I am a regular listener to the skeptics guide to the universe podcast, which aims to promote science and critical thinking. I am not 100% sure how I came across this podcast but I think it was one of many that I initially subscribed to when I was in the planning and generating ideas phase for the delivery of my TOK course for the first time – just over a year ago now.
I do this thing with podcasts, where I subscribed to lots of them at any one given time and will listen to an episode or two before deciding whether to continue the subscription or unsubscribe. The SGU has borne a lot of fruit for my teaching. It is genuinely, laugh-out-loud funny and packs punch. The panel of speakers are engaging personalities and the topics fairly diverse, readily supplying classroom material for my Biology and TOK classes.
A recent episode (#574) of the SGU featured a segment discussing a 1st July 2016 Washington Post Editorial written by a psychiatrist who believes in demon possession. The article itself is a great resource for any TOK classroom discussion but the SGU discussion adds an additional dimension by walking students through sections of the article and explaining the logical fallacies implicit in those sections.
In the TOK classroom this article and the SGU discussion would fit in nicely after a lesson that introduces students to Reason as a WOK and logical fallacies. The SGU has a resource page that describes different types of logical fallacies, and this website also provides a nice interactive description of common logical fallacies.
So next year I when covering this topic I will introduce the idea of logical fallacies to students using these resources and with some activities that require students to identify the type of logical fallacy present in a variety of statements.
In the second lesson I will give them the Washington post article and ask them to identify one or two logical fallacies in the article individually before pairing up to share the fallacies they have identified before snowballing up to a whole class discussion of the article. We can then listen to the SGU segment focussing on the same article to see how much agreement we have in the class.
I provide a clip from the SGU episode as well as a pdf copy of the Washington Post editorial.
Article
Podcast clip