Episode 06: Modern Socratic Dialogue

How can educators cultivate self-cultivation in their students? How can they maintain an intimate connection between their scholarly research, what they teach, and how they teach? How can they encourage students to find common ground in a period of intense political division? In this episode, Ryan discusses these and other challenges with Dr. Laura J. Mueller, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at West Texas A&M University. Mueller’s provocative answer to these questions is “Modern Socratic Dialogue,” a pedagogical approach she explores in her recently published article, “Modern Socratic Dialogue and Resilient Democracy: Creating the Clearing for an American Bildung.” In this conversation, Mueller describes the historical roots of MSD and provides a step-by-step explanation of how to implement this method in the classroom, drawing on examples from her own courses. She also unpacks her argument that — because American identity is distinctive — we need a distinctly Americanized version of German Bildung. As the conversation turns to contemporary political questions, Mueller describes how her commitment to consensus-oriented teaching methods has been informed, in part, by her experience growing up in a rural and conservative part of Southern Illinois. She also explains the ways in which similar methods have been used in settings like the Highlander Folk School Workshops, the social-justice leadership school (pictured in the image accompanying this episode) that helped train civil-rights leaders like Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.