The Department of Philosophy will host the 86th Aquinas Lecture on Friday, Oct. 10, at 3 p.m. in the Fr. John Naus, S.J., Room (AMU 163).
This year’s lecture, “A Teacher’s Dilemma: Balancing High Expectations with Evidence,” will be delivered by Dr. Jennifer M. Morton, Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania with a secondary appointment at the Graduate School of Education.
The Aquinas Lecture will be followed by “Education, Agency, and Action: A Workshop on Themes from the Work of Jennifer Morton,” which will take place on Saturday, Oct. 11, and Sunday, Oct. 12, in Marquette Hall 105. For details and a full program, visit the Department of Philosophy website.
Morton’s lecture will explore the tension between teachers’ responsibility to maintain high expectations for their students and the growing emphasis on data-driven pedagogy. She argues that addressing this dilemma requires reconceiving teaching as ethically motivated inquiry, while recognizing the complexities of institutional frameworks that shape how evidence is interpreted and applied.
Morton, an award-winning scholar and author of “Moving Up Without Losing Your Way: The Ethical Costs of Upward Mobility,” has held fellowships and faculty positions at leading universities, including Princeton, UNC-Chapel Hill, and CUNY. Her work has been recognized with the Grawemeyer Award in Education, the APA’s Scheffler Prize, and Philosopher’s Annual’s selection of her co-authored essay “Grit” as one of the top 10 philosophy papers of 2019.
Both the Aquinas Lecture and Aquinas Workshop are free and open to the public.
