Training The Critical Mind: Teaching Philosophy Through Cognitive Dissonance

This contribution, as an exploratory phase (Lumbelli, 1984) of a more extensive doctoral research, aims to investigate a strategy of philosophy teaching in high school, inspired by the Socratic disputation (Flammia, 2021), which aims at the creation and effective management of cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957) as a tool for promoting critical thinking. The didactic choice under study originates from the assumption that a didactic planning aiming at the promotion and development of a critical attitude towards reality cannot disregard the awareness of the complex psychological mechanisms related to the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance that can contribute positively or on the contrary hinder the learning process when the preconceptions and prejudices questioned are deeply rooted. The research originates from a series of philosophical workshops held in the years 2016/2019 in a technical and vocational school in the province of Varese (Italy) in which the author took part as a teacher. This experience is particularly interesting from the point of view of didactic research because of the large number of students involved (about 150) on a continuous basis (3 years) in an institute where the discipline is not curricular, who voluntarily decided to participate in the workshops in the afternoon hours after attending presentation meetings during curricular hours. Therefore, starting from an exploratory empirical investigation of a qualitative, naturalistic and participatory type of a real situation, relevant for its novelty and the successful involvement of students, this research aims to describe this experience and the educational model that underlies it, trying to bring out the complexity of the variables involved. Therefore, the research questions are: to what extent is it possible to propose the teaching of philosophy according to a problematic approach through the use of cognitive dissonance? What didactic forms can it take? The research also aims to explore the relationship between this strategy and the promotion of critical thinking in light of the theoretical debate on the topic. This research project starts from practice and aims to return to it through the scientific modeling of a teaching experiment that allows its transferability, possibly even in the teaching of other related disciplines. The complexity of the object of investigation requires that this transferability is not configurable in prescriptive terms, as a sort of "recipe" to be applied uncritically, but rather by a clear identification of the variables involved and their interaction, so that they can be elements of an autonomous and coherent design.