Teaching and Learning > DISCOURSE

Hands-On Philosophy: Learners as Teachers

Author: John Foster

Journal Title: Discourse

ISSN: 2040-3674

ISSN-L: 1741-4164

Volume: 7

Number: 1

Start page: 19

End page: 32

Return to vol. 7 no. 1 index page

1. Introduction

This report describes and evaluates a small-scale project entitled Hands-on Philosophy funded by the Higher Education Academy's Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies in 2006-07. The aims of the project were to involve 2nd and 3rd year philosophy undergraduates as teaching assistants in the introduction of philosophy topics to school students, and to investigate the perceived benefits of this work for their own studies.

2. Background

Since 2004 the Department of Philosophy at Lancaster University, where the project was based, has run a programme of outreach and oncampus study events for school students from Years 5/6 to Sixth Form. These activities have been organised principally through the (former) National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth and the regional network of LEA coordinators for G&T and Aim-higher schemes. Events have explored key philosophical issues through teaching, discussion and group activities, and have introduced classic philosophical figures and writings as appropriate. This outreach programme has been developed by an Honorary Fellow of the department acting as tutororganiser, with teaching assistance from a number of philosophy postgraduates and undergraduates over the period. Further details can be found at http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/ippp/schools/index.htm. HEA project funding was sought in order to guarantee nil or reduced costs to individual schools willing to be involved in a further round of the programme, and to fund the necessary additional tutororganiser time, so that the benefits to participating undergraduates could be specifically researched. Aone-year award of £5,000 was made in October 2006.

3. Project Activities During the Year

Following confirmation of funding, a leaflet about the department's outreach programme including an invitation to participate in this project was circulated by post to some 250 schools in Cumbria, Lancashire and the northern part of Greater Manchester. Schools circulated were 11-18 secondaries in the whole of this area and (experimentally) primary schools in the Lancaster area.

From responses to this mailshot and other contacts, a programme was put together comprising sessions at a total of four primary and two secondary schools. These were located in Cheshire (1), Cumbria (1), Lancashire (3) and Rochdale (1). A number of other schools responded but could not be included in the programme owing to resource constraints— those selected were largely on a first-come, first-served basis. In four of these schools, two or three sessions were arranged, spread over a period of weeks in each case. In the other two schools, a full morning session (Primary) and a full study-day of four one-hour sessions (Secondary) were delivered. Pupils were drawn from Years 5 and 6 at primary, and Years 10 and 12 at secondary level. Work with the primary children included enquiries into the ideas of courage, fairness and personal identity. With secondary pupils, topics in political philosophy (the state of nature and the rule of law) and in philosophy of knowledge and science (based on the theme of climate change) were covered.

A total of eleven undergraduates, six second-year and five thirdyear, took part in these sessions as teaching assistants. All were philosophy majors or combined majors.

A standard pattern rapidly emerged for the teaching sessions themselves, with the tutor-organiser introducing the topic and steering the lesson and the undergraduates working with smaller groups of pupils to explore aspects of the topic and conduct related games and exercises. None of the undergraduates taking part felt confident enough in the event to take the lead role in front of a whole class (although one of the postgraduates also assisting was emboldened to do so), and it was decided not to press this aspect of the original plan. Arrangements for debriefing and feedback after the teaching sessions are described in Section 4 below.

As well as teaching sessions, the project programme included a training dimension for the undergraduate students involved as TAs. This comprised:

In recognition of the time commitment required for preparation, attending training sessions, teaching and providing written feedback afterwards, participants were paid £50 per session taught.

4. Procedures for Feedback and Evaluation

Feedback on the teaching experience for undergraduate students was obtained informally in group and one-to-one discussions after each session. After each course of sessions in a particular school, the students involved were also asked to complete a standard email questionnaire inviting them to reflect on their experience. Respondents were asked:

Some students were involved in work with more than one school, and in some cases repeat questionnaires were returned, though this was not made a requirement because of then-imminent university exams. Email feedback was also requested from the schools involved after completion of each course of sessions. In this case the questions asked included:

Finally, members of the Philosophy Department staff who had taught the undergraduates involved during the year were asked towards the end of the Summer Term for any observations on the effects of involvement for the students' studies, in terms of understanding of philosophical topics, ability to articulate philosophical issues, contributions to seminars and philosophical confidence generally. (Responses here were not shared with the students though all were aware that comments were being sought and had consented to this happening.)

Feedback from schools, students and staff is discussed below in Sections 5,6 and 7 respectively.

5.The Schools' Perspective

Feedback from the schools involved in the project was generally extremely positive. Sessions were felt to have been pitched appropriately and accessibly in most cases, with good use of stimulus materials at whole-class level and effective work in smaller groups to explore the chosen topics. The latter point reflects well on the undergraduates, whose role it was to conduct this small-group work. Indeed the only slightly qualified comments received from the schools referred to the tutororganiser's introductory material, which for a couple of sessions with a rather restless group of Year 10s was felt to be rather too demanding. Schools indicated in response to the email questions that pupils had enjoyed the sessions and shown learning gain from them in terms both of subsequent reflection and enhanced ability to probe more deeply into topics studied in the standard curriculum. Without exception, participating schools said that they would like to repeat, and in some cases extend, the programme in following years, if the opportunity became available.

It is clear that the project has raised the profile and reputation of philosophy as a subject of interest to school students, not just in the participating schools themselves but amongst the significant number of others who became aware that the programme was being run and that this might be a real option for extension work.

6.The Undergraduates' Perspective

The main project aim as described in the agreed brief was to test the assumption that undergraduates engaging with the introduction of philosophy to school students in this way would find their own philosophical skills and understanding strengthened in the process. The reaction of the philosophy students involved, in particular their views on how participation in the work had related to their philosophical studies, is therefore at the core of this report.

Key points from participants' reflections on their experience are included as an appendix.

From a scrutiny of these responses, it emerges that participants identified two distinct though related strands of benefit to their studies. The first of these strands might be said to run with the grain of the standard undergraduate philosophy curriculum, whereas the second lies at something of a tangent to it.

In the first place, participants recorded that helping school students to find their way through philosophical topics encountered as both unfamiliar and quite challenging had required them actively and critically to revisit their own prior acquaintance with these topics:

I definitely had to refer back to what I had learnt to find good examples.

This process:

requires that you really know what the main points are.

Its benefits for the purposes of undergraduate study were explicitly7 recognised:

I had to make my own thought a lot clearer...which helped me to be clearer in seminars and essays.

This appreciation of the value of clarifying and sharpening one's focus on a topic accords with the strong sense of philosophy as an analytical discipline for dealing with complexity which is evident in the responses. This comes across not just in the references to undergraduate work as a training in 'the analytical approach', but also in the value which participants perceived introductory philosophy to have for the school students themselves. Thus it was seen to offer:

tools and skills for approaching any question they think about,

in particular practice in supplying and listening to reasons for what is said. It also brought these skills to bear in areas where the pupils had to recognise that:

there isn't always a right answer

- where from being 'too sure of their own opinions' they were being encouraged to move to 'seeing that things aren't black-and-white'.

Helping their juniors to engage with all this was clearly welcomed by the participants (not just in their written comments, but in their evident enthusiasm for the work as it went on), as strengthening their own sense of the value of philosophy and appreciation of why they were studying it:

It allows you to take a step back from specific philosophical questions and remember why they matter.

The sharpening of their philosophical focus corresponds, too, to the benefits which members of the Philosophy Department staff perceived project involvement to have had (see Section 7 below). And it evidently goes with the grain of the undergraduate philosophy programme, which at Lancaster (as commonly elsewhere) presents itself as developing (along with 'an understanding of great and deep ideas') 'clear thinking...the capacity to locate and analyse problems and exercise judgement in their solution...and argue effectively for favoured courses of action'.2

The second strand of benefit which undergraduate participants recognised was, however, interestingly different. A real pleasure in what might be called the rediscovery of philosophical innocence comes through in such comments as:

The children aren't weighed down by preconceived philosophical theories.
They came up with ideas I wouldn't have thought of because in trying to look further I often miss obvious points.
The children weren't overwhelmed—when you study philosophy there are so many counter-arguments!

This reaction is perhaps best summed up by the thoughtful and articulate second-year student who wrote, with almost audible relief:

it made me realise that philosophy doesn't need to be unfathomable.

What these remarks point to is an aspect of the experience of studying philosophy at undergraduate level which perhaps deserves more overt recognition by those designing or reviewing curricula. The discipline as offered to university students is typically so text-based, and teaching material moves so quickly from an exposition of the issues in a given area to tracing the arguments of the classic writers and their contemporary commentators, that any fresh first-hand encounter with philosophical problems can rapidly be submerged. It is this freshness of vision and response which participants in the project were so clearly relishing in the school students, and enjoying by proxy in working with them.

No doubt for the same kind of reason, the components of the 'Philosophy Gym' training sessions which participants found most stimulating were those which drew on the dialogical practices of smallgroup philosophical enquiry as developed by the Philosophy for Children (P4C) approach, in order to put the undergraduates into something approximating the situation of the pupils with whom they were going to be working. (Questionnaire responses here have not been tabulated for reasons of lack of space, but included such comments as 'very useful in helping me see how the children would be thinking...getting into the mindset of people who aren't studying philosophy'.) These explicitly 'Socratic' techniques involve doing philosophy directly and 'hands-on' as each conceptual crux comes up in the shared exploration of an idea or theme prompted by an unannounced stimulus.3

Possible implications of these findings are considered in the 'Conclusions to date' at Section 9 below.

7.The Departmental Perspective

Although members of the salaried philosophy lecturing staff at Lancaster were not directly involved in the project, the department was collectively very supportive. Resources were made available in the form of an office base and administrative and clerical support for the tutor-organiser, and a financial contribution was made towards travel costs in excess of the funded budget.

Feedback to the department included a contribution by the tutororganiser to the regular 'Work-in-Progress' seminar series organised for staff and postgraduates. Occasional email reports of project progress also kept it before the collective mind.

At the end of the academic year lecturing staff were asked for their observations on any gains from involvement in the project for those undergraduates concerned whom they had taught during the period. An impressionistic response was sought here, rather than a specific review of progress in assessment marks over the year, as it had been decided that the latter would have introduced an inappropriately formal element to the project for the students themselves.

This mini-survey of the nine lecturing staff was inadvertently left to be conducted in the period immediately following university exams when they had other preoccupations, so it is perhaps unsurprising that it did not quite achieve a 100% response rate (seven out of the nine responded). Not all those staff members who had actually taught project students had noticed specific results from involvement which could be distinguished from the general trend of improvement to be expected over a year's study. Several, however, had comments included:

My impression was that it made a real difference to the ability and willingness of the [four] students I taught to participate in seminars, and developed their philosophical confidence.
...[X] became a more active participant in seminars and his ability to talk intelligently about philosophy improved.
...bright and articulate, though whether there's any causality I couldn't say.

This last comment points up the obvious problem with impressionistic results of this kind - that there were a good number of other factors potentially in play. It would have been difficult in a project of this nature to have ruled these other factors out without arrangements which would have given involvement a very different feel for the students and might well have discouraged participation. In any case, numbers of both students and staff are too small for any claim that this was a statistically representative study. What probably can be said, however, is that taken in conjunction with the responses of the students themselves, these comments from their lecturers do suggest that the experience of teaching philosophy in schools made a distinctively beneficial contribution to the experience of studying it at university level.

8.The Institutional Perspective

Interest in the department's outreach work as background to the project had already been sparked at the wider university level following an invitation to the tutor-organiser to contribute an article on it to FASS-Track, the quarterly newsletter of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, in which the idea of the project itself was foreshadowed.4

More specific interest was expressed by the university panel (including external members from the universities of Glasgow and Keele) responsible for the Philosophy Department's Periodic Quality Review which took place during the year of the project. The report of this review panel welcomed the initiative, which it said: promotes philosophy as a discipline and Lancaster University as a provider in addition to the benefits for undergraduates which it also recognised. It may be presumed that this recognition contributed in at least a minor way to the vote of Full Confidence which the Department received from the review process.

A further indication of support has been the decision in July 2007 to award the Department a grant of £4,000 from the university's Alumni Programme to enable the work of the project to be continued into the current (2007-08) academic year—and hopefully, if further funds can be identified, extended beyond that. The award was made on the basis of preliminary results from the year's activity as now presented in this Report, and demonstrates how the initial award from the HEA has been used effectively as seed-corn funding.

9. Conclusions to Date from the Project

As already noted, this work was on too small a scale for it to be offered as a representative study. It is reasonable however to suppose that its results are usefully indicative, subject perhaps to their replication in the new academic year with a different cohort of students. Their preliminary implications may therefore at least be of interest to the wider subject community.

The first of these results is, indeed, only what might have been expected. The project seems to confirm, as far as it goes, the hypothesis with which it started out—that trying to understand philosophy from the perspective of school students and introduce them to it in a topicfocussed way under classroom conditions does give undergraduate students both more insight into the specific philosophical issues dealt with, and greater confidence in their own developing philosophical abilities more generally. This suggests that other university departments might well benefit from exploring the potential of involving students in outreach work along similar lines in parallel to their standard undergraduate programmes. One of our undertakings in exchange for HEA funding was to make sample teaching materials for this purpose available on request, and colleagues from elsewhere are warmly invited to contact the author of this report (tutor-organiser for the project) directly if they are interested.

Our second main result was less expected. This relates to the value so clearly found by undergraduates in rediscovering (or just discovering) first-hand philosophical thinking about central human issues through the 'Socratic dialogue' aspects of the work in schools. The benefits of philosophy in the school classroom, in this regard, are the benefits of its being philosophy outside the lecture-theatre and the textbook, where many who have taken up philosophy either at A-level or for the first time at university may never have had any opportunity to encounter it. While these benefits were here being reaped in the context of preparation for the project's activities in schools, this is of course not a necessary requirement. It may be that even where outreach work is not a practicable option, the provision of 'hands-on philosophy' sessions drawing on the P4C model and experience (and, of course, extending it to make explicit connections with the formal philosophy which undergraduates are studying) could be a means of enriching the standard undergraduate curriculum in a direction which this project suggests that students would welcome.

It is certainly our intention to explore further how this might be done as part of the next phase of what will hopefully become a continuing programme at Lancaster.

Endnotes

  1. See: http://www.sapere.net/ John Foster, Hands-On Philosophy: Learners as Teachers
  2. Lancaster Philosophy Department website: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/philosophy/prospective/undergrad/careers.htm
  3. See Lipman, M. Thinking in Education (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) and Lipman, M., A.M. Sharp and F. S. Oscanyon, Philosophy in the Classroom (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980)
  4. http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/faculty/news/newsletters/FASSNewsletterVol1Iss3.pdf

Appendix

Follow-up questions for Hands-on Philosophy sessions : points from undergraduates' feedback

1. In what ways did undergraduate Philosophy help you to help the children grapple with topics?

Helping them accept that there isn't always a right answer!
Being familiar with thought-experiments helped me find good simple examples.
I could help them relate their own ideas to the topic—this was the main problem they had.
I could put things in a different way for them.
I definitely had to refer back to what I had learnt to find good examples for them.
I really needed the analytical approach I had learnt in philosophy.

2. Did taking part in the programme help you think about philosophy topics you are studying?

It allows you to take a step back from specific philosophical questions and remember why they matter.
It made me realise that philosophy doesn't need to be unfathomable.
Having to explain sometimes quite complex issues requires that you really know what the main points are.
I had to make my own thought a lot clearer for the children to understand, which helped me be clearer in seminars and essays.
Freeing up thinking in school education related directly to my dissertation topic.

3. Did you get any new philosophical ideas or insights from the students?

It was interesting to be made to see the issues from their perspective. Sometimes the children said unexpected things which gave me new insights.
The ability to explore something without any previous philosophical ideas provokes very perceptive responses.
They came up with ideas I wouldn't have thought of because in trying to look further I often miss obvious problems.
Because they didn't know how complex the issues were, they helped me to see positive aspects in points I had thought of as null or useless.

4. What do you think school students can get out of philosophy sessions like this?

Tools and skills for approaching any question they think about. The experience of thinking outside the box.
It taught them about listening to each others ideas.
It gets them used to having to provide reasons for their thoughts.
Seeing that things aren't black-and-white.
They will start to think analytically in ways many other lessons don't demand.

5. What were the main differences between your philosophical thinking and that of the school students?

I am more aware of the different situations in which concepts are brought to bear.
The children aren't weighed down by preconceived philosophical theories and mindsets.
The children weren't overwhelmed—when you study philosophy there are so many counter-arguments!
They always tried to explain themselves in ways that made direct sense to them, instead of using theories without examples.
They were often too sure of their own opinions.

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This page was originally on the website of The Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies. It was transfered here following the closure of the Subject Centre at the end of 2011.

 

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