Thinking About Thinking – Philosophy And Teachers

This post stems from the first day of P4C training -- which I blogged about here.

Hello to the participants of yesterday’s Philosophy in Schools Level One training course! I did promise to post some useful links, so you know where to head to find out some more!

Some of the topics that were mentioned (which you as regular readers might like) included the issues behind ‘Brain Gym’. I popped the name ‘Ben Goldacre‘ on a piece of paper as soon as it was mentioned and this is what I meant:

Ben Goldacre: Brain Gym exercises do pupils no favours! Taken from The Guardian newspaper in the UK.

Summation on his blog:

…Brain Gym is a set of perfectly good fun exercise break ideas for kids, which costs a packet and comes attached to a bizarre and entirely bogus pseudoscientific explanatory framework.

They tell you to rub either side of your breast bone, in a special Brain Gym way called Brain Buttons: “This exercise stimulates the flow of oxygen-carrying blood through the carotid arteries to the brain to awaken it and increase concentration and relaxation. Brain buttons lie directly over and stimulate the carotid arteries.” Through your ribcage. Without using scissors.

They’re keen on drinking water. Fair enough. But why? “Processed foods,” says the Brain Gym manual, “do not contain water.” Is there water in soup? No. “All other liquids are processed in the body as food, and do not serve the body’s water needs.” This ridiculousness comes at very great cost, paid for by you, the taxpayer, in thousands of state schools.

… A clue can be found in a set of experiments from the March 2008 edition of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, which elegantly show that people will buy into bogus explanations much more readily when they are dressed up with a few technical words from the world of neuroscience.

I first learned of Brain Gym from Margaret, a librarian in Queensland who fought hard to have the lack of research into Brain Gym acknowledged by her school after a lot of time better spent on educating or proper PD funding was taken away from her and others! There’s plenty of other ‘snake oil’ items in education (don’t get me started on ‘bonding’ exercises…) which I hope she’ll continue to tell me about.

Other information that was given included the FAPSA site (where those hoping to do the Level 2 course next year can check out the interstate sites -- this year our Level 2 will be in Pemberton in late September -- early October) and you should certainly check out the links to the research by Tricky and Topping which I mention in this blogpost: Philosophy in WA!

The course itself is a part of the training required to use the community of inquiry method in the classroom. The wonderful Candice was kind enough to let us use her venue -- which you can kind of see in this blurry photo as I remembered to bring my video camera but not my usual camera. Thankfully, the modern mobile phone in-built camera can give you an idea of Dr Stephan Millett presenting before we got into the community of inquiry circle.

The text that we were using (I scribbled on mine -- sorry Stephan!) was The Knife, one of the stories in Dr Phillip Cam’s collection that you can find thanks to ACER press. I know that Woolridges will be more than happy to help track them down!

Best of all, at the end of the day I was able to interview both Dr Alan Tapper and Dr Stephan Millett for The TANK Vodcast! Since empirical evidence of how philosophy for children WORKS is vital, it was my first line of questioning -- and they certainly had a lot to say about what has been shown, what you can face in regards to people not wanting questioning going on and how important it is for the next generation.

If you are interested in critical thinking for children, what research has been done and how to encourage it world-wide, check out the next edition of The TANK!

Not really related (how’s this for a great example of a lot of work and energy ) -- but a presentation by Clifford Stoll! I first read his works after going through my husband’s book shelves a few years back -- The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage is a great book.

http://www.ted.com Clifford Stoll could talk about the atmosphere of Jupiter. Or hunting KGB hackers. Or Klein bottles, computers in classrooms, the future. But he’s not going to. Which is fine, because it would be criminal to confine a man with interests as multifarious as Stoll’s to give a talk on any one topic. Instead, he simply captivates his audience with a wildly energetic sprinkling of anecdotes, observations, asides — and even a science experiment. After all, by his own definition, he’s a scientist: “Once I do something, I want to do something else.”

I do agree with his point about ‘get talking to kindergarten teachers about what the future will be like’. To start investigating the future of society -- as many of the pre-service Primary and Primary teachers can attest from yesterday! As for what he says about ‘put your money where your mouth is’ if you care so much about the education of children -- got that right.

At any rate -- I never thought that Clifford Stoll would be like this in person. Scary, he kind of reminds me of myself when doing a class… although I don’t usually swipe what my viewers are drinking and give them a Klein bottle instead…

Tagged as: Brain Gym, Clifford Stoll, Education, FAPSA, Neuroscience, philosophy, Philosophy for Children, Pseudoscience, Science, TED