We are announcing the American Philosophy Olympiad's HS Philosophy Essay. Brochures are going out in paper and electronic formats. This short blog post is the first electronic vehicle for it in a PDF format. All the information you will need to get started is here. This is the qualifier for the International Philosophy Olympiad 2014 in Lithuania. Good luck! Click here.
Wednesday, December 11, 2013
Monday, February 18, 2013
D-E School Qualifies for National HS Ethics Bowl 2012-13!
Some very exciting news for Dwight-Englewood School (www.d-e.org): We have qualified for the National High School Ethics Bowl 2012-13. We'll compete at UNC at Chapel Hill. Follow the link here to read all about it. I'll blog about this in more depth later. http://nhseb.unc.edu/
Congratulations to Jamie, Josh, Matt and Phoebe.
Congratulations to Jamie, Josh, Matt and Phoebe.
Will You or Your Students Qualify for IPO 2013?
In 2011, the International Philosophy Olympiad was celebrated in
Vienna, Austria. It was the first time the USA participated in almost a decade.
The USA sent two students. Last year, IPO was celebrated in Oslo, Norway. This
year it’s in Odense, Denmark in May. Two American students may qualify. Two is
the maximum number of students any country, except for the host country, may
send to participate.
In order to participate, an American high school student must
study philosophy and be able to write well in French, German, or Spanish. English
is the only other official language of the IPO, but a competitor may not write
in his or her national language. There is no official language of the USA, but
English is the de facto language of this country. In 2011, the two American
competitors wrote in Spanish.
The infrastructure of the
American Philosophy Olympiad is not yet totally organized as a national
competition the way we want it to be, but we are participating and evolving. If
you would like to participate in APO 2013 for a chance to qualify for IPO 2013,
follow the information in the flyer below. Or, if you are a pre-college
philosophy teacher, you may follow the same information to share it with your
students. Good luck.
Sunday, December 16, 2012
HS Ethics Bowl at Stevens Institute of Technology
 |
| L to
R: Josh Davis, Phoebe Mattana, Joe Murphy, Jamie Spingeld, Matt Wang at Stevens Institute of Technology |
The Stevens Institute Ethics Bowl on Saturday 12/15/12 was a
great experience for my students. It was Dwight-Englewood School’s first. Now
we have one under our belts and will proceed to deepen our knowledge and
practice.
I had been skeptical of Ethics Bowl events,
competitions. My a priori opinion was that they were competitive events similar
to high school competitive debates in which an affirmative or a negative side
is defended regardless of one’s own real considered view. One in which a
position is defended because it is the one assigned to the speaker or her team.
I imagined them to be more argumentative
for the sake of it and positional rather than open, sincerely considered, and reasoned philosophically. I was wrong. Ethics Bowls are competitions, yes,
but they are genuine, well reasoned and philosophical. They
are competitions in which both competitive sides may actually agree, bow to the
other’s greater reasoning or, perhaps, adopt the opponent’s argument and try to
further it. Their energy and excitement, even maybe their passion is
competitive, but their spirit, their deeper motivation and reasoning is philosophical
to the best of their pre-collegiate, adolescent, but intelligent ability.
I am grateful to Roberta Israeloff of the Squire
Family Foundation for being persistent with me. She listened to my a priori
skepticism about Ethics Bowl competitions and understood and paid attention to some of my concerns.
But she was gently tenacious. After about a year of discussions, Roberta
invited me to judge an Ethics Bowl event at Malloy College on Long Island in
New York. I did that last year. I came away not only with an understanding of Ethics Bowls, but with enthusiasm for their goals and the process. Also, I can
now imagine what the High School Ethics Bowl may become and how it may evolve. I appreciate it now and am
committed to its further development.
The week after I returned from Malloy College I spoke to one
of my students. Josh Davis had taken my Ethics course that year as a sophomore
– it’s a required course for all sophomores at Dwight-Englewood. In a Friday
afternoon conversation I briefly explained to Josh what an Ethics Bowl is, as I
had come to understand it. I gave him an essay about it and a few websites
addresses with videos for him to watch over the weekend. I told him to take a
look at the essay or one of the videos. If he found himself becoming intrigued,
pursue it, I encouraged him. Then talk to me on Monday if you're interested. When Josh came in to see me on Monday, he asked me
how we could form a Ethics Bowl team at our school. He was intrigued and I
smiled.
We created an Ethics Bowl Club through the normal
channels at school. Josh recruited more than 20 club members. About half of
them have become serious members. Since September we've been meeting once or
twice a week. The most serious members read two books I recommended (a brief
history of philosophy and an introduction to ethics beyond the book we used in
our sophomore course). They also watched college and high school videos about
Ethics Bowls and some actual events. We talked a lot and eventually started to
prepare some cases for the Ethics Bowl at Stevens.
On Saturday, 15 December, there were 18 teams that
came together at Stevens to ‘compete’. Each ‘debate’ or formalized dialogue could
end in a win, tie, or lose. Beyond that, teams were also assigned points for various
aspect of their discussion style and philosophical argumentation. I will quote
from the Stevens Institute of Technology HS Ethics Bowl description of How to Debate. This is found on the SIT website. Dr. Michael Steinmann is the director
of the Ethics Bowl at Stevens.
“Discussions are not
structured as pro/con debates. Therefore, teams do not have to defend one
specific position, and they also do not have to disagree. Rather, they have to
compete in their analysis of the problem and in bringing about the best answer
or solution. A team's performance will be judged according to the following
criteria:
·
Clarity of the
presentation
·
Awareness of the
complexity of ethical problems involved in each case
·
Feasibility of
practical solutions
·
Creativity in
imagining the different stakeholder concerns related to a case, and in
presenting a solution that is both sensitive to these concerns and opens a new
way of thinking or acting
·
Capacity to engage in
a fruitful and serious discussion with the other team and the judges.”
Of the 18 teams who met at Stevens on this Saturday
in 2012, only four had two wins each. D-E was one of them. The 18 teams were
divided into two groups, one of eight and the other of ten teams. Group 1 had two
teams with two wins each: Middlesex 1 with 92 points and Piscataway 1 with 91
points. Group 2 had two teams with two wins each: Middlesex 2 with 96 points
and Dwight-Englewood with 93 points. So, depending on how one looks at this,
D-E placed either second – with number of wins and points – or third – because the
top team from each group debated in the final. But there were also two schools
with one win and one tie each with high point scores, too: Ridge 1 and Ridge 2
with 101 and 97 points respectively. Middlesex 1 and Middlesex 2 did the final
debate. Middlesex 1 will go to the National Competition in North
Carolina at Chapel Hill in the spring of 2013.
But for us at D-E more important than any of the competition was the actual preparation in ethical thinking and discussion at school and also the consideration we gave to the cases. Finally, the actual formal discussion/dialogue/debate between the two teams at the event deepened our team's thoughts about the ethical problems presented in each of the cases and about the language and concepts we used to address the problems. After the event was over we started to do some self-reflection that took into consideration our own thoughts, feelings, values, language style and conceptual framing of the problems and the event. We'll continue this and deepen it in our Ethics Bowl Club meeting on Monday.
Thursday, November 15, 2012
Appointment to APA Committee
I have just been appointed to an APA committee that is relevant to my daily work and to this blog:
"Dear Joseph Murphy:
I am writing to give you formal notice that the American Philosophical Association’s board of officers has appointed you to a term as member of the APA’s Committee on Pre-College Instruction in Philosophy, starting on July 1, 2013 and ending June 30, 2016. Congratulations on this honor!
Please note that only members in good standing of the APA are eligible to serve on APA committees, and thus all members of APA committees are expected to pay membership dues in full and on time for each year of their committee service. If you have any questions about this policy or anything else related to your committee appointment, please don’t hesitate to contact me.
You have the sincere thanks of the board of officers for your willingness to serve the APA in this way. I look forward to working with you in your capacity on the committee.
All the best,
Amy
Amy
Tuesday, July 10, 2012
IPO Oslo 2012 on Euronews TV
I am in Salamanca, Spain this month leading a group of students at
the University of Salamanca. So I haven’t had much time to write for this blog,
but recently I’ve received notice about a Euronews TV program in which the IPO
Oslo 2012 event was highlighted. It is a good, general overview of the Olympiad
in Oslo this year with some nice video clips. I hope you enjoy it. http://t.co/ieb0Cs3G
If you want to see what I’m doing in Salamanca (USAL), you can go
to my Twitter account @Salamazing or to my facebook page. On fb look for
JoseLuisMurphy.
Wednesday, June 6, 2012
High School Philosophy in the USA?
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| Some of the IPO 2012 Int'l. students at Frogner Park, Oslo. |
I am the American Delegation Leader to the IPO and, therefore, the source of the data from the USA. Because of the limitations on my volunteer organization (essentially me at the moment) and time, I supply what information I have at almost a moment’s notice off the top of my head to the IPO. I have just done this for a page that we are creating on the organization of teaching philosophy in high schools around the world. But this blog post, more than a report, is a request for help from my countrymen who are working to advance the teaching of philosophy in schools before university.
One of
my colleagues at the IPO in Oslo last month asked me the following question. “Why is it that in a country (the USA) that
has such an important and creative philosophy profession, there is so little
philosophy taught in the high schools?” It is an embarrassing question. It
has to do with our culture, our educational system, and, actually, with some assumptions
made by some of our very own professional philosophers! But, fortunately, some
of us are working very hard and, I’d even say, dedicating our lives to changing
this. I remember a conversation I had with Matthew Lipman in the mid 1970’s at
Montclair State College. He was mentoring me as I was teaching a course in
Philosophy for Children to fifth graders. They were the early days of the
Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children. He told me that
children already have genuine philosophical questions. We teachers have to help
children pursue their questions by giving them the language and method to
discuss them well. And, by listening carefully and following their train of
thought while gently guiding them in a true line of inquiry. This is also real
Socratic dialogue. It seems to me to be irresponsible of the adult community in
our society not to help our young develop the true philosophical thought that
they are already struggling to pursue.
But, as
I have said, this post is a request for help. Please read what I have supplied
(below) to the IPO Webmaster and send me information that you think should be
included. You can do that by commenting at the end of this post or by emailing
me at JoseLuisMurphy@gmail.com.
Thank you, colleagues!
The actual request for information from the IPO came in the
following form of topics on which to respond.
“A. TEACHING OF PHILOSOPHY IN HIGH SCHOOLS: (yes/no)
B. COMPULSORY/OPTIONAL:
C. NUMBER OF LESSONS PR. WEEK + PR. YEAR:
D. ORAL/WRITTEN EXAMS:
E. BASIC OUTLINE OF CURRICULUM:”
The
following is a version of the information from the USA that is being added to
an IPO Wikipedia page. This is how I responded to the IPO request today.
Organization
of Teaching Philosophy in High Schools
Overview
from Participating Countries at IPO Oslo 2012
TEACHING
PHILOSOPHY IN AMERICAN (USA) HIGH SCHOOLS
There are no national or even state
required philosophy courses taught in high schools in the USA. There are some philosophy
and ethics courses taught in some high schools across the country, but they are
created and taught by particular schools.
Two
examples of schools in which philosophy and ethics courses are taught are the
following.
Dwight-Englewood
School in New Jersey
Ethical
Culture Fieldston School in New York
There
are, however, groups or associations that have as their mission to create and /
or promote philosophy and / or ethics courses or clubs for high schools. Here
is a very brief list of some of them.
The
American Philosophical Association’s Committee on Pre-College Instruction in
Philosophy http://www.apaonline.org
and PLATO-Pre-college Philosophy, a facebook
page: https://www.facebook.com/groups/244397402239159/
The
Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children at Montclair State
University in New Jersey
The
Squire Family Foundation, Advancing Philosophy Education
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