Sharyn Clough

Sharyn Clough is a Professor of Philosophy in the School of History, Philosophy, and Religion at Oregon State University. She is also Director of Undergraduate Studies in Philosophy, Curriculum Coordinator for the Peace Literacy Program, and Director of Phronesis Lab: Experiments in Engaged Ethics. She has research expertise in philosophy of science, feminist theory, and contemporary pragmatism.

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

I direct Phronesis Lab: Experiments in Engaged Ethics. The Lab came out of a 2012 summer reading group on classical and contemporary pragmatism with Oregon State University (OSU) philosophers Sean Creighton and Matt Gaddis (graduate students in the MA in Applied Ethics program, since graduated) and Sione Filimoehala (at the time a philosophy undergraduate student). In December of 2012, newly hired philosophy faculty Stephanie Jenkins joined, and in early 2013, Phronesis Lab was born.

We chose the name “phronesis,” often translated as “practical wisdom,” from Aristotle. With John Dewey, we wanted to encourage the idea that wisdom isn’t something you have, it’s something you do. It is a skill that can be learned, coached, and improved with practice. We organize the work in our lab around the informal testing of hypotheses concerning ideas such as “peace,” “social justice,” and “civic engagement” in practical context. How are these ideas deployed in our day-to-day activities? How might we test to see which kinds of deployment work well and which don’t? While we don’t run formal experiments we often make use of experimental data, and any other tools we find useful.

2. Give an example of a successful project.

Initially, we investigated the possibility of starting a charter school modeled after Dewey’s Laboratory School in Chicago. We then learned that College Hill High School, an alternative program for youth placed at risk, was just a few blocks from the OSU campus. Although the “at-risk” category covers a number of different circumstances and life experiences, the high school students all shared experiences of disenfranchisement. We joined the school’s community steering committee to see what needs we might help fill. Within a couple of months, we formulated a very general hypothesis that we could:

• Work with the College Hill students to help us test philosophy modeled as engaged, participatory, experiential, and skill-based;
• With curricula focused on community-level, social-justice content;
• To achieve increases in student-citizen identity, participation, motivation, and self-efficacy.

The five founders then formed an instructional team, aided by two community volunteers. We led a pragmatist-themed seminar on peace and social justice designed with and for the College Hill students, who were able to earn credit toward their high school diplomas. The seminar was designed to help the students identify and address social and political barriers that keep people from participating in their communities as engaged citizens. The students identified bullying, homelessness, and poverty as barriers; we helped them develop skills to address the barriers, such as activism, persuasive speech, research, and writing. We invited in community leaders such as the Chief of Police and the director of the local youth homeless shelter to help the students research their projects.

The aim was for the seminar to nurture a “living laboratory” for civic engagement, praxis, and pedagogy for the high school students and for the undergraduate and graduate student instructors. The seminar met twice a week for the full 10-week spring quarter, and the instructors met an additional hour each week for grading and discussion. The seminar met on the OSU campus: The instructional team walked the students to campus from the high school. Despite the proximity, most of the high school students had never been to OSU. Getting them comfortable with the collegiate setting was an important experience of agency that many of them identified as a critical feature of the seminar.

For the second and third iterations of the seminar, the instructional team included as a community volunteer one of the high school students, Tenagne Downes, who had attended the first year and then graduated.

By the fourth iteration of the high school seminar I had a brand-new set of student instructors, so I decided to provide them with a more formal framework to help them with their teaching. I set up a 3-credit internship class-within-a-class for the university student-instructors; this included more structured weekly meetings for the team, as well as pedagogical readings and assignments. I successfully applied for funding to cover the cost of the internship credits for the university students.

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

OSU students report that they gain experience managing a classroom, evaluating written and oral presentations, and a clearer idea of what social justice and civic engagement looks like as engaged philosophical concepts on the ground. The high school students filled out very positive evaluations each iteration of the class. Eric Wright, the College Hill principal, had this to say:

I cannot begin to describe the incredible impact that the Phronesis program has had on the students of College Hill High School…Despite living in a college town, many College Hill students have not seen college as an option for their futures. This program has changed that for several of our students and that is something upon which I would like to build in the future. When our students have the opportunity to walk onto the campus, work alongside successful college students, and even contribute intelligently to the conversation, their whole view of themselves is challenged and they become open to many more possibilities. The work our students were able to engage in was transformative as well. Many of our students chose social justice issues that were close to home and celebrated their personal heritage in ways they had not done before. It was so exciting to see these students present their work and be recognized for their excellence.

4. What sorts of engaged projects are you working on now?

This year, Phronesis Lab is focused on peace, partnering with public philosopher Paul K. Chappell of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. Our programming and supporting website are oriented around “peace literacy,” which we view as a kind of phronesis—a set of skills necessary for successful social justice and civic engagement work. I am organizing with College Hill High School principal Eric Wright and a team of local high school teachers to incorporate peace literacy into public school settings as a model for other school districts around the country. OSU undergraduates from philosophy and the sciences are involved as interns, helping me design curricula and run workshops on peace literacy for K-12 teachers. Two alumni of our MA in Applied Ethics Program returned in the fall to facilitate workshops in peace literacy and liberatory practice for OSU faculty, staff and graduate students.

5. How does this work connect to your research?

My philosophical research over the last decade has been focused on the relationship between political values and empirical evidence, especially in science. I have argued that political values can function as empirical claims, and that where relevant and well-supported by evidence, values can increase the empirical strength of particular scientific theories. The seminar in peace and social justice for high school students, and the more recent workshops and curricular designs on peace literacy for teachers have marked a shift in my research. I now focus not only on showing that political values can have evidential support, but also on showing how such evidential deliberations can be effective in science contexts, classrooms, and workplaces, e.g., articulating the conditions and skills—the phronesis or practical wisdom—required for effective deliberation. For example, I now focus on the importance of skills like empathy and epistemic humility. A local newspaper recently did a profile on my work that links some of these themes.

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