Seabury Hall Philosophy Club Presents:
"First Wednesday"
A Symposium Series
What Is the Philosophy Club First Wednesday Symposium Series?
by Carter Latendresse
I. Genesis
This Philosophy Club Symposium Series is the fruit of years of professional collaboration and hours of conversation between colleagues here at Seabury Hall. It perhaps had its start four years ago at our opening full faculty meeting in August, 2002. Our Headmaster, Joe Schmidt, presented some heartening statistics from that past year: that 70% of Seabury students who took AP tests earned 4’s or 5’s, that 81% of Seabury Hall graduates who attended college go on to graduate college within five years. He went on with a report that spoke to the high quality of education we provide here at Seabury Hall. I felt proud, validated in my professional efforts.
A week or so later, though, when I read the August 26, 2002 edition of Time, a Special Report entitled “How to Save the Earth,” I found myself—in light of the swelling global environmental crises outlined below—questioning the validity of those same professional efforts.
• “Up to a third of the world is in danger of starving. Two billion people lack reliable access to safe, nutritious food, and 800 million of them—including 300 million children—are chronically malnourished” (A9).
• “At present 1.1 billion people lack access to clean drinking water and more than 2.4 billion lack adequate sanitation. ‘Unless we take swift and decisive action,’ says U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, ‘by 2025, two-thirds of the world’s population may be living in countries that face serious water shortages” (A10).
• “More than 11,000 species of animals and plants are known to be threatened with extinction, about a third of all coral reefs are expected to vanish in the next 30 years and about 36 million acres of forest are being razed annually. In his new book, The Future of Life, Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson writes of his worry that unless we change our ways half of all species could disappear by the end of the century” (A12).
I asked myself if those students who were earned 4’s and 5’s on the AP exams, and who were graduating college within five years, would be better prepared by my efforts as a teacher here at Seabury to address these ecological problems. It will be the world in which they and their children will grow, so—I asked myself—am I helping those students to address the problems? Certainly I am teaching them to be better thinkers, more humane citizens, more skilled writers and readers, but are they more able, by my efforts, to begin to solve some of these predicaments?
II. Curriculum Design
I carried these concerns to our Curriculum Committee that September in 2002, just as the faculty was leading the way toward addressing these predicaments. The teachers were returning from weeks of collaboration around interdisciplinary teaching or weeks of professional development in teaching Harkness Method Humanities. We on the Curriculum Committee had also read Understanding by Design, a seminal text in contemporary curriculum design. As a group at that meeting, we affirmed that the best teaching is in preparation for college while it is, at the same time, as John Dewey says, “a process of living and not a preparation for future living.” I left that meeting believing, just as I still believe, that the most riveting, relevant curriculum we can present as teachers looks toward the future but is rooted in solving the problems and celebrating the wisdom that exist today. Quite often as teachers I think we hear the news on NPR on the way to school, or we read our Time magazines at night at home, and we sigh dejectedly and worry about the world our students will inherit. We worry and we plan and we work to better the world while we’re at home and out in the community. Still, when we walk into our classrooms, I wondered, do we bring these deepest concerns, and do we address the process of living today, or do we focus solely on preparing our students for future living?
My colleagues here at school have been my teachers when answering these questions. We read books together, discuss them, and debate them. Through this spirited interaction, I have become convinced that we need a teaching that is contextualized within this world and that is bold enough to address the problems of the world today without falling into hopelessness. One might ask, Why address the problems and risk overburdening our students with a worry that we as adults are better at sublimating? Because the problems of the world—polluted water, global warming—are not simply “out there” in the world. They are beneath our feet and over our heads. In another way, September 11 brought this painful realization into national focus. We cannot afford to ignore, for example, the tension that exists in the Middle East, or the growing global leadership of China and India that Friedman points out in his book The World Is Flat, or the twenty global problems that Rischard outlines in High Noon. Here at Seabury Hall we are not ignoring the discussions taking place among the best scientists, economists, journalists, politicians, writers, and philosophers of our time. We believe that the problem-based teaching with a backward design process outlined in Understanding by Design offers a good model on how to remain, simultaneously, college preparatory and relevant for today. We want to prepare ethical, enlightened problem-solvers to create a better tomorrow.
I periodically return to a quote from Herbert Kohl’s book “I Won’t Learn from You”:
Teaching in the absence of hope is a burden that can demoralize even the most caring and energetic person, and yet it afflicts the lives of most sensitive teachers these days. It is up to us to negate this negativity—not through a denial of the horrible things that do exist but through the affirmation of possibility and the energy and love we can bring to our students. We have to be hopeful despite the obvious despair in the lives of our children and communities and society. We have to be dreamers ourselves and not allow foolish accusations about being out of touch with the real world to bother us. What is real is less important than what can be made real through our efforts and our students’ untapped brilliance and boundless energy. (86)
If the students feel that their problems and the problems of the world are being addressed at school, then they will find their education at Seabury Hall relevant and important today. We know—because alumni tell us so—that these students do realize, after their first semester away from Seabury, that the education they received here was relevant and important to them. We hear from those returning alumni that we have been giving them the tools to confront the problems of today without deferring that confrontation to some later date when they may not have the energy.
Wiggins and McTighe, authors of Understanding by Design, present us with a model that allows us to clarify for ourselves what is worthy of enduring understandings, of yearly foci, and of unit questions. They also provide us with a way to make education relevant for today and tomorrow. I believe that hope can be restored by problem based teaching. How do we start? I don’t believe we should start (on one end of the spectrum) with a skill or objective list taken from a scope and sequence, nor do I believe we should start (at the other end of the spectrum) with a list of fun, groovy activities that our students might experience. In a humanities course, one might start somewhere near the middle of the spectrum (and therefore more easily draw from both ends) by asking essential and unit questions:
• Are people separate from nature or a part of it?
• Is violence “natural”?
• Will societies always have exploited, dispossessed populations?
• Do racial categories exist?
• Is a just government possible?
These questions address problems in the world today and help us to figure out what is worthy of enduring understanding in our disciplines. Questions such as these that frame humanities courses and units of study can be approached from several disciplines at the same time with different lenses. The inquiry can be problem-based, real world, inspirational, connected to students’ lives, and interdisciplinary. That inquiry can also remain college preparatory.
III. Private School Public Mission
We’ve been hard at work using Backward Design and interdisciplinary study these past four years. At our first faculty meeting of this year, in August of 2005, Joe Schmidt, our Headmaster, put a charge to the teachers: How do we make our private school a public place? Shortly after that August meeting, in September, I met with three colleagues to begin talk of organizing this Symposium series. Present were Joe, John Dependahl, Chair of the Philosophy and Religion Department and moderator of these Symposiums, and Father Moki Hino. We shared a common vision: We all wanted to organize a forum on Maui to discuss and debate philosophical issues, current local events, and pressing global concerns. We also wanted to connect the learning here at school with the world outside of the campus property lines. The intention was to offer a time and place for intellectual and ethical inquiry, once a month, with students in the Philosophy Club taking leadership roles in putting the evening together. The Philosophy Club is a group of 10-15 high school students who value diverse opinion and tackling heady political, social, and philosophical issues in a half-hour discussion in John’s room every Friday. John, advisor to the club, agreed that it might prove fruitful to pitch the idea of leadership to the club.
IV. Philosophy Club
As you can guess, the club agreed, and now they help select topics and speakers for each symposium. They also write the first five questions for each symposium that the speakers answer. They are an extraordinary group, and we find that, ironically, they are posing the same types of essential questions that we, their teachers, pose during our curriculum design meetings. They continue to teach us, their adult mentors. In addition, they provide refreshments, the proceeds from which go to support their Friday trip to the homeless shelter to feed the hungry.
I feel that we have been successful in weaving together pedagogy and morality in a town hall meeting venue. At our opening symposium, John Dependahl read what has become a sort of touchstone for us before every symposium:
We begin this symposium series with a thought both humbling and exalting: that we are dust sustained by the earth, by God, and by one another—dust that will one day return to the earth. If we are to live well on this earth, with God and with one another, we must have faith in these processes and collaborate well with them. In the spirit of collaborating well, let us resolve tonight to speak with humility and to listen with consideration.
It is my hope that the students will continue to take an active, leadership role in this program. They are the lifeblood of this program. I also hope that this symposium series will continue to allow the Maui community to collaborate well with the larger global community.
