Abstract: The American Association of Philosophy Teachers (AAPT) is an association that focuses on the advancement of the art of teaching philosophy. Recently, the AAPT has partnered with other philosophical associations to run "Teaching Hubs" at those conferences. Teaching Hubs aim to bring active, student-centered teaching discussions and resources to the wider audience of philosophy instructors. This AAPT-PSA Teaching Hub seeks to bring AAPT-style pedagogy to the problems facing the teaching of philosophy of science.
The AAPT-PSA Teaching Hub is a series of interactive workshops and conversations designed specifically for philosophers of science and created to celebrate teaching within the context of the PSA biannual meetings. Organized by the American Association of Philosophy Teachers, the Teaching Hub aims to offer a range of high quality and inclusive development opportunities that address the teaching of philosophy of science at all levels, pre-college though graduate school. This session first provides a brief introduction to AAPT Teaching Hubs, followed by two workshop sessions: (1) The Thinking Science project, which aims to bring philosophical questioning to science education for schoolchildren. This extension of the project covers various topics involving AI, big data and robotics. (2) "Robust Classrooms: Redesigning Science Learning" details an approach to teaching that scientific modeling necessarily involves choices and the integration of visual technology. The session leaders have implemented this teaching strategy through the modeling of COVID-19. Additionally, the session leaders will demonstrate one way to effectively integrate visual technology into a group project about modeling.

Our aim is to explore how to structure collaborative student learning environments.
We discuss an ongoing GE, service-based philosophy of science course, where we are
researching how to re-design the learning environment into teams of scientists that create
socially-relevant models about the current SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 pandemic. We call this
learning structure: the ‘robust classroom’.
We will engage the workshop audience by visualizing a model of the robust classroom—
consisting of: learning objectives, collaborative iterative structure, service-learning community
partnership and social outcomes, and visual and technology-based products. The learning goals
are not just to model the complex, dynamical biological phenomena—e.g., virus-to-host
interaction and genetic changes; it is also to model socially-relevant processes. For example, by
working with community partners that focus on the science of social spaces (e.g., complex
interactions between housing structure, community relations, and local ecosystems), our students


attempt to understand how social spaces and pandemic social shifts can be visualized into multi-
scale dynamical scientific models. The current focus is on modeling how the pandemic reveals


important environmental and social injustices. With the assumption that all models are limited in
their aspects and degrees, we challenge the workshop audience to work collaboratively to
critique and improve the robust classroom model.
The reason why we find this to be an important project is because our robust classroom model
attempts to synthesize: scientific modeling/analysis skills, scientific visualization, technology,
and diverse community perspectives on socially-relevant issues. We use the robust classroom
model to take a broader perspectival scope over the skills that we are teaching our students—not
just to analyze, but also to use technology and art, and to collaborate with local communities on
important social issues.
The takeaway for participants will be to explore new learning models for teaching applied
philosophy of science courses. The participants will re-design components of the robust
classroom: learning objectives, collaborative iterative structure, service-learning community


partnership and social outcomes, and visual and technology-based products. Each of these
components will be critiqued, improved, and visualized—using cutting edge digital
technology—so that the collaborative output can be useful for philosophy of science education.
We want our participants to suggest broader perspectives about applied philosophy of science
learning. That is, we hope to find new ways that our students can analyze complex phenomena
that are at the intersection between biological and social processes; but more importantly, we
want our students to make products that help local communities—e.g., by creating public
presentations, popular publications, and social policy changes.