Delicate Dancing: Creating a Shared Language
Meet Winston C. Thompson:
William H. and Laceryjette V. Casto Professorship in Interprofessional Education; Associate Professor, Educational Studies; Associate Professor, Philosophy (by courtesy); Co-director, Center for Ethics and Human Values, Ohio State University.
The Saturday plenary session at the upcoming PLATO Conference will open with a panel discussion: “Embracing Difficult Conversations: The Intersection of Ethics and Civics Education.” Winston Thompson will be one of five featured panelists. Here are paraphrased excerpts from a conversation with Winston.
“I found my way to philosophy as a child growing up in a home with what seemed like endless bookshelves. I couldn’t read all the books – they were about social work and sociology, my parents’ professions – but simply taking in the titles as I walked by them grabbed my attention. More than this: they introduced me to the fact that the world is full of ideas and theories.
No surprise: I grew up to be an avid reader. One book that stands out in my entry to philosophy is Sophie’s World: A Novel about the History of Philosophy by Jostein Gaarder. Reading about this inquisitive young girl who comes to understand the artifice of her own reality initiated me into the ongoing conversation of philosophy. I realized that I was a philosopher too, but even more importantly, that there were other people like me and that I belonged to their community. It felt like a homecoming.
I didn’t take any philosophy classes in high school. I tried. When I heard that there was going to be a Theory of Knowledge class I enrolled right away. But since I was the only student in my high school who had enrolled in the course, it was canceled just before the academic year began. Until college I felt like a philosopher in exile. I triple majored in philosophy, religion, and sociology and learned how to ask questions about what we owe one another. I began thinking about how different people in different faith traditions and under different social circumstances responded to the core of those questions. The education class I took during my last year of college became my fulcrum. I learned how education was a vital context in which we could think about core moral questions and responses, about social circumstances, social mobility, ethics, and, ultimately, justice. From there, it was a short step to studying philosophy of education.
Some of my work, along with John Tillson (Liverpool Hope University), focuses on clarifying the ethics of discipline in schools. As we see it, much philosophical theorizing about discipline and punishment is shaped by the way adults interact with the state in carceral environments. We find this somewhat regrettable because many people don’t have a direct experience of being incarcerated, but many of us were, as children, subject to various forms of discipline. We take seriously the idea that children as persons who have moral interests that are, at best, ill-defined in much of the existing justifications of school punishment.
I am also interested in the overlap of civic and scholarly virtues. In both spheres, ideally, we tend to praise related traits: curiosity, openness, receptivity, eagerness to engage across different points of view. When you study together, alongside one another, the temperature that rises during many of our political discussions often drops. The goal isn’t to have our own opinions win in a competitive landscape, but to reframe the encounter with others so that we work collaboratively rather than competitively.
The Center for Ethics and Human Values is committed to providing these opportunities. We work on campus and beyond. This is delicate, nuanced work. You have to know how and when to bring up your perspective on a range of issues. As a professor, I have to think about how much of my own perspective to share with my students in a given classroom space. I also have to take into account how my students perceive me – my gender, race, class. How much do people presume about me? With whom and how do I share my perspective so that we can have a productive discussion that will be deep and rigorous without forcing us to retreat to our respective corners? It’s a dance. Good dance partners don’t step on each other’s toes but allow each other some freedom of movement to express what needs to be expressed, in all our dimensions. In these difficult conversations, we try to figure out how far we can go. How can I help create an environment in which we both feel safe to tell each other what we need to say so that we can engage in the kind of high quality conversation that we both desire.
This work and these questions are important because I think we are in a Tower of Babel moment. Underlying the challenge of engaging in difficult conversations is the meta-challenge of communication. How do we navigate a world in which positions differ so widely, in which the standards for what counts as meaningful discussions range as widely as they do? As we move toward talking with each other rather than past one another, philosophers can help us create a shared language. How do we meaningfully speak to each other, discern each other’s core concerns; and even more important, listen to one another?”
Appropriately, we end with questions.
