Unveiling and packaging: A model for presenting philosophy in schools

As a philosopher and a reflective practitioner of philosophy in schools, I explore two aspects of presentation which I call unveiling and packaging. Both aspects bear on the work of designing and facilitating philosophy workshops for school students. I describe unveiling philosophy as a practice of collaborative inquiry and dialogic argument: social processes that foster thinking skills and dispositions, an evaluativist epistemology, and a range of constructive norms. I then discuss packaging philosophical materials in ways that create effective stimuli for thinking. I encourage educators engaged in designing or curating stimuli to draw on the rich diversity of available media, to focus on the quality of both the philosophical content and its creative expression, and to ensure that the content connects with students’ life experiences. I propose five criteria for judging the likely effectiveness of a philosophical stimulus: that it activate emotion, induce perplexity, challenge intuitions, ignite controversy and elicit reasoned argument. I offer three detailed examples of high school philosophy workshops to illustrate the practical application of these criteria, and to illuminate fruitful possibilities for arranging stimuli, including using a Provocation-Complication sequence or arranging stimuli as elements in a more complex puzzle.

Reflexivität

ZusammenfassungZeitgenössische Lehrerbildungsansätze eint das Ziel, die Reflexivität angehender Lehrpersonen zu steigern. Häufig beruft man sich dabei auf Schöns reflective practitioner-Konzept. Im ersten Teil des Beitrags wird zunächst gezeigt, dass diese Berufung zu Unrecht erfolgt; Schön hat eine Theorie des Lernens an der Erfahrung vorgelegt, dessen Schwächen in Reflexionsansätzen gerade überwunden werden sollen. Sodann werden diese Schwächen benannt und das Reflexionskonzept als Antwort darauf rekonstruiert. Schließlich wird die Vielfalt unterschiedlicher Ausformungen reflexiver Lehrerbildung exemplarisch illustriert. Im zweiten Teil wird auf bislang kaum diskutierte Gefahren und Probleme hypertropher Reflexionsanforderungen hingewiesen. Der Beitrag schließt im dritten Teil mit einer kritischen Anfrage an das Programm einer reflexiven Lehrerbildung.

In-Service LTE Program for Chinese Private Institute English Teachers

This paper describes a half-year in-service Language Teacher Education (LTE) program, targeting the trainee teachers who work in Chinese private English institutes. This is to better prepare them at the outset of their career. Primarily intending to build the trainee teachers’ professionalism and raise their awareness, an overall illustration of adopted training courses and choice of activities are introduced in this paper. Focusing on integrating instructional knowledge from ESL and English language teaching, the LTE program schedule will allow majority of readers to implement during their daily teaching and research activities. Principles underpinning this program design are illustrated one by one. A course like this may not foster all teachers to become professionals at once, but to be a reflective practitioner can be a reachable goal, as accumulation of professional expertise is based on teachers’ capability of understanding how to reflect on teaching.

Qualitative content analysis – piano accompanists’ and collaborative pianists’ competencies / Kvalitativna analiza vsebine – kompetence umetniških sodelavcev/korepetitorjev

The aim of this research was to describe, explain and categorise the key competencies of collaborative pianists in music schools and music/arts academies in the Republic of Croatia. A qualitative research design was applied, based on qualitative content analysis of nine interviews with collaborative pianists and an online questionnaire filled out by nine fifth-year students from the Music Academy in Zagreb. Findings have been grouped into five competence categories according to the European Polifonia framework: performance and artistic, planning and organisational, communication and pedagogical, facilitation and reflective practitioner.

The Meaning of Silence for Mastering the Practitioner’s Reflective Skills

The aim of the article is to show the meaning of practicing silence, enhancing the quality of the reflective skills of the reflective practitioner. These skills – being, speaking, disclosing, testing, and probing – reveal one’s reflective competences, which require time and silence to be developed. The reflective practitioner is a person who can creatively interact with their true-self, others, the world, and God. Therefore, he or she finds time to distance themselves from many stimuli that bombard the mind and the outer environment and treats silence and quietness more as a challenge, rather than a threat to their own existence. Silence, perceived as a space for finding a new quality of one’s identity, is presented in the paper in different perspectives. The meaning of listening silence is especially worth noticing in the domain of education, which is preoccupied with large streams of information coming from varied sources that demand to be acquired. That is why this goal seems important for those who must cope with matters connected with teaching, learning, upbringing, and development. I attempt to deal with this briefly in a theoretical, practically-oriented analysis by suggesting some solutions covered in the material below.