As far as possible, I would like my students to start the learning process with prior knowledge and intuitions, and then work through a rigorous process of responding to an indeterminate series of questions that seeks to clarify and critique every stage of their response.

This Socratic process is meant to mimic critical thinking performed at the individual level, thereby inculcating a powerful habit and method of critical reflection. It is an active student-centred learning method that works by treating the students’ responses with interest, fairness and respect, helping them realise that they, their thoughts and personal experiences can be an immediate source of learning for their peers and teachers. Consequently, students can become more confident to re-examine the familiar in the light of the new and less familiar, and make risky, but often profitable, connections among theoretical, historical, and empirical sources of knowledge, textual encounters, personal experiences and intuitions. This can mean that whatever is learnt Socratically will be owned by students themselves, becoming the stuff of long-term memory. The critical processes enacted in this method can instil a way of thinking, communicating, and acting that goes beyond passivity in life.

I have used the basic Socratic method in different ways to serve different purposes in my teaching. Many of these examples will be discussed in a book about pedagogy and citizenship that I am currently writing. In this article, I shall highlight one example from a University Scholars Programme module called “Democratic Possibilities in Singapore”—please see http://www.scholars.nus.edu.sg/sep/use2302/schedule.html—a module that aimed to encourage 34 students from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to become active and critical citizens.

I organised new students coming to class for the first time into four groups of unequal numbers, different genders and disciplinary profiles. Each group was given a set of building materials comprising postcards, playing cards, and paper plates. The task, which was explained only to the few who had arrived punctually for class, was to compete against the other teams to build the tallest structure in 15 minutes using at least one item from each kind of building material. They were responsible for explaining the objective and rules of the competition to other members who arrived later. At the end of the session, the winning team was presented with only four lollipops, which they had to decide how to distribute amongst the group (each group had more than four members). The activity was designed to serve as an icebreaker, to be fun, and for an immediate experience of the various key concepts, processes, and issues that would be explored with greater levels of complexity in subsequent weeks.

Following the activity, the students were engaged in a Socratic dialogue that encouraged them to articulate, develop, frame, and defend their intuitive ideas about these concepts, processes, and issues to which they would later attach specific critical vocabularies encountered in their course readings. I used a whiteboard to map out the flow of discussion, which included the following argument clusters raised mostly by students themselves:

• Links between aspirations, group dynamics, talent, stereotypes, and exclusions
• Leadership, decision-making, and different bases of authority
• Competition as threat, motivation, discipline, and control
• The status and role of late-comers The dynamics of reward and blame
• And by analogy, Singapore’s nation-building project, citizenship roles, hierarchy of talent, technocratic government, ideology, new-generation Singaporeans, economic competitiveness, and income distribution

I drew the discussion to a sufficiently open-ended conclusion by directing students to focus on the relationship between democracy and nation building in Singapore.
The ‘jargon-free’ discussion gave students the confidence to participate fully even if they had never given politics and current affairs any serious thought. It became apparent that their intuitions and prior knowledge mattered deeply. I continued to build upon their awareness and understanding in the subsequent weeks, discussing specific theories and issues that could help them to develop new, interesting and personally meaningful ways of thinking about democracy in Singapore.

It was noteworthy that students themselves took turns to lead small-group discussions using the Socratic facilitative style in the weeks that followed. In fact, they even ran the final sessions effectively by themselves as a significant part of their overall assessment. They had to design the two-hour sessions, during which they would perform a philosophical dialogue written on given topics such as “meritocracy and democracy in Singapore” in teams. The task was to facilitate discussions surrounding the themes and issues raised in their dialogues in the Socratic manner. Through the processes involved in the exchange of ideas, students learnt a most practical democratic skill—how to facilitate a discussion with focus and clarity, and stimulate active, inclusive, spontaneous and intellectually responsible debate.