Our Project

Our project looks at student utterances across several schools in our trust in years 7, 8 and 9. We want to understand how students are using Tier 3 philosophical language. The project came about because we wanted to specifically monitor the impact of our explicit teaching of Tier 3 language (subject specific language from a particular field) from the discipline of Philosophy in our trust-wide RE curriculum. We wanted to ascertain how disciplinary language has impacted students’ ability to explain philosophical concepts, relate them to beliefs based on texts and also how students might be employing the Tier 3 words or the concepts that sit behind them to engage in reasoning.

Methodology

Our methodology took the form of audio recordings from lessons and transcript analysis (TA), pupil panel sessions capturing student talk (ST) and observations by teachers from the experience of teaching or from lesson visits by the project leader.

Our first stage was to visit lessons and record observations of student speak and analyse the audio transcripts. We then looked at what themes emerged from this talk. We asked if and how student utterances were moving beyond the descriptive and into the analytical. Based on these analyses we created questions for student panel interviews where students were asked about philosophy and engaged in philosophical discussion.

Examples of Findings

• Tier 3 vocabulary enabled students to think deeply about concepts such as ‘creation’. Language such as ‘ex-nihilo’, infinite past, finite past and absolute beginning when pre-taught explicitly helped students to speak about the beginning of the universe.
• Argument analysis emerged as powerful and practical. Students needed help to avoid substituting Tier 3 terms for more well-known words.
• Student panels suggested there was high credibility in the purpose of learning these terms.
• Disciplinary reasoning happened ‘live’ in some of our student panels.
• Students became more aware of the ways to criticise a conclusion by objecting to premises.
• Overall, we found that students were willing to engage with philosophical reasoning as a process or ‘extended project’ and we feel this mitigates against ‘early closure’ (Ashley, 2005 quoted in Stones and Fraser-Pearce, 2021).

Current and Future Developments

We have developed oracy tasks with authentic and accountable student talk through a Talk Moves approach (particularly Turn and Talk and Push for Justification). We have developed multiple choice questions to use at the end of a learning sequence which ask students to analyse an argument as valid but not sound, not valid or sound and then use logical chains of reasoning, tier 3 vocabulary to justify their claims. We are applying some of these oracy opportunities into other areas of RE such as theology (justifying interpretations based on texts) and this year sociology (justifying qualitative statements by sociologists and media based on quantitative data such as the 2021 census).

We are interested in the work of Stephen Toulmin (1958) in general and, in RE, how argument is conceived in curricula and syllabi, especially the differences and similarities between the disciplines of Theology, Philosophy, History and Human Sciences. We are interested in how these considerations might contribute to epistemic literacy. Please do get in touch if you are interested in these or related themes. crodriguez@dret.co.uk

References

Alexis Stones and Jo Fraser-Pearce. Some pupils should know better (because there is better knowledge than opinion). Interim findings from an empirical study of pupils’ and teachers’ understandings of knowledge and big questions in Religious Education, Journal of Religious Education 69 (353-366): 2021.

Stephen Toulmin. The Uses of Argument, Cambridge University Press: 1958.