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Tips for prepping a new course outside of one’s expertise?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread a reader asks:

Do you have any general rules of thumb that guide prepping a syllabus for a new course? Suppose, for example, you are teaching X in the Fall, and you have no familiarity at all with X. Do you find someone who has published a lot on X and look for their teaching syllabus on X? Do you look for a widely cited textbook/anthology on X and? And so on.

Good questions. I've done this on more than one occasion, and I don't have any simple template. In some cases (such as philosophy of law), I searched for textbooks and found a widely-used one that cohered better with my background than others and how I preferred to teach the course. In other cases (such as philosophies of race and gender), I recall approaching a few people with expertise to see how they taught their courses and went from there.

Do any readers have any helpful tips or experiences to share? 

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7 responses to “Tips for prepping a new course outside of one’s expertise?”

  1. Course design

    One resource that I found helpful in this regard is the APA’s Diversity and Inclusiveness Syllabus Collection!

    Reply
  2. anon

    My main rule of thumb here would be “minimize prep!”, since it’s easy to end up putting too much into it when you feel unfamiliar with the area.
    More than one way to follow that rule of thumb, but here’s one way I’ve done it: don’t feel too constrained by the course description (depending on institutional norms/rules) and use that freedom to give the course a bit of an angle that allows you to draw on your expertise – not so much so that it’s a special topics course, but in a way that can still help you.
    So if you’re a metaphysician of something else but you’re teaching a course on love, focus on the metaphysics of love. If you’re an epistemologist teaching a course on art, focus on something like how we manage to get knowledge about aesthetic properties. Then when you’re giving important background information on issues in the texts, you’re discussing stuff you already know well, and have maybe taught already too.

    Reply
  3. Karl

    Teaching classes way outside your areas are a routine part of being a professor in most American non-elite colleges. Get used to it and get used to it early. I found it a generally valuable philosophical experience overall too. Teach those classes as a graduate student if you can, before you have more serious time-consuming responsibilities than your dissertation. You will learn (I hope) that it is not a daunting task if you put in the right kind and amount of work and usually you will come ti enjoy it.
    As a graduate student when I was asked to teach classes like environmental ethics or philosophy of law I read as many introductory texts in the field (and the occasional anthology) as I could before I decided how I wanted to structure my class. Then I would read as many popular books on environmentalism or law or whatever so that I had a store of good examples and I understood the relevant technical details. You can then look to other people’s syllabi to see how yours compares and adjust as you feel comfortable.
    It is a serious summer’s work the first few times, but worth it. The more you do, the easier and more rewarding it gets.

    Reply
  4. academic migrant

    The Diversity Reading List may also be helpful:
    https://diversityreadinglist.org/blueprints/

    Reply
  5. rutabagas

    Google syllabuses in that area. Seeing how other people structure their courses is, by far, the most helpful thing for me when I’m planning something new.

    Reply
  6. Anony

    The style of class you run can also make this harder or easier on you. If it is an upper-division course, I would recommend teaching it seminar style, where you have free-flowing discussions around a variety of readings (where, of course, there are essential points that you are making sure to bring up). This sort of course is a lot easier to prep for than one where you are planning to quickly create an expertise to the level that would allow you to extensively lecture.

    Reply
  7. Bill Vanderburgh

    When I first taught bioethics (I subject I had never even taken a course in), I started by asking what books the previous person used. I kept one, replaced another with something I found by searching “bioethics textbooks.” It was a good enough place to start.
    Echoing other comments, make the course as easy on yourself as you can the first time around: Think of some in-class activities students can do that they will find useful and which don’t require a lot of you in terms of weekly prep time. (Some possibilities: class discussions; written argument analysis with peer critique and whole-class debrief; groups formulate arguments for both sides of an issue; student presentations on topics you don’t know really well; group debates. I have often worried that such things were not rigorous enough, only to find out students felt they learned the most doing those things.)
    Free yourself from the trap of thinking you need to “cover” the material. The readings can be the main source of information for students, in which case your role becomes motivator and facilitator of synthesis, application, and similar.
    A new prep doesn’t have to be perfect the first time you teach it. (If the chair wanted it to be perfect the first time, they would have assigned it to someone who already knows the field!) Caveat for those on the tenure track: Make sure you do enough that your course evals are not terrible the first time you teach a course, but it can be a very good thing from a tenure review committee’s perspective if the evals show a trend of improvement on subsequent iterations of the course.

    Reply

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