Beginning Blog

Thinking of ideas for celebrating 21 years since we had the first Philosophy for Children class in the UK:

Oct 1990 in Langbank Primary School with P2 ( 5 and 6 year old) children.

Langbank children doing CoPI - From The Readers Digest

Getting in touch with those children  - now adults - for celebration day at Langbank Primary school Oct 14th 2011

LOGIC is MAGIC (2)

I’ve had some response from Philosophy with Children practitioners, but I think many of those responding are Teacher Trainers rather than teachers,  and this  is a practical course – not for PwC teacher-trainers or for those with a degree in Philosophy, where I teach students how to do basic logic correctly. Any PwC Teacher trainer will (or at least should)  already know this!

There are lots of introductory books on Logic that are great – but if a student just doesn’t “get it” even the best and clearest book cannot and does not help them.

A couple of the international Teacher Trainers have asked if I can give this course online?

It would be great to do this, but really hard to get a programme that will work for the way I teach the course, because it requires that I have direct contact with students. I diagnose how each individual is going wrong or misunderstanding and then address that  - and this is different with different students. A couple of year ago I tried to write the “LOGIC is  MAGIC” book – but could find no way of substituting this personal one-to-one teaching which really is the core of my course. So if I create an on-line course it has to work in real time with a class of students, and it has to have a common space for students to do the exercises and for me to analyse how they are going wrong.

When I first went to the USA to teach the graduate P4C courses, the IAPC had a problem. Vicki Shipman had created the ‘New Jersey Test of Reasoning Skills’ specially to test the expected improvement in reasoning skills in students who had done the “Harry Stottlemeir’s Discovery” programme. “Harry Stottlemeir’s Discovery” had logic at its core, and school students were expected to travel the discovery route (discovering Aristotle’s syllogisms) along with the characters in the book, and then do exercises from the Teachers Manual which reinforced their logic skills.

But the test results were coming back with no improvement in logical thinking. What Phil Guin discovered was that the teachers implementing the ”Harry Stottlemeir’s Discovery” programme, were avoiding the logic exercises. The short term answer was for Phil to work directly with the school sudents so that they would have exposure to the logic exercises. The result of the students having Phil work with them was an increase in the test results (but Phil was a Philosophy PhD, not a typical High School teacher).

As a Philosophy PhD, I was recruited by Mat Lipman in 1984 to go to the USA specifically to develop a new way of teacher training – to create and teach graduate courses for teachers in Philosophy and Logic as well as the standard 12-graduate credit courses (teacher training) in the IAPC programmes. This was experimental – to see if teaching the teachers Logic and Philosophy would result in better scores for the students.

It did.

What seemed curious to many was that the children did not find the logic in  ”Harry Stottlemeir’s Discovery”  difficult, but the teachers did not understand it at all. How could this be?

Part of my job (as I saw it) was to ‘diagnose’ why the teachers could not understand the logic and the philosophy.

I had 3 classes: 2 Beginning Classes and 1 Advanced Class. And I learned so much from the Advanced Class! As soon as I began teaching them Philosophy and Logic they told me that this was what they had always been missing, though they had not known it. Now the IAPC programmes made more sense and they were no longer afraid to use the logic exercises because they had some idea what they were about and what they were trying to achieve.

(to be continued)

LOGIC IS MAGIC – international course on logic

I am planning to offer an international course on basic Logic for (primarily)  Philosophy with Children practitioners – to be taught in English, called ‘LOGIC IS MAGIC’.Over many years I have developed a speciality in teaching Logic to those who find Logic difficult  - ever since I found myself helping fellow students in Honours Philosophy at university.While I found Logic easy, I was surprised that fellow Honours Philosophy students found it so difficult, and began to try to figure out why they found it hard. It was very important as Logic was compulsary,  and if one failed then one failed the whole degree. The text book we used worked for the students who already understood algebra, but others just could not understand the very basics. And it was here I had to invent a way of explaining how Logic works.I first devised and taught this course in Montclair State University for the Philosophy Dept in 1986, and later taught it as part of the CoPI training. (I also taught a children’s version during the 1990′s.) As most lecturers experience, it is easy to teach Logic to those who find it easy e.g.  those who are good at algebra – they more or less teach themselves.  But it is very hard to teach Logic to folk who are not adept at symbolic manipulation. For a couple of years I tried to write a book using the Logic teaching method I had developed , but found that it is not possible. I have written a handbook that accompanies the course, but the main teaching has to be done individually with the students present, I cannot find any way of writing up as a text book.I am asking on social networks if folk would be interested. lets see the response.

via LOGIC IS MAGIC – international course on logic.

LOGIC IS MAGIC – international course on logic

I am planning to offer an international course on basic Logic for (primarily)  Philosophy with Children practitioners – to be taught in English, called ‘LOGIC IS MAGIC’.

Over many years I have developed a speciality in teaching Logic to those who find Logic difficult  - ever since I found myself helping fellow students in Honours Philosophy at university.

While I found Logic easy, I was surprised that fellow Honours Philosophy students found it so difficult, and began to try to figure out why they found it hard. It was very important as Logic was compulsary,  and if one failed then one failed the whole degree. The text book we used worked for the students who already understood algebra, but others just could not understand the very basics. And it was here I had to invent a way of explaining how Logic works.

I first devised and taught this course in Montclair State University for the Philosophy Dept in 1986, and later taught it as part of the CoPI training. (I also taught a children’s version during the 1990′s.) As most lecturers experience, it is easy to teach Logic to those who find it easy e.g.  those who are good at algebra – they more or less teach themselves.  But it is very hard to teach Logic to folk who are not adept at symbolic manipulation. For a couple of years I tried to write a book using the Logic teaching method I had developed , but found that it is not possible. I have written a handbook that accompanies the course, but the main teaching has to be done individually with the students present, I cannot find any way of writing up as a text book.

I am asking on social networks if folk would be interested. lets see the response.

Thoughts about GSD 3: How to get Philosophical reasoning into schools quickly?

The trick was how to enable the teachers to deliver this without training. As one Head Teacher said , “I want a book that a teacher can just pick up and begin to implement with children.”

Writing the books for children and teenagers was a joy,  but writing the teacher manuals was a new experience. I had to observe and reflect upon what I was doing and write down every step, no matter how obvious or insignificant it seemed – such as telling teachers “Do not make any comment upon what the children say in discussion”  and “Do not to indicate specific approval or disapproval of any child’s performance or contribution – only give a very general praise to the whole class.” I even give examples of what to say to the whole class.

The first GSD book “Thinking Adventures” was funded by the Scottish Government. The Director of Education in ERC required that every child should have the experience of GSD, but it was left up to each school how they would implement.

Thoughts about GSD 2: How to get Philosophical reasoning into schools quickly?

We did get philosophical reasoning into all the schools quite quickly. So  - how did we do it?

In 2004 I had a phone call from one of the Honours Philosophy  students who had taken  my  CoPI course at Glasgow University in 1990-91. She had never forgotten the impact CoPI made both on the Honours Philosophy students and on young children. Now, 14 years later, she was a Quality Improvement Officer for East Renfrewshire – consistently the No 1 Education Dept in Scotland according to the HMIE reports.

As they were already the best Education Dept. in the country they were able to take a risk that other Education Depts could not. She organised a ‘Philosophy Day ‘ in May 2004 in which I gave demonstrations and presentations to all the 7 High Schools.  From that day both pupils and staff were keen and I went on to meet with the Director of Education.

The Director wanted every child in every school to have access to the kind of philosophical  reasoning that I had demonstrated. However I had used CoPI in the Philosophy Day, and when I described the training needed for teachers to implement CoPI, the Director said that they could not afford either the time or the funds for a large number of teachers to take the equivalent of a 2- year post graduate degree. So he asked me if I could create a new way to make Philosophical concepts and reasoning accessible to the children. I agreed to this project and the Director applied to the Scottish government for funds to pay me to create this new way of teaching and to write the materials.

I decided to call it Guided Socratic Discussion, as the children were guided in a Socratic way, and the aim was for all  the kids to be able to engage in a discussion about philosophical concepts using valid reasoning by the end of each course.

So in 2005 I began to create philosophical exercises and activities and pilot them with 3 different groups of 11- 13 year olds. The first group were volunteer children who came in their dinner break.

That class was filmed for STV News and also for a BBC 2 Newsnight feature. See the STV news item here:   STV NEWS ITEM

However these children were not typical – they were giving up their lunch hour to do philosophy and so were self selected and therefore interested. After the first 10 weeks I continued with these self selected children to test different activities and exercises. The children themselves reported when they thought an exercise was too difficult for other children. They understood other children of their age and what would interset them. The GSD programme had to work with the most challenging students as well as those who were interested.

So I asked the Director of Education to give me the most challenging class in the whole school authority. And I got it. When I began to work with these sullen, non-cooperative young teenagers, the Head Teacher decided that for security reasons she or another teacher (the Physical Education teacher as it happens)  would need to be in the classroom. However after observing 2 sessions The head Teacher cleared her schedule so that she could observe every class.

These 12-13 year olds would sit in silence looking at the ground, with barely concealed hostility. (Later one of the 13 year olds was implicated in a murder – it was a very, very challenging class). One of the simple techniques I used was  - just to wait. The Head Teacher was squirming as we waited in silence, she could hardly bear it. Eventually one of the boys said “What are we doing?”.  I replied that I was giving them time to think, that it was their thoughts about the question that was important and I would give them as much time as they needed to think to give an idea. We waited for 3 minutes, and then a hand went up. Gradually more and more students spoke. The class transformed from a sullen, silent group with violence simmering under the surface to a fascinating philosophical discussion.

One of the questions they really wanted to talk about was “Are there jobs that are for women, and other jobs that are for men?” Again the observing Head Teacher was very uneasy as the kids gave what she regarded as sexist answers, while I did not correct them. By my truly facilitating the kids’s own ideas and not restricting them to acceptable answers, they eventually came to believe that indeed their thinking counted, and that it was their thinking I was waiting for. At first they thought that there were acceptable answers, but I was not telling them what those answers were, but making them guess what kind of answer I wanted. And they resented this. They wanted to be told what kind of answer to give. Their expereince was that when a teacher said that s/he wanted to know what they thought, – that this was not true. What the teacher actually wanted was ‘politically correct’ responses, not the racist and sexist views that these kids actually held.

The Head Teacher was very uncomfortable having racist and sexist views said aloud in class. So I explained that if the kids were never allowed to say what they really thought, then those ideas would never be challenged and would never change.

The story that I had written to stimulate the kids philosophical thinking involved characters who engaged in racist and sexist behaviour, and  that raised these issues. It was deliberate on my part.

Thoughts about GSD 1: How to get Philosophical reasoning into schools quickly?

Just returned from an intensive Masterclass in Gent, Belgium. I was asked to give 4 half-day workshops that needed both to stand alone for people coming only to 1, and also be continuous for people coming to more than one. So I could not give an introduction to CoPI as I did in the VEFO Masterclass of 2009. Instead I demonstrated and talked about my Guided Socratic Discussion programme. One of the workshops was a demonstration of GSD with 11 and 12 year old Flemish children in front of an audience of adults.

I explained that I had written the GSD curriculum in order to solve a problem: the Director of East Renfrewshire Education Department wanted all the children to have access to philosophical reasoning, but could not afford the equivalent of 2 years postgraduate training for teachers.

So  - how to get philosophical reasoning quickly to the children and teenagers?

Where teachers could only attend a half day introduction, instead of the knowledge of Philosophy and Logic being ‘in the head’ of the teacher or facilitator, both the Logic and Philosophy is all in the books that the children use.

And it was really successful.

I asked for some ‘hard’ testing of the skills that children developed by going through the GSD programmes, using validated instruments.  East Renfrewshire Psychological Services ( a separate dept from Education) searched for validated instruments that would measure the problem solving skills, communication skills, reasoning skills etc.  of 11 and 12 year old children. they could not find any validated instruments for children, but they found the SPSI tests that are validated for 18 year old college students that does measure the skills we were hoping to develop.

The norm for 18 year old college students is 100 on all scales.

Our 11 and 12 year old children scored better than 18 year olds! Moreover this was a group of children selected by their teachers as having learning challenges, lacking in confidence , difficulties in communicating etc. The children themselves told me that they were stupid – that was why they had been selected to leave their normal class and do this special course. Not a good motivation!

But the results were astounding

Thoughts about CoPI (3)

Continuing thinking about the nature of CoPI.  Although I have always emphasised the importance of philosophy, and called CoPI ‘philosophising’ – I am now wondering if this is really accurate?

In “Transforming Thinking” I describe the origin and development of CoPI -

” …  I decided it [improvised philosophical dialogue] was worth pursuing: this way of working was so much more interesting than listening to lectures, or having discussions or writing essays. And the opportunity to continue practising this improvising dialogue arose a few months later.

During my third year at university I had joined the Metaphysical Society^[1], only to find that no one attended the lectures. I offered to produce posters and ‘fly post’ around the college, as we did for theatre productions, in order to attract an audience. By virtue of this I was seconded on to the committee as ‘social secretary’. The next year I was the only committee member left, and by default became the Auditor (Chair). The society had a large budget^[2]and no members.

 I had no experience of committees or running a society, but I knew what attracted students – free wine. Taking Plato as the model (and who could be better?) I persuaded my classmates and friends to come to ‘Symposia’. We would sit round a huge oval table and have philosophical dialogues with wine – just like Socrates! Having got an audience through the door with the prospect of free wine we needed something more to keep them, and listening to philosophy lectures was not something most students would choose to do in their free time. So I decided to try the improvised ‘Hegelian’ dialogue that we had used to produce our written dialogues for class. We wrote to various philosophers and explained that we wanted to try a new type of programme for the Metaphysical Society – a short paper followed by a dialogue. To our surprise they all agreed. It turned out that they also preferred to have a dialogue rather than give a lecture in their free time. The dialogues were always rather clumsy, but they improved with practise, and they were fun for everyone.

All university societies had access to funds for field trips (though the Metaphysical Society had not taken advantage of this). So I applied for field trip funds to send two of us students on a field trip to observe Professional philosophers in one of their natural habitats: a philosophy conference.  I wanted to see how Philosophers did philosophy when they were not lecturing. So we set off (abroad to England) to the Northern Universities Conference and there we found something wonderful – a group of Northern Universities philosophers engaging in dialogue with each other. The dialogues were similar to the Metaphysical Society Symposia, but were much more sophisticated and smooth.  Of course the professionals did not use the somewhat rigid structure of thesis, antithesis and synthesis; their dialogues were more fluid and more varied. Moreover the philosophers were using underlying logic that they all understood without having to make it explicit, whereas the students and others who attended the Metaphysical Society Symposia had not internalised logic and needed some kind of external structure.

Not all of the sessions at the conference included dialogue; some of them were more like listening to lectures followed by a short questions and answer session. However in some sessions the paper would be followed by fascinating dialogue in which the structure looked something like this:

 

1) Smith gave his paper explaining a new theory

2) The Chair then asked audience for any questions

3) Five philosophers raised their hands to indicate that they had a question

4) The Chair selected Brown to ask a question.

5) Brown asked a question about one of the claims put forward in the paper

6) The Chair called on Smith to speak

7) Smith then responded by making restating the claim (x) giving an argument (i) to support the claim

8) The Chair then called on Carerra who took the argument (i) and showed that it led to a different conclusion (y)

9) The Chair then called on Davids who came in and gave an example (a) which contradicted (y) and supported (x)

10) The Chair called Evelyn who offered a counter-example (b), which weakened the support for (x), but suggested a new theory (z).

11) The session continued with the Chair calling on different philosophers to enter the dialogue

12) Smith took the new theory (z) and examined whether it was consistent with his original claim (x), using new arguments (ii) and (iii) to show that (x) was stronger than (z)

13) Fredericks then contributed a new argument (iv) which demonstrated that Smith’s original theory (x) had to be altered

 And so it continued.

The dialogue proceeded with contributions from different philosophers, critical but constructive.  While there was a variety of different papers at the conference, those sessions in which dialogue occurred seemed to have some features in common.  The ‘dialogue stimulating’ papers had a kind of ‘human interest’ – you could see their relevance for everyday life, compared with what could be described as technical papers. For example one of the ‘dialogue stimulating’ papers concerned children’s rights^[3], and many of the audience were parents so their examples and arguments came from personal experience.

Perhaps a more important factor that distinguished the dialogue sessions from the more traditional sessions was the skill of the Chair. The Philosophers all knew each other and knew each other’s work and some of the Chairs seemed to be able to call on individual respondents in a sequence which furthered the dialogue. One Chair was exceptionally skilled at this; she would ask for comments from particular Philosophers at particular times, she appeared to have some knowledge as to the kind of argument they would make and how that would ‘play’ within the dialogue. Observing these features [4], I decided to try to incorporate them into the Metaphysical Society Symposia upon our return.”

As sometimes happens, I now think that at least 2 of the footnotes in this chapter are as important as the main text – namely

[1] Having spent as much time working as a Stage Manager in the university theatre as studying philosophy, I had watched writer-directors use improvisation exercises to generate scripts.

[4] The Northern Universities conference was the first philosophy conference we had attended, and we assumed it was typical – however I was to learn later that it was anything but. Attending philosophy conferences over many years since then, I never again saw the kind of exciting dialogue that we observed there.

Firstly the importance of the skills of a theatre director in the development of the role and function of a CoPI Chair. I did not include everything about the development of CoPI in “Transforming Thinking” , as it would have taken a lot of space and I was not sure that it would be interesting. However after graduating I worked for 4 years in professional theatre in the West End and Paris. When I returned to academic postgraduate work I also ran Philosophical Dialogue sessions for Applied Psychology post grads – for fun. By this time I had acquired and practised skills as a theatre director , and I used these skills in the eliciting of philosophical thinking and the shaping of the dialogue, just as I had in eliciting acting and shaping a play.

There were aesthetic elements to my creation of  philosophical dialogue among a group of people just as there are in the production of a play, and these are very difficult to articulate. One of the elements is pacing – there is a beat , a rythm to a play and also to the kind of dialogue I was eliciting and shaping. There is a use of the physical space in combination with the speech – it makes a difference.

Orchestrating the dialogues using all the elements I would use in a play made a difference to the quality of philosophising that emerged. For example , a decade later when I was teaching and training M.Phil students in Glasgow University I used to bring my own lamps in to the lecture room as the quality of the lighting made a difference to how well people could think and articulate their thinking. And not just lamps, I also created a coloured gel that I put on an overhead projector, to create the feel of a stained glass window on a wall of the lecture room (harking back to my time as a lighting designer in theatre).

It is so hard to describe the kind of aesthetic almost musical sense that I use in contrasting and building in a dialogue – weaving (what I see as)  the underlying philosophical assumptions in what participants say together in a way that makes a pleasing or beautiful pattern,  as though the underlying philosophical assumptions are coloured threads and I create a picture out of them.  This is the aspect of chairing a dialogue that I cannot teach. I always knew about this aspect of chairing CoPI, but was surprised to learn in September about how much the feel of a CoPI dialogue is actually created by this, rather than by the reasoning structure.

And then there is footnote 4. What I observed in that one particular conference was not typical of Philosophy conferences. I never did see it again. And yet it was that unique experience that I tried to replicate in what was to become CoPI.

It was that particular Northern Universities conference that inspired me to continue in Philosophy – I thought that I would enter a world where philosophers engaged in this kind of exciting and creative philosophical dialogue, where they actually helped one another with constructive criticism. But this was not to be. I never again saw a real community among professional philosophers either in the UK or the USA.

Why Philosophy is a useful degree

From Stephen Law’s Blog

http://stephenlaw.blogspot.com/2012/01/why-philosophy-is-perhaps-one-of-most.html

Why Philosophy is perhaps one of the MOST useful degrees

Here is an excellent resource on why philosophy degrees make especially smart and successful businessmen and women, lawyers, journalists, etc. (you are actually dramatically better off doing a first degree in philosophy than business administration for a career in business).Some very good answers to “Philosophy? What are you going to do with that?” question. Go here for “testimonials”.

Includes GRE test performance (philosophers do staggeringly well – look right), comparative salary information, and various other useful bits of evidence that collectively puncture the peculiar modern myth that philosophy isn’t “useful”.

I previously commented on the GRE scores comparing philosophy students with all other students here.

A quote from Fordham:

“In addition, as the marketplace becomes more competitive, graduate degrees become more desirable, and that entails a strong performance on the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT), the exam most business schools require their applicants to take. Philosophy majors consistently outperform other majors on the GMAT, including all business majors, all humanities majors, and all social sciences majors. Philosophy majors enjoyenormous advantages going into business.”

The first and last testimonials are especially good. Opening quote from the final “testimonial” on linked page:

“Most of management theory is inane, writes our correspondent, the founder of consulting firm. If you want to succeed in business, don’t get an M.B.A. Study philosophy instead.”

Revisiting the nature of CoPI (2)

Two events have made me revisit the nature of CoPI since writing “Transforming Thinking” . The first was the final session of the SOPHIA Network Meeting in Sept in Alev School, Istanbul. I chaired the final session in which participants investigated a meta-question arising from the Meeting – ‘Is it possible to learn to be a good facilitator?’ .

The content of the dialogue was very interesting, but it is a different aspect of it that has made me think a lot since. And that aspect is   – several very experienced teacher trainers who took part commented upon how well that dialogue was facilitated. This was a group of about 30 out of which 5 had been trained in CoPI, so I could not use the CoPI reasoning structure (as it can take 20 hours of practice  for folk to learn this). However I chaired the session in the same way – that is I used the skills of a CoPI Chair without doing CoPI. What has made me really wonder was that I could shape a philosophical dialogue almost as well just using those skills as using the skills with the CoPI reasoning structure. I could move the philosophy forward, structure the dialogue, keep a certain pace etc. So there are aspects of CoPI that are very important and that are not directly related to Philosophy.

The second ‘event’ was and is my son’s experience of philosophy at university. I felt as though I had almost mislead him when he was growing up – letting him think that when we were doing CoPI it was philosophy. It was and is philosophising of a kind – but what may be important is the kind of philosophising it is, rather than it being rooted in philosophy.

more in next blog

Thoughts about CoPI, university Philosophy teaching & philosophising (1)

Recently I have been thinking about Philosophy and CoPI.  In chapter one of  “Transforming Thinking”      I wrote

“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 with questions about: the nature of reality; how we know what is true and what is ‘correct’; what made some actions and decisions fair or just; the nature of good and bad; 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 actually 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 ten 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 further 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, but rather 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. We were learning the canon of Philosophy, and every week we wrote essays putting arguments for and against the theories of great philosophers but not about our own thoughts. “

Now my son has begun Honours Philosophy at university, and he is so disappointed! He is not able to philosophise. At first he just found his tutorials a bit frustrating as there was no structure and the discussions rambled and did not build or lead anywhere. everyone simply put forward their opinion about the philosophical topic, one after another. But he was raised with CoPI, and could see all the missed opportunities where the talk cold have been shaped into a real dialogue. Later he is even more discouraged as the lecturers and tutors have no interest in original thinking about the topics – they only want to see a re-iteration of the history of philosophy they are teaching and not philosophising on the part of the students themselves.

But for him it is so much worse because he has been doing CoPI since he was 5, and so is used to engaging in philosophical reasoning about his own and his classmates’ ideas about philosophical concepts. He expected to continue this at university, but that is not what university Philosophy does!

I invented CoPI precisely to create the opportunity for us and then later for others to do what we were not doing in Honours Philosophy – and that is to do original thinking and to philosophise ourselves!

I thought there was  a huge difference in what I observed professional philosophers doing themselves and what they were teaching us. And over time I created CoPI to capture what I thought the professional philosophers were doing , but in a non academic form. That is I tried to capture the essence of reasoned philosophising and create a format that would allow everyone to do this kind of thinking.

“Then one week we were given the option of writing a modern philosophical dialogue instead of the usual essay. We all chose this option thinking it would be easier – just like a record of our coffee bar discussions. But we were wrong. Writing a philosophical dialogue was much more difficult. We learned that a dialogue is not a discussion. As in a play script the dialogue had to develop, it had to have tension, and it had to have variety and there had to be character development shown through the dialogue itself. But a philosophical dialogue had to do more; it had to show a development in philosophical ideas as well.  Sitting in the library trying to write such a dialogue was not productive, so I decided to try to a theatrical technique to get my classmates to improvise a philosophical dialogue.[1] This was the beginning of what would develop over time into the Community of Philosophical Inquiry method.

The most challenging aspect of improvising or writing a philosophical dialogue was: how to create the development of the philosophical ideas within the dialogue. We had no guidance as to how to do this; in fact we had no guidance in how to write a philosophical dialogue beyond the advice to look at Plato.  However there was one philosopher who wrote about the development of Thought – Hegel. So for the purposes of the improvisation exercise I asked my class mates to use a (simplified) Hegelian structure: the first speaker should put forward a thesis; the second speaker should put forward an antithesis; the third speaker should then offer a synthesis of the thesis and antithesis; the fourth speaker should regard the synthesis as a new thesis; the fifth speaker should then offer a new antithesis and so on.

It was extremely difficult to accomplish, but it was fun to try and we did manage to achieve a kind of development of ideas. There was a problem with the final result of our written dialogues: they all looked similar, and partly because of this we received very low marks. Of course the essays were bound to be similar because they were the product of a collaborative exercise. Setting aside the fact that they were all similar, the written dialogues were not very good and the task was never set again. However, I was fascinated by the fact that the written dialogues did not reflect the energy that had been generated in the improvisation, and did not reflect either the work everyone did or the delight that was produced when someone managed to find a new antithesis or synthesis. I decided it was worth pursuing: this way of working was so much more interesting than listening to lectures, or having discussions or writing essays. And the opportunity to continue practising this improvising dialogue arose a few months later.”

However I am now wondering whether what I created (the CoPI Method) IS really a non-academic distillation of what professional philosophers do?

Or is it really something else?

There was another influence on my creation of CoPI that was also important ..  that i will talk about in the next blog

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[1] Having spent as much time working as a Stage Manager in the university theatre as studying philosophy, I had watched writer-directors use improvisation exercises to generate scripts.