Does One Stand to Gain by Combining Art with Philosophy? A Study of Fourth-Year College (13/14 Years of Age) Philosophical Writings Produced Within the PreCPhi/Philosophemes Corpus

Abstract

Creative thinking is sometimes neglected by schools. Introducing philosophy in schools represents a commitment to balancing the development of logical and creative thinking, currently exercised only orally. In the present study, the focus is on writing. Firstly, the value of authentic pupil writings is underscored. The pupils and students studied wrote texts for "Adolescence et Société", a magazine produced by researchers. 100 students' works, written by philosophizing students in fourth-year college in France, culled from the PreCPhi/Philosophemes Corpus (1,300 texts collected from 43 classrooms) were studied in order to measure the progress of philosophizing students between a pre-test and a post-test following the introduction of a pedagogical tool that unites Art with Philosophy, Philo & Carto. Their writing skills were measured according to the following five dimensions: linguistic, philosophical, cognitive, reflective and creative. Performance measures, calculated on group averages and applied to the group's variance between the pre-and the post-tests, were related to each dimension. Linguistic performance (presence of an introduction and conclusion) did not progress, remaining subject to pupils' academic level. Philosophical, cognitive, creative and reflective performance increased significantly, or at least confirmed the trend. Reasoning, metaphors, conceptual differences and discourse ownership increased, while anecdotal examples decreased. These increases were accompanied by an increase in the post-test variance: gaps between the strongest and the weakest performances widened, except in the case of questioning, personal examples and generation of doubt, which were at the core of the effect produced. The study validates the fact that the Art and Philosophy link promises unprecedented educational prospects with regard to the production of early quality philosophical writings. This will require validation with other samplings.

Improving the quality of philosophical writing: experimentation on the first philosophical compositions of 12 and 13-year-old pupils

“…This tendency to explore an alternative route may lead to a change in point of view, reversing the direction of a text's local or general reasoning (Cassidy & Christie, 2013). So, the creative component of the quality of philosophical writing can be assessed by the quality of divergence produced by the writer (Auriac-Slusarczyk et al, 2018;Maire et al, 2018). Some pupils' texts collected in this study exemplify this notion.…”

“…When applied to philosophical writing, the number of concepts addressed in the text (key ideas) can be counted within the textual planning process, in both the produced text and the draft. Similarly, the manner in which the writer makes distinctions between these concepts and does or does not build on them to structure the text can be compared to the mode of planning and reflect the text's logical quality (Auriac-Slusarczyk et al, 2018;Maire et al, 2018). For example, in our study, some students (writing on the topic of dreams) made local distinctions (dream/nightmare: "Dreams are gentle and nice, but nightmares are strong and sometimes violent").…”

“…Due to the lack of benchmarks in philosophy, we proposed a minimal definition of philosophical composition in our previous work (Auriac-Slusarczyk et al, 2018;Maire et al, 2018), that might include the writings of young students whose level of schooling is well below the possible exercise of composition writing (see Choulet, Folsheid, & Wunenburger, 1992). In this minimalist perspective, philosophical writing lies somewhere at the crossroads between dissertation (linguistic and logical aspects) and invention (creative aspects).…”

“…Lipman insisted on the role of metaphorical thinking, which he considers to be of an ampliative rather than explanatory type (Lipman, 1995, p.241) and involves a general mechanism of proportionality in the similarities mentioned. So, the creative component of the quality of philosophical writing can be assessed by counting the number of metaphors produced by the writer (Auriac-Slusarczyk et al, 2018;Maire et al, 2018). Moreover, creative thinking is based heavily on the exploratory divergent thinking capacity, i.e.…”

“…The long-term goal of this current exploratory study is to introduce an experimental device for philosophical discussion combining art and philosophy in middle school classes (Maire et al, 2018;Slusarczyk, 2017). Thus, this study is preparatory and aims to verify the extent to which artistic support may or may not positively influence the writing process, and to test the possible different impacts of media and topics leading to good philosophical composition among middle school students.…”