Grace Lockrobin

Ciaran: So, could you tell me a bit more about Thinking Space? What the work involves, the different places it takes you, the people involved, and so on.

Grace: Sure, so to begin with it was just me as a freelancing philosopher-for-hire. That work was almost entirely in schools and it came at a time where there was unprecedented educational investment via the Labour Government funded ‘Creative Partnerships’ programme. The funding allowed me to do all kinds of things like philosophy in forests, philosophical treasure hunts, inquires in art galleries and immersive philosophical performances. In partnership with other philosophers and specialists from other disciplines, I was able to develop my practice at quite a pace. In 2009, we did Nozick's Experience Machine as an interactive role play with a load of Year 7's, with a great big budget and professional actors and stuff - awesome, so exciting. In another project, we got a group of disengaged teenagers together and over a year, we tried out loads of different inquiry-based learning experiences. So, we did a Crime Scene Investigation workshop one week, then photography, then clowning. We asked at the end of each week: what did it tell us about the concept of education? The result was a philosophical inquiry into the purpose of education with the most incredible resources to support students to re-engage in their own education.

This period of work, during which I was joined by my colleague Amber D’Albert, was absolutely fascinating. But it was also expensive and experimental and was never going to last. One way of looking at it is to think that that funding gave me unrealistic expectations of what a career as a community philosopher would be like. Certainly, those days are long gone! But there is a positive legacy: those years gave me a sense of creative imagination, I still ask: 'what if?' about all the projects that I do. Even though I don’t expect to have that kind of funding again, I get excited about what could be possible. I don't think "let's just do a philosophy session where an expert speaks for an hour and the audience ask a few questions".

In 2015, I turned the company into a Community Interest Company, which is somewhere between a private company and a charity; it's more of a trusted business formulation that potentially puts you in the running for public money. It allowed us to make bigger bids, most of which were unsuccessful! I was joined by a small team of philosophers and facilitators. Some used their membership to develop their own initiatives, others worked on ad hoc projects and a few just lent their moral support. We launched the company and then about three days later I realised I was expecting my first child… So, it went quickly from, "Yeah! Let's scale this up!" to "Oh god, how are we going to stay afloat?!". So, for the first couple of years of Thinking Space in this new form, I was holding things together with a newborn baby and no maternity leave. I ended up having my husband and baby follow me around on all kinds of projects which included filming for a BBC2 documentary The World According to Kids and taking part in the Education Endowment Foundation’s randomized control trial on the effectiveness of philosophy for children (P4C).

I’d scarcely recovered from the chaos of my first child when along came my second. At that point, the sustainability of Thinking Space became the goal for me rather than world domination. For that I have various members of our team over the years to thank, among them Jenny Young, Elizabeth Watkins and Sophie Collins. Because of them, we have been able to reach out to communities where voices are marginalised and do the kind of work we value most. For example, though the National Collaborative Outreach project, we’ve used philosophy to help disadvantaged young people think about their future; through the charity Ashiana, we have had conversations about beauty with mothers and children who are refugees and asylum seekers; and together with Mind the Gap Theatre we have worked with learning disabled artists to interrogate the value of their work.

Although our facilitation style often aspires to neutrality, the ethos that drives our work is not remotely neutral: we seek out ways for philosophy to do good in the world and in conversation with those we work with. This means responding to issues as they arise. In recent years, we've done some work with climate activists, about philosophical issues that are arising from the climate emergency. At the moment it's all about ethical decisions and COVID-19, so one of our members Kate Halliwell and I have just done some public philosophy with Sheffield University on the ethics of technological advancements such as contact tracing and vaccine passports.

So, as you’ll have gathered, our projects are varied in terms of content, but one of the interesting things about doing this kind of work is you don't have to be across all of the really complex philosophy around, say, privacy. If you've got a basic grounding in ethics, you can read up about it. While we rarely do a lot of didactic philosophy teaching, we do introduce content in a light-touch and open-ended way, as stimulus and provocations and in the way we facilitate the conversation. You can see it in the way we plan sessions, or invite particular people to speak, or draw on resources written by people who are experts. But the pedagogy that we use doesn't assume you know the philosophical canon, it doesn't assume you have read widely. Instead, we start with the concepts that you possess and the meanings and values that you put on those concepts. We try to meet people where they are, eliciting whatever it is that makes ideas seem significant to them, rather than saying, "You'll be familiar with the background of the dualism debate". Setting things up like that makes philosophy a club that people are excluded from. It might feel cosy from the inside, but from the outside it doesn’t look like a club worth joining!

Ciaran: That kind of meeting people where they are facilitating, not without content but striking a balance - I think that those who have public philosophy down best, they come to that kind of conclusion as well, I’ve found.

Grace: It depends on the format as well. I tend to use dialogic workshops for public philosophy, whether online or face-to-face, whereas you think about public philosophers like Barry Lam, he produces Hi Phi Nation, a podcast which is wonderfully content-rich. His interview style is expertly dialogic, but it would be remiss of him not to treat the interviewees as experts and to let them teach the audience what they know. Then there is someone like Michael Sandel who facilitates large public meetings for the BBC but also teachers dense open-access courses for Harvard. He is using the right methodologies for the format. I do notice in some philosophy in schools, the content is very light. There can be a deep methodological commitment to striping away all substantive philosophical teaching. Sometimes this is a useful practice for the autonomy of students and the professional development of teachers as facilitators. But in our work, while the emphasis is on the method of facilitating dialogue, there is definitely space for philosophical content too, so long as we don’t take over the conversation.

Ciaran: How has Thinking Space changed the way that you think about what it means to be doing philosophy? I'm particularly interested because it sounds very much like it's been informed by your understanding of pedagogy and philosophy of education. I feel like you might have a richer picture of this then some people who may have come from philosophy but have maybe not reflected as much on the practice or the activity itself too much.

Grace: My formative philosophical education didn't talk much about the concept of philosophy at all. In fact, I didn't even consider it until I wrote my MA dissertation on philosophy for children, and I found myself asking myself, "Well, what is philosophy? What are its methods?" Crucially, what is the point of doing it - on both the individual and the societal level? Doing this kind of work in the public, it's kind of ruined me for being a normal academic - which I think is both brilliant and a shame! I sometimes think that one day I’d like to try and have a more traditional job, but I worry so much about impact. I know "impact" is a dirty word in philosophy but I'm interested in impact in that kind of wider and richer sense of whose life is this making better? It probably sounds ridiculously pretentious to say that those small little workshops and engagements with schools are making people's lives better, but you don't have to make lives massively better, just a bit. If I do move into academia in the future, I hope I can find a role where I can have an impact beyond the University community, however modest.  

As a result of my work, I'm really attuned to the instrumental value of philosophy. More so than ever and I don't think that it’s problematic to point to its instrumental value at all. I think it's really important. I'm now really committed to the idea that philosophy should be instrumentally valuable to society and I think it can be in a number of ways. I still think that traditional academics producing forms of understanding, it can be one of its outputs, but it can't be its only value. It's quite easy for a non-philosopher to start to unpick the value of that output when it's not in any way connected to what's going on in the world. Perhaps that's because academics aren't speaking to other disciplines, never mind the public, or they're not connecting with current issues. For example, the climate crisis, the newspapers should be awash with philosophers discussing it, people should be chipping in left, right, and centre; a few are but many aren't. I think that's one thing philosophy could kind of do to make itself more valuable.

Knowledge-producers, wisdom-producers don't even need to be doing public events, they can have a trickle-down contribution in less visible ways by being interdisciplinary in nature, or by using their platforms. But I think being interested in community philosophy has driven me towards different kinds of philosophical issues. So, I wasn't interested in Dewey, for example, before I started really understanding this work more deeply. Now I often find myself attracted to pragmatist ideas. My PhD looks a lot at Aristotle and notions of flourishing and how they connect to education. That has come arisen out of my practical experiences and my daily reflections on what education aims at, how learning connects to living, and what living well looks like. So, there is a symbiosis between theory and practice.

Participants at a Thinking Space discussion. Image by Grace Lockrobin.

Ciaran: What for you is a good place for society to get to with philosophy being more widely engaged with? Whether you call that "public philosophy" or otherwise. What for you is that kind of ideal, and what do you think needs to be done to reach that?

Grace: I think it starts in schools. I think, as part of people's formative education, experiencing philosophical inquiry as opposed to teaching philosophy as a set of ideas. I think it's a really important part of being educated. I think it's the beginning of pointing out that these questions can be asked, the significance of dialogue in answering them, and then inculcating some of the skills you need to keep asking and discussing these issues as you move through your life.

If you want this to be part of everybody’s education then this raises the debate over whether philosophy ought to be on the curriculum, or otherwise mandated to ensure that everyone gets to do it. I’m reluctant to suggest that specific schemes of work, or learning objectives about philosophy are recommended, or that anyone be "forced" to do philosophy regularly. School are such a political battleground: there are always people demanding that whatever they think is important should be  
immediately introduced in schools: sex and relationship education, cookery, how to pay your bills, colonialism, different languages, non-violent direct action. All of these things are important, but the school day is nine till three! This external and top-down pressure creates intolerable pressures on schools.

So, I don't think that clamping down schools and forcing them to do philosophy would be a good idea, indeed it would be incredibly antagonistic to the aims that I have. But I think the government supporting charities that do philosophy in schools to give a bigger platform as an endorsement of this way of working, and to help charities and organisations like mine to communicate the fact that philosophy is an approach that can be used throughout education with respect to every single subject, that it can enhance the teaching practice of teachers, that it offers a thoroughgoing enhancement of what's already there, not an extra subject, that costs very little money to implement. In your history lessons, you could inquire into what counts as evidence, in your geography lessons you could ask whether the idea of nationhood makes sense.

So, there are these opportunities in every single subject to open up that dimension of children's thinking and talking and being. And that would be such an amazing place to start the wider endorsement and encouragement and promotion of philosophy, rather than the insistence that it must be taught. I suspect that if it were mandated, we’d see silly stipulations, like when you're in primary school you learn about Descartes, when you're in high school you do Kant. That would murder it!

And then I think what could flow from that is, I'd like to see a bit more of what's already happening, which is philosophy being understood as recreation. People go to philosophy and film nights a lot in university cities, for example. It's a form of recreation and it probably attracts the same old faces with certain kinds of privileges and educations, but - and it's the same as I discuss in Philosophy and Community - it's the same as playing football on a Thursday night, or joining a choir on Saturday morning. It's a form of recreation that is life-enhancing in similar kinds of ways. People play tennis because they think it's good for their body and mind, and I'd like to see philosophy happening a little bit more like that. I'd like to see every single university department have a couple of people who support that kind of thing happening. But I'd also like to see it happening in a grassroots way as well as that more top-down way.

People could be informed by having a little taste in their education, knowing it's something that could be in their life in the future. People continue sports as they played them at school, and it floated their boat and so they take it forward. Very few people, unless they're quite privileged in their education, get a chance to do philosophy. They don't know it's an option for them, they don't realise how life-enhancing it could be to talk about this stuff that you think is important.