Association of Philosophy Teachers Annual Conference 2024: REPORT

Yesterday (June 14th) was a great day for teachers of Philosophy in secondary schools. Not only did SOAS release their Decolonising the Philosophy Curriculum Toolkit, but it was the 2nd annual conference of the Association of Philosophy Teachers (APT). Held at Clifton College in Bristol, although I was part of the organising committee for the event you never know how these things will go until the actual day arrives. We’d put together a programme we hoped would be useful and engaging, we’d booked some great speakers, and we’d sent out the invites. But that doesn’t guarantee people will actually come. With school CPD budgets increasingly being tightened and a short turnaround between our invitation and the date of the event, I was worried many teachers might not make it. I’d already heard a few colleagues from local places near where I teach tell me they wouldn’t be there. What if no-one came?

Luckily, I could see, hear and smell that my worst fears weren’t going to be realised the minute I turned the corner into the Prep School Hall where delegates were to register, and was greeted by the aroma of coffee, noise of networking chatter and sight of philosophers from all around the country and, in some case, the world. Amazing. Last year wasn’t just a fluke - we were really building something here. An organisation. A community. A movement.

I got my name-badge and lanyard, filled a cup with much-needed coffee after the early drive from the Midlands to Bristol, and then went to mingle as best as my socially awkward self is able to. Catching up with fellow organisers Michael, Dan and Robert first, we were all happy to see everyone arriving, and then it was time to put names to some of the faces of people I follow on Twitter, or have spoken to via email or mass Zoom meetings but never in real life. Say hello to old faces I’d remembered from last year’s conference, or previous interactions. Catch up with old friends. Philosophy departments can be lonely things - often only one person or small two person teams - so, for many, an event like this is the first time they really get to share thoughts about what we’re doing in our subject areas with somebody else who understands. Or somebody who asks why and suggests another way. A lot of insular bubbles being burst and echo chambers being cracked wide open alongside the solidarity and support. A buzzing vibe, excited for the day ahead.

Our first speaker - the keynote - was the always excellent Julian Baggini. The conference’s theme was Developing, Diversifying and Doing Philosophy, with those three strands informing different parallels sessions throughout the day. Personally, I was most interested in the Diversifying thread, building on my own conference talk last year, and was slightly sceptical of Julian, a white male who, in his most recent book, How to Think Like a Philosopher, had said “Most of my examples will come from the tradition of Western philosophy in which I was educated, but the principles are universal, as the more occasional references to the rest of the world’s philosophies remind us. Historically, women have not been given as much voice as men in philosophy, so although I will cite many brilliant female philosophers, inevitably the cast list is skewed towards the patriarchy.”, being the most appropriate person to speak to us all about ‘World Philosophy’ and broadening the curriculum. I was mindful of my own position last year as another white male lecturing about the need to diversify our subject and the words of Meena Dhanda, who had chastised me in the Q&A afterwards for still focusing my efforts to diversify on a growing alternative ‘canon’ of fairly high profile names of previously unrepresented female and ethnically diverse thinkers, while ignoring the work going on every day in universities around the world by amazing women and philosophers of colour. But I was pleasantly surprised by Julian’s talk, and his name recognition certainly meant people’s ears were open to his discussion of Thomas P Kasulis’s work on comparing different global epistemic frameworks of intimacy and integrity (although, disappointingly, Kasulis is, of course, another white male, so we were using his lens to interpret global thinkers instead of letting those thinkers speak for themselves). The message was, in the end, perhaps more important than the messenger: to remember that we, the current generation of philosophy teachers, will all have blindspots to global philosophies which we need to acknowledge. We all need to open our minds to different ways of doing philosophy and thinking about ideas that come from different global traditions than the Western European one. That doing this does not dismiss or diminish the Western European philosophic tradition, but enriches it. “It is through contrast that we understand things best”, Baggini said, before warning us against the ‘three deadly sins’ of comparative philosophy: 1) to domesticate other traditions we learn about (i.e. to say something like “Indian philosopher X is the Indian version of Western European philosopher Y”); 2) to exoticise them (i.e. to say they are so completely different to what we do here than no comparison is possible); or 3) to essentialise them (i.e. to say all thinkers from Africa are like this or all Asian philosophy says…) He then used the Kasulis example to show how opening our minds to different global approaches can enrich our understanding of the world. Making the non-essentialist caveat that this is not true of all Asian thought, Kasulis noted, broadly speaking, a distinction between the Asian continent’s more intimate approach to philosophy (looking at relations between things) and the European West’s approach of integrity (looking at things as atomised individual concepts which must make sense). What I really liked about this was acknowledging the intimacy approach included the idea that “lack of ability to explain” something “does not expose lack of understanding” despite the integrity approach assuming if you can’t explain it you can’t understand it. This idea resonated all day, and especially later, during the plenary talk on ‘disassociated disagreement’ and ‘recalcitrant estrangement’ in philosophy from Anne-Marie McCallion and Leonie Smith.

Baggini illustrated the idea with further examples from aesthetics, ethics and politics. Again, a nice illustration of the intimacy model of knowing was the objectivity of figure skating scores compared to the integrity-approach objectivity of the 100m sprint. The entanglement of personal judgement and seemingly subjective aesthetic interpretation with the idea that such a judgement remains objective felt like such an important barrier to break down in our collective understanding of what philosophy must be. As would come out in later talks throughout the day (and in the SOAS toolkit) - a myopic definition of what philosophy is, and must be, is putting up unnecessary obstacles for student inclusion, student understanding, and student success. From course-content to methods of assessment, this needs to change. Baggini’s message that we ought to recognise those barriers in our own understanding if we don’t compare our Western European tradition in which the bulk of the room had been educated to other ways of knowing from around the world felt like the intellectual foundation from which everything else I heard during the conference took root.

After the keynote speech, three parallel sessions ran on each of the strands. For those developing philosophy, Hugo Whateley spoke about ‘assessment by coding’ in the subject. For those doing philosophy, Gerald Jones spoke about making philosophy accessible through ‘philosophical activities’. For those, like myself, following the diversifying thread, we went to watch Heather Widdows from the University of Warwick ask ‘why philosophy matters’ with the case of ‘lookism’.

I can only speak about the session I was in, but Widdows is a fantastic speaker. I had seen her speak about lookism before, earlier this year, on a trip to her university with my A-level students, so was slightly worried what I’d hear would just be a repeat, but Widdows framed the discussion around the threat Philosophy currently faces as a discipline around the country. Following closures at Kent and Wolverhampton, there are only twenty-eight philosophy departments now left at UK universities. Those that still exist are facing constant scrutiny to justify their existence, as are philosophy courses at A-level, either from institutions wanting to know why they should fund them, or parents and students asking why the subject ought to be taken. Widdows noted that traditional arguments in defence of philosophy to these interrogators were failing. The internet has scuppered the claim that transferrable research skills are taught on a university philosophy course now everyone is a ‘researcher’ on their phone, and to say that we somehow teach critical thinking as an exclusive property of philosophy ignores the critical thinking going on in every other subject. While it remains true that philosophers tend to do stuff with knowledge that other people can’t, by focusing on questions of what knowledge is and practicing specifically epistemic skills the way a musician might regularly practice their playing to become great, AI is emerging as a threat to even that, as it gradually learns how to manipulate knowledge in more ‘philosophical’ ways. As Widdows put it about the weak-sounding defences of the discipline we usually put forth: “often philosophers speak to philosophers and they don’t realise how badly these arguments sound outside of philosophy”. So how is philosophy to be defended to those who seek to shut it down or can’t see its value?

Here she took us into her own current work on ‘lookism’ - the unjust discrimination of someone because of how they look. Widdows presented a synthesis of empirical data and theoretical analysis and showed how, like sexual harassment before it, this is a discrimination which has existed and continues to exist but, until the work of Andrew Mason, wasn’t given a name or properly conceptualised. Therefore it wasn’t being addressed. A wrong was happening, but couldn’t be defined. Lookism is the name for the 20% ‘beauty premium’ people gain, or ‘ugly penalty’ they lose, in wages based on things like weight, height, and pleasing characteristics of face and appearance. It explains why there can be such trauma in people being dismissed or treated differently because of how they look in a way we haven’t really, until now, properly named and understood.

Which brought Widdows back to her argument about the importance of philosophy. With lookism, philosophy has conceptualised an existing phenomenon by naming it, recognising it, defining it, and drawing relevant analogies and comparisons with other concepts so that we can make sense of it. By identifying such an injustice, and the normative case that we must respond to it, philosophy manages to effect change in people’s real world attitudes which, in turn, can transform the real world itself. Philosophy, for Widdows, allows us to critique the world we have against the world we’d like to have. Philosophy matters because it creates worlds, calls out injustice, and makes visible the invisible.

It was a very powerful and inspiring argument. One which resonated with me especially as an anarchist thinker always inspired by the anarchist slogan that ‘another world is possible’. My book, Authentic Democracy: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism starts with a quote from Thomas Paine: “we have it in our power to begin the world over again” and, for me, that is such a fundamental, yet oft-forgotten, principle of existence. Whether it is anarcho-revolutions we are imagining, or the possibility that the table in front of us might actually be different in reality than it is in its appearance, philosophy is unique in the focus of its critical questioning on problematising received wisdom and asking if things could be otherwise. Linking back to Julian Baggini’s talk beforehand we see, even in philosophy itself, how philosophy can shine new light on possibilities of alternative approaches to what it means to ‘do philosophy’.

After a brief refuelling with coffee and biscuits, the second parallel sessions began. I went to see Elizabeth Mackintosh in the diversifying strand while others went to see Susan Andrews of Philosophy Ireland talk about ‘devising a philosophy course for Years 8 - 11’ in the developing strand. Unfortunately, due to last minute childcare issues, our third session, on doing, from James Layman and Tina Williams - a ‘thinking science workshop’ - had to be cancelled, but delegates seemed happy enough to join the remaining two talks.

Mackintosh talked about ‘thinking with exclusions in mind’. In other words the idea - as Heather Widdows had made so stark - of using philosophy to make the invisible visible and - as Julian Baggini had highlighted - being aware of our intellectual blindspots as educators of philosophy. Who are we excluding when we think about anything. From broad topics like moral communities to the more immediate environment of our classroom - whose voices are we not hearing when we philosophise? Mackintosh drew on her own quartet of excluded heroes, Mary Midgley, Saba Mahmood, bell hooks, and Val Plumwood (a nod to the Oxford quartet of women, Mary Midgley, Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe and Iris Murdoch, long marginalised from the recent history of philosophy, like so many women before them), to take Midgley’s idea of philosophy as plumbing and dig deep into the underlying pipework hidden beneath many of philosophy’s everyday assumptions, exposing several blockages in need of repair. Again, in harmony with the clash between intimacy and integrity narratives of epistemology illustrated by Julian Baggini earlier, Mackintosh looked at how atomistic and exclusionary conceptual frameworks of ‘who counts’ ignored our inherent interconnectedness, and how drawing lines of exclusion need to be scrutinised so we can ask the question of what drawing such lines has caused us to lose from the discourse.

As well as her own fab four, Mackintosh drew on the work of Sina Kramer, Helen de Cruz, Saba Fatima and Eva Feder-Kitty to draw rich illustrations of excluded ideas, methodologies and ways of knowing and exposed the many dangers of an exclusionary approach to philosophy and the ‘ethically treacherous’ nature of any attempted delineation of who is going to count as worthy of inclusion. Whether it is non-human animals being excluded from our considerations, or the very students in front of us in the classroom, Mackintosh first demonstrated the existence and perpetuations of such exclusions in our discipline before bringing to light practical approaches to doing philosophy differently in schools which she believes might move us towards more inclusion. Demonstrating Widdows earlier point, by naming, recognising and defining exclusion, and drawing relevant analogies and comparisons, we are able to now see a problem which might have been previously invisible and act to transform the world.

Solutions were especially pressing given most of our classrooms being corseted by the demands of limited and problematic exam specifications and lack of time, but Mackintosh (and the audience) provided some excellent ideas, from decolonised verbal assessment and revision techniques to teaching students a ‘philosopher not on the spec of the month’ (or the alternative ‘philosopher not on the spec who should be’ at the end of each topic). Shifting the focus back to the questioning, and not merely regurgitation of arguments, was a recurring theme: giving students space for their own voice as part of a classroom community and not as merely conduits for repeating specified formal arguments.

The closing words of Mary Midgley were a great way to go off to lunch: ‘listen to everyone’. They served me well over my vegan puff pastry and chips when a sceptic about decolonisation lamented a colleague’s experiences in their History department tokenistically adding an African king to a lower school scheme of work instead of the Tudors and then feeling the new example lacked historical depth and importance. I pointed out that just adding black or brown people to a scheme of work wasn’t decolonisation, and if you don’t change the framework of what counts as ‘good’ history (or philosophy) you will likely end up feeling any newly added example or thinker as somehow ‘less than’ because the criteria of what counts hasn’t changed.

“But what if it just turns out that Plato and Aristotle and all those guys just happened to be the best philosophers? Should it matter that they all happened to come from western Europe?”

“Again,” I replied, “if you keep the same framework in place of what counts as good philosophy which gave us Plato and Aristotle in the first place, you likely will come to that conclusion, but decolonisation is about recognising how the construction of that definition of philosophy might contain many exclusionary biases and assumptions. It means shifting the criteria of ‘good’ philosophy to include those previously excluded. You can’t do decolonisation well if you don’t actually believe in decolonisation or that the subject has been colonised.”

I’d like to think I left him thinking about things and that he might have opened his mind a bit, but we didn’t have time to discuss the issue further as it was time for the AGM of the APT.

Members gathered in Clifton’s beautiful chapel and discussed upcoming elections (within the Association, not the impending UK General Election…although the need for a more receptive ear to the needs of Philosophy at the DfE and Ofqual were certainly mentioned). We also discussed the creation of an Association constitution, advocacy work we intend to do as an Association and upcoming Member consultations on those issues. Then it was off to parallel sessions for the third and final time. Alex Thornton in the developing strand spoke about ‘a non-examined Philosophy curriculum for years 7-11’ and, in the diversifying strand, Anne Bukard from the University of Göttingen spoke about ‘diversifying the philosophical canon in German secondary schools’. This time, however, I decided to attend the doing strand and enjoyed a practical session from Jeremy Hayward on ‘teaching controversial issues’. Mainly, because I was intrigued what his definition of ‘controversial’ would be.

It turned out that it was on that very question the session turned, with Hayward beginning by covering various academic debates around when teachers should use directive (closed) teaching to inform students about non-controversial ‘facts’ and non-directive (open) teaching of non-settled and therefore ‘controversial’ issues that students can explore their own different ideas around. Of course, different conceptions of what counted as controversial or non-controversial determined whether an idea or topic area should be taught directively or non-directively, and Hayward provided different communities of consensus a teacher might wish to appeal to for determining controversy or non-controversy: general social norms, epistemic standards based on reason and defendability, political values held in common in a liberal democracy, or based on the consensus of the relevant epistemic community (i.e., if speaking of something scientific - what do scientists think about it?) Hayward then presented the ‘third way’ of the ‘softly directive’ approach, where a teacher might essentially have an agenda, with students meant to reach a certain firm conclusion by the end of the lesson, but with room for them to come to it to themselves critically. In my own teaching experience it is the difference between teaching a PSHE lesson on domestic abuse (directive teaching: this is wrong - don’t do it) vs a PSHE lesson on the legalisation of drugs (softly directive: there are some good arguments in support of legalisation…but the law still currently says don’t do drugs kids, so don’t do them). An approach “explicit in endorsement, but open to discussion”.

However Hayward then positioned the argument in the classroom, and noted that the ‘controversy’ in schools is often not the issue, but the ‘asserter’ of the controversy: the teacher. That teachers have special constraints on them because of their social role as a mouthpiece communicating the views of certain communities - academic, political, and the school.

It was at this point that the lessons from all the day’s other sessions shone a light on some thinking without exclusions in mind, making visible an invisible problem. I disagreed with the idea of the teacher as spokesperson for some official body of knowledge, at least in philosophy, because of the inherent contestability of supposedly settled bodies of knowledge, even within academic disciplines. We had spent the whole day so far as philosophers discussing blindspots philosophy has and alternative conceptions of what philosophy is and ought to be. To therefore assume a teacher ought to represent as spokesperson the ‘Academic Consensus Norm’ of what academic philosophers think philosophy is and be directive or softly directive to students about what current academic consensus is, at least in philosophy, would be to likely commit ourselves to reproducing structurally problematic ideas and consensuses without appropriately scrutinising the knowledge production which goes into the creation of such consensuses in the first place, excluding many from its dominant conclusions.

Still, a fun practical activity followed, and a room full of philosophy teachers argued with each other over where to place cards with different issues on them on a card-sort board with areas labelled for ‘directive’ teaching, ‘softly directive’ teaching, ‘non-directive’ teaching, and a pile for cards we couldn’t agree on where to place. I was pleased to see a norm consensus emerge, at least in my small group, that rebelling against the enforced ideology of ‘fundamental British values’ when it was philosophically incoherent appeared to be fairly standard. None of us could teach the idea directively that democracy was definitely the best form of political organisation. We all knew the debate there is still ongoing.

Somehow the day had reached its final plenary session and we all gathered once more in the hall from our various venues to hear a closing talk from Anne-Marie McCallion and Leonie Smith on ‘Alienating Attention: Disassociated Disagreement and Recalcitrant Estrangement’. This important talk synthesised all three themes by showing the need to develop philosophical pedagogy through diversification of what we are doing given the evidence of alienation and exclusion of many students of philosophy, marginalised because the sort of philosophy they are seeking to do, or doing, is not the conception of philosophy held by their teachers.

Essentially, McCallion’s work is on the confusion many students feel when they read works of philosophy and disagree with it. Because it is an apparently esteemed work of philosophy, students often mistake their intuitive disagreement with what the work is saying or doing for misunderstanding or confusion. The paper can’t be as stupid or awful as they think it is, because why would it be set for them to read? So they second-guess their critique and assume they have somehow failed to comprehend something great, beyond their understanding. This could either be the particular argument being made or the whole philosophical discourse.

I remember feeling this myself throughout my time as a philosophy student. I always wanted philosophy that was practical, applied to the real world, unleashed…but time and time again I would be told to read papers I found dull and dumb, ignoring the real world but carrying on navel-gazing and pedantic linguistic arguments about the usage of words. I assumed at first that the problem was with me, not them, and that the arguments were too hard for me to understand. Then I realised that it wasn’t that - it was that I thought these were the wrong arguments to be having. That, in my case, political philosophy without empirical engagement with the real world was a waste of my intellectual time. I ploughed on and focused on the philosophy that felt important. Meanwhile I did well in my studies because, recognising disagreement and not disassociating from it, I was able to write my critiques as passable essays.

Not all do. For many, that feeling leads to a feeling that they can’t, or shouldn’t, do philosophy. That it is too difficult. That it is beyond them. They are excluded because their legitimate intellectual disagreement is misread as inability or failure.

Smith’s development of McCallion was to take the principle that disagreement is not the same thing as confusion, and the inner battle students of philosophy are often making with their decision to study a subject they (wrongly) believe they don’t understand, and turning attention onto how the teacher reinforces this misunderstanding to the point where the student is actively told they cannot do philosophy. Not because they actually can’t do philosophy, but because the teacher cannot recognise what they are doing as philosophy because it is a different conception of what philosophy is, or should be, than the sort of philosophy they are looking for.

As an example: a student writes an essay evaluating the strengths and weakness of utilitarianism and deontology as approaches to ethics. They conclude that neither approach really works and no one theory is better than the other. This legitimate approach to philosophy - critical exploration and identification of problems in need of solutions - is dismissed by a philosophy teacher as ‘intellectually lazy’ because it is sitting on the fence and not picking a side. The assumption that philosophy must involve reaching a conclusion is not essential to philosophy at all. It is merely the way philosophy has been historically or traditionally defined and taught, and the teacher is reproducing that and expecting it of their students. This creates a blindspot to what else could be philosophy, or philosophically valid, and the student is told they cannot do something they actually can. It just isn’t being recognised for what it is. This, in turn, alienates the student and estranges them from the subject. Their epistemic status as a knower is not entirely rejected (because the teacher wants them to know, and believes they may ultimately be capable of knowing), and they are not denied epistemic attention (the teacher has read their answer carefully), but their knowledge is missed.

This structural problem, McCallion and Smith concluded, is one we teachers can start to solve by breaking those cycles and reimagining the barriers and structures that enforce the problem: diversify our curricula, not just the content we teach but the range of methods, traditions and norms taught. Not just who the philosophers are that we teach, but what philosophy itself looks like.

It was a great final reinforcement of the message we had been getting all day: that there is more to philosophy than the philosophy we have all been taught ourselves and have likely always been teaching. Other philosophical worlds are not only possible, they are legitimate. There are philosophies, not just one philosophy. Philosophy is important. It changes attitudes and it changes worlds. It finds and fights injustice. It gives names to what ails us and helps us make the tools that will help us to get better. But if we are not careful, philosophy can also exclude, and that exclusion has consequences. Voices not heard. Alternatives never considered. Better worlds we might therefore fail to create. And that exclusion will happen in our classrooms if we continue to merely replicate and reproduce the exclusionary vision of philosophy the vast majority of us were taught as the only way to do philosophy. The exclusionary canon and its exclusionary obsessions and methods. An immediate world we need to change, therefore, is our own. Not to replace one exclusion with another and kick out the old canon to just replace it with a new, diverse, one, but to include all philosophical voices and ways of doing, and undoing, philosophy. Myopic exam boards be damned!

This year’s conference left me feeling motivated and buzzing with new ideas. It was a very worthy follow up to last year’s inaugural effort and a hopeful sign for the future of the Association. As I drove home I pondered my own many blindspots and all the things I might do differently going forward in my teaching, big or small. Things to experiment with. Things to tweak. And things to change entirely. Hopefully by next year’s conference we will be hearing many members report back about how they enacted some of these ideas in their own classrooms, or at least began to sow the seeds for change in their various different contexts. Hopefully we will all be looking at the decolonisation toolkit from SOAS and thinking about our curriculums and reading lists. But even if we don’t quite change the world immediately, the problems have now, at least, been recognised. They’ve been defined, and the relevant analogies and comparisons made. The normative naming of injustice - to our students, to ourselves, and to the discipline - has been done, making visible the previously invisible. An alternative, and previously excluded, vision of an alternative, better, world of philosophy has been shared for us all to think about.

It is up to us now to see where all that thinking might take us…

Author: DaN McKee (he/him)

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

My latest academic paper - ‘An error of punishment defences in the context of schooling’ is finally out in the Journal of Philosophy of Education here. (Though OUP wouldn’t let me make it open access without paying an extortionate amount so you will need either institutional access to the journal or to be a member of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain to read it, unfortunately).

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.  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   

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