K-12 PROGRAMMING

The first Philadelphia Regional Ethics Bowl was hosted at Penn in February 2020, and the second was held virtually in January 2021. The Ethics Bowl is an extracurricular activity where students discuss and debate ethical cases studies with teams from other schools. We have worked with 5 Philadelphia High Schools to help them prepare for their participation. This effort was assisted by a wide variety of Penn students, faculty and volunteers.

We run informal philosophy classes weekly with students at the Benjamin B. Comegys School, a neighborhood school in West Philadelphia. We have worked with several grade levels from 4th to 8th. In the past we have enlisted Penn undergraduate students via an ABCS (Academically Based Community Service) course to organize class activities for 5th graders.

We have run a number of philosophy clubs spanning a variety of topics and grade levels with local Philadelphia Schools. Some recent initiatives are a philosophically themed movie club at the Penn Alexander School, and an Ethics Club at the Julia R. Masterman High School, and an intro to philosophy club at the George Washington Carver School for Engineering and Science. In past years we have also run a club for first generation college-bound students via a partnership with Philadelphia Futures. This included integration with an academically based community service course offered for Penn undergraduate students on the Philosophy of Education, culminating in a conference featuring student presentations at Penn.

We have taught several 8-week credit bearing mini-courses on the Philosophy and Ethics of Science at the Science Leadership Academy, a magnet school in Center City Philadelphia.

This program embeds a philosopher in a school for several hours each week to run various programming that ranges from philosophy clubs, push-in philosophy lessons, and curriculum support and development for faculty. So far, our philosopher residents have been placed at the Academy at Palumbo, but we hope to bring this program to other schools as well. This program has been made possible through generous support from the Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization (PLATO) and the Whiting Foundation.

We work with Mighty Writers, a not-for-profit that offers free workshops and activities for K-12 students in and around Philadelphia with the goal of supporting the development of writing skills. We create programs that combine their mission of improving writing skills with our P4Y goal of giving students an opportunity to think philosophically.

Several times each school year we host local K-12 students at Penn for various talks, discussion, and activities. We are in the process of developing a colloquia series for high school students.