld University are marked by a fruitful, constructive atmosphere, where most students are prepared and willing to take part and engage with the philosophical questions put up for discussion. At their worst, the seminars are dominated by a couple of active students while others struggle or don’t care enough to keep up.
Both at the LSE and at Bielefeld one encounters similar ideal types of students: the ‚excellent,‘ who are active, hard-working, and often make valuable contributions to discussions; the ‘generally interested,‘ who show interest and are at times active in the discussions, but whose efforts in working through the material are not always consistent or sufficient; and the ’strategists,‘ who care mostly about passing the course and pragmatically search for the most effective way of doing that with minimal effort; and there are, of course, others. My point is to indicate that students generally represent several familiar types, not to provide an exhaustive classification. Both at the LSE and at Bielefeld, I have had the experience of guiding discussions of complex texts, where students kept up well and made sometimes ingenious critical points, but also discussions where interest and enthusiasm were rather difficult to foster. I have suggested that seminars succeed and fail in similar ways. The overall experience, however, has been positive: seminars at both institutions can and more often than not do run well.
Now, why should one find all these similarities in any way surprising? Why should one expect that a philosophy seminar at a UK university and a German university would feel substantially distinct?
The reasons stem from significant organisational differences between the LSE and Bielefeld University. The academic units (for lack of a different neutral term) that the LSE students take are more thematically unified and the workload is more concentrated. For example, a semester of a typical undergraduate student at the LSE might involve a unit in political philosophy, a unit in normative ethics, and one in epistemology. A unit at the LSE (units are called courses there) normally involves one weekly lecture and one weekly seminar, organised around one roter Faden, and taught by a team of teachers in collaboration. Say, a week in a normative ethics course devoted to consequentialism and its demandingness would involve both a lecture providing background, context, and an outline of the key arguments, and a seminar where students have a chance to discuss the specific readings in detail.
While a student at Bielefeld also might take three units per semester (units are called modules here), each module isn’t usually a thematically unified combination of academic events. A module usually involves two weekly seminars, independently taught by different teachers and having little to no overlap in content. When taking a module in normative ethics, one might choose one seminar on, say, animal ethics and another on the demandingness of morality. Each of these seminars would have a distinct syllabus, reading list, and forms of assessment. In effect, a student at Bielefeld gets six rather distinct courses under the guise of three modules, while an LSE student gets three thematically unified ones.
One might expect that having fewer, more thematically unified units would support one’s focus on preparation for the seminars taking place as part of these units. The fact that lectures provide much-needed context that goes beyond the required readings also helps. Moreover, since students at the LSE attend fewer distinct seminars, they are required to read and prepare more for each. This is coupled with higher requirements for passing a unit, which typically include a combination of an essay and a written exam. By contrast, individual seminar courses at Bielefeld are typically not very challenging to pass, given that each student attends so many during a single semester. This might seem like not adding extra motivation to prepare for seminars. Add to this a strictly required and recorded seminar attendance at the LSE, compared to the students’ prerogative not to attend seminars at Bielefeld. A combination of thematic unity, concentrated workload, demanding assessment, and attendance requirements appears to be a recipe for better, smoother, more productive seminar discussions.
And yet, the seminars at the LSE and at Bielefeld both have been, by and large, a positive experience. This is, I suggest, a reason for modest optimism. What makes the seminars overall go well is, to a large extent, student enthusiasm and active participation. Since students at the LSE and at Bielefeld, in my experience, are generally both enthusiastic and active, both respective philosophy departments are doing something right. They are at best enabling and fostering student enthusiasm, and at the very least not stifling it. However, the effect that students are active and enthusiastic is not easily attributed to one or even a few specific measures or aspects of institutional design. Being prominent universities clearly helps in both cases, as does the fact that the students have plenty of options to pursue the courses of interest to them, and to be sure, there are other relevant factors. That I do not have a deep diagnosis of why things are going well with the seminars partly explains why I am cautious with the optimistic verdict.
Furthermore, reflection on the organisational differences provides insight into the changes that may be desirable. That things work with seminars at both places does not entail that both systems are optimal. One difference in particular is instructive. I have mentioned that coupling lectures and seminars as part of one course provides students with important context and a broad picture of a certain discipline or topic of study. It also allows teachers to focus the seminars on specific arguments and to go deeper into the material. At Bielefeld, however, the lectures are largely confined to the two introductory courses in practical and theoretical philosophy, as well as to the logic course. Specific seminars in other modules, be it specific topics in metaphysics or political philosophy, are not supplemented by lectures. Moreover, the wide variety of seminars taken per semester necessitates limiting the number of readings one can assign as required for each seminar. Students do not really expect to read more than 25–35 pages per seminar each week. This makes it more difficult to manage to both discuss substantive philosophical content and provide the relevant background and context as part of one seminar series. Supplementing at least some seminars with lectures might be a way of improving things.
Whether this is feasible is a further question. One potential worry is poor attendance. If lectures serve mostly to cover background and context, rather than the material directly relevant to assessment, such as exams, the worry would be well-founded. One wonders, however, whether the wide discretion students have in choosing whether to show up is justified in the first place. This is, of course, a separate issue, which I can’t discuss here. But if there are good reasons to limit this freedom, the worry about lecture attendance would also be addressed.
Another potential worry is that students would be less flexible in choosing the courses they attend. This is because by committing to a course, a student would commit not just to a weekly seminar, but to a pair of events, which would limit their capacity to combine more different courses. Moreover, given that students in Germany typically study two subjects (a Kernfach and a Nebenfach), limiting their flexibility in choosing courses might create further organisational difficulties. This worry is well-taken, and there is a trade-off between thematic unity provided by pairs of lectures and seminars, and flexibility provided by standalone seminar courses.
One way forward is to increase the number of lectures without supplementing each seminar with one (this raises the question of deciding which seminars require lectures). In any case, point I am raising isn’t that we must have more lectures. The point is that there is a need for more thematic unity, or at least more background and context that is difficult to secure as part of a seminar series. One alternative to coupling lectures and seminars is an American-style blend between the two. Another possible measure is increased coherence and coordination among the teachers to ensure that introductory-level seminars serve as background for more advanced ones. I purposefully omit the details and thorny issues that these alternatives might have. A discussion will have to wait for another occasion.
Zur Person
Dmitry Ananiev ist wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter in praktische Philosophie an der Universität Bielefeld. Zuvor promovierte er an der London School of Economics (LSE). Seine Forschung bewegt sich an der Schnittstelle zwischen Metaethik und normativer Ethik. In seiner aktuellen Forschung beschäftigt er sich mit dem Verhältnis zwischen Pflichten, Rechten und normativen Gründen sowie mit Fragen im Zusammenhang mit den Anforderungen der Moral und der Supererogation.
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