Birch / Worley The Philosophy Foundation Provocations

Philosophy for Secondary School
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-84590-901-7
Verlag: Crown House Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 328 Seiten

Reihe: The Philosophy Foundation Series

This book is ideal for teachers, whether they are P4C trained or just experimenting with philosophy. It will help teachers to present ideas and stimulate discussions which both accommodate and engage adolescent appetites. Are human beings flawed? Is murder an act of insanity or just plain thoughtlessness? Do we need a soul? From the fall of Icarus to the rise of Caesar this practical book draws upon history, philosophy and literature to provoke students to think, question and wonder. Divided into chapters on The World, Self, Society and Others, this resource for secondary school is written to give teachers the means to listen rather than teach and to allow the ideas and thoughts of students to form the centre of the lesson. It raises questions on the nature of evil, belief in God, slavery, consumerism, utopia, the limits of freedom, and a whole lot more. With a clear introductory outline on its use both in and out of the classroom, Provocations also contains tips and advice to help guide teachers to span the curriculum. Applicable to History, Geography, RS, Science, Art, English and Citizenship it offers teachers of all subjects the opportunity to introduce a student-centred approach to their lessons. There is also an extensive bibliography for those who wish to explore the topics in greater depth. Provocations is a set of philosophy sessions designed for secondary school and predicated on the pedagogical methods of The Philosophy Foundation. These sessions are mature, challenging and provocative, using history, literature, myth and the world today as their basis. Each session contains particular pedagogical tips and advice and suggestions as to how they can be effectively delivered

David Birch works for The Philosophy Foundation, an award-winning charity that brings philosophy to schools and the wider community. He is also a teacher of philosophy and religious studies at both Newham Sixth Form College and Kensington Park School.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Birch, David

Worley, Peter

Leseproben

Introduction
It is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. Ralph Waldo Emerson The lessons in this book are based on talking. It’s a simple yet peculiarly radical approach. Children spend little class time speaking and listening to one another, yet the best (and worst) thing about school is the opportunity to make friends and discover new people. It is this aspect which is obviously the most important to the pupils. PE and drama are the only subjects that cannot be done solo, where the class itself is internal to the lesson, where the pupils become a group rather than a random assembly of separate individuals. Philosophy is asking to join these subjects. As well as playing and performing together, it suggests we talk together. This book is made up of questions; a question is an invitation; the best questions are the questions that multiply. In philosophy the class does not take, but rather becomes, the subject. That is to say, if these lessons have a topic, it’s not so much philosophy as other people. Listening is odd. It is porous and strange. Other people’s words, like their smells, are emanations we cannot remain indifferent to. To listen is to be involved, and it’s to be involved without ever quite knowing what we are involved in. Though we can suppress our own thinking, it is rather more difficult to defend against the thoughts of others, to shore ourselves up against their influence; ‘shut up’ is never said politely. Listening opens us up to ourselves. It permits the mind to be moved in ways we cannot will. The solipsist, in other words, is a creature of habit. Schools harp on about respect and the necessity of boundaries without also promoting the pleasures of togetherness. The emphasis is on how it can go wrong when we are with other people, not on the available goods. We need to respect in order not to hate. Other people are the enemies we mustn’t make. But if that’s all they are, what is the point of them? An education that isn’t concerned with this question is an education palpably unconcerned with the good life. The focus on listening dissolves the dichotomy of child-centred or teacher-led learning. It dissolves the idea of a source, an originator. Speaking and listening mixes and merges. Conversation makes a farce of supply and demand (a question is a demand that doesn’t know what it wants, an answer is the supply that doesn’t know what it is giving). To put the cards on the table, this book believes in liberalism without the individual and collectivism without the cult; the individual may not be sovereign, but neither should they be pressured to participate, which brings Oscar Wilde to mind. His line about the weather seems just as applicable to education: whenever people talk about it, one feels quite certain that they mean something else. Education can serve as a distraction from social injustice – it is, among other things, the state’s attempt to drum the family out of the child – and it is always at risk of utopianism, always in danger of converting our dissatisfaction with adults into a wish to create new ones (a wish that never works; the utopian teacher inevitably ends up more like Prospero to Caliban than Pygmalion to his statue). Education, in other words, is plagued by its desired ends, which is perhaps why there are many more books on philosophy for primary school than there are for secondary. Children are believed to be more pliant than adolescents, they are pre-lapsarian, easier to bewitch; their eventual nature is still up for grabs. The effort to produce tolerant citizens, rational individuals or sceptical atheists is a race against time. The adolescent is a lost cause; they are a kind of underclass. Though we can imagine a situation in which a child might protest that they should be treated more like a child, or an adult like an adult, it is rather more difficult to imagine an adolescent asking to be treated like an adolescent. Whatever it is about adolescents that makes adults envy them, it is not the trust and understanding they receive (these are, of course, things which the adolescent seeks to sabotage; it might be worth acknowledging that adolescents present us with impossibilities, such as the need to maintain our understanding while not forestalling their resourceful attempts to shatter it). If we dropped that other dichotomy, the one of knowledge or skills, and approached education with an old-fashioned belief in virtue – our dispositional paths to self-actualising pleasure – we might think of the project as being to encourage, or bring out, the virtues of the pupil. When teaching children we would encourage their childhood virtues and when teaching adolescents we would seek out and inspire their adolescent virtues. What, then, are the virtues of adolescence? Unless we are interested in this question, I would suggest, provocatively rather than prescriptively, we should not be teaching. The idea is simply that we cannot live well unless we are living as ourselves. Of course, for us to see these adolescent dispositions as virtues we must be free to consider them as options, and aspirations, for ourselves. Set-Up
The classroom should be arranged in whatever way will be conducive to conversation. These are three options: horseshoe, circle and desks. Having pupils seated in a horseshoe creates the sense of a shared space where everyone can see everyone. The opening also gives you access to the board. But if you don’t wish to use the board, sitting in a closed circle is often better. The horseshoe has a leak in it. I have taught classes where their sessions were much improved simply because we sealed the leak and sat in a circle. Sitting with the class in a circle offers a greater sense of your presence. It is no good asking pupils to speak if you are not going to help them feel they are being listened to. The board can be an unhelpful distraction, even a barrier. The allure is that its filled emptiness at the end of a session will prove that something has been achieved, something has been produced. But the board will only give the teacher’s version of what has been achieved or produced, and this risks becoming the party line. If teaching philosophy were to have its sins, pre-emption and foreclosure – forms of interruption – would be cardinal. Philosophy is incorrigibly curious. To teach philosophy you need to adapt to the idea that you might not be able to identify what, if anything, was achieved. When we read a poem or eat an eclair we don’t sit and wonder afterwards what we’ve accomplished. Profit is not the point (no philosopher ever went into it for the money). Philosophy requires you to lead with passivity. The circle and horseshoe may not do. A class may find it too difficult to sit in a shared space. What feels communal to some will feel exposed to others. I have found that some classes are more able to enter into a session when they remain at their desks. Every class is different. There is no single way. When arranging the classroom, the question is simply: what will best enable discussion? Find yourself a large (easy to catch), soft (obviously), colourful (exuberance is beauty) ball. This will be passed round the group, held by the speaker. The ball is like the baton in a relay. It connects speakers, it hints at a common thread. It also serves as a signal to help follow the action. And it gives the pupils a sense of security; when holding the ball they know they will have the space and time to think and talk without being interrupted or overridden. Again, some classes get along fine without a ball, and this becomes truer the smaller the class is. But, beside the point, the ball also makes the time more enjoyable. It knocks things over and hits people in the head. Pupils become rather attached to it. If you do use the board, you should emphasise to the class that in philosophy it undergoes a metamorphosis. It’s no longer an instrument of information but a medium of experimentation. I have found that if pupils are not aware of this change, they become outraged when an idea they disagree with is converted into pixels; it is seen as a kind of sanctification. In philosophy what’s written on the board is not what the class is being taught, but what they are being asked to consider; the board is not performing its usual function. This also applies to the teacher’s voice. You are not using your voice to direct or dictate. When you speak in philosophy you are not telling but suggesting. So you need to suspend your certainties. The voice becomes a catalyst, a solvent. It may take the class a while to get used to this. Their voices are also being used differently. They are not reciting or speaking to please. They are speaking to find out what they believe. Speech is not a medium of consensus or conformity, of falling into line, nor is it a declaration of individuality. It’s something else. Material
The sessions feature three types of questions: Starter Questions, Hermeneutic Questions and Task Questions. Starter Questions are the prelude, they get things started; Hermeneutic Questions are the digestion, they give the class time to ponder a text; and Task Questions are the eye of the storm, the central philosophical focus. That’s the idea. But, in fact, you may find that a Task Question falls flat and that a Starter or Hermeneutic Question carries more energy. Don’t let the book’s way of carving things...