The Community of Philosophical Inquiry in Question: Examining the Role of the Facilitator in Deliberative Discussion

This article examines the democratic hopes for the community of philosophical inquiry (CPI), a mode of deliberative discussion, when social justice is both the topic and the goal of discussion. It shares insights from a CPI that was used as an intersubjective research method (Golding, 2015) to enabl...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Democracy & education 2024-03, Vol.32 (1), p.1
Main Authors: Lucas, Ashley G, Milligan, Andrea, Bacharach, Sondra
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Education
Methods
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Summary:This article examines the democratic hopes for the community of philosophical inquiry (CPI), a mode of deliberative discussion, when social justice is both the topic and the goal of discussion. It shares insights from a CPI that was used as an intersubjective research method (Golding, 2015) to enable the authors to interrogate their assumptions about "teaching for social justice." The "bake sale" was a recurrent metaphor employed by the group to reject thin conceptions and pedagogical practices of social justice. However, the inquiry became blocked at a level of externalized analysis and arguably perpetuated injustice. This article uses the productive force of the authors' failures to consider the methodological and facilitative conditions that could have promoted a deeper interrogation of teaching for social justice. In affirming calls for greater attention to the dynamics of race, positionality, and power in CPI (e.g., Burgh & Yorshanky, 2011; Chetty, 2017, 2018; Chetty & Suissa, 2017; Reed-Sandoval & Sykes, 2017; Vansieleghem & Kennedy, 2011), we argue that facilitators seeing themselves and the CPI as "being in question" (Biesta, 2017) is central to the viability of the CPI to pursue social justice aims.
ISSN:1085-3545