The Philosophers' Cocoon

By Dallas Amico-Korby

With the increased prevalence of AI tools, it is difficult to ensure that students are doing the assigned reading, and previously popular enforcement mechanisms seem insufficient for the task. For example, students who paste articles into Chat GPT and ask for a summary, will often be provided with summaries that are accurate enough to pass in-class quizzes. And Socratic Note Taking methods can also be performed by AI in a way that’s pretty difficult to discover without time consuming grading.

So what’s to be done? 

One way we could approach this question is by brainstorming new types of enforcement strategies. But I think it is useful to take a step back and start by thinking about what makes people excited to read in the first place. 

Outside of school, reading (when done at all) seems like a lot of other media in the following respect. It’s way more fun and enjoyable when it’s consumed with friends. Think back to books, TV shows, and movies that gripped the culture like Game of Thrones, Twilight, The Hunger Games, Harry Potter, Breaking Bad, and The Sopranos. Part of the explanation for why these books and shows gripped the culture is surely that they were (mostly) quite good. But there was a very real social aspect to why people got hooked on these books and shows and kept coming back. When everyone was watching Game of Thrones, for example, I could hardly wait to go and talk about the most recent episode at work the next day. I wanted to hear my friend’s theories, discuss the most recent plot twists, and gossip about the characters I hated the most (definitely Joffrey). The show was great, but what really motivated me is that I wanted to be a part of the community, and this meant I had to keep coming back to watch the show. After all, missing an episode meant I couldn’t take part in that week’s banter and fun! I’d have to ask my friends not to spoil what happened, and (worse) sit on the sidelines while they had all the fun. 

This is the kind of principle that drives the success of book clubs as well. One Redditor who was thinking about starting their own book club asked other Redditors what has (or would) motivate them to join one. While responders mention a range of things they would want out of a book club, a consistent theme is that responders are driven to join book clubs for the social opportunities and friendships. In an article on Literary Hub titled “Why Everyone—Yes, Everyone—Should Join a Book Club”, Linda Marie-Barrett begins her plea with a discussion of the loneliness epidemic in the United States, and offers the humble book club as a solution. 

If you, too, yearn for a way out of the despair and disconnection that is the zeitgeist of our time, let me suggest a tried and true remedy: join a book club. It’s not a panacea for all that ails us, but it’s a simple way to connect over ideas wrapped in beautiful passages that crystalize something we’ve felt, longed for, worried about, feared, or wanted to speak aloud to others.”

Importantly, community seems to have played a role in sparking a desire to read in younger generations as well. The best evidence for this is BookTok. BookTok is the corner of TikTok dedicated to all things bookish. It’s deeply social. Influencers (and regular people) react to and discuss books as they read them. But BookTok is often social in another way. It permits direct engagement between authors and their readers, and gives them the opportunity to build community with their fan base. And it has been wildly successful. For example, The Publishers Association points to research suggesting that almost 2/3rds of UK 16-25 year olds say “BookTok or book influencers have helped them discover a passion for reading”, and many brick and mortar bookstores now have sections at the front of their stores featuring the most popular books on BookTok. 

So, what can the popularity of Game of Thrones, the explanations for why people join book clubs, and the popularity of BookTok teach us about motivating students to read philosophy? 

I think the lesson is that we can increase the likelihood that our students will get excited about reading philosophy if we create opportunities for them to build community around the texts and articles that we assign. 

Of course, there are many ways of building community in and outside of the classroom, and one size won’t fit all. Below I discuss a few strategies I’ve used or am planning to use. Many of these could be combined with traditional assessment methods or performed on their own. I would love to hear about other ideas for building community and encouraging reading in the comments. 

1. My favorite example of a strategy like this comes from my Fall 2025 Introduction to Philosophy: How to Live an Awesome and Meaningful Life course. One section of this course was dedicated to the value of work. One Monday, I assigned Bertrand Russell’s “In Praise of Idleness” in which Russell argues that we all should spend more time being idle. On Wednesday, I took my students to Kansas State’s on-campus bowling alley to practice idleness. This was early in the term, and most of my students were not convinced we would actually be bowling for class until they had laced up their shoes and thrown their first ball. But, come Friday, when we discussed Russell’s arguments in detail, my students were on fire to talk about his ideas. For the remainder of the term students referenced our bowling excursion and Russell’s ideas, and they often suggested we add on more activities like it when relevant to the reading. For example, during a week discussing human achievement we asked whether the achievements of Rawls’ grass counters or Alex Honnold (famous for climbing El Capitan with no ropes and no safety equipment) added to the meaningfulness of their lives, and my students joined together to ask that we schedule a time for the class to go test out our views at the local rock wall. 
2. In my “Intro to Ethics: Evil, Distraction, and How to Build a Better World” I teach a section on protest and civil disobedience. We read Malcolm X, Gandhi, and MLK Jr., and discuss Socrates’ views in the Crito. To accompany this, I hosted a movie night where we watched Pontecorvo’s classic film “The Battle of Algiers”. Many of the students who attended stuck around for ~15-30 minutes after the film to talk about the ideas and how they related to course readings, and many of these students ended up discussing the film in their final exam. 
3. I have assigned movies alongside course readings, and offered modest extra credit to students who watch them with at least 2 of their classmates. 
4. One strategy that I imagine many already employ is small group discussions. These quite literally bring many of the benefits of book clubs into the classroom. Taking the book club and TikTok as our guide, here are a few things it might be worth leaning into when running discussion groups. First, it is worth keeping students in consistent groups over the course of the term. Especially in large classes, it is valuable for students to have a group that they get to know over the course of the term. Second, it may be worth permitting a bit more distraction and “catching up” in groups than might be comfortable. A natural concern professors have for discussion groups is that students will get off task. After all, we want students to use class-time to focus on the material and practice philosophical skills. But if our goal is for our students to be engaged with the class, interested in the readings, and excited to come back for more philosophy, then a bit less time spent on material in-class may actually result in more of what we want. Allowing and encouraging students to build community, in my experience, makes it more likely that students do the readings and talk about them outside of class. Third, it might be worth thinking of yourself as playing the role of BookTok influencer. What I mean by this is the following. BookTok influencers often gain engagement because they (a) talk about cool books, and (b) think carefully about what is interesting about their subject matter and think carefully about how to present it. Most philosophy professors spend time doing something like this. But it really is worth spending this time. I think it is especially important before students go off to read or go off to discuss in groups to spend time talking about what is interesting about the material. Why does it matter? Why is it relevant to their lives? Almost everyone has worried about death, meaning, love, god, and their uncle who believes in conspiracy theories, and philosophy has much to say about each of these topics. But sometimes we philosophers write to other philosophers who are deep in the weeds on these issues, and it can be very hard for new students of philosophy (especially first generation students, as many of my students are) to see why what we’re going on about matters. Spending class space really driving this home can make a difference to students’ desire to read. 
5. Short, catchy, in-class readings. Early in a semester, it may be worthwhile to assign a short reading (or two or three) in-class. I recommend assigning something that is interesting, obviously relevant to their lives, provocative, easy to read, and likely to end in aporia. This accomplishes several things. First, it ensures that most students will do the reading (I ban laptops and phones in my classrooms, so there isn’t much else for them to do!). Second, it provides you with an opportunity to demonstrate the delight and joy of talking about philosophy early in the class. This can help students get excited to read more philosophy, it can give you an opportunity to teach them the skill of reading philosophy which will help prepare them for more difficult readings later in the course, and it can  also buy you some good will when you do go ahead and assign those more difficult readings. When you assign readings that they recognize as important and rewarding, you earn their trust. This is similar to an idea C. Thi Nguyen points out in “Trust and Sincerity in Art”. Some art takes a significant amount of time to appreciate. As he puts it “To the uninitiated, Coltrane’s later work, and much of the free jazz which follows, is indistinguishable from random noise. Many can see no difference between abstract expressionist paintings and the random splattering of a child. And some forms of difficulty are subtle. The difficulty itself can be invisible to the careless eye. Audiences raised on Western modernist poetry, for example, often miss the quality of Basho’s minimalist haiku and Tu Fu’s plain-spoken verse. These poems’ superficial clarity masks their artistic depth. The verse can seem simpleminded and childish to those raised on the more willfully obscure poetry of, say, John Berryman and Jorie Graham. Similarly, to those unversed in the complexities of hip-hop production, it’s easy to mistake Kanye West’s deliberately rough vocal work for mere ineptness—and miss the complex relationship between the simplistic vocal work and the dense, atmospheric production work in which it is embedded”. So, how do we determine what difficult art to try? For art we are unfamiliar with, testimony is often our guide. Our friends and loved ones, for example, are often the ones who sell us on spending time trying to understand difficult art. For artists who have already earned our trust, we are often willing to invest more time in their future projects. For Nguyen, this plays a role in explaining why we feel betrayed when artists sell out—they do not live up to the trust we’ve placed in them. Much of philosophy is like difficult art. It is deeply rewarding and meaningful, but it takes time to appreciate this. To the uninitiated, philosophy can seem boring, uninteresting, and even indecipherable. Earning students’ trust through more approachable and obviously meaningful pieces can pave the way for them to trust you enough to choose to spend their time on more difficult pieces later on in the course. 
6. Here is a strategy that requires the right facilities. Last term I was fortunate enough to teach in the Kansas State philosophy building directly across from the philosophy lounge. Throughout the term I encouraged my students to come early and stay late to hang out in the lounge. Our department is fortunate to have a phenomenal office administrator, Teresa Zerbe, who bakes cookies and muffins and welcomes every student into the lounge. By the end of the term, it was common for nearly many of my students to hang out for 10-15 minutes in the lounge before class. Not infrequently, I would find students discussing their readings or out-of-class projects. 
7. Offering credit for attending philosophy events. Attending a department tea or talk can connect students to other philosophers and philosophy students. And the more that the people we hang out with are interested in something, the more likely we are to get interested in it. This explains why I started watching Game of Thrones in the first place! 
8. Out-of-Class group projects. Here is one example. In introductory and applied ethics courses, I often assign a Civic Engagement Project. These projects require students to create and execute a plan to improve the world in a course-relevant way. While it is not required that students work together, most students opt to. These projects not only create opportunities for students to get to know each other better, they create opportunities for them to talk about course materials outside of class as one requirement for their project proposals is to discuss their project in light of the readings from the course. 
9. Finally, and perhaps most obviously, you can have students form real-life book clubs centered around course materials for credit. These require students to meet up with a small number of their classmates to talk about a small number of articles over the term. I don’t do this with ALL articles, because (a) that seems a bit too demanding, and (b) it’s more exciting to talk to friends about what you care about. This gives groups the opportunity to choose which articles interest them the most. But how do you assess this assignment? If you ask students for pictures of them together, there is no guarantee that they will have actually chatted about the article. If you ask for students to write something about their discussion, we are back to our original concerns. It is very easy to produce something with AI that will satisfy this requirement. What I am experimenting with this term is for students to video record their conversations and submit them to me. While I certainly won’t watch these in their entirety, they won’t know that (and they’ll know that I can). My hope is that this will provide sufficient motivation for students to actually hang out, become friends, and get excited about the ideas you and I already think are so interesting. (For more on a similar strategy, see this piece by Lily Abadal on teaching philosophy online). 

These strategies really do seem to help build community and excitement for the ideas covered in the class. Last term I taught two of my courses back to back. By the middle of term, I often felt like a bouncer at a bar having to kick the first class out so the second could begin: “you can keep talking about philosophy but you can’t do it here”.  

Of course, not all of these strategies will be suitable for all classes nor all instructors, and there are difficult questions to ask about how to make tradeoffs between inspiration and assessment. But I hope they’re helpful for thinking about how to encourage our students to get excited about philosophy and, especially, to get excited about reading philosophy.