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Schools Program

Since 2002, the Monash University Centre for Public Philosophy has conducted a series of successful, self-contained workshops, reaching hundreds of students from all over Australia.In a full day program, students can attend three of the following one hour workshops:

Workshop Learning Objectives

Our experienced presenters draw upon the students' natural reasoning abilities and intuitions so as to integrate new knowledge with pre-existing skills. Students learn how:

Critical Reasoning Workshop

The Critical Reasoning Workshop focuses on analysing arguments for their strengths and weaknesses. Broadly speaking, the aims are:

  1. To train students to identify the constituent parts of an argument - for example we find that a significant percentage of students, when given a piece of text, cannot identify the conclusion.
  2. To coach students to recognise the difference between an argument that fails because one or more of its supporting statements are not true and an argument that fails because there no proper relationship between the supporting statements and the conclusion. In logic, this is the difference between an unsound argument and an invalid argument. Generally people find the first a simple concept and the latter more difficult, although an understanding of both is crucial to an attempt at building or analysing an argument.
  3. To explore some common argumentative fallacies through the use of real examples - e.g. ad hominem (to the person), post hoc ergo propter oc (before which, therefore because of which) hasty generalization and others. Please note that 'technical jargon' has been eliminated for the students' ease of understanding.

Advanced Critical Reasoning Workshop

The Advanced Critical Reasoning Workshop develops and expands the students' abilities to properly and carefully interpret, extract and evaluate 'everyday arguments'. This workshop aims to:

  1. Develop with our students a useful method for deciding what parts of a text can properly be interpreted as the argument.
  2. Allow students to acquire an understanding of what rational thinking involves through exploring 'good' thinking.
  3. Encourage students to identify and interpret an appropriate selection of arguments by way of language analysis and comparison.
  4. Develop with students the ability to extract arguments into standard form and apply an understanding of 'inference' in order to locate missing argument components and sub-arguments.

Academic Writing Workshop

The Academic Writing Workshop demystifies academic writing, and introduces students to a different way of thinking about the process of tackling a major piece of assessment. The basic idea propounded in this session is that it is an anxiety-producing, idea-destroying mistake to try to write and polish a piece of academic writing at the same time. The basic aims are twofold:

  1. To help students to overcome anxieties about starting a piece of academic writing
  2. To give students the skills to polish their writing once they get it on the page e.g. information on structure, style, research, plagiarism, use of quotations and citations.

Communicating Ideas Workshop

The Communicating Ideas Workshop is all about building confidence in the ability to present an interesting, well-structured oral presentation. These workshops use trainers who have achieved international success in debating and who have wide experience training high school students. If desired, this session can be modified to focus on debating-specific skills. These sessions:

  1. Identify the ways in which we tend to make our presentations a boring or nerve-wracking experience for our audience.
  2. Teach tricks of the trade for dealing with pre-presentation nerves and looking more confident than you are.
  3. Emphasise the importance of preparation and structure, and teach basic sign-posting techniques.
  4. Discuss the use of audience participation and of technologies like power point.
  5. Involve each student in the preparation and practice of an oral presentation.

Here it needs to be emphasized again that the workshops are highly interactive - each has at least two substantial group activities and audience interaction with the trainer throughout.

Learning Experiences

Students are introduced to the key concepts of each seminar component:'reasoning', 'writing' and 'communicating ideas', through engaging, appropriately pitched presentations by a talented and experienced speaker. Your students' everyday experiences are an important part of our presenter's foci.

Students are scaffolded into actively applying these concepts to Problem scenarios through a combination of; presenter modelling, challenging small group work, individual tasks and careful feedback from the expert. The key concepts are reinforced through whole group discussion and comprehensive printed material for you and your students to take away.

We are committed to improvement, that's why we ask you to encourage Your students to complete our workshop evaluation forms.

The workshops are designed to reinforce in students the basic skills essential to good VCE and University performance: how to construct strong arguments, write high-quality essays, and make effective and confident presentations. Students leave the workshops having improved their existing academic skills and acquired new ones.

When:

We conduct workshops on your school's premises throughout the year, and at the Monash campus in Clayton in April and May. Bookings can be taken in advance for the latter workshops and are available for individual students or groups.

Seminar Schedule:

Each full-day workshop consists of three 1.15-1.30 hour sessions. Alternatively, we can provide the Critical Reasoning, Advanced Critical Reasoning, Academic Writing and Communicating Ideas workshops separately or in a negotiated combination to suit your needs. We provide a whole day, or a half-day format.

Please don't hesitate to contact the Centre if you are interested in a quote or to book a workshop at your school, or if you would like some further information about our workshops and how we can suit your school's unique needs. We have available 'Learning Objectives Information' that gives in more detail the learning objectives, foci and methods of each workshop.

E mail us at cpp@arts.monash.edu.au or phone on (03) 9905 9132.

Centre for Public Philosophy