Seminar
in Philosophical Inquiry
Kirovograd,
Ukraine
June 16-21, 2003
Seminar participants met between 9am and 2pm each day, with each of the mornings loosely structured around a particular theme or issue. These were 1) issues of the adult-child relation; 2) issues surrounding evaluation and assessment appropriate to a form of education which understands itself as inquiry rather than transmission of information; 3) sexual and gender politics, which is a central indicator for the construction of power in any culture; 5) issues surrounding nationalism and ethnocentrism; and 6) the definition of democracy. These themes wove themselves at varying levels of abstraction and instantiation throughout the conversations, and formed a theoretical context for the pedagogical methodology which was being modeled by the facilitators.
As well as allowing for the provision of the theoretical background, the mornings comprised two practical sessions in which the community of inquiry pedagogy was implemented and practiced as it was being reflected on by the participants. The facilitators used excerpts from three philosophical novels—Harry, Lisa, and Mark—as texts, and conducted guided discussions of philosophical questions which emerged from the participants themselves. They then used their records of these discussions to identify and clarify characteristic structural and systemic patterns which are identifiable in successful group dialogues. These included logical and metalogical “moves” which developed or advanced the overall structure and direction of the argument; and skills and dispositions which characterize successful group dialogue, such as generalization, exemplification, identifying contradictions, clarification, systematic recursion, location of the argument, and group recall of the sequence of moves within it. In this way, the conversations which took place themselves became the subject of further conversations about what they demonstrated about the community of inquiry model.
After
the morning’s sessions lunch was served at the University dining room.
The lunch
gave participants an opportunity to continue their reflections on the experience
of the morning in a more informal and relaxed fashion.
Each day participants would share over a meal together their impressions
of the process, the content
of their discussions and the role of the educator within them.
They were cooperatively piecing together for themselves an understanding
of what it was they were experiencing, making the methodology more meaningful
for them and more likely to be internalized.
After
lunch, some of the participants would return to the conference room, to continue
their discussions and inquiry about the pedagogy in Ukrainian.
These sessions were facilitated by Zlata
Rzhevska and Eugenia Dannikova.
During this time Drs Kennedy and Laverty met with faculty and
administrators of Kirovograd State Pedagogical University.
In particular Drs Kennedy and Lushyn met daily as part of their ongoing
collaborative research on the relationship of inquiry facilitation with systems
theory and the process of group dynamics.
As a whole the seminar was extremely successful. It was an opportunity for Drs Kennedy and Laverty to witness the growth of Philosophy for Children in Kirovograd, but also to learn from the faculty there about some of the problems they are encountering and the kinds of the support they require form the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children (IAPC). Faculty and students of Kirovograd State Pedagogical University presented the results of their empirical research in Philosophy for Children over the past three years providing the IAPC with invaluable information. The seminar further contributed to the ongoing collaborative work of Drs Kennedy and Lushyn. Participants who had been practicing Philosophy for Children in their classrooms were reinvigorated and appreciated feedback from the facilitators as to some of the difficulties they had been experiencing. Participants in the seminar who were encountering community of philosophical inquiry for the first time expressed an understanding of the methodology and an intention to begin practicing it in their various classroom settings.