John Torrey

John Torrey is a philosophy PhD candidate at the University of Memphis. He studies how Black Americans are recognized in society, effects on their right to rectification, and whether precollege philosophy can help diversify the philosophical canon and participants.

1. What civically engaged project(s) or work do you do with students? What is your role?

The Philosophy Department at the University of Memphis has an outreach program, Philosophical Horizons, which works with Memphis-area precollege schools to do philosophy discussion groups and even philosophy classes. (The program has been on hiatus for the last year as we undergo structural changes, but we plan to continue our programming in the spring of 2018.) The target audience for this programming has been underrepresented groups in philosophy, with a specific aim towards offering these students exposure to philosophy and its benefits sooner than their freshman year of college. This has been my primary means of doing civically engaged projects, and as part of that project I have been responsible for developing school partnerships, recruiting graduate and undergraduate students to participate, training them to do philosophy discussion groups with their groups, and evaluating the process. Part of many of our discussion groups is a component of moral and political philosophy, something I consider important for being a civically engaged person in society.

 

2. Give an example of a successful project.

Our outreach program has been able to successfully run philosophy outreach discussion groups throughout the school year for nearly 10 years by collaborating with local teachers, administrators, and students to identify the specific goals and determine a curriculum for a particular discussion group. Some questions we have addressed are the nature of friendship, authority and when it should or should not be respected, and the ideas of agency and freedom as children or young adults. We often use children’s books, like Frog and Toad or Toni Morrison’s The Big Box,  to address these questions, or use real world or fictional scenarios to prompt discussions. We have generally had two facilitators per classroom or discussion group, which would have 8-20 students, and could include multiple classrooms in one school and multiple schools during the semester. At our peak, we operated in 8 different schools during one school year! One way that we knew our program was successful was the positive responses of teachers and students about how students’ questions in class and student interactions inside and outside of class improved. As a discussion facilitator, watching their philosophical abilities grow over time is evidence enough of a successful project. I have seen students change how they address each other, how they listen to each other, and how they express their own original thoughts on a wide range of philosophical topics.

 

3. What do you think students gain from doing this civic engagement?

Students who do precollege philosophy often have improved moral reasoning, moral communication, and critical thinking skills, and they are developing the toolkit to be able to engage their communities. Particularly for underserved and underrepresented minorities that are not given access to this kind of engagement, being exposed to different ways of describing and analyzing one’s self and one’s relation to the world can be invaluable.

 

4. What does the civic engagement project offer to wider communities?

If by wider communities you mean a larger community, precollege philosophy discussion groups are great tools to respectfully engage the perspectives of not just students in classrooms but also after-school program participants, prisoners, and even the homeless. Many different communities can participate in this kind of work and the same benefit of developing a philosophical toolkit for these communities to analyze and address their world are valuable for all of these groups.

 

5. Why do you choose to be involved?

During college, I worked with a nonprofit organization, Finding Empowerment Through Education (F.E.T.E.), that did a lot of character education with young Black children at after-school programs. This kind of work really invigorated me—there is nothing like seeing the eyes of a student light up when they are doing philosophical thinking and feel like they are being listened to. Additionally, doing precollege philosophy with underrepresented groups helps develop future potential diverse philosophers in the world, something that we could certainly use more of. Lastly, I feel an obligation to do this because I think philosophy is immensely valuable for doing introspective work about who we are as individuals and as part of a community, as well as valuable for providing a language and a set of theoretical tools to engage our communities and try to make them the best that we can. Many people have something important to add to our communities but do not feel like their voices will be heard or even can be heard. While I can’t guarantee that they will be heard, I do think that exposing them to alternative ways of processing and describing their world gives them more chances to be able to speak.

 

6. How does this work connect to your own civically engaged philosophy?

My research is in three separate but related areas: how Black Americans are recognized in society and what that does to their moral rights; diversifying philosophy both in its canon as well as its participants; and looking at the connection between precollege philosophy and diversifying the philosophical canon. One particular connection that I plan on addressing in my dissertation is that how Blacks (or any group) in America is socially recognized is informed through our society’s institutions, particularly education. To change how Blacks are socially recognized, we must change how Blacks are valued in society. One way is by highlighting in educational spaces how central Black contributions are for society. My position is that precollege philosophy should be commonly introduced so that in the process of changing how the Black experience is taught to the public, it can be done with a public that is also being introduced to critical thinking skills and the ability to ask philosophical questions about why these experiences are uniquely valuable.

 

7. Did you have an experience as a student or in your life that lead you to embrace your civic engagement work?

I come from a family of educators, mostly K-12 teachers and a few principals. Something that has never left me has been the importance of educating others and helping people learn something that they either did not know or did not know that they already knew. I view precollege philosophy as something that, in many instances, people did not know they already knew. Philosophy, in general, is not seen as a pragmatic pursuit and is often considered esoteric. I suppose in college was when I really noticed how people overlook the value of philosophy, and part of my mission in doing this work is to help demonstrate the usefulness of philosophy and philosophical pursuits. Everyone benefits from doing philosophy.

 

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