[Catino]: Hello, my name is Dominic Cattino, your favorite voice of Medford High. Today I'm here with Audrey Ledbetter, the Philosopher in Residence here at Medford High School. Thank you for joining me today, Miss Audrey.
[Ledbetter]: Thank you.
[Catino]: All right, so before we get started, can you please share with us what exactly is a Philosopher in Residence?
[Ledbetter]: Yes, a Philosopher in Residence is a way of infusing philosophy into high schools that takes pressure off of faculty and administrators so that someone with philosophy experience with an education in philosophy can include philosophy into a high school without having to hire a teacher who has a background in philosophy, a PhD in philosophy, and that sort of thing. So the kind of work that I've done so far is I've guest lectured in a class about justice. I've been working with the Ethics Bowl team. I've been working with the Tufts Philosophy Workshop, which is an after school program on Thursdays that students can come and break out into groups Tufts philosophy students to talk about different philosophical topics and what else have I done. I've also led a professional development workshop, which was really awesome. And yeah, so basically I'm just a resource to expand and support all philosophy programs here.
[Catino]: Lovely. Does that have anything to do at all with the Ethics Bowl or the Ethics Club or whatever it's called?
[Ledbetter]: Yeah. I wouldn't say that my role is to support the Ethics Bowl. The Ethics Bowl has been here for 10 years, actually, since Ethics Bowl began. And my work has been assisting them as a coach. I also coach the Tufts Ethics Bowl team. And we did really well this year. And I was just at nationals with the high school. team and we got fourth, which was awesome.
[Catino]: Why do you think it's important for philosophy to be taught in high school?
[Ledbetter]: Yeah, so when I think about philosophy, pre-college philosophy, well, first of all, philosophy is something that is generally associated with academia, with college, higher education. And philosophy, to me and to the people who do this work, is not something that should be confined in such a way. And so the idea Of having philosophy in high schools is to sort of break out of that stereotype of philosophy and also to when I think about teaching philosophy before college. I think about two things. I think about the method of doing philosophy. and the topics in philosophy. So when we think about the method of philosophy, it's a lot about independent, critical thinking, using, like, thinking about, thinking through things, discussion, talking with people, like, using argumentation, figuring out how to structure an argument, how to defend a claim, how to, like, how to give way to counterarguments, and that sort of thing that's, like, very, very fundamental to the practice of doing philosophy and that kind of method and that kind of independent critical thinking is something that is very important for democratic participation and also just general empowerment for a student to be able to think for themselves and not be given, you know, a list of you know, biological things to memorize, you know, or write a paper in English about a certain book. It's really to like, it's the method I think transcends different departments and different types of classes. So topics like, you know, starting out with like what is the meaning of life, which is very broad, and like with Ethics Bowl we do a lot of ethical issues, like some of the issues that came up in high school cases were taking in immigrants, what were other good ones, Chad GPT, the morality of GMOs, and just things like that, like thinking about complex ethical issues that might come up tangential to other classes in high school but aren't given the full treatment. So there's ethics, there's you know the meaning of life, there's free will, do we have free will, there's metaphysics, what is what exists, there's epistemology, how do we know something, and these are all topics that are very important to education generally and really touch a lot on the topics that are taught in high schools but never really given the time of day. because of, for plenty of very good reasons. So the idea of having me here is that I am a resource to kind of like expand thinking in those areas beyond what's taught in the normal high school curriculum.
[Catino]: On top of Ethics Bowl, do you do anything with mock trials with the school?
[Ledbetter]: No, I haven't worked with mock trial yet. I'm just starting to get my bearings and get involved with Ethics Bowl. Mr. Esner, the teacher who works with Ethics Bowl, is a teacher we've worked with in the past for the philosophy workshop. So I've kind of started with his work in philosophy. He also teaches an intro philosophy class here. So that's where I've started, but I hope to expand to more areas. So not mock trial yet.
[Catino]: What philosophical question are you most interested in right now?
[Ledbetter]: Right now, I am most interested in what does it mean to have character as a person. It's the term character comes up all the time. You know, character development, character growth, when you're watching a series, like character growth. And also like going back to Aristotle and Plato, they talk about a lot about moral character. And like how to develop virtue and moral character. And there's also, you know, colloquially we talk about like out of character actions and someone acting out of character. So right now I'm just really interested in pinning down what it actually means to have character as a person. Is it something that we automatically have? Is it something that we grow to have? And that kind of thing. So that's where my real interests are in philosophy right now, beyond doing this, the work in the high schools.
[Catino]: Do you have a favorite philosopher?
[Ledbetter]: Philosopher, this is hard because when people ask this they expect me to say like, you know, Plato, Aristotle, you know, all of these, you know, fancy old names. There's a woman named Amiya Srinivasan at Oxford who's doing feminist philosophy and she recently wrote a book called The Right to Sex that feminism in the 21st century and it's just it's very it's very measured and very well written and I find her writing both like compelling and technically philosophically good so I would say That is my favorite philosopher right now. But I feel like I'm missing so many people. But yeah.
[Catino]: And you said she is at Tufts. She's at Oxford.
[Ledbetter]: She's currently at Oxford. But yeah, present day. She's alive right now. And there are a lot of amazing philosophers at Tufts too. One of our faculty just won a Pulitzer Prize, which is awesome. And everyone's just doing really exciting work. And it's really fun to be around them.
[Catino]: All right. Lovely. Thank you so much for being here. We appreciate your time. And those answers were lovely, even though you didn't prepare for it.
[Ledbetter]: Thank you so much for giving me the time to answer.
[Catino]: Can we dip to black now?
[Ledbetter]: I made that awkward.