Teaching Skills and Bioethics, the use of the Community of Inquiry

Title: Using the Community of Inquiry Methodology in teaching Bioethics: A focus on skills development Author: David L. H. Hunter Affiliation: Lecturer in Bioethics School of Biomedical Sciences University of Ulster Address: Cromore Road Coleraine Co. Londonderry BT52 1SA Email: d.hunter3@ulster.ac.uk / idmonfish@gmail.com Abstract: The community of inquiry methodology was developed by Professor Matthew Lipman to enable the teaching of philosophy in schools. Lipman felt that inquiry based learning was essential in schools because he felt that: Education should empower children to be thoughtful about the lives they lead, and doing philosophy is important to that goal.1 The community of inquiry is a powerful pedagogical tool to foster student engagement, critical thinking, collaborative and affective skills development. As such it can be useful in the bioethics classroom. This paper describes the community of inquiry methodology, and how it can be a useful arrow in quiver of someone teaching bioethics. 1 Using the Community of Inquiry Methodology in teaching Bioethics: A focus on skills development Introduction: This paper is split into three parts. The first part describes the community of inquiry methodology and how to implement it. The second part assesses the community of inquiry methodology, offers some evidence of its effectiveness and discusses its strong points and weak points. The final section discusses the uses and limits of the community of inquiry methodology in teaching bioethics. This methodology does share some characteristics with problem based learning and case based teaching, but has its own advantages and uses. Part 1. What is a community of inquiry: A community of inquiry is simply a group who are focused on solving the same problem through reasoning together collaboratively. The central idea is to provide a group learning environment in which students cooperate to test, share and improve on their thinking, together.2-3 The community of inquiry (Also known as Philosophy for Children) teaching methodology was developed by Professor Matthew Lipman.4 This methodology aims to engage the participants, both teacher and students in collaborating with each other to grow in understanding of the world around them, forming a community of inquiry. The community of inquiry model has been shown to be very effective at engaging students in learning and exploring ideas, improving critical thinking skills, affective skills and collaborative skills.5 The community is developed by engaging a small group (usually between 12-25) of students in regular, student driven inquiry into discussion of common, central and 2 contestable concepts. Each of these elements generates student engagement making it their community of inquiry. This is done by providing some stimulus material (A talk, book, news article, video, case anything which can be used to generate questions), getting the students to generate questions from this source material and then organizing these questions. The students then engage in discussion of the chosen question until either it is resolved or it is determined that some prior question needs to be resolved before the original question can be settled. The facilitator focuses the discussion and forces it to consider the topic deeply by using procedural questions, but avoids substantive inputs. Students are engaged because it is their questions which are being addressed, and because the topics are important to them, they are engaged in the intellectual process of trying to discover the right answer to a question that matters to them. At the end the facilitator usually summarizes the discussions, what questions have been settled, and asks where the group wants to go next. The role of the facilitator: The community of inquiry flourishes only when certain preconditions are met: 1. Readiness to reason; 2. Mutual respect (of children towards each other, and of children and teachers towards one another); 3. An absence of indoctrination. And it is the facilitator’s role to provide this environment.6 The facilitator mediates the discussion and encourages both rigorous thinking and collaborative thinking by the use of modeling and procedural questions (Such as, can a distinction be made here? Can anyone think of another explanation of that? etc).7 8 Importantly they do not drive the discussion with substantive inputs, instead they create 3 an environment where the participants generate the substantive inputs themselves. The facilitator must avoid guiding the discussion through constant questioning, their job is strictly only to foster critical thinking skills and to focus and deepen the discussion.9 It is particularly important that they require participants to give reasons for any claims they make. By ensuring the discussion is rigorous and well focused the facilitator imparts skills and avoids students getting frustrated with a pointless discussion which comes to no conclusions. In many senses the community of inquiry pedagogy subverts the typical student-teacher relationship shifting the role of the teacher from the font and giver of all knowledge to a co-explorer discovering knowledge and exploring ideas alongside the students. It is often hard for lecturers, teachers and tutors, even good ones, to adopt this model of teaching because the way they need to behave to facilitate its success will usually go precisely against their instincts. So for example rather than answering student’s questions these often should be left for the other students to answer. Another very frustrating example is when you feel the inquiry is heading the wrong way, instead of adding a substantive comment as you would in a normal classroom to steer the conversation back to the ‘correct’ path you have to trust the group to spot the problem that is irking you and to do the steering themselves. Often I find myself having to remind myself to take a breath and keep my mouth shut, and let the inquiry develop. The facilitator helps the students to develop critical thinking skills by using procedural questions that reflect these skills (E.G. “Could that be clarified?”, “Can anyone think of a counter example” etc) which develops these skills in the students both by modeling them, but also by demonstrating how they are useful in getting what the students want, answers to questions that are important to them. Procedural questions ought to challenge the participant to think and explain their reasoning. 4 As the community matures the facilitator becomes less important since as the participants internalize the critical thinking skills modeled by the facilitator they will come to ask procedural questions removing the need for the facilitator’s intervention. Stimulus material: There is significant discussion in the literature on what material should be used to generate a community of enquiry and specifically whether it should be material developed specifically for this purpose.10 I would suggest that in the context of bioethics it would be better to not use material specifically developed for the community of inquiry method.11 Most of this material is developed for the philosophy for children market, and while there are the occasional gems, this material tends to not be productive for bioethics teaching purposes, both because it is pitched at the wrong level, and because it is intended to provoke general philosophical exploration, not focused bioethical exploration. However almost anything can be used as a effective stimulus for a community of inquiry as long as it can generate questions that cannot be resolved simply by observation or by finding out already established facts.12-13 In particular, for the purposes of bioethics, newspaper articles and of course case studies can be a fruitful stimulus for a community of inquiry. However short stories can also be a useful resource.14-15 Of course the stimulus doesn’t need to be text based and could be for example a video or even simply a topical event (I have used the Iraq war as a stimulus for a discussion of just wars).16 Whatever is used as a stimulus it should be relatively short, anything too long will generate far too many possible lines of inquiry, and simply eat up valuable discussion time. 5 Tips and tricks: Several strategies can be used to improve communities of inquiry and I will describe some of these here. Although these strategies are being discussed in the context of the community of inquiry many of them should be generalizable to other small group teaching contexts. Something I typically do as a facilitator is track the conversation on a big (A3) piece of paper. This could also be done with a laptop using mind mapping software.17 This serves three useful functions. Firstly, it allows the participants to see what they have achieved. Secondly it allows discussions to be rejoined later on without going over the same ground, but with a clear sense of direction. Finally, it gives the facilitator something to do which distracts them from the temptation to make comment on everything thing that is said. When initially gathering questions, it is a good idea to get the participants to write their questions on pieces of paper. These can then be sorted more easily by putting them in the middle of the group.(Or with magnets/blue-tack attached to a white board) If the group is large you might want to restrict the number of questions each person can write down, or only allow one question between two. It is often a good idea to allow the students to organize the questions. This also allows further critical thinking skills development, either by directing the organization towards some end i.e. find the question which needs to be solved before the other questions can be sensibly addressed or by allowing free organization of the questions by the students but requiring them to explain their organization and reorganization when they are finished. At the end of the first session, it is a good idea to discuss how the session went, and in particular set up a set of rules to govern future communities of inquiry. One way to elicit these is to ask participants how they could have made that the worst discussion ever, the community of inquiry from hell, then what rules could be used to avoid that situation eventuating. This also encourages meta-cognition. 6 Skill development can be further encouraged by the use of skill games and the use of specific role setting.18 So for example you could set one participant the job of pointing out assumptions, or counter examples. This can also be a useful way to deal with participants who dominate the conversation, assigning them a job controls their input and gives others space to participate.19 Part 2: The strengths of the community of inquiry: The first major strength of the community of inquiry methodology is the level of engagement it generates. Done right, it becomes clear to the participants that they are in control, and they can direct the questions, which generates a huge level of buy in from students. However this is achieved by allowing student direction and focus, and resisting giving the ‘answers’. If an attempt is made by the facilitator to give the party line on a particular issue, and to get the students to endorse this view, it will fundamentally undermine the community of inquiry. When the community of inquiry was first developed it was primarily aimed at developing critical thinking skills, and there is solid evidence that it is a very effective means of doing this.20 This is particularly the case if the facilitator models theses skills well, and if they use various strategies to make skill usage explicit. For example by complimenting and identifying skill usage, but also by playing various games and assigning particular skill development tasks. The process of the community of inquiry itself engenders affective and collaborative skills and attitudes as well. Since the participants are engaged in thinking together, and if they want their view to be respected, they will learn that they need to respect other view points. Furthermore they will discover that respecting another view point doesn’t just mean waiting their turn to express their view, but to engage with that view, and challenge it to discover just how robust it is.21 Some intellectual virtues developed by participating in the community of inquiry are: 7 Charity Humility Respect Creativity Listening Understanding Courage Curiosity Empathy Open mindedness Finally, and most important, implicitly the community of inquiry model encourages thinking as a means of problem solving and in particular collaborative thinking. The disadvantages of the community of inquiry model: The main disadvantage of the community of inquiry is that it can only be used to fulfill some teaching goals. When we teach we have several diverse objectives. For example we may aim to impart knowledge, teach skills, encourage students to learn, encourage students to internalize a particular set of beliefs and so on. While the community of inquiry model is a very successful tool for the second and third of these aims it is not particularly useful for the first aim, and it has limited use in terms of the fourth. The community of inquiry has limited use in imparting specific sets of knowledge, because the inquiry is student driven. It may be the case that they will happen onto the particular question that will require learning the knowledge you wish to impart, but it also may not, and trying to force it in a particular direction is very likely to shut down the inquiry altogether. This makes imparting specific sets of knowledge to the students difficult in the context of the community of inquiry. The community of inquiry has only a limited use for imparting specific attitudes or beliefs as illustrated by this lovely example from Clinton Golding: 8 Student: Maybe racism could be good when it gives a minority a bit more opportunity? Teacher: Maybe. (students can tell by the teacher’s tone and body language that they haven’t got the ‘right’ answer so they try again.) Student: Yea, maybe racism is OK when it’s the minority against the majority Teacher: Hmmm. (students know that this reaction means they still haven’t got it ‘right’) Student: I think racism is always bad because it is always unequal treatment. Teacher: That’s right. You can’t have good racism because that would mean treating people unequally and treating people unequally is always unfair. OK, next question.22 As this example shows, attempting to impart particular beliefs to the participants shuts down genuine inquiry. However as I discussed earlier the community of inquiry does implicitly impart and reinforce certain beliefs and attitudes, such as collaborative problem solving. Finally the facilitator can seriously undermine the inquiry in several ways. One common mistake is to treat all answers as good, this undermines the usefulness of the inquiry, if all answers are equally good, then what is the point trying to find the best answer? Instead every input should be treated as valuable, but not equally correct, the search for the truth is arguably the most important guiding norm of a functioning community of inquiry.23 It is also important to ensure that participants are aware of the progress that has been made even if this progress is primarily negative. (i.e. “well we still don’t know the answer to that, but at least we know that that isn’t the right answer”) Otherwise they will come to see the time set aside for the inquiry as simply empty talking time. Part 3: Community of inquiry in bioethics. As my discussion of the disadvantages of the community of inquiry should have made clear the community of inquiry is not a panacea for dealing with all the issues with teaching bioethics.24 In particular we typically need to convey certain knowledge to the students, and often bioethics courses are also supposed to play the role of instilling belief 9 in or at least adherence to certain professional standards. Nonetheless it does provide some advantages which make it a useful tool as part of the repertoire for teaching in bioethics. Engagement is often an issue in teaching ethics to any professional audience, and the community of inquiry method can be a useful way to generate initial engagement, getting the participants interested in the questions because they have generated these questions, and they can then see how the subsequent lectures may help solve these questions.25 It is important however that the students are made aware when they are in a community of inquiry environment (I often use half of my tutorial time for these) and that the operating procedures of the environment are made clear to them, otherwise they may well become confused between the use of different pedagogical tools, such as the discussion of case studies in a tutorial to ensure they have understood the lecture or to encourage the internalization of certain values. This would undermine both activities. The main reason to use the community of inquiry however is a combination of the skills and the attitudes it promotes. A perennial problem faced by bioethics teaching, especially in the professional context is that there is rarely enough time available in the curriculum to teach everything that would be taught in an ideal world. You might think, well if we only have a limited time frame to teach in, and this teaching method cannot achieve several key objectives of bioethics teaching, then why waste time with it at all? However the community of inquiry method is excellent at imparting skills, and more importantly in interesting students in exploring ideas for themselves. Thus it can be used as a replacement to having the ideal amount of time to teach bioethics, given the limited timeframe, we are better to excite students about the subject and give them the tools to explore it on their own time. In essence this is the old Chinese advice about teaching a man to fish, rather than giving him a fish. In modern pedagogical terms, what is being suggested is that we should aim to teach students to be active learners in bioethics, and the community of inquiry is an excellent tool for encouraging active learners. 1 Finally you might object that the community of inquiry as a teaching method as I have been describing was developed as a method of teaching philosophy to school children, rather than as a method of teaching adults bioethics. However the community of inquiry approach has been used both in higher education, and in areas of learning as diverse as mathematics, science and social science. In each of these areas the community of inquiry has been shown to be an effective teaching tool.26 As such there seems to be no reason to object to its adoption for the purpose of teaching bioethics. . Acknowledgements: First I must thank Vanya Kovach for sparking my interest in Philosophy for Children and providing much of my initial training. Anne-Marie Olly and Clinton Golding also deserve much thanks. Finally I would like to thank the various classes and teachers that I worked with at Epsom Girls Grammar throughout my time in New Zealand, you were very inspirational, and kept me interested in this pedagogy. Endnotes: 1 1 Pardales, M & Girod, M, 'Community of inquiry: Its past and present future', Educational Philosophy and Theory, vol. 38, no.3, 2006, pp.299-309. 2 Part 1 of this paper builds on an earlier paper of mine, Forward thinking: a teaching project which appears in Environmental Justice & Global Citizenship, The Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2006. 3 Splitter, L J. & Sharp, A.M, Teaching for Better Thinking, Melbourne: ACER, 1995. 4 For further information about the philosophy for children movement see Lipman, M., Sharp, A. M. & Oscanyan, F. S, Philosophy in the Classroom, Philadelphia, PA, Temple University Press, 1980; Lipman, M, Thinking in Education, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. 5 Pardales, M & Girod, M, 'Community of inquiry: Its past and present future', Educational Philosophy and Theory, vol. 38, no.3, 2006, pp.299-309. 6 Lipman, M., Sharp, A. M. & Oscanyan, F. S, Philosophy in the Classroom, Philadelphia, PA, Temple University Press, 1980. 7 For an excellent list of procedural questions see Golding, C, 'Thought encouraging questions', FAPSA conference paper 2005, Auckland, New Zealand. Available at: http://www.p4c.org.nz/Conference%20Papers/Thought %20encouraging%20questions.doc [accessed on July 12, 2008] 8 For general suggestions to improve the quality of questions discussed see Kovach, V, 'How to do things with lists: easy opportunities for more careful reasoning in the community of inquiry', FAPSA conference paper 2005, Auckland, New Zealand. Available at: http://www.p4c.org.nz/Conference%20Papers/How%20to%20do%20things%20with%20lists.doc [accessed on July 12, 2008] 9 Gardner, S, 'Inquiry is no mere conversation', Critical & Creative Thinking vol. 16, no.2, 1996, pp. 41- 49. 10 Fields, J, I. K, 'Is it really a question of preference? Philosophy specific or non-philosophy specific teaching materials', Analytic Teaching, vol. 19, no. 1, 2000, pp.54 – 68. 11 See for example Cam, P, Thinking Stories 1: philosophical inquiry for children, Sydney: Hare & Iremonger, 1993; Cam, P, Thinking Stories 2: philosophical inquiry for children, Sydney: Hare & Iremonger, 1994; Cam, P, Thinking Together: philosophical inquiry for children, Sydney: Primary English Teaching Association and Hale & Iremonger, 1995; Cam, P, Thinking Stories 3: philosophical inquiry for children, Sydney: Hare & Iremonger, 1997. 12 For more on the sorts of questions which are appropriate see Golding, C, 'Thinking treasure', Presented at FAPSA conference 2005, Auckland, New Zealand. Available at: http://www.p4c.org.nz/Conference%20Papers/THINKING %20TREASURE.doc. [accessed on July 12, 2008] 13 Cam, P, Thinking Together: philosophical inquiry for children, Sydney: Primary English Teaching Association and Hale & Iremonger, 1995. 14 I particularly like using Terry Bisson’s short story, They're Made Out Of Meat from Bears Discover Fire and Other Stories. You can read it here: http://www.setileague.org/articles/meat.htm 15 Lawford-Smith, H. 'P4C and science fiction', Presented at FAPSA conference 2005, Auckland, New Zealand. Available at: http://www.p4c.org.nz/Conference%20Papers/P4C%20&%20Science%20Fiction.doc [accessed on July 12, 2008] 16 Shapiro, D, A, 'Some active alternatives to reading in philosophy for children' Analytic Teaching. vol. 21, no. 1, 2002, pp. 16 – 23. 17 Excellent, free mind mapping software is available from here: http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page [accessed on July 12, 2008] 18 Some excellent skill games can be found in Shapiro, D, A, 'Some active alternatives to reading in philosophy for children' Analytic Teaching. vol. 21, no. 1, 2002, pp. 16 – 23. even more can be found in Golding, C, Connecting concepts : thinking activities for students, Camberwell, Victoria: ACER, 2002.. 19 In the UK the Society for Advancing Philosophical Enquiry and Reflection in Education (SAPERE) provides further information and training in regards to the use of the community of inquiry. Internationally the community of inquiry methodology is promoted by the International Council for the Promotion of Philosophical Inquiry with Children (ICPIC) See respectively: http://sapere.org.uk/ [accessed on July 12, 2008] http://www.icpic.org/ [accessed on July 12, 2008] 20 See for example Shipman, V, 'Evaluation replication of the philosophy for children program - final report', Thinking , vol. 5, no. 1, 1983, pp. 45-57. Shipman reports that testing with approximately 2.200 5th through 7th grade students in New Jersey indicated that even after adjusting for initial relevant group differences, students in program classes were superior to their non-program peers in formal and informal reasoning skills. 21 Gardner, S, 'Participation in a “community of inquiry” nourishes participants perspective-taking capacity: a report of an two year empirical study', in Palsson, H, Sigurdardottir, B and Nelson, Y (eds.), Philosophy for Children on Top of the World, Akureyri: Univ. Akureyri. 1999. 22 Golding, C. 'Thought encouraging questions', FAPSA conference paper 2005, Auckland, New Zealand. Available at: http://www.p4c.org.nz/Conference%20Papers/Thought%20encouraging%20questions.doc [accessed on July 12, 2008] 23 Gardner, S, 'Inquiry is no mere conversation', Critical & Creative Thinking vol. 16, no.2, 1996, pp. 41- 49. Perkins, Henry S. Geppert, Cynthia M. A. Hazuda, Helen P, 'Challenges in teaching ethics in medical schools', American Journal of the Medical Sciences, vol. 319, no. 5, 2000, pp. 273-278. 25 Freakley, M & Burgh, G, 'Improving teacher education students’ ethical thinking using the community of inquiry approach', Analytic Teaching, vol. 19, no. 1, 2000, pp.38 – 45. 26 See for example: Freakley, M & Burgh, G, 'Improving teacher education students’ ethical thinking using the community of inquiry approach', Analytic Teaching, vol. 19, no. 1, 2000, pp.38 – 45; Goos, M, 'Learning mathematics in a classroom community of inquiry', Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, vol. 35, no. 4, 2004, pp. 258291; Sprod, T, 'Improving scientific reasoning through philosophy for children: an empirical study', Thinking, vol. 13, no. 2. 1997, pp. 11-16; Pardales, M & Girod, M, 'Community of inquiry: its past and present future', Educational Philosophy and Theory, vol. 38, no.3, 2006, pp.299-309. 24