Rethinking Socratic Seminars: Making Small Changes for Larger Impact

ABSTRACT

The Socratic seminar is a long-standing tradition in our education system, as it challenges students’ ideas and values in an open forum where they can all participate. In this critical commentary, we discuss the values and barriers of Socratic seminars. We focus on three barriers: lack of institutional support, student exclusion, and student harm. Lack of institutional support for instructors can leave students exposed to harm when an instructor is unprepared to or anxious about navigating strong emotions and controversial commentary in the classroom. Teaching difficult topics is important and urgent in such a divided society, and we suggest pedagogical strategies for Socratic seminars to minimize harm and student exclusion, including scaffolding and low-tech solutions. We also acknowledge teacher anxiety and fear and encourage instructors to prepare themselves to intervene in those conversations and to support their students. We offer advice that has helped us collaborate to develop a critical practice, from self-reflexive writing to rehearsal.

KEYWORDS:

• Pedagogy
• Socratic seminars
• teaching circles

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Claudia Chiang-Lopez

Claudia Chiang-Lopez is a first-generation scholar and immigrant at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. They are a PhD student in the Department of Teaching and Learning and certificate student in program evaluation and assessment. Also at UNLV, they earned a BA in Multidisciplinary Studies, and an MA in Communication Studies. They are a Point Foundation Scholar, an American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education Holmes Scholar, and an American Association for Hispanics in Higher Education Fellow. Their scholarship focuses on how marginalized communities create discursive spaces and on the relationship between abolition and dis/ability critical race studies.

Vanessa Núñez

Vanessa Núñez is a first-generation doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She holds a BA in Sociology from the University of California, San Diego, and an MA in Sociology from UNLV. Vanessa is a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellow, a UNLV President’s Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, a California State University Chancellor’s Doctoral Incentive Program Fellow, and an American Association for Hispanics in Higher Education Fellow. As a scholar, her work examines undocumented student access to higher education and the undocumented student movement in Southern Nevada.