This article shares reflections from members of the community of philosophers of education in the United States and Canada who were invited to express their insights in response to the theme ‘Snaps...

Research on the cognitive consequences of bilingualism typically proceeds by labeling participants as “monolingual” or “bilingual” and comparing performance on some measures across these groups. It is well-known that this approach has led to inconsistent results. However, the approach assumes that there are clear criteria to designate individuals as monolingual or bilingual, and more fundamentally, to determine whether a communication system counts as a unique language. Both of these assumptions may not be correct. The problem is particularly acute when participants (...) are asked to classify themselves or simply report how many languages they speak. Participants' responses to these questions are shaped by their personal perceptions of the criteria for making these judgments. This study investigated the perceptions underlying judgments of bilingualism by asking 528 participants to judge the extent to which a description of a fictional linguistic system constitutes a unique language and the extent to which a description of a fictional individual's linguistic competence qualifies that person as bilingual. The results show a range of responses for both concepts, indicating substantial ambiguity for these terms. Moreover, participants were asked to self-classify as monolingual or bilingual, and these decisions were not related to more objective information regarding the degree of bilingual experience obtained from a detailed questionnaire. These results are consistent with the notion that bilingualism is not categorical and that specific language experiences are important in determining the criteria for being bilingual. The results impact interpretations of research investigating group differences on the cognitive effects of bilingualism. (shrink)

À peu près tout le monde a déjà fait l’expérience intuitive de l’authenticité, d’un moment qui semble révéler une lueur de sa véritable identité. Pourtant, en posant l’existence d’un «vrai moi», l’idée d’authenticité pose des défis métaphysiques qui mettent en lumière les complexités de l’individualité. J’avance que pour être bien examinée, l’authenticité exige une structure essentialiste qui tend à s’appliquer à l’identité personnelle. J’examine ensuite les trois types d’approches les plus influents dans les discussions philosophiques modernes contre cette position : (...) le romantisme et ses héritiers contemporains, l’existentialisme tardif et les conceptions de la vertu. Cette analyse met en doute la possibilité de générer une conception philosophique complète de l’authenticité. (shrink)

Primary objective: This study represents the first large-scale research on high school philosophy in a public education curriculum in North America. Our objective was to identify the impacts of high school philosophy, as well as the challenges of teaching it in its current format in Ontario high schools. Research design: The qualitative research design captured the perspectives of students and teachers with respect to philosophy at the high school level. All data collection was structured around central questions to provide insight (...) into the dynamics of their shared process of teaching/learning. Methods and procedures: We conducted semi-structured with interviews philosophy teachers (n = 9), classroom observations (n = 142), and student focus groups at 16 diverse high schools. Transcripts were coded according to themes. Results: Our findings reflect the complicated nature of philosophy as a discipline characterized by abstract thinking. Participants found it mind-opening, yet challenging, providing educational opportunities that are largely absent in conventional schooling. They saw multiple connections between philosophy and other subjects, but also appreciated its distinctive benefits. Teachers relied primarily on textbooks and contemporary media to deliver the curriculum. We found that a teacher’s background in philosophy may influence what is taught in philosophy courses and how, especially given the flexibility of the provincial curriculum. Conclusions: The findings suggest that philosophy is a unique, beneficial subject that teachers enjoy teaching and students greatly value, characterizing it as both difficult and rewarding. Our study revealed that considerable differences exist in how philosophy is taught and learned around the province. The flexibility of the provincial curriculum appears to be an invitation for creative and responsive teaching; however, philosophy teachers’ weak preparation can, by their own admission, be a hindrance to effective curriculum delivery. Studying philosophy enhances students’ thinking about other academic areas of study and in some cases opens them up to new ways of thinking. (shrink)

A speech perception experiment provides evidence that the linguistic relationship between words affects the discrimination of their talkers. Listeners discriminated two talkers' voices with various linguistic relationships between their spoken words. Listeners were asked whether two words were spoken by the same person or not. Word pairs varied with respect to the linguistic relationship between the component words, forming either: phonological rhymes, lexical compounds, reversed compounds, or unrelated pairs. The degree of linguistic relationship between the words affected talker discrimination in (...) a graded fashion, revealing biases listeners have regarding the nature of words and the talkers that speak them. These results indicate that listeners expect a talker's words to be linguistically related, and more generally, indexical processing is affected by linguistic information in a top-down fashion even when listeners are not told to attend to it. (shrink)

Abstract In this paper I probe the kinds of views about selfhood that inform our understanding of sincerity and authenticity and argue that the terms have separate, but related, boundaries. Borrowing Harry Frankfurt's notion of wholeheartedness, I argue that authenticity is a form of alignment or consistency within the self, which requires self-knowledge and intentionality in order to be actualized. Sincerity involves representing oneself truthfully to others but does not depend on the presence of authenticity. I contrast sincerity and authenticity (...) in depth using literary examples. In the final section, I call into question the assumptions underwriting the distinction between sincerity and authenticity and introduce the category of ?shtick,? which plays with both. I conclude that, although authenticity and sincerity stand in a complex relation to one another, that relation is neither one of synonymity, as might have been the case in the Renaissance, nor of sufficient condition, as Polonius famously claims. (shrink)

Pre-college philosophy has proliferated greatly over the last few decades, including in the form of ‘philosophy across the curriculum’. However, there has been very little sustained examination of the nature of philosophy as a subject relative to other standard pre-college subjects and the kinds of expertise an effective philosophy teacher at this level should possess. At face value, the minimal academic preparation expected for competence in secondary philosophy instruction, compared to the high standards for teaching other subjects, raises questions and (...) concerns. In this paper I make some provisional observations about the subject of philosophy and how it is taught from p4c through to the post-secondary level. I begin by examining the concept of ‘philosophy across the curriculum’ and offer a working analysis of the main features of philosophy's form and content that enable us to determine its relevance to, and difference from, other subjects. Next, I examine and critique what I term the ‘populist’ conception of philosophy, which correlates to lower expectations of teacher training, and use my own experience of teaching philosophy across the curriculum to shed doubt on the viability of this approach. In the third section I consider what I term the ‘autonomous’ conception of philosophy, which correlates to more stringent expectations of teacher capacity, and explain why it is preferable to the populist conception with some qualifications. I conclude by reflecting on how philosophy compares to other subjects that are advanced cross-curricularly and argue for more training of high school philosophy teachers. (shrink)

The Canadian province of Ontario introduced philosophy as a secondary school subject in 1995 (Pinto, McDonough, & Boyd, 2009). Since publicly-funded Catholic schools teach approximately 32% of all students in Ontario (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2022), the question arises regarding how teachers in those schools coordinate philosophy and Catholic teachings. This study employs a secondary analysis of interviews with six teachers from Ontario’s Catholic schools, and employs two of Avery Dulles’ (2002) conceptions of church (institution and mystical communion) to determine (...) how they consider the choices available within their own tradition that could answer this question. Rather than looking only at the shortcomings of treating magisterial teaching as philosophy, this paper argues that there are also conceptual problems that these courses must address in order to improve their ecclesiological adequacy, and illustrates how an apparent null curriculum privileges the institutional ecclesiology. (shrink)

Assessment is a necessary task in all areas of education, but there is no agreement on how to assess the impacts of different approaches to sex education, both on an individual level and on a population level over time. The history of mid-20th Century Family Life Education in the United States illuminates some of the obstacles that have made assessing sex education programmes so difficult: control groups, access to large numbers of research subjects and the means to verify self-reporting are (...) elusive. These persistent challenges have to do with the nature of the subject, which is, in contrast to most subjects, not supposed to be practised at school. Standards of reliability, validity and classroom authenticity, therefore, apply partially at best. We argue that some approaches to sex education are valuable whether or not they are assessable, and that some things that are assessable may not be valuable in the way they are thought to be. (shrink)

In 2012, a provincial bill amended the Ontario Education Act to provide more focused measures to eliminate bullying on the basis of sexual orientation. Bill 13 specifically requires that students be allowed to establish gay-straight alliances (GSAs), including in the publicly-funded Catholic school system. The Ontario Catholic School Trustees’ Association responded by proposing an alternative policy, called “Respecting Difference,” on the grounds that GSAs run contrary to Catholic teaching. Respect is a complex ethical notion with a long philosophical history. Through (...) an overview of what philosophers from different traditions (including Kant, Buber, Levinas, Hegel, and Rawls) have said about respect, it becomes apparent that the kind of respect that is due to all persons requires recognition, or a willingness to accept the other as a self-identifying subject who is irreducible to my experience. In its discussion of LGBT students, the OCSTA fails to accord them such recognition, even while it emphasizes the meaning of difference. Consequently, there is reason to conclude that it does not truly respect sexual minority students and that it is not fully committed to eradicating homophobia-based bullying in the Catholic school system. “Respecting Difference” declines to heed best evidence about the factors that actually protect LGBT students from bullying, and uses the guidelines for “Respecting Difference” groups as an opportunity to reinforce its pathologization of LGBT identity itself. (shrink)

Authenticity is often touted as an important virtue for teachers. But what do we mean when we say that a teacher ought to be ‘authentic’? Research shows that discussions of teacher authenticity frequently refer to other character traits or simply to teacher effectiveness, but authenticity is a unique concept with a long philosophical history. Once we understand authenticity as an ethical and metaphysical question, the presumed connection between authenticity and teaching appears less solid. While being true to oneself may render (...) it more likely that a teacher does her job well, there is also reason to believe that excellent teachers can be inauthentic and that inept or even very dangerous teachers can be authentic. This paper breaks down the concept of teacher authenticity and examines three cases to show that the relationship between authenticity and good teaching is less direct that it may initially seem. (shrink)

Much ethical attention has been devoted to sex segregation and its relation to fairness in the world of sports, with prominent controversies about transgender and intersex athletes helping to advance the debate in recent years. In this paper, I deploy some of the discussion from philosophy of sport to examine the fairness of allowing a trans woman to compete in a beauty pageant. This requires scrutinizing the physical characteristics that are rewarded in such competitions and their distribution among the sexes. (...) The analysis casts doubt on the coherence of simple sex segregation and facilitates a feminist critique of beauty standards. (shrink)

In the United States, sex education is more than just an uncomfortable rite of passage, it's an amorphous curriculum that varies widely based on the politics, experience, resources, and biases of the people teaching it. Most often, it's a train wreck, overemphasizing or underemphasizing STIs, teen pregnancy, abstinence, and consent. In Touchy Subject, philosopher Lauren Bialystok and historian Lisa M. F. Andersen make the case for thoughtful sex education, explaining why it's worth fighting for and which kind most deserves our (...) fight, despite all the inconveniences and compromises along the way. They argue that democratic and humanistic aims can be used to provide the tools to reason about the content and form of sex education. In practice, this amounts to a curriculum that meets what are currently considered highly comprehensive standards, incorporates ethics and civics education, and substantially modifies some aspects of teacher training and school design; it also assigns different responsibilities to different actors inside and outside schools, and it responds to the salient features of young people's evolving worlds, including the inequities that put some students at much higher risk of sexual harm than others. Throughout their inquiry, the authors show the reader how sex education has progressed and how the very concept of "progress" remains contestable. (shrink)