Ongoing Efforts

Ancient Tragedy in the Community

In partnership with the Department of Philosophy and the Department of Classics, and with support from the Society for Classical Studies, Humanities for the Public Good, Carolina Public Humanities, and the Department of Music, this is an annually recuring project that aims to create an intergenerational space for community members to grapple with life’s inherent tensions and contradictions, and to ask questions that are grounded in the richness and lived experience of folks across the lifespan. By watching, discussing, and in some cases reading these dramas aloud, participants were able to personally experience living as moral beings who must confront a world that is riddled with contradiction, vulnerability, and loss. All events are free, accessible, open to the public, and eligible for Campus Life Experience credit.

More information about this year’s program is available here: go.unc.edu/alcestis

Service-Learning: National High School Ethics Bowl

“Ethics Bowl and Democratic Deliberation” is an undergraduate community engagement course in Philosophy offered in the fall semester. In this course, UNC undergraduates have the unique opportunity to combine the philosophical study of ethics with service to high school students across the country. Students in the course master the major ethical frameworks philosophers use to think about the rightness and wrongness of actions, our obligations to others, and moral life more broadly. Students also learn how to distill complex philosophical ideas and to facilitate productive discussions with a young audience. With this training in ethical theory and pre-college pedagogy, undergraduates serve as coaches and advisors to new startup high school teams across the country who are competing in an annual ‘borderless’ competition event near the end of the semester. The Ethics Bowl competition presents an opportunity to sharpen the participants’ ability to reason through complex moral issues, and invites us to consider the philosophical and civic foundations of education. Students also reflect on the ways in which our discursive practices can sustain and impede the health of our democracy.

• Click Here to see our course flyer.
• Click Here to watch our NHSEBBridge 2021-2022 launch video
• Click Here to read about our 2021-2022 outreach efforts

Service-Learning: Intergenerational Philosophy

In partnership with the Orange County Department of Aging, we are committed to creating opportunities and spaces for intergenerational encounter and intergenerational dialogue. In “Philosophy across the Lifespan” experiential education course in philosophy, UNC undergraduates participate in regular discussions with older adults in the Triangle Area. The experiential and intergenerational character of the course provides an occasion for students to reflect on the nature and aims of education, including the prospect and value of lifelong learning beyond schooling and the social and civic ends of education at all levels. By creating spaces for intergenerational dialogue, we hope to draw on the wisdom and experience of older adults in the community, and to facilitate understanding across generations. As always, we hope to resist the narrative that adults beyond schooling years are unable to exercise their minds fruitfully, or unable to contribute to the ongoing projects of humanistic inquiry and public deliberation. Through in-class discussions, writing assignments, and community interactions (both written and verbal), students practice inviting others into a shared space of reasoning and thinking.

Philosophy in Juvenile Justice Centers

Thanks to the support of UNC’s Humanities for the Public Good, the Outreach Program launched a multi-year program entitled “Dialogue and Transformation: Bringing Philosophy to Juvenile Justice Centers in North Carolina.” The program began in March with a virtual course on Plato’s Republic with high school students at Cabarrus Youth Development Center, to be followed by additional offerings to both students and teachers in the Juvenile Justice education network in NC and the production of classroom integration resources centered on the history of philosophy. Plato’s Republic is unique in that it serves as a nexus for some of the most enduring philosophical questions, including justice, human happiness, virtue & vice, the aims of education, the best political regime, gender & the family, art & morality, and the afterlife.

Deliberative Pedagogy for Teachers

We regularly work with teachers to produce curricular resources, assignments, and lesson plans that promote ethical inquiry and deliberation in the classroom. Our aim is integrate ethical reflection into K-12 schools and to create opportunities for pre-service and in-service teachers to integrate ethical reflection into their classrooms and to reflect on the normative dimensions of their professional practice by using deliberative pedagogical techniques. The groundwork for this project has been established through ongoing efforts to explicate the pedagogical core of Ethics Bowl, to codify the norms that should govern our discursive practices in and out of the classroom, and to create student and teacher-facing opportunities for philosophical reflection, ethical growth, and the exercise of civic agency. Our strategies are rooted in pedagogical practices that have emerged from the Philosophy for Children movement and from recent work on deliberative democracy.

Outreach Director Michael Vazquez shared some strategies for facilitating deliberation in the classroom during the inaugural UNC Faculty Symposium on Deliberative Pedagogy:

Philosophy by Mail with Correctional Facilities

Thanks to a partnership with North Carolina’s Department of Public Safety, the Outreach Program offers extracurricular discussion programs with adult correctional facilities across the state of North Carolina (to date, we have partnered with 7 prisons, and have sent and received hundreds of letters of correspondence). The basic aim of the Philosophy by Mail program is to facilitate philosophical reflection on questions and issues at the core of human existence and to create opportunities for meaningful social interaction. Recent readings have included Jennifer Morton’s “Philosophy as an Antidote to Injustice”, Martha Nussbaum’s “Beyond Anger,” María Lugones’, “Playfulness, ‘World’-Traveling, and Loving Perception,” Albert Camus’ “Myth of Sisyphus”, William Clifford’s “The Duty of Inquiry,” and Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” and Peter Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.”

Philosophy for Older Adults

At its core, philosophy is about asking perennial and intractable questions and critically reflecting on our beliefs and values. We believe it is best practiced in the company of others, in a social and intergenerational setting where we can draw on the richness of our experiences and backgrounds to get closer to the truth. We regularly partner with retirement communities across the Triangle Area to provide philosophy programming of various kinds. We also partner with local agencies and organizations to reach adults who did not live in congregate facilities. Most recently we have partnered with Bartlett Reserve, Carolina Meadows, Carol Woods, Galloway Ridge, the Retired Faculty Association at UNC, and the Orange County Department of Aging for regularly-recurring philosophy programming.

Thanks to a new partnership with the Orange County Department of Aging and a grant from the Society for Classical Studies, the Department of Philosophy continues to offer Ancient Wisdom, a historically grounded entry point into ethical and philosophical reflection about happiness, virtue, aging, and justice. Meeting information for the 2021-2022 academic year is available here: https://chapelhillmagazine.com/event-directory/ancient-wisdom-discussion-group-with-unc-philosophy

Philosophy in K-12 Schools

We work with a number of primary and secondary schools across the Triangle Area to integrate philosophy and ethics into the classroom. With some of our primary school we partners we use picture books (such as Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad stories, Crockett Johnson’s Harold and the Purple Crayon, Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, and Leo Lionni’s Frederick, Tillie and the Wall, and Fish is Fish) and fun activities to generate conversations with children about values and big philosophical questions. With our secondary school partners we introduce students to the practice of philosophy, the basics of philosophical methodology, how to construct arguments in support of one’s positions, and how to critically evaluate reasons. We also provide coaching assistance to teams preparing for the North Carolina High School Ethics Bowl, as well as structured programming around ethics that extends beyond the NHSEB competition season.

We also offer programs specifically for K-12 teachers. In addition to our individual consulting services, we have recently initiated a series on Educational Ethics for Educators. You can read about our first iteration of this program, offered in partnership with the Morehead Planetarium & Science Center, here: https://parrcenter.unc.edu/event/educational-ethics-in-pandemic-times.

Ethics in the Workplace

In partnership with UNC Human Resources, we regularly offer a training module on ethics in the workplace, centering on case studies and intentional discursive practices that aim to promote a collaborative and vibrant workplace culture. The Outreach Program also works with other organizations, including the City of Durham, to provide ethics training workshops and philosophy programming more generally. We stand ready to work with specific organizations to craft a tailored plan for integrating ethics programming into the workplace, and to providing workshops on ethical leadership.