The Conversation Series
Critical Thinking and Socratic Questioning
Hosted by Pascale Mompoint-Gaillard
Miloš started implementing elements of SQ in his teaching very progressively. He notices that since he’s started SQ sessions, he hears students adopting this kind of thinking by themselves and with others. Another practice he has initiated is philosophical counseling, which he offers to students from his class and to colleagues from the schools he is active in. With philosophical counseling he can help students who are experiencing difficulties writing essays or sometimes help them solve personal issues and dilemmas.
Why is Socratic Questioning and Critical Thinking (CT) a path for democracy? First, they create together the affordance for tackling controversial issues (you know… those hot issues that divide us, that make democratic processes stick and get stuck) and second, through engaging in SQ one learns how to improve dialogues, and even to empathically disagree (a phrase from Marta Vines Jimeno) with those we view as ‘the other’.
What’s the method? We have included a session plan at the end of this blog. For now, just a few major points.
“Would you still be you if you changed gender?”
Imagine if we became more competent in Socratic thinking, would this be liberating? Could it allow us to dialogue with people who no longer are able to have a conversation across the divide? Can we be democratic without facing ourselves?
It’s easy to say ‘I’m tolerant’, ‘I’m democratic’ but how can we know if we don’t know ourselves, our arguments, our feelings, our thoughts? In this podcast, Miloš explains the premises of the method by using the method… with lots of examples.
We give you our usual advice:
The session plan: Obstacles to Critical Thinking
2. Materials from the Institute of Philosophical Practice:
3. Study Plato to prepare yourself for this exercise: follow argumentation in dialogues in “Meno”, “The Republic”, “Protagoras”, “Trial of Socrates”, “Symposium”.
4. Speech Acts and conversation: various kinds of syntactic structures and what they mean we see that people often don’t seem to say what they mean. They use languages differently from its apparent meaning by haroldfs@ccat.sas.upenn.edu.
In this article we answer some questions regarding the decision to transform Learn to Change from an association to a collective.
In this article, we talk about what we mean by Collective – the new form chosen by L2C – and how you can join it.
Learn to Change’s members held a General Assembly in fall 2022, in which the decision was taken to transform the association into a less formal, and more agile entity. Therefore, we will change status, going from an ‘organization’ to a less formal entity that we name “The collective”
If you feel you are committed to the vision and mission of the association, then your place is here.
We are sure that becoming a member will benefit you in many ways. Read the product description for more details or click sign up now.
