idea for an afterschool program/club focusing on socratic dialogue, critical thinking skills, and Civil discussion -- need advice!

Hi everyone,

I won't get into my background too much except to say that I have a degree in Linguistics and Philosophy and have several years of experience in tutoring early university students in writing, which most often translates to critical thinking and basic logical and rhetorical skills. Anyways:

I have been researching political polarization and dialogue and am becoming increasingly concerned about the way that, in the public sphere, people are taught to react to positions they disagree with. I won't get into the details, but its startling, and seems to get worse and more polarized as students pass through university. While trying to think about how to engage the community best with regards to this problem, because I think its so important, I got the idea for an afterschool program or club for high school students (probably restricted to Juniors/Seniors) where students can discuss political, philosophical and social problems of their choosing in a controlled and challenging setting where they are not afraid to share their opinions. The specific details vary in my mind so far, since I'm only brainstorming, but I think that a group focused on engaging in Socratic dialogue would be very beneficial to students that age, since rhetorical and logical skills seem to have gone down a lot in just the 6 years that I worked with university students (2011-2017).

As of now, my idea is to have students pick a topic (or for the teacher/adult to pick a topic from a bunch they suggest) and let someone begin the discussion and let others respond, with the adult coming in only for a few things: to guide the discussion by asking students to clarify their position, ask clarificatory questions about their position, or disclose the presuppositions of their argument, or to provide "devil's advocate" arguments in the absence of students comfortable with doing so.

I think this is something that would have interested me in high school, and been very useful. Very few college courses I took didn't involve some kind of argumentative debate, in writing or in person, and these are just the skills I want to expose young people to: clarity of information and information organization as well as the ability to listen to an opposing viewpoint civilly and respond in a logical in coherent way instead of relying on "party views".

Anyways, a few questions:

1. Any suggestions in general that anyone can give, please do.

2. I am not a teacher, just a normal guy in the community. I know a teacher at my old high school near by who I imagine would be interested in this, but may not have time. If he is in charge of the group, is there some legal stricture on my involvement if I am not formally affiliated with the school and just acting as a volunteer? I know I couldn't do something like this at a school on my own, which is reasonable.

3. In the absence of opportunity to do something like this in a school, I would turn to my local library which has a lot of programming geared towards teenagers, but I think it would be harder to create engagement. Any suggestions appreciated.

Any other related information is welcome! Thanks.

Submitted November 26, 2018 at 04:23AM by Dessicated_Fig https://ift.tt/2FR0bM6