Transforming Thinking

Philosophical Inquiry in the Primary and Secondary Classroom

Catherine C. McCall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317709572
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Essential reading for anyone who seeks to prepare active citizens for the twenty-first century, this long-awaited book considers Philosophical Inquiry, an empowering teaching method that can lead to significant improvements in confidence and articulacy, and produce positive effects in other school activities and in interactions in the wider world.

Readers are guided through the creation of a Community of Philosophical Inquiry (CoPI) in the kindergarten, the classrooms of primary and secondary schools, the community centre and beyond, with practical ideas to make CoPI work. With examples ranging from five year old children to underachieving teenagers, and even senior citizens, the book shows how participation in a CoPI develops:

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• the skills of reasoning, critical and creative thinking
• concept formation and judgment
• the virtues of intellectual honesty and bravery.

Including chapters on the theory and development of Philosophical Inquiry, the creation of a community, and using CoPI with groups of different ages, this book forms essential reading for teachers, professionals and community workers.

Chapter 1

Introduction

The core of this book is a transcript of a ninety-minute philosophical dialogue with 5-year-old children,¹ which illustrates many of the features of the Community of Philosophical Inquiry (CoPI) method.² This philosophical dialogue was part of a five-year research project designed to demonstrate that, given the right environment, even young children could engage in philosophical reasoning.

When the research project began, almost no one would believe that young children had the capacities that would be required to engage in the kind of philosophical reasoning which occurred in CoPI sessions;it was commonly held that that young children could neither think in abstract terms nor engage in logical reasoning about philosophical concepts. Influenced by Piagetian³ theories of cognitive development, most education professionals⁴ took it to be a fact that young children could think only in ‘concrete’ terms. One of the few theorists to question this widely assumed view was Gareth Matthews,⁵ who questioned the very concept of ‘stages’ in cognitive development.⁶ However, because most of the ‘experts’ held that young children could think only in ‘concrete’ terms, education curricula had largely been stripped of abstract ideas and ambiguity. And so from the 1960s onwards, young children generally had no experience with, or practice in, thinking and reasoning about difficult abstract ideas, ambiguities, contradictions and inconsistencies.

Because they had had no experience with abstract thinking, it is not surprising that young children ‘failed’ in this skill when they were tested. And research results which showed that young children were unable to perform complex abstract thinking tasks served to entrench the idea that children were incapable of so doing.

However, being unable to do something does not mean that one does not have the capacity to do it. For example, I cannot speak Russian and would fail any test of my Russian language skills, but that does not mean that I am incapable of learning Russian. It would most likely be very difficult but not impossible for me (and quite possible for a 5-year-old) to learn Russian. I have the capacity to learn Russian. This is not to say that practising CoPI is like learning Russian; analogies only go so far! Rather, it is to say that to be proficient in any activity or skill, one needs to be exposed to the activity and to practise it. For example, a child or adult who has never been in water will not be able to swim. There is a lot involved in learning how to swim, and many human beings cannot swim, but all have the capacity to swim.⁷ It is even possible to teach a lot about swimming without going into water, and some swimming coaches do this prior to their students going into the water, but no matter how much one knows about it, one cannot be said to know how to swim without actually being able to swim in water.

Similarly, although many adults and children do not practise philosophising, they all have the capacity to do so. And philosophising is not the same as learning about philosophy. One can learn a lot about philosophy without actually philosophising, but to engage in philosophising for oneself requires practice.

The 5-year-old children described in the Preface⁸ had already spent fifty-six hours philosophising through the practice of CoPI, whereas the university students had spent sixty hours listening to lectures about philosophy. So, perhaps it should not be surprising that the group who had spent fifty-six hours engaged in the practice of philosophising for themselves were better at philosophising than the group who had listened to lectures about, and learned the results of, someone else’s philosophising. What did surprise (then and still today) was that 5-year-old children could philosophise.

The children knew nothing of Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Hegel, Wittgenstein, and so on, so one could say they did not know philosophy. But they could juggle with epistemological and metaphysical ideas, and make ethical distinctions and meta-ethical distinctions. In short, they could philosophise.

The next chapter begins by describing how the idea of CoPI arose out of a mixture of academic philosophy and improvisational theatre techniques. It continues by describing the development of CoPI as a method of eliciting philosophical dialogue from groups of people in a non-academic setting, and the way in which CoPI was then adapted to its current form initially to use with 5-year-old children.

Chapter 3 looks at the theoretical landscape in which CoPI was first implemented. The chapter describes background theories in cognitive psychology that have influenced both education and school curricula for many years. This chapter presents some examples that show 5-year-old children reasoning correctly with hypothetical syllogisms and with set relations as a result of their immersion in CoPI, and analyses the logical structures that underlie their reasoning.

Chapter 4 presents the transcript of the CoPI session with 5-year-old children (referred to in the Preface), with comments and explanations about the role of the Chair (teacher): what the Chair is actually doing in this session; what is philosophically important in the thinking of the 5-year-olds in the session; what is startling in the cognitive skills and emotional intelligence skills of the 5-year-olds in this session; and an analysis of the underlying logic within the children’s dialogue.

Chapter 5 explains the nature of the Community of Philosophical Inquiry, illustrated with examples from the transcript of the 5-year-olds in Chapter 4.

The chapter gives a simple, understandable explanation of the philosophical theory of realism that underlies the CoPI method, and how that philosophy is instantiated in the practice. It describes the role of the Chair in creating the CoPI, and the different levels at which the Chair works.

Chapter 6 gives an outline of different methods of eliciting philosophical dialogue, describing first Leonard Nelson’s Socratic dialogue method and Matthew Lipman’s P4C programmes. In an accessible and easily understandable way, it explains the different philosophical theories that underlie different methods, and how those theories are instantiated within the different practices. It describes, too, the actual practices – what a teacher does in the classroom when using each method. The chapter continues by giving an outline of two methodologies designed specifically for the classroom: the SAPERE approach to Philosophy for Children,⁹ and the Guided Socratic Discussion series. The chapter compares and contrasts all four methods with the CoPI method.

Chapter 7 gives a longer exposition of what the teacher needs to know in order to create a CoPI in the classroom, as well as an outline of the philosophy and logic that it is desirable for an aspiring CoPI Chair to know. Illustrated with transcripts from the classroom, the chapter describes features of CoPI that are distinct from other kinds of pedagogy.

Chapter 8 outlines features that are specific to implementing CoPI with younger children in primary school and with younger and older teenagers in secondary school. Illustrated with transcripts of beginning CoPI sessions in both primary and secondary classrooms, this chapter looks at the similarities and differences that a teacher is likely to find when beginning to implement CoPI in either primary schools or secondary schools.

Chapter 9 explores the purpose of philosophising with children. The chapter first outlines the individual benefits of philosophising for the future life chances of children of all ages and backgrounds, including the academic benefits of the raising of achievements in subjects such as mathematics and language, the development of both moral virtues and cognitive skills through the practice of CoPI, and the positive changes in behaviour that are induced through the practice of CoPI. Second, the chapter explains how the practice of CoPI benefits society through the development of the skills and disposition required for children to become active, effective citizens within a democracy. The way in which CoPI develops those skills and dispositions is illustrated with transcripts of CoPI dialogue.

Chapter 10 develops the explanations given in Chapter 9 about the way in which the CoPI practice creates active citizens. This chapter gives expanded examples of three different projects, which involved both adults and children who practised CoPI out with the education system, and explains how these projects changed their lives and their communities. The chapter also describes how the CoPI practice follows in the tradition of the philosophy clubs of the Scottish Enlightenment, and makes a case that the re-emergence of philosophising outside academia could transform society in the twenty-first century.

Chapter 2

The origins and development of ‘Community of Philosophical Inquiry’

When I went to university, I made a tremendous discovery: that there was a name for the kind of thinking I had been doing all my life. It was called philosophy, and moreover it had a 2,000-year history.

I had always been fascinated by questions about the nature of reality; how we know what is true and what is ‘correct’; what makes some actions and decisions fair or just; the nature of good and bad; and why some things are beautiful. As a young child I would ask my teachers, but I never seemed to get replies that answered the questions I was asking; it seemed as though these were the wrong questions. The teachers at the local village primary school were (mostly) kind and caring. They thought I was a ‘dreamer’, and they probably thought these were fantastical childish questions, which were distracting me from class work. Gradually they ‘weaned me off’ asking – but I never stopped wondering.

Then, when I was 10 years old, we had the good fortune to have a wonderful science teacher. When I asked Mr Howie whether ‘power’ was real in the same way as objects were real, he did not treat it as a ‘silly’ question. We were learning about electrical circuits, and another teacher might just have been annoyed at the distraction, but he responded by giving me books on theoretical physics. For the first time I encountered serious thinking about the nature of reality and of the world, and the possibility that there was more than one answer, and that the answer had to be argued for and demonstrated. It seemed to me that there could be nothing more important! Although theoretical physics did not address questions of morality or aesthetics, it did raise questions of metaphysics and also of epistemology. (Of course, at the time, I did not know the names for these kinds of questions, or even that they had names.) Later, in a new school and studying algebra, I was trying to fathom what ‘tending to infinity’ meant. There was no Mr Howie to ask. An exasperated teacher told me that it didn’t mean anything; it was just how you describe this graph, and this part of the equation. If anything, that answer made the concept even more puzzling.

In encountering the discipline of philosophy at university, I found the home for all these questions. It was a revelation and a kind of liberation. It felt as though a great secret had been kept from us all through our childhood and teenage years. It wasn’t because here were the answers to all the questions; rather, it became clear that this kind of thinking was important and fundamental. All my classmates seemed to feel the same way: we were all excited about the topics and we spent hours discussing philosophical puzzles in the coffee bar. But after a year or so we began to feel something was missing...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The origins and development of ‘Community of Philosophical Inquiry’
• 3. The theoretical landscape
• 4. Philosophising with 5-year-olds
• 5. Creating a Community of Philosophical Inquiry (CoPI) with all ages
• 6. Different methods of group philosophical discussion
• 7. What you need to know to chair a CoPI with 6–16-year-olds
• 8. Implementing CoPI in primary and secondary schools
• 9. CoPI, citizenship, moral virtue and academic performance with primary and secondary schoolchildren
• 10. Afterword: the past, the present and the future?
• Appendix A: The rules of the Fair Intellectual Club, 1717
• Appendix B: The laws of the Easy Club, 1713
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index