Philosophy for Children and Learning Circles: How
Do We Help People to Want to Be Better? Peter Shea -- June 24, 2008
"A
sower went out to sow his seed; and as he sowed, some fell along the path, and
was trodden under foot, and the birds of the air devoured it. And some fell on
the rock; and as it grew up, it withered away, because it had no moisture. And
some fell among thorns; and the thorns grew with it and choked it. And some fell into good soil and grew, and yielded
a hundredfold." -- Jesus
Rich was worried yesterday
about how to get people to want to be good, to want to want to adopt the
policies that reason determines to just or generous or courageous. Clearly,
some people do want to be good, and their good will makes rich and complex
community possible. But how does any sort of instruction lure the agnostic, the
undecided into making (and remaking, every day) this most basic commitment.
Surely philosophy for children and other democratic education strategies have
something to offer here, in two ways: they make the rich activity of a working,
complex, decent community attractive to people, and they allow people access to
the lives of others, so that everyone can see how it is possible for them to
live, learning from whichever available models are appropriate to their
particular stage of moral and psychological development. That’s the problem: it
must be clear that rich, decent community is valuable and that it is possible
for me, at my place in growth and development, to enter such community as a valued,
competent participant. In the paper that
follows, I want to imagine in some detail philosophy for children and
residential philosophy education based on story circles as two parallel
strategies for helping people to want to be good, for making it likely that the
seeds of moral and wisdom teaching fall on good ground and remain safe from
birds and weeds. I then want to think a bit about what these two different
traditions can learn from each other.
“Only Superman need apply” – the Demands of
Teaching in the Spirit of Dewey
Think about what Dewey
requires, in Experience and Education.
Dewey thinks the right sort of teacher in the right sort of school must be
familiar with the present experience of each student, the attitudes and
impulses pressing forward into the future. That teacher is then responsible to
craft experiences that move each student forward in a natural and continuous
way, without big jumps, in the direction of growth and learning and wider
sensibility – while somehow keeping a classroom of students together as a
group. Given the real experiential and developmental diversity within any
ordinary classroom, Dewey’s ideal requires superhuman powers in the educator;
he or she must craft a group experience that connects seamlessly to the different
particular experiences of each group member. The group experience must convince
each student of the power of common, shared, cooperative activity while
providing just the individual next step needed for his or her growth.
I want to think about
philosophy for children and the residential story circle work I have been doing
with a University of Minnesota team for the last few years as two related ways
of approximating this ideal indirectly. Lacking the power to micro-manage
individual growth, doubting sometimes that even God could figure that puzzle out, we who have developed
these approaches have generated instead -- a blood stream: a changing nutrient
stream of ideas and lives from which students are encouraged to take what they
need. We cannot connect to the exact developmental status of each student; we
can create an environment in which it is very likely that such connections will
be made. And we can in the process show people (ourselves included) how much
people can matter to each other, when they appreciate each other’s strengths
and cooperate in ways that make good use of those strengths.
Philosophy for children
makes participants’ minds (and to a limited extent, their life experience)
available to each other, so that all come to depend on each other’s strengths
of mind to help them understand something that they want to understand, and
adapt what they need from the models represented in the group to promote their
own growth. The community of inquiry arises because participants own the
conversation; it progresses through careful coaching in listening and in
knitting conversation together.
Residential Education in
Philosophy and the Story Circle Approach
Like philosophy for
children practice, a residential course in philosophy gives people access to
each other’s minds and lives, in a safe environment, as a common treasure and
as resources for each person’s development.
For
the last ten years, a group of faculty, staff, and graduate students loosely
affiliated with the University of Minnesota Philosophy Department has
experimented with residential offerings, exploring notions central to the
construction of a meaningful life. We began with weekend workshops, and then
transferred what we had learned to a four week undergraduate course: “Lives
Worth Living: Questions of Self, Vocation, and Community,” also known as
Philosophy Camp. In our last offering, the eighth, we had 15 students; the staff included 5
instructors, 2 apprentice instructors, and a course grandmother. Two resident
fellows took part each week and were available to students for conversation.
The principal activity of
the course is a story circle, held most mornings after breakfast. The story circle
strategy is adapted from traditions of the Highlander Folkschool in Tennessee.
Students are asked to tell a story from their own lives concerning a topic or
question that connects to the theme of the course. Stories are told without
interruption. Students are free to pass; no one is pressured to tell a story.
Large group discussion of the stories told is minimal – maybe 20 minutes at the
end of the circle time. The primary processing of material from the story
circles happens in spontaneous conversations later, during the mostly free
afternoon and evening time.
A
second circle activity structures our daily routine: the morning
acknowledgement circle. Each person in the group is invited to say something
about how other members of the group have contributed to his or her learning or
growth or happiness in the previous day. This circle is also an occasion for
people to say something about how things are for them, to mention anything they
wish everyone to know. The same rules apply to these circles as to story
circles. I was initially doubtful about the value of this activity, but
students take to it with great enthusiasm, and I have come to think that it is
a very important component of the work of the course, perhaps because it
assures people in unmistakable ways that their contribution to the community is
noticed and valued.
The
leadership of this course is unusual. The leaders do not present a plan for the
orderly processing of ideas and insights. Rather, they set up the structure of
the time together, to make certain kinds of interactions likely, and they make
themselves available, as participants in the process of reflection – telling
their own stories, participating in group activities, and engaging in casual
conversation. Although leaders make very light use of their power to direct the
action, the leadership is a substantial presence: 9 people in a group of 23 had
some leadership role. The work done by the leaders is subtle and diffuse.
Partly, the leaders maintain faith in the integrity and power of the
storytelling and discussion process; partly, they watch what is happening and
adjust questions and course structures – time constraints, activities, general
rules – to encourage deeper and more productive interaction and to avoid
problems.
One
example of such structuring is the allocation of time. All of our residential
events, even weekend events, contain substantial stretches of unstructured
time. There are breaks in the afternoon for naps and walks, and there are long
evenings without programming. Perhaps most important, the groups prepare their
own meals: all workshops and courses are conducted without cooks or
housekeeping support. Meal preparation and housekeeping provide occasions for
people to come together in new configurations around practical tasks.
The
residential model requires a big staff, and that staff does, overtly at least,
very little. The normal work of teaching, the normal structures of control and
guidance and information, even in the minimal sense that philosophy for
children requires, are mostly absent. The course is very similar to: a group of
people getting together to talk and eat, like a family reunion or an Elks club
meeting – but – with a few different rules, a different intention, and some
very light supervision.
How
do we understand the role that the story circles play in promoting thinking and
discussion and growth within this residential community? Think of the way we
learn from novels. Like novelists, the organizers of residential philosophy
gatherings bring people together and invite them to learn from each other.
Novelists exercise a different kind of control that over their “events:” some
of the people they “invite,” their characters, are carefully chosen, and the
way those people show themselves is carefully structured. The novelist leads
the reader, a visitor to this temporary community, to particular insights and
attitudes. The leadership of our residential education experiments is generally
much looser, the selection of participants is much less intentional, and our
goals are more general. Nevertheless, the educational environment of a novel is
close enough to what we are up to in residential philosophy education to make
the comparison and contrast worth exploring.
Discussing
Jane Austen’s novels,[1] Alice Crary shows one
way that an author can present a view – what Gilbert Ryle calls the “wine
tasting” method. On this account, Austen introduces the reader to a variety of
characters that exemplify a particular human quality – pride or susceptibility
to influence, for example. The reader is invited to respond to these different
characters – comes to see some as excessive, others as striking the right
balance. By engaging the reader’s emotions in this complex way, Austen’s works
persuade the reader how to stand with respect to important human problems.
Novels provide a means of moral formation and initiation.
The
story circle experience parallels this kind of learning. People tell their own
stories around some important moral theme: standing up for what one believes,
friendship, home. Like the novel, the story circle establishes a set of
examples for important qualities through the stories told in the group. It may
happen that – like Austen’s ideal reader -- people in the group take some of
the stories told in the circle to display excesses or deficiencies or ‘striking
the right balance;’ they may respond as, on Crary’s account, Jane Austen
invites her readers to respond. However, people in the circle may also take the
stories as simply presenting alternatives, as portraying different responses to
significantly different circumstances.
The discussion does not necessarily move toward a moral result, as Crary
suggests that Austen’s novels move toward an outcome, a recommendation: “be
like the balanced heroine we see at the end of the novel.”[2]
People have choices about how to take the stories that they hear.
A
residential course that incorporates story circles is close to
“normal” adult life – with differences. More material is generated in a
residential course than in most adult living contexts, the course’s rules of
engagement provide more opportunities for processing and following up than do
the rules of normal adult living, and a group of thoughtful people watches over
the whole process.
A
residential course that makes story circles central to its practice is thus a
half-way house beyond the classroom. Other kinds of teaching bring concepts,
models, and thinking strategies into play in people’s consciousness, making
them part of their repertoire. These concepts, models, and strategies are only
useful if they help people in making sense of messy and unpredictable social
circumstances – and if people actually use them in those circumstances. The residential course introduces just the
sort of complexity that adult life serves up. The framework of the course – the
customs and procedures and rules – is constructed to help people learn from
that complexity. Residential courses provide some practice at thoughtful life
under very favorable conditions, to give students a taste for such life and to
help them address the practical problem of making a place for life-shaping
thought and conversation within their lives.
What can we learn from
residential education for philosophy for children practice?
Philosophy
for children is located between traditional education and Philosophy Camp. It
fits within conventional classroom structures, without big staffs or special
arrangements. Its materials are generally less directive of student attention
than conventional novels or texts, allowing for individual choice and
expression, and yet there is a content agenda behind each curriculum: the
manuals say what we expect students to learn. Philosophy for children
discussion leaders are committed to making participants fully available or
accessible to each other, in one central dimension, at least: argument and
conceptual thought. Lives and experience come into the discussion in an
important but secondary way.
The
continuation of discussion and cooperation, its integration into life, is just
a hope on the horizon of philosophy for children practice. We can’t make it
happen, or even set up the conditions under which it is likely to happen. We can only hope that we have planted good
seeds: as the parable of the sower suggests, the rest depends on the soil, the
birds, the weeds, the water supply. Philosophy Camp tries to briefly produce
the favorable conditions for the growth of “community of inquiry” into true and
lasting community.
Philosophy
Camp happens each summer because of considerable sacrifices on the part of
instructors, and because we have devised some very creative financing. It is
not a burden on the University; the last session of the course returned $10,000
to the U of M after expenses. I think this kind of program could be done at
other institutions, using some of the experience we have gained from our
experiments. However, one must admit that it will be impossible to do this at
many institutions; the requirements of faculty good will and administrative
support are simply too great. So what can be learned from this experiment for
use in those contexts within which philosophy for children is traditionally
done, in college and in elementary and secondary schools?
- Philosophy Camp makes clear where philosophy for children is heading, what sort of society it aspires to create. That’s important information for teachers, teacher trainers, and administrators. Perhaps the investment in this kind of program is justified, as part of outreach and of teacher training, if not in the central philosophy for children program.
- Philosophy Camp probes the relationship between “communities of inquiry” and the kinds of community that students encounter in their lives. Storytelling is closer to normal practice than philosophy for children discussions, and thus easier to insinuate into ordinary community practice. Our work defines an important task: to develop bridging strategies for making the ideals of the community of inquiry real in day to day life, for continuing and expanding Dewey’s project.
- The story circle is legitimate philosophic inquiry in a mode parallel to the logical and conceptual investigations that are the strength of philosophy for children practice. There is every reason to bring philosophy for children into the residential experience, as another mode of community building and shared exploration, and to bring the story circle into philosophy for children sessions. We have in fact made some use of philosophy for children strategies in our workshops and courses, and are in the beginning stages of figuring out how the two ways of teaching work together. The same work, from the philosophy for children side, would, I think, be very fruitful. In particular, it would bring some new people into the conversation.
- Within the constraints of the elementary school environment, or the undergraduate college environment, it must surely be possible to develop opportunities for those who have learned to work together in the community of inquiry to extend their sense of common purpose, of community life, to open their lives more fully to each other in other ways. We have found for example that the experience of preparing meals together is central to achieving our goals; people get to know each other in those contexts in ways that complement their interaction in the classroom. Why can’t we press these limits, and see how much more is possible?
One last point: both of
these ideas taken together are not enough. The students who finished Philosophy
Camp last week are now in withdrawal; the relationships back home are no longer
satisfactory, and they don’t know how to fix them. Myles Horton, founder of
Highlander, took it as his task to create “islands of decency.” That’s also
what philosophy for children does. But human beings need and deserve continents of decency. To accomplish
this, anybody who takes Dewey seriously has to worry about helping people
establish in their lives: ground to stand on, communities that nourish,
incidental conversations that have life and promise. We must ransack the full
experience of democratic education, therapy, social work for tools to complete
the work we have started, to make good on our promises.
[1] Alice Crary. “Does the Study of Literature
Belong Within Moral Philosophy? Reflections in the Light of Ryle’s Thought.” Philosophical
Investigations 23:4 (2000): 315-350.
[2]
One might think of the wine-tasting method as supplemented by the Three Bears
method: the heroine overdoes, then underdoes, then gets it right. That sort of
moral instruction happens in journey novels of various sorts.
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