“Me and Socrates, we are tight friends”: Co-constructing a polis of teachers and philosophers of education.

Abstract

It is an educational truism that reflection helps teachers to be more effective and ethical. Building on John Dewey’s assertion that we learn by doing and reflecting, and Hannah Arendt’s that reflection is strengthened through discourse among peers, I argue that a valuable role for teacher educators is to be interlocutors with whom teachers can reflect. Adding to previous scholarship that positions philosophers of education as ideal interlocutors, I focus on the nature of the relationship between teachers and philosophers of education. Mirroring the format of the Socratic dialogues, I include three dialogues to explore how teachers and philosophers of education might reflect together. The first dialogue is the transcription of an interview about reflection and teaching between a former elementary school teacher colleague and me (then a doctoral student in philosophy of education). The second is a written dialogue that brings the interview into communication with Plato and Arendt to further elucidate what it means to reflect as a teacher and with teachers. The third dialogue occurred many years later as a group of philosophers of education reflected upon dialogues 1 and 2 to consider how they might better engage with teachers.