Association of Philosophy Teachers Annual Conference 2025: REPORT

The third annual conference of the Association of Philosophy Teachers (APT) took place on a beautiful June day at the equally beautiful St Dominic’s Sixth Form College in Harrow last Friday.  Having been a conference organiser for the first two events, and one of the members of the original ad hoc Zoom group from which the initial idea of the APT emerged, this was my first year in the APT as merely a member.  Attending the conference, therefore, it was the first time I would be going as a delegate with no prior idea about what was on the agenda and who the speakers would be.  Truth be told, I was worried.  Other than the initial call for papers in February, and then the invite to the conference on the APT email list a few months later, I hadn’t seen the conference advertised anywhere.  Many philosophy teachers I know weren’t coming this year because they didn’t know the event was happening, or had found out about it too late to get time off work.  Even my own ticket was in doubt, as I realised a few days before the conference began that I had never received a confirmation of my order or any official ticket.  Last I’d heard, months before, my order was still being “processed”.  Happily, an email from the APT the morning before the conference confirmed a problem with the ordering system but assured me my ticket was purchased and my name was on the list.  I could make the long, two hour, drive to Harrow in peace, knowing I would not be turned away after making the additional twenty-seven minute walk from the train station we were advised to park in (unlike previous years, the venue had no parking available).  So at 6:30am on Friday I got in the car and made the journey.  There was, however, still one thing worrying me about the day.  Having looked the conference programme over several times, I really wasn’t sure which talks I wanted to go to.  Not because there were just too many good ones to choose from, but because many of them felt like things, or speakers, I had already heard before.  Driving down the M40, there wasn’t any one talk I was particularly excited about hearing.  It was more a case of which talks would I pick to fill the time in between keynotes?  (And I didn’t see any unifying theme between the keynotes either!)  The first conference had an underlying theme of asking what philosophy was for and why we ought to form an association. The second was about “Developing, Diversifying and Doing” Philosophy. The call for papers had repeated the second conference’s theme but asked speakers to focus on three specific themes: the pedagogy of teaching philosophy (doing?), seminars on particular texts (a potential for diversifying?), and the development of super-curricular philosophy programmes (development?). The final programme sort of reflected the three areas the Call For Papers had asked for, but nothing really jumped out as crucial or new. I was hoping some of the blurbs just undersold what would still be an interesting and useful day of ideas.

Entering the library and signing in at the College, I was encouraged. There was already a buzz around the coffee and pastries and I’d seemed to have walked in on the sort of casual debate about philosophy of mind one expects at a conference of philosophy teachers. I brought the tone down to ask the location of the toilets. The real location problem. Then, returning from the bathroom to get my own coffee and cake, joined in the pre-conference chatter. It was nice to see people arriving from all around the country and catching up with some familiar faces I’d forgotten the names of since our first conference in Birmingham, as well as some names I could remember and know well. I was feeling hopeful. The whole idea of the APT conference was to build a professional body to represent the interests of philosophy teachers, but also to give us the opportunity to break out of the isolation of our usually small, often one-person, departments and meet others around the country teaching philosophy. The library was filling up with delegates (though in seeming smaller numbers than previous years) and there were representatives in the room from AQA, Philosophy Now, and The Institute of Art and Ideas. Everything was feeling nice and conferencey.  We were welcomed by the Headteacher of St Dominic’s and soon were ushered into the beautiful large chapel at the school for our keynote talk from Professor Clare Carlisle.

Carlisle was asking the question: Is Kierkegaard a Good Teacher?  Having loved my sporadic encounters with Kierkegaard’s work at university, I was interested in the talk, and was surprised how much her account of Kierkegaard as a teacher resonated with some of bell hooks’ ideas about education as the “practice of freedom”. I especially loved the idea of using narrative fiction pedagogically. But, once the talk was over, as interested as I was, I did feel rather like I had just attended a random lecture on something interesting rather than it being a tone-setting starting point for a conference.

In our first year at APT, our keynote was Angie Hobbes. We had gathered together that first year to basically start the APT and rally the troops of philosophy teachers, and her opening talk on the case for philosophy in schools was a relevant rallying cry for a day of discussion around that theme. Last year, in Bristol, Julian Baggini spoke to us about global philosophy, in keeping with the conference theme of doing, developing, and diversifying philosophy. We started the day with that idea planted in our head that there were many “philosophies” and always more to develop and do than we were currently doing. If Professor Carlisle’s talk had been more generalised, asking what makes a good philosophy teacher in general, and perhaps the conference was clearly themed around different approaches to the pedagogy of philosophy, then it would have felt galvanising, and given us a possible framework for considerations in sessions the rest of the day. As it was, I walked to my first talk merely feeling like it might be nice to dust off some of my old Kierkegaard books over the summer and still wondering what the purpose or theme of this year’s conference actually was? Despite its appearance on the February Call For Papers, there was no further mention of Developing, Diversifying and Doing, nor any signposting of the three sub-themes the Call also mentioned.

My question only grew as I sat through the first talk. To be fair, it’s my own fault. There was a talk I could have gone to by the always excellent Stephen Law about Mind and Body, looking at Descartes’ two arguments for dualism, but I chose not to go to that one because I know the arguments well and have seen Stephen talk many times before. There was also a talk by Gerald Jones, which may have been better off as our keynote speech given its title: Teaching Philosophy. And its blurb, which said: “Philosophy and its outcomes: What are we trying to do when we teach philosophy, and how can we do it better?” Again, if this had been the keynote it would have framed the day in a provocative way, giving context to the many different answers each talk possibly provided. Unfortunately for me, having been teaching philosophy for so long and already having a clear idea in my mind about why I do it, I foolishly decided there was no point in going. So I went to the talk titled: “Is Leaving Out Philosophy a Social Injustice?” by Jon Donnelly from Wallington High School for Girls.

The blurb for that one had got my spidey-senses tingling from the off: “This talk explores how curriculum has become central to educational debate over the past decade, shaped in large part by Michael Young’s concept of powerful knowledge. We’ll consider how his ideas have influenced curriculum design and why access to disciplinary knowledge is a matter of social justice. The session ends by inviting reflection on whether philosophy offers powerful knowledge—and what its exclusion from the National Curriculum might mean for equity in education.” While a lifelong advocate of teaching philosophy in schools, and believer in the idea that teaching young people how to think for themselves is a genuine issue of social justice, there were too many buzzwords and phrases in the blurb that warned me this was not going to be that kind of argument, but rather something else. The recent turn to cognitive-science in education theory is something I have criticised elsewhere, but in a nutshell, I believe it is an impoverished model of education built around the idea that the only thing that matters in the classroom is quantifiable memorisation, measured in examination success, and therefore because we now have increasing knowledge from cognitive science about how the brain best remembers things, there is claimed to be a “right” way to teach stuff and a “wrong” way. The science is real and the premise is fine if memory is all you care about in the classroom. But if you think education is about more than that, or something else entirely, then the model - and its current ascendancy in mainstream British education talk - is deeply worrying. It’s great for a regime of exams, but bad for nurturing well-rounded human beings. Yet because we do live in that examination regime, for the last ten years or so the cognitive-science movement have cleverly framed the discussion as a social justice issue: if we “know” the “best” way to teach, and aren’t teaching in this way, then classrooms where the approach is not being used are denying their students the same chance of success as the classrooms where they are. In other words, the idea is so successful because it is a perfect argument for replicating the status quo without challenge in schools and giving in to the many baked-in problems of the current flawed world in which we educate the citizens of tomorrow.

The mainstream acceptance of these ideas within education policy and state schools is a result of a concerted effort over a number of years to disseminate, amplify and normalise them. A combination of social media echo chambers, ideological teach-meets like researchED, and agenda-driven publications which cite each other in an endless feedback loop (speaking at those same teach-meets and then dominating the social media discourse) have, like all slow-burn, well-financed, ideological revolutions, led to those carrying the torch for such views gradually entering more and more positions of authority in schools and the DfE, further sanctifying the ideas in policy and practice. While I have sympathy with the idea of research-informed education, as a philosopher of education, my experience of what “the research” says is that other approaches and aims for education exist. There is a lot of different research and lots of different perspectives (including methodological questions about any “research” done in classrooms with too many variables to control for, let alone extrapolate a universal from!) There is no the research, only research. All of which is a long-winded way of saying, I would have thought a philosophy conference might have had more to say about the current education theory de jour than “I like it”, and hearing Donnelly discuss “the Goveian critique” of education so uncritically left me intellectually cold. His argument that philosophy, as a discipline, meets Michael Young’s (contested) criteria of “powerful knowledge” and therefore it ought to be part of the National Curriculum was not (even to this instinctive advocate of philosophy in schools) a convincing one. There is lots of “powerful knowledge” students are denied in the inherently arbitrary and limited curriculum of finite school timetables, and an argument for inclusion requires making the case for the unique aspects of the particular domain of “powerful knowledge” you are arguing for. Philosophy, of course, has much in its favour. But Donnelly did not do this. Instead he made the case (in line with all members of the cult of cognitive-science) for a more “knowledge rich” philosophy curriculum. Lamenting how few students know the names of great thinkers like Aristotle, Locke, Hume, Plato, Rawls, and all the other standard white, male names of the problematic and myopic traditional philosophy canon that the APT have spent the last two years (futilely?) arguing we need to decolonise and diversify.

In other words, Donnelly argued, stop focusing on doing philosophy, because teaching skills in isolation does not work. Teach knowledge of philosophy (names, dates, arguments like puzzle pieces to be fitted together for precise logical regurgitation) so that domain-specific skills will, one day, follow and students will have a body of strong - powerful - knowledge with which to pass exams and international olympiads.

Rather than being provocative in the philosophical sense, the talk was a completely uncritical, by-numbers, application of the dominant cog-sci educational dogma to the teaching of philosophy, and what worried me most about it was knowing that this wasn’t the only planned appearance of this sort of stuff that day. I had already decided against attending Patricia Copeland and Alexis Philippou’s afternoon talk: Socrates Was Wrong – Exploring the Optimum Lesson Structure for A-level Philosophy because I knew it would be bad for my blood pressure. The blurb here asked: “Is the traditional Socratic method really the best way to teach A-level Philosophy? In this session, we draw on insights from Engelmann’s Direct Instruction, atomisation, and cognitive science to propose a new approach to lesson design that aims to improve clarity, retention, and understanding. We’ll explore the evidence behind these techniques, share model lesson segments in this alternative format, and invite discussion on how this shift might transform student outcomes. Come ready to question received wisdom and rethink what a high-impact philosophy lesson could look like.” and, because I think philosophy should be about more than “high-impact” retention and “direct instruction”, and don’t think discovery learning should be a dirty word in our profession, I knew the talk would just leave me angry. It disturbed me to see two ideologically aligned speakers from the same school taking up so much speaker space on the programme. And when the critical questions came flying at Donnelly (not just from me - though I did ask about who gets to pick which “knowledge” goes into our “knowledge rich” curriculum and which knowledge gets excluded from it) after his talk, rejecting the premise of his project (for which he had no satisfying answers), he was seen afterwards warning his colleague that his afternoon talk would likely be received the same way this one was.

I acknowledge that my resistance to this dominant model of “research informed” education is not everyone’s view, and that being the dominant view, it might even perhaps be useful for a conference of philosophy teachers to talk about how to adapt their subject to meet the demands of the dominant norms in the sector (no matter how problematic they might be). But this did not feel like that conversation. This felt like giving up way too much airspace to the same generic talking points we are getting in any school CPD session these days from any Edutwitter true believer who has drunk the cog-sci Kool-Aid. It left me with a very bad taste in my mouth and a real sense that the conference had lost its way.

Happily, a sense of purpose was restored in the second session. I listened to the incredibly inspiring Mary Margaret McCabe speak about her amazing work with the charity Philosophy in Prison. This talk rhapsodised about the exact kind of philosophy teaching being excoriated in the previous session and demonstrated a true issue of social justice in its ability to give the incarcerated back their humanity, if only for a few hours a week. I also realised that the Philosophy in Prison model felt much more aligned with Professor Carlisle’s thoughts earlier that morning about Kierkegaard’s teaching methods. Methods which were also spoken about derisively in Joe Donnelly’s session. Though excited to hear about the fantastic work Philosophy in Prison is doing, it again made me question the coherence of the day’s programme and lack of any overarching purpose of the day. By offering views of philosophy education at total odds with each other, was the APT’s position that any approach goes? Was it for us to make up our own minds? Did the Association even have a position? By putting speakers in the programme without any nuance or caveat, it felt like implicit APT endorsement. But endorsement of such oppositional approaches made no sense. It almost felt like speakers had simply been selected to fill up space on the programme, rather than to provide any unifying vision.

This confusion of purpose was illustrated by the other two talks I did not see in that same time slot. The wonderful Peter Worley was talking about The Funnel of Righteousness, what he calls “a way of presenting an approach to epistemology that is practical and does not require the unreachable high standards of success criteria that much of epistemology in philosophy often does”. Knowing Worley’s brilliant work, having read the original article the talk was based on in Philosophy Now, and hearing him speak many times before, I did not attend this talk, but know Worley certainly seems to think philosophy education is more about getting young people thinking than it is about rote learning of a canon of “knowledge” and passing exams. Yet Hugh Burling’s concurrent talk in room three on Using Deduction as a Teaching Tool was, from all accounts of delegates who attended the talk, again, an attempt to reduce philosophy teaching to rote memorisation: this time breaking complicated arguments down to deductive standard-form for easy coding and retrieval. Though not exactly an egregious proposition (if anything, it’s almost so obvious a thing to do with arguments, where useful, that I suspect many of us do it already), in the context of those other two talks on the programme, it felt like another way of taking much that is wonderful and unique about the philosophy classroom and sacrificing it at the alter of exam preparation.

As nice as it was to grumble about all of this with people over lunch (which I did, and found myself not alone in my thinking), it would have been nicer to do it over more than a small plate of quarter triangle sandwiches and a handful of crisps. The previous two conferences provided delegates with a hot meal worthy of the ticket price but this year it was cold food only, with no labelling to say what was, or wasn’t, vegetarian or vegan. A minor problem, but a further thing that made me wonder where my membership and conference fee is actually going given that, throughout the entire year since the last conference it feels like all I have got from being a member of the APT is an occasional email. There was also significant skimping on the AGM, which felt like less of a meeting of a professional organisation and more a brief verbal message to attendees. Apparently, we were told, David Blunkett and various civil servants dismissed the idea of a Philosophy GCSE during British Philosophy Fortnight earlier this year and that’s that. No further discussion. No vote. No talk of the year ahead for the APT or what our membership means. No discussion about our finances or a budget report. No transparency about what exactly the conference fees from the last two years have been spent on (I hope not speaker fees, though notice this year, despite the lower attendance numbers, seemed to have more “big names” speaking than did previous years, where we relied on speaker volunteers?) The AGM honestly could have been an email, and did not give me much faith in the power of my membership. I left lunch feeling troubled by that more than anything else that troubled me that day.

Lunch was followed by the final optional sessions. The aforementioned cog-sci bashing of the Socratic Method was one option; an interesting sounding talk from Showkat Ali about inspiring more state school students to take up philosophy was another (not relevant in my current position teaching outside of the state system but certainly a necessary endeavour); and the talk I went to was the third: Jeremy Hayward on “Responding to mis/disinformation, conspiracy theories and dangerous narratives in the classroom”. I was interested in this talk specifically because I will be teaching about conspiracy theories and epistemology within a new key stage four philosophy course next year and wanted to see if I have planned anything Hayward - a Prevent and extremism school safeguarding expert - might advise against (I haven’t). At the same time, again, this felt more like something which better fit a school safeguarding INSET session than a philosophy conference (though there was definitely some interesting philosophy in there). It was a useful session, I’m glad I went to it, but as it came to an end I realised that if the final keynote talk from David Edmonds didn’t radically inspire me, this would be the first time in three years I have left an APT conference without a pile of new books to read and new philosophers to explore. I hadn’t heard any actual philosophical idea or thinker that day that I hadn’t heard of before (even the desire to re-read some Kierkegaard had waned across the conference).

As well as hopefully showing me something new and exciting to read, Edmond’s’ closing talk had even more heavy lifting to do. The overwhelming sense of the conference feeling aimless could perhaps be salvaged if Edmonds managed to tie everything together in some sort of unifying closing thesis. Sadly, however, he did not. Instead we had even more purposelessness as Edmonds simply rattled through a random list of famous thought experiments in philosophy (the trolley problem, the Chinese room, Mary’s room, the experience machine…) with no seeming overarching point. Other than Sam Scheffler’s post-life asteroid, all of these thought experiments were deeply familiar to us (two are on the A-level spec and the other two may as well be) and as Edmonds had no thesis about them to share, or seeming purpose to his talk other than sharing them because he’s currently writing a book about thought experiments and finds them interesting, I ended the conference with a bleak new thought experiment in mind:

Imagine you are a person at a conference but the closing talk will turn out to be an utter waste of your time. Shouldn’t you have just left after session three, even if it means you would have missed the closing talk, because at least you’ll beat the traffic home?

That this was my closing thought from a whole day at the conference was a damning indictment of how little I felt I got out of it this year. Whereas the last two years I left each conference feeling positive and inspired, this year I drove the two and a half hours home (after the twenty-seven minute walk back to the station with others who had gone to the ‘Socrates was Wrong’ cog-sci chat and were furious about it) thinking only about what exactly the APT is these days? Has it lost its way already after only three years? And what can be done to restore it to the inspiring and important organisation it started out as?

The anarchist in me wonders if the whole thing is down to the difference between the APT starting out as a grassroots and decentralised ad hoc organisation and its gradual formalisation into a more rigidly structured association. Before, everything was a conversation and the views of the many were included in fluid and open planning decisions. The last two years everything has become a lot more closed door, with committees and people in named roles making decisions without consultation. Certainly the number of APT meetings has dropped. As far as I am aware I was involved in no meetings at all since the conference last year. I think I remember one zoom meeting organised with very little notice in November. But if we aren’t speaking to each other as an organisation in between conferences, then how can we expect our conferences to reflect our needs and interests? My own hostility towards the dogmatic cog-sci turn in education policy still understands its role within the current education picture, so if conversations about its role in philosophy had been open and ongoing within the APT all year, then its recurring place on the conference programme would at least have made some sense. As a member of the APT I feel I should feel knowledgable about the concerns and needs of philosophy teachers, not taken by surprise by them. But with no prior debate about the issues we face or needs we have, any conference programme feels rather arbitrary. The last few years seemed to have defined the issues and needs as being around assessment of the A-level exam, approaches to delivering philosophy at key stage 4 and key stage 3 (including the need for a philosophy GCSE), practical ways of teaching material in the classroom in interesting ways, and diversifying what we teach (including the need for the AQA to diversify their A-level, or OCR to start a competing one). Each conference, and meeting in between conferences, logically progressed those conversations along. But this year felt like catching up with an old acquaintance who smiles and nods as they talk, but seems to have forgotten every important thing about your life you’ve shared with them previously.

My hope is that this was just a blip. Or maybe just a completely personal feeling about the conference, at odds with the majority of philosophy teachers. My hope is that the Association learn from their mistakes, hopefully soliciting feedback from attendees about what they liked and what they didn’t, and hopefully increasing the contact and communication we have as a membership across the year so that there is a real sense of community rather than a sense merely of common employment. Crucially, APT was created to be something distinct from already existing bodies within philosophy teaching, such as the National Association of Teachers of Religious Education (NATRE), to focus on the distinct and specific needs of philosophy, not just education in general. I would like to see more engagement with academics sharing unfamiliar ideas which might inspire our students as we had at the first two conferences, and more engagement with the female thinkers and non-white thinkers most of us have been excluded from knowing about in our own educational journeys in philosophy. And I would certainly like to see an Association willing to put up a fight and make the case for a philosophy GCSE and the development of an improved A-level, rather than simply accepting civil service resistance or government foot-dragging. (I only found out the latest on the AQA’s ongoing saga to update their course from speaking informally to the AQA representative running a booth on CPD). Successful professional organisations do not simply involve themselves in national conversations, they should be shaping them. And they do this by developing and solidifying their collective voice through lengthy and engaging discussion about aims and purposes, at things like conferences. Sadly, as I reflect on this year’s APT conference, it feels like an opportunity to do that was wasted, leaving us passively listening to a random assortment of stuff instead of actively energising and inspiring the membership to continue the work of the last few years: developing, diversifying and doing philosophy. Next year’s conference must do better.

Author: DaN McKee (he/him)

If you liked this post and have enjoyed what I do here at Philosophy Unleashed - and have been doing every year since 2019 - and want to buy me a coffee or cool philosophy book as a gift to say thank you, feel free to send a small donation/tip my way here.

My own book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere on paperback and eBook.  You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon.  Paperback or e-book.

My academic paper - ‘An error of punishment defences in the context of schooling’ is out in the Journal of Philosophy of Education here.

My other book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE , from the publisher, and from all good booksellers, either in paperback or as an e-Book. 

I also have a chapter in THIS BOOK on punk and anarchism.

Listen to me on The Independent Teacher podcast here. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. Listen to me on the Philosophy Gets Schooled podcast here.  Listen to me talk anarchism and wrestling here or anarchism and education here.  For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com