54. REFLECTIONS ON THE FIRST YEAR OF PHILOSOPHY UNLEASHED - Looking Back & Looking Forward
This is the last week of the academic year (at least at my school - I know some schools broke up ages ago) and it has always been the plan with Philosophy Unleashed that we only publish during term-time because, as well as trying to promote the idea of applying philosophy to all walks of our weird and wonderful lives, I also want to promote the idea of a work/life balance (something sorely lacking for many in the education profession and, even more sadly, too often passed on to our students). I started this blog just over a year ago with a simple challenge to myself - can I write a short philosophical blog post every week for a term? Something that would remind myself and my students that there is more to philosophy than what an exam specification is asking. If I could then, from September, I would formally launch the blog and open it to submissions from any student or teacher who wanted to join me; if I couldn’t then the “blog” would stay as a failed project in my NOTES folder, like so many aborted song lyrics or ideas for novels. Happily, I wrote my arbitrarily imposed quota of posts and went live in September. Since then there has been at least one new post a week published here every Monday morning at 6am during term time. A total of 54 posts (including this one), not bad for an academic year which only has 39 weeks in it! We’ve covered political philosophy, ethics, mortality, time, epistemology, identity, mental health, pop culture, education, economics, to name but a few common areas looming large in the archives, and we’ve had about 3,000 unique people visit the site over the year. Many of those people have been teachers and students of philosophy and I have heard from many educators that they have been using the site as a resource for their classes, especially during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic when lockdown caused a sudden scramble for online resources! Many students have said they have found the site useful. Several have been inspired to write for the blog, and over the first year of Philosophy Unleashed we have been privileged to publish student writing on a range of issues, such as: environmentalist school strikers explaining their reasons for putting climate justice first; atheists dissecting how they can still fear hell despite their lack of belief; anti-capitalists trying to formalise their feelings against the dominant economic system; anti-racists trying to make sense of the senseless murder of George Floyd; a transgender student sharing their experiences of identity conflicting with cis-gender norms; and, most inspiring of all, a survivor of an attempted suicide showing how philosophy can literally save your life. I have been honoured to receive submissions from a range of student voices. That said, if I were to point to a failing of the blog in its first year it would be the relatively low number of voices on here that aren’t mine. It was always my hope that Philosophy Unleashed would be an outlet for many people to write that argument down that has been growing inside them throughout their studies but never quite addressed by any of the examination topics, but it seems to be that the majority of students out there (and teachers) are sadly too busy trying to keep up with the demands of their exams to find the time to write something beyond that curriculum. While some amazing students have, far more have written me a pitch of an essay they plan to write but never do, and it saddens me to think what this shows in general about the current education system and how it leaves young people (and their teachers) with so little free time to stretch their intellectual muscles and drains them of motivation to do so by demanding so much of them. Not necessarily the courses themselves, but the whole education machine - exams, mocks, UCAS, more exams… To have a few spare hours to bash out some nascent thoughts about a pressing issue in your mind should not be a luxury, but sadly seems like it is.
Happily, when questioned about why they haven’t written anything themselves for Philosophy Unleashed, some students have answered that they enjoy reading what I have to say about things. While I appreciate that, and enjoy writing my own articles, I only really feel free to be so forthright about my own views on here because I do not believe it to be my own mouthpiece and want my voice to be just one of many. The hope has always been students and teachers will publish their own things on here and drown me out, or at least provide a regular counter-point. Without that the blog simply becomes a soapbox - nice to have, but not the point. It is my second disappointment of the first year of the blog that not enough is made of the comments function. Some of the more contentious posts I had always envisioned causing debate and discussion - either an entire new article being written in response or, at the very least, an objection put in the comments. That has happened only very rarely. Again, that leaves my own views unchallenged and seemingly authoritative when they are anything but. The lessons which inspired this blog - Philosophy Unleashed lessons where I suspend the teaching of the specification and we discuss anything but and apply some philosophical analysis to everyday issues - are not simply me holding forth and lecturing to my students. They are back and forth discussions, often very heated! It is a shame that less of that has happened on here, as it is certainly happening in my head all the time. From about 6:01am every Monday morning that I publish a new post, I begin to see all the problems with my own position and by Friday, on some issues, I have already completely changed my mind (yes - that is a confession that I am finding it very hard to ween myself off wrestling, watched the Undertaker documentary the very week I published my article about the ethics of watching wrestling, cried several times despite his terrible support of right-wing sloganeering, and will probably find myself tonight, the day that this post is published, sitting down to watch WWE Extreme Rules. I know it’s wrong, but I guess I’m going to keep saving my sanity from the burning building instead of doing the right thing and saving ten strangers…I’ve been watching too long to stop now…and yet…etc…). So my hope for September, after the six week break the blog is about to take, is the following:
More philosophical engagement in the comments so that the articles become a dialogue instead of a monologue.
More contributions from other voices. More student writing, and more teacher writing from teachers who aren’t me.
At the same time, I can’t stress enough how happy I am with what the blog has achieved in its first year:
54 original articles published in 39 weeks.
3,000 unique visitors and counting.
Student contributions at least every other month, including some amazing personal reflections I’ve felt very privileged to publish.
The blog’s use by multiple schools and students as a resource which has genuinely inspired people to see there is more to philosophy than an exam specification.
The blog being a springboard for further creative philosophical projects by students - i.e. the student who wrote an article for us which then became the start of a new podcast.
The fact that the blog’s existence allowed Tippermuir Books to track me down as the author of a PhD thesis on anarchism they wanted to turn into a book and led to the publication of my first philosophy book, Authentic Democracy: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism.
My own personal inspiration to keep writing one of these posts every week, allowing me to kick around ideas and crystallise my thinking (or further muddy it up) on a wide range of issues, some of which have inspired me to write extended, more academic versions of the ideas first sketched here and re-engage with the business of academic publication (fingers crossed something will come of one of them soon).
I am also happy the blog has remained free and that I have no intention of attempting to monetise it despite it costing me money to maintain each month. It is my gift to the world of philosophy, particularly student philosophy, and I am happy to continue providing it.
So all in all, I’m really happy with how this first year has gone and look forward to seeing what the 2020/21 academic year will bring here at Philosophy Unleashed when we return SEPTEMBER 7TH.
I hope it is more promising on here than it is in the actual world of education.
Covid-19, as terrible as it is, gave those of us working in education - like many sectors during the pandemic - a really valuable opportunity to evaluate what we do, rethink and reimagine. We saw that exams, for example, were not the only way to assess the achievements of our students as the necessary decision was made to cancel them. We saw the massive learning potential of online technologies previously kept at arm’s length in the classroom as a trial by fire forced everyone in the profession to experiment and explore with new approaches to our subjects and we saw, entailed by this, the moral necessity of providing all students with fast broadband capabilities and reliable IT equipment so that all could access the same online learning. Likewise, we saw the inequalities in provision exposed across the country, both in resources available, and in the quality of actual teaching, between schools, as some schools kept up remotely their exact in-school timetable during lockdown, and others simply emailed out a series of limited worksheets and complained about the hours of learning “lost”.
Some of us were able to see advantages in integrating technology alongside more traditional pedagogies and see the benefits of the flexibility of online learning. Students could do work at their own pace, get sleep, find their own rhythms, and teachers were made to think carefully about what they were actually asking students to do - was it necessary? If we were asking students to come together and have a virtual “lesson” with us, why do so if it is to accomplish something which could be accomplished independently by the students? In my own case, I used “live” lessons sparingly, arranged at least a week in advance so students could organise themselves, as a means to expand on and deepen the work/reading they had done independently and clarify any misconceptions, etc. And just like I would in the classroom, when setting work i had to pre-consider where the stumbling points would be and what elements of the work would need further support. By anticipating that, I could add elements to the resources provided (videos, extra information, interactive quizzes which gave specific answers/facts based on the answer given) which would allow the students to do, independently, the same job I would if we were together in the classroom. Essentially, being forced to teach remotely demonstrated how much the structural assumptions of school - classrooms, timetabled lessons, assessment by exam - influence the way we teach in ways that have nothing to do with educational needs and everything to do with institutional ones. Could everything I usually teach in 50 minutes a week be taught in just 30 minutes a week? Of course! Because the methodologies of the classroom and the methodologies of remote teaching differ - registers don’t have to be taken, time doesn’t have to be wasted on students reading new material or waiting to hear from everyone in the class; we can do things differently, more personalised and yet more collaborative. The 30 minutes of contact time can expand into however long or short the student wants beyond that 30 minutes to take things further or ensure they understand the basics.
I am not saying that teaching remotely has been better than being together in the same classroom, and that there aren’t cons (there are, of course, just as there are cons to teaching in the classroom even without a deadly virus rampaging among us). I am saying that it has exposed that much that we do in the school day is not really about learning but is more about the processes of running examination factories and moulding a future workforce. It is deeply disappointing to see, along with the ludicrous suggestion from the DfE that all year groups must be returning to schools full time in September, that most schools rather than thinking about how education could be transformed by taking on board some of the lessons of the last few months - flexibility, flipped learning, alternatives to exams, etc. - are simply rushing to “get back to normal” as soon as possible. There is a very real possibility that the fear and challenge of doing things differently online will have crowded out the valuable lessons which could have been learned and, for comfort, for the security of the familiar, we will look back on 2020 as a strange blip rather than the transformative event it should have been. For five months UK schools were unable to put students through damaging exams, unable to use punitive methods of behaviour management, unable to dictate the hours students did and didn’t learn, unable to set meaningless tasks just to fill timetabled lesson time, and those teachers who lent into that new reality and devised flexible, responsive and meaningful online curriculums were able to get some of the best work ever out of their students. It makes me sad to think that come September those breakthroughs will be forgotten, and row upon row of disengaged students will be back “banking” their spoon-fed knowledge of exam specifications under threat of carceral sanctions yet again.
That said, if 2020 has taught us anything it is that the world can change in just a few months. We’ll see in September what September brings. Have a great summer!
Author: D. McKee