Thirty years of P4C: #12 — Sophie’s story

In one way, my story with P4C is very simple. I was once in the right place at the right time and have since then never quite quit. Specifically, I was a second-year undergraduate student at the University of Leeds in 2013.

I had picked a joint honours degree in English and Philosophy for balance: Philosophy for fun and English for employability. This still makes me smile, given how my career has panned out. But to me, Philosophy before university was fun. My sixth-form classes had fizzed with conversation, with ease, and with laughter. There were only seven of us, so there was space for us to really explore what we thought.

My first year at university hadn’t been like that and I was saddened by the lack of brain-fizzing conversation in seminars. People seemed either too shy to speak, or overly aggressive, shutting each other down. It wasn’t collegiate, and I missed school and our friendly attempts to think together, and to outthink the old white men we were studying.

But then, in my second year at university, Grace Lockrobin was piloting what was to become the Leeds Philosophy Exchange and she was recruiting for student volunteers. I remember hearing Grace talk about P4C and thinking, ‘YES. Obviously. That’s what people need.’ Nearly a decade later, I still think this. (Although admittedly less emphatically, but that’s due to the weariness of being 30, rather than a waning enthusiasm for the work.)

What Grace described seemed both excitingly new, and also familiar in the best way. Saying yes to the place I was offered was an incredibly easy decision.

As with so many things, it’s only with hindsight that I can see how impactful the Leeds Philosophy Exchange was not only on my career, but also on who I am as a person. The program had two parts. First, was exploring theoretical underpinnings of P4C, and education more broadly. Finally, here was a group of my peers ready to think and discuss and laugh. It was a breath of familiar air. I made good friends in the group (in fact I celebrated the wedding of one of them just last summer). Then we took that theory to the classroom, planning and facilitating our own P4C sessions with Y4 classes at a local school. The sessions with the young people were exciting and challenging.

Between then and now, my career has looked similar to lots of folk who work in charities, or as freelancers, in that I have often had more than one job at a time. Sometimes this has actively been facilitating P4C: I’ve had the luck and privilege of regular gigs with The Philosophy Foundation and Thinking Space. I’ll always be grateful for those opportunities. Money and time have been tight across the education sector, throughout the decade I have been working. I’m keen to never take for granted those who get facilitators into schools: they do the near-impossible, so we can build the fizz.

Most of my work, however, has not been P4C. Yet, I have always been fascinated by how its managed to sneak its way in. I have worked in outreach for universities, facilitating participatory lessons, rather than just talking at the young people. I have worked in social policy, running focus groups, which always feel remarkably similar to a community of enquiry. I am now a Relationships and Sex Education specialist, supporting students with their exploration of big questions such as ‘what are the qualities of a healthy relationship?’, ‘how should we navigate conversations about condoms?’ and ‘if an alien landed here today, and asked you “What is sex?”, what would you say?’ In this work, I am most closely back to my P4C roots.

To me, being a good sex ed practitioner is about asking the right questions, building caring and collaborative spaces of enquiry, and helping young people grapple with the messy complexities of being a person. I have no doubt where I developed and practiced these skills and values. 30 years of P4C happens to match with 30 years of me – we were both ‘founded’ (or born) in 1992. That feels fitting, given how much of me has been built by my experience of it. I look forward to another 30 years of it popping up wherever life takes me. I have no doubt there’s more fizz to come.