Michele Flammia

Contemporary educators view classroom dialogue as an effective pedagogy that promotes critical thinking and, consequently, disciplinary knowledge. Yet, many current dialogue-based models may not be sufficiently robust to help students learn to discriminate among competing claims and, whenever appropriate, change their initial positions. In this article, we introduce an instructional approach we call Socratic Challenge. Inspired by the centuries-old model used by Socrates, as well as contemporary research in education, this approach relies on brief and critical exchanges between the teacher and the learner in the context of strong counterintuitive arguments. We discuss the importance of truth as a collective goal of a dialogue designed to foster the development of critical thinking and examine the role of cognitive dissonance and social interaction in supporting key practices of Socratic Challenge: strengthening the critical-analytic function of dialogue and attending to students’ epistemic emotions. Next, we illustrate a step-by-step process for implementing Socratic Challenge. To show how Socratic Challenge can offer opportunities for students to progressively recognize errors in their reasoning and process the emotions associated with being wrong, we draw on transcripts from a discussion in a high-school philosophy class. We then argue that truth-seeking dialogue should not be restricted to a specific disciplinary context. Instead, educators should capitalize on the transdisciplinary nature of philosophy and use it to promote student learning across school curricula. While the contribution of this article is largely theoretical, we draw on the concept of Socratic Challenge to question some of the common assumptions and instructional practices aimed at promoting critical thinking and disciplinary knowledge through dialogue. This analysis exposes disagreements about the role of truth and critique during dialogue, providing guidance for future empirical studies.

Socratic dialogue is nowadays often invoked as a model in education, and several educational approaches explicitly claim to be inspired by it (Naccari, 2003; Shah, 2008; Delić & Bećirović, 2016). However, contemporary versions depart profoundly from its original form as expressed in the Platonic dialogues, reinterpreting the role of the teacher in the dialogical exchange and referring to different epistemological criteria (cf. Shields, 1953; Reich, 1998; Dinkins, & Cangelosi, 2019; Marshall, 2019). The aim of this paper is to highlight, on the one hand, how such a distortion of the classical model results in the renunciation of the heuristic and transformative functions of Socratic dialogue, and on the other hand, to propose an alternative model of dialogic teaching that restores these functions while maintaining its practicability in contemporary school contexts. Specifically, the role of epistemological relativism and the facilitator in constructivist education are identified as the critical issues in the construction of effective dialogical confrontation in the post-truth era.

This research project analyzes a strategy for teaching philosophy in secondary school inspired by Socratic dialogue, which aims at the creation and effective management of cognitive dissonance as a tool for promoting critical thinking, called Socratic Challenge (SC). The research originates from workshops held in the years 2016/2019 in a technical and vocational institute in the province of Varese, in which I participated as the creator and conductor, involving the voluntary participation of about 150 students. The research questions are: What are the characteristics of the Socratic Challenge? Can it constitute a teaching methodology to be proposed? Under what conditions? Within what project framework? The empirical research is qualitative, naturalistic, and exploratory (Lumbelli, 1984), specifically a self-study (Hamilton & Pinnegar 2009), divided into two phases. In the first phase, data regarding motivation and perceptions of training impact were collected through in-depth interviews of students (16) and analyzed using the criteria of reflective thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke 2019). In the second phase, the workshops were repeated remotely in technical and vocational institutes in Milan and the province, involving 113 students who were surveyed with a qualitative questionnaire. The workshops were recorded and the discussion interactions were analyzed according to a qualitative inductive approach that refers to Constructivist Grounded Theory (Charmaz, 2006). Results show how this dialogical instructional strategy in philosophy teaching can be considered an effective alternative to the historical-philosophical approach predominant in the Italian tradition (Illetterati 2007).

This paper is a reflection on the potential of teaching methodologies that focus on the phenomenon of dissonance or cognitive conflict. In a multicultural and increasingly polarized society, the capacity to question one’s own beliefs and behaviors is certainly one of the skills that the educational system should promote, and the development of this competence is closely related to the effective control of the experience of dissonance originated by new information. Starting from a brief reconstruction of the pedagogical and psychological literature on the subject, I will try to analyze the complexity of the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance by proposing an explanation of the contradictory results of empirical research, identifying as the main problematic nodes the emotional regulation of conflict and the role of the teacher as a facilitator of the process of conceptual change.

Even though it has been a privileged form of philosophical inquiry since its origins, dialogue seems to have a marginal role in the teaching of philosophy in Italian schools. The attempt to overcome this paradox through methodologies from the Anglo-Saxon tradition, such as debate, does not seem to respond to the intrinsic needs of the discipline to promote a problematizing attitude towards reality because it is based on a formalization of the debate that emphasizes the competition but neglects self-confrontation and the real questioning of one’s pre-knowledge. Through an analysis of the related literature, this paper proposes a recovery of the Socratic model of dialogue, as a tool to induce cognitive dissonance, a necessary condition for the development of critical thinking.