Philosophy PhD Candidate at UW-Madison
Founding Director of Madison Public Philosophy
Aaron Yarmel
Karma: 22
Thanks, Caroline!
I saw your comment this morning, and it’s been in the back of my mind all day. I’m going to respond with two comments. This one will be about evidence and the next one will be about safety. I’ll be brief at first, and I’m happy to continue the conversation and expand on any point.
First of all, despite what many of its proponents say, I wouldn’t pitch a program of P4C classes using the CPI method as an intervention that will lead to statistically significant increases in math and reading scores (that result wasn’t found in the best relevant study: Link). What’s more, my impression is that hardly any of the studies that have been conducted about the efficacy of the method are of a high enough quality to warrant generalizations about its efficacy (here’s a page with links to a fairly comprehensive list of studies: Link .)
A challenge for evaluating the method is that the most important outcomes haven’t ever been measured very well. For example, in the study I linked to above (the one I called the best relevant study), “teachers who took part in P4C reported feeling that the programme had a positive impact on pupils’ social, thinking and communication skills, and found it particularly helpful for children who were less self-confident.” On the one hand, those reports match my experience (and the experiences shared with me by the veteran teachers I’ve collaborated with). We’ve seen students get better at talking to other students collaboratively about challenging philosophical questions after practicing these skills every week. On the other hand, that study didn’t make the sorts of measurements that you would need in order to actually measure changes with respect to these outcomes in children. I’ve looked at scales for measuring social emotional learning outcomes in children, and that experience has made me more optimistic about the prospects of conducting a study that will answer the open questions suggested by these positive reports from teachers.
That said, I think that the claims I’m making in my forum post are modest enough to be plausible. At the very least, the dialogues are enjoyable activities (this study and the one I cited above both reported that) that could be used to introduce EA topics to children of a variety of ages (that’s a claim about the kinds of lesson plans I can create) while also giving them an opportunity to practice using skills that are relevant to EA projects that they might engage in down the road. More speculatively (because better research needs to be done to substantiate this beyond positive reports from teachers), but still plausibly, practicing these skills will make students better at them.
Here’s my second comment (in case they get out of order).
I’d like to frame the question about safety like this: all teachers need to figure out how to impose without imposing too much. Does the CPI method get the balance right?
Any time you insist on waiting for your turn to talk, using evidence and arguments to evaluate claims, or sticking to the topic at hand, you’re imposing your beliefs about (1) how we ought to communicate, (2) what counts as evidence, and (3) how broad the topic is. I’m not saying this to be pedantic. I actually believe that these procedural facilitation moves are substantive because all three of them relate to things about which reasonable people disagree: in some cultures, interrupting is part of the dance of the conversation; in some kinds of social justice-oriented spaces in the US, people are discouraged from critically evaluating some kinds of claims that are being made; I’m sure that if you and I were to talk for long enough we’d have at least one disagreement about the scope of our topic.
The CPI method does involve these kinds of impositions, but something like this is inevitable if you’re educating (or even merely socializing) children. One difference between the way these kinds of impositions happen in CPI contexts than in most other educational contexts, though, is that the method itself allows the participants to evaluate them. You can have a CPI about questions like the following:
how should we interact with people from cultures where interrupting is the norm?
when someone reports that they have experienced a traumatic event and cites that as evidence for a philosophical claim, how should we respond if we disagree with the philosophical claim?
what criteria should we use to determine the scope of a topic?
The answers to those questions can then influence future CPIs in the group.
Let’s talk about the imposition of controversial, political beliefs. I’m going to contrast the CPI method with the Socratic method. There are two methods that Socrates used: he sometimes questioned people until they realized that they did not know what they were talking about; he sometimes used questions to lead people to a particular answer. I’m talking about the second method, which is often used by activists and proponents of religions to get people to believe their claims. I’ve used that method during activism, but the only times I’ve used it with students are when (1) I’m trying to get my students to understand an idea rather than to believe it and (2) they’re old enough to understand the difference. So I might use it with college students when I’m trying to teach them Kant’s formula of universal law or Mill’s defense of utilitarianism, but that’s because we can then critique the steps of reasoning. I would not use it to teach 8-year-olds that God doesn’t exist. It’s too manipulative.
That kind of persuasion is unavailable to facilitators in the CPI method because facilitators aren’t allowed to argue for positions. Their role is to keep everyone on track, clarify positions, make sure that people are respecting each other, push students to critique positions that are being accepted uncritically, etc. This is one reason why a lot of facilitators don’t enjoy facilitating topics that they’re passionate about. It’s hard to be in an environment where you can’t do activism for your favored position.
To be clear, there are still ways to subtly shift a discussion in the direction you want without actually advocating for a position. You can, for example, keep redirecting students to your favored position or ask for counterarguments for a position you personally dislike. But if someone does that, they can be critiqued from within the method because they’re not doing a good job of facilitating a CPI. And, at any rate, this is something that could happen with any method of teaching children. An advantage of training facilitators in the CPI method is that we are explicit about disallowing those moves.
To be honest, I expected that I’d get criticisms from the other direction: the CPI method isn’t a method for convincing students to accept a particular set of propositions, so how is it supposed to convince students to become EAs? My answer to that question would have been that I’d like it to be part of a larger educational project that includes all of the other things I mentioned in the second to last paragraph of section 3 from my forum post above.