Ancient Wisdom for Modern Times

My main approach was to find where my interests overlapped with the interests of the students and the focus of the programme. I am aware that my interest in Greek and Roman Classics are perceived as somewhat niche here in Singapore; NUS doesn’t even have a Greek and Roman Classics programme. Because of this, I’m always mindful not to let the subject matter of my module estrange students.

For Writing and Critical Thinking: Conditions of Happiness, I picked the topic of happiness because I think everyone cares about happiness, even if they haven’t heard about Aristotle or positive psychology. The study of happiness is also cross-disciplinary in nature and can incorporate readings from philosophy, psychology, behavioural economics, and cultural anthropology, among other disciplines. It’s a topic that allows me to leverage my own expertise, pique the interests of students, and meet the interdisciplinary requirement.

For Utopia: Ideal Places from Plato to the Smart City, the impetus was my fascination with Singapore’s  ambition to create a “smart city” and a “city in a garden”, which really struck me when I first arrived here. There is a strong sense that it’s possible to achieve an increasingly efficient kind of governance, while also finding a balance between the city and nature. This reminded me of Plato’s Republic, a text in which I have a longstanding interest, which proposes a blueprint for a just society ruled by rational leaders. I wanted to ask the question: is Singapore attempting to be a utopia, and if so, how? I thought it would be interesting to explore what we could learn from juxtaposing ancient and modern approaches to an ideal society.

Technologies of the Self: From Socrates to Self-Help, was based on a module that I designed when I was still in graduate school, which focused on the concept of philosophy as a way of life in the Western tradition. When I came to Singapore, I thought it would be interesting to redesign this module by juxtaposing Western and Eastern traditions of self-cultivation, and by examining them not just from a historical point of view, but also from a more contemporary one, since many ancient traditions are now being revived as forms of self-help. I thought that this would be a good way to speak to student’s interests, as they are bound to question how these ancient schools of thought might still be relevant today. 

A bit of both. I usually have a hunch about some things that need to be adapted, and then ask students targeted questions through surveys, to get a better sense of the changes I need to make to improve their learning experience.

The requirements themselves are fairly clear, but I noticed that people approached interdisciplinarity in slightly different ways, and when I first started designing modules, I tried to find an approach that worked for me and for the topics that I wanted to teach. With WCT, of course, you have strict parameters and requirements, but for the Inquiry tier there is more freedom. Most of what I learned in designing modules came from talking with colleagues and with the members of the Curriculum Review Committee. Those conversations have saved me from a lot of mistakes.

The number of pages that students have to write is fixed: there need to be at least two papers from different genres, and each of them has to go through at least one round of conferences and peer reviews. However, there was more freedom in designing WCT modules when I came in, compared to the early years of the programme. Back then, there was a shared format with three units and three papers, but when I was designing my module, I was told I could deviate from this structure. I realised that my module naturally split into two halves, so I went with two units rather than the usual three.

If I were to teach Conditions of Happiness as a writing module elsewhere, I would probably keep it more or less the way it is. If I were to change it to an elective, I would probably add some more topics that I don’t get to explore when I have to spend a lot of class time on writing. More specifically, I would like to spend more time exploring cultural differences in how people define wisdom, and examine the socioeconomic aspects of happiness in more detail.

If I were to Technologies of the Self in a philosophy department, I might add a little more metaphilosophy, and spend more time discussing questions about how to do comparative philosophy in a methodologically responsible way, and about what differentiates philosophical and religious thinking. Some students already ask me about these kinds of questions, but I realize that they may not interest everyone.

I did my Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, which was a pretty classics-centric place: one of the core modules was Greek Thought and Literature, and even in the Political Science department, you could find modules on Plato. At NUS, the classics aren’t really “in the air” as much, but I’m pleased to see that there’s a fair amount of interest in my more classics-heavy electives, and that students have approached me to start a Classics interest group and to learn Latin. 

It makes for very interesting discussions because people who are not Classics majors will ask refreshing and challenging questions that you might not get in a group of people who take them for granted. They often ask more fundamental questions about why we are still studying these texts and why they are still relevant today. This has helped me to reflect more on the choices that I make in designing my modules and on and how I articulate those choices. Initially, this was sometimes a bit of a challenge, but I soon started appreciating it because it made me more reflective in my pedagogy.

I do think students might struggle with them a bit more than with texts on more contemporary subjects that have more overlaps with things they already know. To accommodate this, I try to come up with texts that are reasonably accessible, but I often find it difficult to predict which texts students will struggle with. I often find that I have to teach a text in order to see if it works for a particular module or not.

That said, while I tried to make my modules relatable, I also think there’s value in pushing back a bit against the expectation that everything we learn must be immediately relatable and practically relevant. Sometimes, taking a detour to the study the past or to examine seemingly niche topics can give us a fresh perspective on ourselves and the world around us.