We’re sitting in a circle on the floor with a group of elementary Montessori students, waiting for the cello concert to start. Ara, who is completing her music performance degree, launches into a theme in A major. Her next piece is in a minor key, followed by an atonal jazz improvisation. For her final piece, she remains motionless, fingers and bow hovering above the strings. Papers rustle, we hear footsteps as a teacher passes in the hall. A kid whispers, “Why isn’t she playing?” The performance of John Cage’s 4’33” concludes without her making a sound.
Then the conversation starts. Which piece did you like best? We vote. How did the music make you feel? Are minor keys sad? What makes them sad? Do you think all the pieces were music? Can anything be music? Do animals create music? Birds? Whales? What about cows? As the conversation comes to an end, the elementary school students have just completed a lesson developed by the University of Washington’s Jana Mohr Lone on the Philosophy of Music.
The activity was part of the Portland State University service-based capstone in the Philosophy of Children, offered each fall for the past five years. The undergraduates develop and workshop their own lesson plans, then bring them into our community partners’ classrooms at The Ivy School and Metro Montessori. Sometimes they adapt publicly available lesson plans (the University of Washington Center for Philosophy for Children is a terrific resource).
PSU students also collaborate with teachers to create their own lesson plans tailored to the curriculum. We spent a term with Ivy School middle schoolers exploring social organization and utopia, leading up to the Middle School students designing their own personal utopias. At Metro Montessori, we supplemented teacher Sara Adam’s prehistory unit with a migration game that took us across the Portland State Campus and an epistemology lesson built on close observation of the Lascaux cave paintings.
The capstone is also a philosophy of education class where we test out philosophical writings in our practice. We read Gareth Matthew’s Philosophy and the Young Child, a meditation on children’s philosophical aptitude and reflections, which also serves as an introduction to philosophy (this is important as only about half of the students in the class are philosophy majors). We also read Plato, John Locke, W.E.B. du Bois, Paulo Freire, bell hooks, Jacques Rancière, and others to clarify our ideals and goals about education and schooling.
The Philosophy for Children capstone is run as a workshop. Teaching the course is a balancing act to accommodate the needs and schedules of the PSU students, the schools, and the K-12 students. Each lesson plan has one or two student leaders responsible for drafting the lesson plan, ensuring that we have the materials we need, and coordinating the activity during classroom visits. While I want the capstone students to take ownership of their lesson plans, lessons have to be appropriate and engaging for the age group. Sometimes we explore topics such as racism and poverty that need to be carefully vetted with teachers and administrators. Lesson plan leaders need to be open and willing to incorporate constructive criticism. Class members have to support each other so we feel safe, respected, and supported.
Once we have a draft of the lesson plan, the class roleplays it. We break it down into steps. How do we break the ice? Will the instructions be clear for the age group? How can we engage students who are reluctant to speak up? Sometimes this means adding a writing or drawing component or a small group discussion. What strategies do we have if students are disruptive? What do we do if the activity falls flat? I tell PSU students that they need to be comfortable with uncertainty and to adapt. We’ve had to improvise lessons without key props, borrow school photocopiers minutes before meeting with classes, and figure out how to facilitate conversations when an anticipated group of fifteen students turn out to be forty. An activity which involved creating box-stacking robots (which is tougher than it sounds) had to be moved to a greenhouse to get out of the rain. We practice active listening, understanding that you can’t impose the conversation you’d like to have; rather, you need to listen and respond, encouraging them to arrive at philosophical insights on their own.
This fall we’re faced with creating an online philosophical experience for Middle School students. In the past, many of the lessons have been tactile and active; now we need to work with teachers to replicate this experience on a computer screen. I see this as an opportunity to explore new technologies, but, more importantly, to think philosophically about education in the time of COVID-19. When students aren’t in the classroom, where is the school? Who is the teacher? When does education take place? We may need to trust the students to philosophize on their own or with their families before meeting to use screen time effectively.
There are also challenges in creating an online community and workshop for the PSU students. Much of the interaction will be on Zoom and I expect to spread significant parts of the class breaking students out in the discussion rooms to facilitate conversation and small group work. We will use Google documents to share and comment on lesson plans. I am also assigning weekly student reflections and peer responses on Flipgrid, which allows students to record short videos and respond to each other. I learned about this technology from my colleague Maurice Hamington and found it a useful community-building tool for my online Philosophy of Immigration class last spring.
I don’t know how the course is going to play out this term – we’re still finding our way on how to best teach university philosophy courses online. Experience has taught me that I can rely on the ingenuity, creativity, and insight of my students at PSU, the support of the teachers, and the thoughtful responses of middle school students when presented with philosophical questions. I’m looking forward to what we come up with together.
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Alex Sager
Alex Sager is chair of the Department of Philosophy at Portland State University. Much of his research is on the philosophy of migration with recent books including Against Borders: Why the World Needs Free Movement of People (Rowen and Littlefield, 2020) and Toward a Cosmopolitan Ethics of Mobility: The Migrant's-Eye View of the World (Palgrave, 2018). He developed Portland State's Philosophy for Children Capstone class and founded the Oregon High School Ethics Bowl. Follow him on Twitter at @aesager.
