Flint and stone
I get the same charge from the juxtaposition of colors as I do from the juxtaposition of chords. Joni Mitchell The creative is always an act of recombination…as making a […]
Tag Archives: inquiry learning
The Jazz
My favourite cookbook, Cooking Com Bigode, is both more and less than a standard recipe book. Less, in that it’s low on specificity, with recipes vaguely suggesting “some onions”, “lots […]
Unveiling and packaging
Early one summer morning, a young Australian philosophy graduate was awoken by a phone call. It was the eminent professor David Lewis, calling from Princeton University’s philosophy department. “You’ve been […]
Doing without Socrates
The Socratic method, when used correctly, is an ingenious and dependable way of fostering collaborative dialogic argument in the classroom. Yet the Victorian Department of Education and Training (DET) presents […]
Straighten up and fly right: Making dialogue work
Does dialogue work to harmonise conflicting views, or does it simply entrench differences? According to extensive research in the psychology of polarised opinion, the answer is discouraging: when people of […]
Beyond parallel play: Three keys to dialogic argument
In honour of World Philosophy Day, I’m capping off my series on relativism and evaluativism today. If you haven’t read my previous posts in the series – Epistemology Needs to […]
Friendly excursions into disequilibrium
I’ve been progressively building the argument that we educators need to help our students move beyond relativism, and towards an evaluativist level of understanding. But how can we achieve this? […]
What are we doing here?
(Or, how to be inimitable) We’re a motley crew, we Philosophy in Schools people. Our goals are so varied, it can be hard to say exactly what it is that […]
A peak experience
“This was the best morning of my life!”, a Year 9 student enthused, following our recent philosophy workshops at Albert Park College’s Liberal Arts Festival. Students in Years 9 – […]
Questioning debate
The recent podcast episode ‘Debatable‘ from WNYC’s Radiolab got me thinking about formal debating and its relationship to the sort of collaborative enquiry we foster at The Philosophy Club. The podcast […]
The Philosophy Club 