Writing is the mind’s portable workbench of ideas, a means of holding your thoughts steady for a moment while you chip and chisel away to create meaning. You can choose to keep your words to yourself for a while or share them with others. You can discard them without anyone knowing they ever existed. And the wonder of it is that the writer’s workbench can accommodate a project of any size from a brief note to a long novel or a life journal.
What's good for the individual is also good for the collective. Writing holds people’s thoughts in place so others can reflect on them and respond.
In writing, we have at our disposal one of the greatest cognitive tools ever known to humankind. In schools we have a potential haven for dialogue about things that matter and a population of individuals with experiences and abilities that are both common and diverse.
You would expect to see, if not a hotbed for developing inventiveness and judgement, then at least a place where those two essential capacities are encouraged through regular talk and writing. But the ecosystems of schools are often not conducive to reflection and dialogue.
Over the last twenty years, I have been involved in a movement to engage students of all ages in philosophical enquiry with their peers. I’ve been heartened by how willing and able they are to reflect, through talk, on what to believe, do and value.
Yet despite the rewards that philosophical talk alone can bring, I’ve come to the conclusion that philosophical writing (philo-writing) should be used more regularly to support, enhance and communicate philosophical thinking.
When to philo-write
Philo-writing is always in a close relationship with both oral dialogue and private reflection. There are many opportunities to use it. For example:
- To record ideas for future refinement or elaboration.
- As a vehicle for private reflection
- To gather questions or key themes leading to enquiry through oral dialogue.
- As a means of activating prior knowledge and listing ‘what one knows’ prior to oral dialogue, writing or reading.
- As a way of remembering one’s research about a topic under examination.
- As a way of remembering questions or claims to check later through research.
- As a ‘thinking break’ during an oral dialogue to gather and sort ideas.
- As an alternative means of having a dialogue with others.
- As a way of gathering thoughts immediately after an oral dialogue.
- As a means of reflecting on an oral dialogue or a sequence of dialogues.
- As a means of responding to reading in preparation for oral dialogue or further writing.
- As a means of preparing one’s ideas for an audience.
- As a means of communicating one’s ideas to multiple audiences.
Audience and dialogue
The term ‘writing for an audience,' in the sense that it is used in school literacy lessons, is not the same as writing in a context of dialogical learning and teaching as intended here. Writing for an audience doesn't necessarily assume a response, writing dialogically does. When we ask students to write for an audience, we often mean an imaginary audience who, in reality do not respond. However, when writing is thought of dialogically, there is always an intended response, even if the writing is for oneself.
The most accessible audience for students is other students, their teachers and their families. When students write dialogically, they can engage these audiences.
So, philo-writing can be long or short but it arises from dialogue and leads back into dialogue. That's not to say that we shouldn’t introduce students to the concept of different audiences and appropriate expression for those audiences but that ongoing dialogue through talk, reading and writing should be paramount.
