Philosophy is an elective subject in secondary education in the Netherlands, which is not often studied in the context of citizenship education. This is probably because only a minority of students participate in philosophy classes in the upper grades of secondary education (approximately 2-5% of all students). However, especially in the years 2022-2025 philosophy is particularly interesting for those studying how citizenship education can be taught, because the higher general track students study a range of philosophical ideas about democracy for their final exams (Spoelstra et al., 2021).This paper presents a qualitative analysis of three philosophy classes about freedom of speech. The lesson transcripts, pre- and post-observation interviews with 3 teachers and 15 students (5 from each class) are coded thematically with a framework for four teacher responsibilities during philosophical discussion in moral education. These four responsibilities are: teachers have an organizational responsibility to facilitate lesson activities such as classroom dialogue to facilitate thinking about democracy, an epistemic responsibility to warrant valid reasoning and recognition of established facts during the lesson, a pedagogic responsibility to create a safe and open classroom climate and a moral responsibility to find the right balance between value communication and stimulation (Leenders & Veugelers, 2004; Rombout et al., 2022; Sprod, 2001). The main research question was: how do philosophy teachers realize these four responsibilities to facilitate their students’ thinking about democracy in a lesson about freedom of speech and how to teacher and students evaluate these responsibilities in this lesson?The findings contain rich descriptions of lesson activities such as considering borderline cases, facilitating teacher-led dialogue, organizing debate, and learning about philosophers’ arguments. These are supplemented with reflections of the participants on teacher neutrality and how open and safe the classroom climate was during these lessons.
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“Municipal Youth Work taken over by Christians”. (Binnenlands Bestuur, 2009) This heading refers to the work of Youth for Christ in an Amsterdam neighbourhood. This organisation, successful in Youth Work nationwide, last year came out first in an open competition of the Amsterdam district De Baarsjes. Because of this they were commissioned to undertake all the youth work in this multicultural neighbourhood. The conditions were not to evangelise and not to limit recruitment of personnel inside their own circle but to recruit from outside the organisation as well. When they later appeared to have put a job advertisement only on their own website, this led to heated debates. Finally Youth for Christ acknowledged and rectified this mistake. This example is a concrete illustration of the actual and sometimes delicate relationships between philosophy of life and social work
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In this paper we explore how the collaboration between Design Research and Philosophy of technology can be profitable for both disciplines. From three case studies where Philosophy of Technology theories and methods were applied in a design context we show how these projects profited from a more reflexive perspective. Then we analyse the three cases again to show how these design projects also lead to a better understanding from a Philosophy of Technology perspective. In putting the in principle rather abstract theories in design practice, the consequences become clearer and designing actual things thus provides a laboratory to test philosophical frameworks in real life. One can say that the Philosophy of Technology, besides thinking and talking, proceeds to action. Not only Philosophy of Technology with the head, but also Philosophy of Technology with the hands. Therefore, in analogy with the empirical turn in Philosophy of Technology before, we present this collaboration with design as the ‘Practical Turn in Philosophy of Technology’. In: Proceedings of DRS 2018: Design as a catalyst for change (Vol. I, pp. 190-200)
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