Paper for the EERA 1998

ÒLetÕs be reasonableÓ: Fostering the Common Good in primary school classrooms in the UK and Singapore.

Dr. Vivienne Baumfield

University of Newcastle, UK.

Dr. Christine Han,

National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Recent developments in education policy have seen the emergence of two parallel movements in curriculum design; the implementation of thinking skills programmes and the promotion of citizenship education. In both the UK and Singapore the coincidence of these developments has been marked, with the initiatives swiftly following one another. In the UK, The Education White Paper, Excellence in Schools (DfEE, 1997 ), called for an exploration of the contribution the teaching of critical thinking could make to the education of young people. In the same White Paper, an advisory group for Citizenship Education was set up whose final report is due by the end of September. The interim report of the advisory group for Citizenship Education refers to the need for pupils to

...learn to argue cogently and effectively, negotiate successfully and co-operate with others.

without making reference to any mechanisms to achieve this in the classroom. Indeed, the indications are that the final report will set learning objectives for citizenship education and leave decisions about content and process to individual schools to decide. Many will welcome this as it removes the fear that pupils will be indoctrinated into a set of beliefs and attitudes about what it means to be a good citizen. It may well be that when exemplary materials are produced they will employ some strategies borrowed from thinking skills approaches as was the case with the teaching programme produced by the Citizenship Forum for the Home Office (Rowe and Newton, 1994).

In Singapore, Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong has used the phrase ÔThinking Schools, Learning SocietyÕ to encapsulate the aspirations for the role of education in the 21st Century. ÔThinking SchoolsÕ characterizes a situation in schools in which pupils are taught, and encouraged to develop, skills and habits associated with learning, communication and creative thinking. ÔLearning NationÕ refers to the aim to foster the knowledge, skills and attitudes needed for continual learning both in and outside school, and during and after formal education.

SingaporeÕs political leaders have placed emphasis on the achieving of social and political consensus, rather than conflict. The process of obtaining consensus is sometimes described as being akin to going to the people - or the respective ethnic or religious groups - to acquire approval for policies which the political leaders have decided are the best among the possible alternatives. However, if consensus is to be authentic, there has to be genuine dialogue among Singaporeans, with views and fears publicly aired, and a position arrived at that is acceptable to all. It is clear that the political leaders do not consider that genuine dialogue is appropriate for Singapore at the moment. An important factor is the fear of social unrest that could result, particularly on ethnic or religious issues. Indeed, the political leaders frequently remind Singaporeans of the racial riots that occurred in the 1950s and 1960s in which a number were killed, and many injured. An important issue for citizenship education, therefore, is the maturity of Singaporeans as individuals and as citizens with respect to their ability to air and exchange views, even - and particularly - on controversial matters, and come to an agreement on these which is acceptable to many, if not all.

As we have remarked elsewhere ( Baumfield, Han, Mashhadi and Tan, 1998), government policy in the UK and Singapore does not make an explicit connection between the attitudes, skills and disposition necessary for effective citizenship education and thinking skills interventions. It seems a pity not to spend some time at the policy level considering what kind of pedagogy may be best suited to citizenship education and take up the opportunity to examine critically the claims of a thinking skills programme such as Philosophy for Children (P4C) which advocates would claim has much to offer.

Teaching in the Community of Inquiry, which is the central focus of P4C, is based on the educational theories of George Herbert Mead and John Dewey:

...instruction should be an interchange of experience in which the child brings his experience to be interpreted by the parent or teacher. This recognizes that education is interchange of ideas, is conversation - belongs to the universe of discourse ...

The view of instruction as mediation is consistent with the increasing recognition, in current education thinking in general and thinking skills programmes in particular, of the Vygotskian idea that thinking and learning is most effective when this is mediated by others. This mediation can be done by peers or teachers whose ability to reason more systematically and logically may ÔmeetÕ a childÕs rich but disorganized spontaneous context, and so enable him or her to appropriate the superior, adult structures, and internalize these (Kozulin, 1996: xxxv).

For Lipman, the developer of the P4C programme, the teacherÕs main role is that of a cultivator of judgment and the teacher provides a model, not of an expert thinker, but of someone

...who transcends rather than rejects right-wrong answers in the sense of caring more for the process of inquiry itself than the answer that might be right or wrong at a given time. It is the behaviour of such a teacher, it seems to me, that is especially cherished and relished by students, for it has an integrity they are quick to appreciate. (Lipman,1991, p.219)

Where citizenship education is concerned, there is the added need to develop a community of inquiry at a national level. Pring, drawing on the work of Coleridge and Stenhouse, refers to this as a community of educated people. A community of educated people is one in which people who share similar interests and doubts explore together the enquiries in which one tries to resolve those doubts; even though this will often, even inevitably, result in failure, such serious thinking is helped by the scrutiny of others and hence produces conclusions which one may provisionally hold (Pring, 1995). The developing of such a community of educated people is particularly important in societies where there is increasing recognition of plurality. Plurality often means that there are controversial issues on which there is no agreement, and therefore the need to arrive collectively at decisions that will be acceptable to most, if not all.

For advocates of P4C there is a need to develop rationality but also the disposition to be reasonable and the community of inquiry has an impact on the pupilsÕ cognitive powers whilst also affecting their behaviour through promoting beneficial patterns of social interaction:

Reasoning itself involves more than the use of a facility with analytic or logical thinking skills. Reasoning involves both the ability to reason ( in terms of what are often called thinking skills) and the disposition to reason with others ( to be reasonable in oneÕs argumentation). It seems to me that a person lacking in either cannot be deemed rational.

(McCall, 1991)

The Philosophy for Children programme in Singapore

The Philosophy for Children programme was implemented in several Singapore schools under the guidance of Lim Tock Keng, a researcher at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, with the teachers of these schools acting as facilitators. It should be noted that citizenship education was not an objective in the programme as implemented by Lim and her team. The establishing and developing of a community of inquiry was, however, a primary goal, particularly in the initial years of the programme.

The Philosophy for Children programme was introduced in 1992 into two schools (one primary and one secondary) and, a year later, extended to include another two schools. The children involved were in their early teens, ranging from 11 to 14 years of age. The texts read were Pixie for the primary school students, and Harry Stotlemaier for the secondary schools.

The Philosophy for Children programme in the UK

The situation in the UK is more diffuse with several groups developing their own programmes derived from LipmanÕs original idea. The lack of any unified policy on developing thinking skills has led to schools opting for particular programmes under the leadership of enthusiasts on the staff. Consequently, interventions tend not to permeate the school culture and depend for their survival on the dedicated few ( Baumfield and Oberski, 1998). Whilst some schools have used materials from the Lipman P4C programme, one of the most popular programmes is the Philosophy with Picture Books approach developed by Karin Murris (Murris, 1992) and several primary schools have used Top Ten Thinking Tactics which fuses a number of thinking skills strategies including the community of inquiry (Lake and Needham, 1993). The community of inquiry approach is also advocated in Robert FisherÕs writing on developing childrenÕs thinking (Fisher, 1990) and is featured in the Citizenship Foundations You, Me, Us! programme.

3A community of inquiry: findings

UK

In a study of the impact of a community of inquiry approach on the reasoning skills of a group of 11 year old secondary pupils (Williams,1993), it was found that the programme had a significant effect on a number of identified Ôreasoning rolesÕ. The pupils were able to examine assumptions, give examples, consider alternative ideas in more depth and make distinctions between categories (rules and needs for example). The project also looked at the Ôintellectual confidenceÕ of pupils measured by a questionnaire:

The results of the questionnaires confirmed the teachersÕ observations in the philosophy lessons that pupils were becoming more confident about their own performance at school and about their abilities to fulfill more particular requirements of society and academic life, like the ability to ask questions, provide reasons for views, or to persevere with a problem. We also found that the gains on questions like: I am happy to question other peopleÕs views did not suggest that the pupils had become more argumentative or bombastic. On the contrary, they were much more willing to listen to the views of others and to consider them on their perceived merits. (Wilkinson 1993,p 20)

The report identifies the problem of ascertaining the impact of the programme on the reasoning skills of the shy, quiet child who may not participate in discussions. The questionnaires indicated that they did become more intellectually confident but the issue of accommodating the needs of quiet children in this type of intervention is cited in the conclusion as an issue which needs to be addressed. Class size is also identified as an issue; during the study they worked with half classes of only 15 pupils , a situation which would not be sustainable in most school contexts.

Studies of the impact of programmes based on Philosophy for Children in primary schools suggest that a significant change in the pattern of interaction between teacher and pupil and pupil to pupil takes place. The traditional discourse pattern of teacher initiation short pupil response and teacher evaluation (I-R-E) is disrupted and pupils take much more of an active speech role with extended turns. Studies also report that evidence can be found for pupils beginning to develop an argument by building on the points made by their peers and following the thread of the discussion (Baumfield and Higgins,1997). Pupils aged 5 - 6 in a study in six Welsh primary schools were found to be able to sustain interest in the views of others for up to an hour as well as becoming more confident in discussions. This study also reported a positive effect on some children who were shy and withdrawn who made significant strides in overcoming their difficulties(Davies, 1995). However, evidence of pupils being prepared to change their minds over the course of a discussion as a result of collaboration is rare. This rarity is consistent with other research findings about the lack of effect of discussion on opinions (e.g. Diezmann and Watters, 1997).

Critics of Philosophy For Children have focused on the lack of robust evidence for any significant change in pupilsÕ thinking, the debate has often centred on a disputed view of what constitutes Ôreal philosophyÕ (the philosophers John White and Anthony OÕHear have taken this line, for example) rather than on the quality of thinking demonstrated in the classroom discourse. Any attempts to identify markers of quality discourse in transcripts of pupil talk in a community of inquiry are inhibited by the lack of reliable methods of analysis.

Singapore

In the initial years of Philosophy for Children in Singapore, one of the main tasks was to establish a community of inquiry. However, teachers found the process of initiating children into a community of learners extremely difficult:

It was hard trying to get a Ôreal dialogueÕ going, to persuade the students to follow a line of argument through and to listen to the ideas of others (Lim and Koh, 1992: 3).

Even getting the children to contribute to discussions was a challenge, pupils tended to give monosyllabic answers with the result that the teachers talked more than the pupils. After the first year of implementation some children indicated a change in attitude with regard to discussions and pupil participation. The children reported that Philosophy for Children gave them an opportunity to air their views, something which other lessons did not allow them to do. For instance, feedback to one teacher from her pupils showed that many pupils found the discussions to be Ôverbally challenging and interesting, thought demanding at timesÕ; the children looked forward to the sessions, and felt deprived of discussion in their other subject areas. (Lim, 1995b: 6). The children also said that P4C gave them the opportunity to discuss ideas, to acquire skills of speaking to a group, and also helped them build up the courage to express their views. They found it Ôquite funÕ to talk to one another, and to help each other during the discussion; they also said they learnt to co-operate as a group by Ôletting each other talk firstÕ (Lim. 1995d: 6)

Having said that, however, a number of pupils noted that there were children who did not participate in the discussions (see Lim, 1993a: 12). Indeed, teachers who were facilitating the discussions made similar observations:

Many of our students, who actually knew what was going on in class and could make fruitful contributions, opted to keep quiet because they were either shy or afraid of speaking up in case they were wrong... (Lim, 1993a: 5):

It's very difficult to come up with a community of inquiry because from young, you learn to look only at the correct answer... so you get used to it, cannot give the wrong answer... (Lim, 1994c.. 5)

Apart from shyness and fear of being wrong, teachers speculated that pupils might have been afraid of being laughed at:

(Pupils) just don't want to say anything... They are afraid that people might laugh at them... They should think about why people laugh... (Lim, 1994c: 5)

As Lim herself observes, this problem of non-participation, even from bright pupils who could follow the proceedings, is typical in Singapore schools (Lim, 1993b: 5). Dialogue is very much that between the pupils and the teacher, with pupils responding to the teacher's questions, rather than among pupils.

Lim's findings with regard to the pupils' affective development are also interesting. Using a quasi-experimental design, she tested the children with Moos and Trickeff's Classroom Environment Scale and Coopersmith's Self Esteem Inventory. Among other things, the former measures the intensity of personal relationships, as well as pupil-pupil and pupil-teacher relationship, within the classroom, while the latter measures self-esteem as reflected in pupil attitude towards self in social, academic, family and personal areas of experiences. The results did not indicate any significant differences between the control and the Philosophy for Children classes. Lim believes, therefore, that the Philosophy for Children sessions might not as yet have had an impact on the self esteem and learning environment of the pupils in the experimental class (Lim, 1994c: 7 - 8). In fact, the experimental class actually had 'a significantly lower adjusted post-test mean scores in the Affiliation subscale' (Lim, 1994c: 8). This subscale measured the extent to which pupils helped each other, got to know each other, and enjoyed working together. However, the children did show the expected improvements in the other areas, such as mental maturity, general reasoning skills, achievements in English and Maths, as well as verbal, numerical and perceptual ability (Lim, 1994c: 6 - 8).

At the same time, Lim found, in a survey among the teachers conducting the Philosophy for Children programme, that some teachers did not find evidence of group solidarity, although there were some who did. A number of the latter attributed as contributing to group solidarity other factors besides Philosophy for Children; this included the 'gel' effect that came about as children got to know each other better as the year progressed (Lim, 1995b: 4).

4Implications of the findings

Singaporean children are used to a didactic teaching style in which the role of the teacher is perceived as being that of providing 'correct' and definitive answers. Teachers who have attempted to encourage children to reflect on issues, and to discuss these, may find bewildered, or even resentful, children informing them that their task is to provide answers. If children believe there to be 'right' answers to questions, then they would understandably prefer to know what this is before they ventured a response.