Unveiling and packaging: A model for presenting philosophy in schools

As a philosopher and a reflective practitioner of philosophy in schools, I explore two aspects of presentation which I call unveiling and packaging. Both aspects bear on the work of designing and facilitating philosophy workshops for school students. I describe unveiling philosophy as a practice of collaborative inquiry and dialogic argument: social processes that foster thinking skills and dispositions, an evaluativist epistemology, and a range of constructive norms. I then discuss packaging philosophical materials in ways that create effective stimuli for thinking. I encourage educators engaged in designing or curating stimuli to draw on the rich diversity of available media, to focus on the quality of both the philosophical content and its creative expression, and to ensure that the content connects with students’ life experiences. I propose five criteria for judging the likely effectiveness of a philosophical stimulus: that it activate emotion, induce perplexity, challenge intuitions, ignite controversy and elicit reasoned argument. I offer three detailed examples of high school philosophy workshops to illustrate the practical application of these criteria, and to illuminate fruitful possibilities for arranging stimuli, including using a Provocation-Complication sequence or arranging stimuli as elements in a more complex puzzle.

BEING AN INNOVATIVE AND CREATIVE TEACHER: PASSION-DRIVEN PROFESSIONAL DUTY

The research problem relates to the lack of existing research in terms of understanding the meaning of being an innovative and creative teacher in association with a passion connected to professional duty. Research questions were the following: “What does it mean for a teacher to be innovative and creative? What makes an innovative and creative teacher?”. The aim was to explore the meaning of being an innovative and creative teacher through teachers’ experiences. The methodology was based on integration of practical phenomenology and epistemological phenomenology. The sample consisted of ten teachers from ten innovative Basque Country schools. Data was collected by using open-ended interviews. Findings showed that the passion-driven professional duty integrates being an ambitious professional, being professional through ethical and moral actions, endeavoring to discover students’ learning needs, designing learning environments, being coherent with school philosophy, and testing for improvement. Findings showed that a teacher’s innovativeness and creativeness are directed to the self, professional actions, students, school, and professional development. Conclusions are focused on empirical facts that innovative and creative teachers experience the meaning of their practices through duties, which they perform with passion. Teachers’ innovativeness and creativity are related to ethical, moral, professional, intellectual, social, institutional, individual, and processual needs.

Middle School Instructional Practices

As middle school students, typically aged 10-14, begin to navigate a new world after elementary school, not only does their environment change but so do their specific learning needs. When defining the middle school philosophy, it is important to recognize the need for higher order thinking skills. To meet this need and to utilize developmentally responsive instructional strategies, middle school teachers face the daily challenge of designing learning experiences for the classroom. In this chapter, the author discusses a study investigating middle school teachers' espoused beliefs about appropriate instructional strategies and the actual strategies used in their schools. Characteristics of developmentally responsive instructional strategies, including blended learning, are also described.

THE INFLUENCE OF BYZANTINE NEOPLATONISM AND PALAMISM ON THE FORMATION OF RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS AND PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

The article looks at how translations from the Byzantine Neoplatonists influenced the early Russian theology. In particular, enormous impact of the Corpus Areopagiticum has been discovered. Scholars disagree as to how much Neoplatonism was instrumental in forming the early Russian theological thought. The article distinguishes two varieties of Neoplatonism in Russian Theology School philosophy. The works by F. Golybinsky, Archbishop Innokenty (Borisov), Archbishop Nikanor (Brovkovich) and Father P. Florensky considered the formation of Orthodox theism as a transition from the ontology of Christian Platonism to Christian Neoplatonism. We can also assert that the orientation towards Plato was laid precisely through the Eastern Fathers, and not through the Latin influence.

Strategies to Overcome Middle School Teachers' Classroom Management Stress

The purpose of this chapter is to explain the complexities of classroom management, student development, and middle school philosophy for new teachers at the middle school level. In addition, the authors provide the following four strategies to help new teachers deal with the stress of classroom situations: (a) improving knowledge of student development, the brain, and stress; (b) focusing on what is in the teachers' control; (c) breaking down the tasks into small chunks; and (d) creating a positive mindset. This chapter is unique because few authors have combined the concepts of middle school teacher stress caused by classroom management, how the brain influences classroom management, teacher stress, the cyclical nature of new teacher stress, and strategies to ameliorate stress.

Philosophical Questions about Teaching Philosophy: What's at Stake in High School Philosophy Education?

What is at stake in high school philosophy education, and why? Why is it a good idea to teach philosophy at this level? This essay seeks to address some issues that arose in revising the Ontario grade 12 philosophy curriculum documents, significant insights from philosophy teacher education, and some early results of recent research funded by the federal Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) in Canada. These three topics include curricular disputes, stories of transformation from philosophy student to philosophy teacher, and preliminary research findings. All underscore the importance and complexity of philosophy education, as well as its challenges and benefits, including the cross-curricular benefits philosophy education imparts to the study of other subject areas. Collectively, these serve as a springboard for asking some larger and broader philosophical questions about the teaching and learning of philosophy, and they demonstrate that this is a promising new area of study and of teaching for philosophers of education. I will raise some questions about philosophy that will help frame the next stage in the SSHRC research into the teaching and learning of philosophy in Ontario, and which I contend are new and fundamental questions to ask about philosophy itself.

Pedagogic Lapses in Problem-solving Model and the Professional Development of Secondary School Philosophy Teachers in Yaoundé VI Municipality

The professional development of teachers most especially Philosophy teachers has been a major concern of the Government of Cameroon. The ministry of secondary education has experimented several approaches and methods such as the New Pedagogic Approach and the Competence Based Approach. However, the Problem-Solving Model (PSM) could have an influence on the professional development of secondary school philosophy teachers. On this premise, this study sought to find out how the Problem-Solving Model influences the professional development of secondary school philosophy teachers in Yaounde VI Municipality. The investigation was anchored on authors like J. Dewey, E. Kant, C. S. Pierce and K. Nkrumah on their constructivist and pragmatic views. The qualitative approach with the aid of a semi-structured interview and semi- structured observation were employed. A total of ten teachers were selected to participate in this study using the non-probability sampling technique from two secondary schools; G.B.H.S. Etoug-Ebe and G.B.H.S. Mendong in the Yaounde VI municipality. Data was analyzed descriptively using tables, graphs and thematic content analysis. The results revealed that PSM influenced the professional development of secondary school philosophy teachers except for some few elements like stating the problem, contextualizing and rephrasing the problem, recalling the problem and contextualizing the solution that need to be relooked into because teacher practices do not conform to Dewey’s pragmatic model. The results of this study led to the proposed pragmatic triadic model to guide teacher practices.

"The Dawn of Wonder”

“The Dawn of Wonder” is a philosophical laboratory that the author, a high school philosophy teacher, has for many years led in several elementary schools in Rome. The paper aims at presenting the main characteristics of such experience of teaching philosophy to children, which doesn’t adopt the methodology of Philosophy for Children, but develops an original approach based on a historical narration of ideas and thinkers coming from both Western and Eastern traditions. According to this perspective, teaching philosophy to children means dealing with theoretical issues by keeping them in their historical and geographical context. In this way, a child who meets philosophy can reason on the basic problems of human understanding without losing sight of their geo-historical origins.

Tetens, Johann Nicolaus (1736–1807)

Tetens was a German philosopher, mathematician and physicist, with a second career as a Danish government official, who was active in Northern Germany and Denmark during the second half of the eighteenth century. Together with Johann Heinrich Lambert and Moses Mendelssohn, Tetens forms the transition from the German school philosophy of Leibniz, Wolff and Crusius to the new, critical philosophy of Kant. Tetens’ philosophical work reflects the combined influence of contemporary German, British and French philosophical currents. His main contribution to philosophy is a detailed descriptive account of the principal operations of the human mind that combines psychological, epistemological and metaphysical considerations. While showing a strong empiricist leaning, Tetens rejected the associationist and materialist accounts of the mind, favoured in Britain and France, and insisted on the active, spontaneous role of the mind in the formation and processing of mental contents.