Teach them how to write like … a philosopher

by Joe Kinnaird

This is the second in Joe’s series of lesson design blogs on ‘Teach them how to write like …’, taking the three disciplines of Theology, Philosophy, and Social Sciences in turn.

You can see examples of this lesson in action in this tweet from Joe

Introduction

As Gillian Georgiou and Kathryn Wright argue in Reforming RE, a multi-discplinary approach to RE is essential for our subject.[1] The disciplines provide different ways for pupils to explore the ways in which religion has been thought about, discussed and questioned.  The discipline of Philosophy enables students to consider the impact of knowledge on the ways in which people understand the world and their place within it. Philosophy can be translated as ‘love of wisdom’. In order to fulfil the purpose of R&W, the discipline of philosophy provides students with an understanding that not everyone sees the world in the same way. Philosophy enables students to appreciate different ways of reasoning about the world and the existence of a range of religions.  The discipline helps to drive student curiosity about knowledge.  Students can look to explore what we know, how we acquire knowledge, and how we formulate arguments about our understanding of the world.

As with the discipline of theology, it is vital to consider how the disciplinary lens of philosophy is reflected in student writing and how students can produce knowledge-rich writing which is grounded in philosophical thought.

My initial suggestions on what writing like a philosopher entails are:

• Examining the different ways in which people have tried to gain knowledge of reality
• Studying and evaluating the chains of reasoning within an argument or belief
• Exploring how humans have determined what is right and wrong

Here are strategies exploring how we can teach students to write like a philosopher.

Use of philosophical scholarship

You can see this resource in action in this tweet.

If we want students to write like philosophers, it’s important that they read philosophy.  Using scholarship in the classroom is a really powerful way of increasing challenge, rigour and sparking student curiosity.  Here is an example from a Year 9 SOW on the Philosophy of Religion. In this lesson, students are exploring Freud’s critique of religion. In the past, I may have given students the quote and got them to summarise it in their own words.  However, given the complexity of the text and the ideas it contains, I have put scaffolds in place to ensure that students can really get to grips with the philosophical thought:

• A short contextual summary of who Freud was and why he was important
• Highlighted passages of the quote I want students to focus on
• Questions based on what I have highlighted to focus student thinking
• Key words and definitions found in the text

After reading through the text and discussing the key ideas, students would answer the set questions.

To follow up this task, I provide students with some because-but-so sentences to complete. As outlined in my previous post, because-but-so sentences really help to focus student writing.  By using the sentence stem of ‘Freud was critical of religion’, I am making sure students are focused on this key idea.  In this example, the because-but-so sentences serve the following purpose:

Because – allows students to explain why Freud was critical of religion. An understanding of his understanding of the world is needed.

But – allows students to explain a contrasting perspective or issue with Freud’s view. An understanding of how others may critique Freud is needed.

So – allows students to explain a consequence of Freud’s view with relation to ethical conduct. An understanding of how Freud’s view would influence the behaviour of others is needed.

Unpacking the deeper meanings of philosophical scholarship

We may want to give students a paragraph where they evaluate a philosophical argument or position.  However, setting up a question such ‘Is Freud’s critique of religion correct?’, may appear daunting without unpacking the deeper meaning of his argument.

To do this, here is a strategy takenfrom Making Every RE Lesson Count by Dawn Cox and Louise Hutton.[2] Here, we provide students with prompt questions to encourage more deeper thinking to uncover the layers of meaning. We can consider layers of meaning in relation to:

• Author – who is the author?
• Context – when was it written?
• Expertise – why was it written?
• Bias – do they have a vested interest?
• Audience – who was it written for?
• Interpretation – how might individuals with different worldviews interpret this?
• Influence – how might individuals with different worldviews be influenced by this?
• Language – what language have they used?

When looking to evaluate a philosophical argument, students now have a broad scope of criteria of which to evaluate it.  Their writing could touch open how all of these layers of meaning affect the success of the argument.

Sentence expansion

Here is another strategy taken from The Writing Revolution by Judith Hochman and Natalie Wexler. This strategy can enable students to produce more expansive, knowledge-rich sentences rooted in philosophy.  You start by giving students a complete, but brief, sentence. This is called a kernel sentence. 

After giving students the sentence, you give them a list of question words to respond to: who, what, when, where, why, how. Students provide answers in the form of notes and then converts those notes into a complete sentence. You don’t need to use all the words with each kernel sentence. The question words when, where and why are best starting points.  For philosophical writing, we may look to include how so that students can explore the chains of reasoning with a philosophical position.

After students have answers to the question words, the teacher can demonstrate how to expand the sentence. When expanding a sentence, it should always begin with the answer to when. This is a feature common in writing, but not in speech.

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[1] Gillian Georgiou and Kathryn Wright, 2020, ‘Disciplinarity, religion and worldviews: making the case for theology, philosophy and human/social sciences’, in Mark Chater (ed) Reforming RE, Woodbridge: John Catt, pp 149 – 164.

[2] Louise Hutton and Dawn Cox, 2021, Marking Every RE Lesson Count, Carmarthen: Crown House Publishing.