BRILLIANT CLUB – YEAR 12 STUDENTS RISE TO THE CHALLENGE OF UNIVERSITY LEVEL PHILOSOPHY AND ETHICS.

This year’s Brilliant Club is being run by Gordon Duffy-McGhie, a PhD student from the University of Sunderland. The Brilliant Club has been running at Richmond School and Sixth Form College since 2017.

We recently sat down with Gordon to find out a bit more about The Brilliant Club and the impact it’s having on students from Richmond Sixth Form College.

To start off with, we asked Gordon what The Brilliant Club involves and what it’s designed to achieve:

G: The Brilliant Club is an initiative where PhD students come into schools in postcodes where historically there hasn’t been a large number of applications to the best universities, to engage with students to upgrade their skills of discussion, academic analysis and written communication.

It’s a charity that’s been going for seven or eight years now and involves schools from across the region – Consett, Hartlepool, for example. A big focus of the initiative is raising aspirations – getting students to look beyond traditional local employment.

We moved on and asked what specific work Gordon was doing with Richmond Sixth Form College students:

G: PhD students are asked to produce a workbook covering seven weekly tutorials to include scenarios, case studies, etc. My area of interest is robot ethics and raising employability skills – that’s the focus of my PhD: how do we get young people to elevate their thought processes to make them more employable and not be replaced by AI or a robot!

The workbook and the marking criteria are undergraduate level, so it takes a bit of time for students to realise the level of work they should be producing. At A-level, many students haven’t come across the concept of citation yet – how many sources are they drawing from, are they using sources to validate arguments, are they using them to compare and contrast expert viewpoints? After only seven sessions, the mechanics of how to structure a 2000 word essay at undergraduate level when you’re sixteen, seventeen years old – that’s quite hard!

We talked about some of the differences between the approach taken by The Brilliant Club compared to A-level lessons and got into some of the specifics of the discussions the groups have had.

G: A lot of school work concerns knowledge accumulation, then recall at assessment, but the approach we take is slightly different. We’re looking from a philosophical and ethical viewpoint about a person’s view of the world. 

Recently we had a discussion about AI decisions in driverless cars. For example if a driverless car is in a situation where there is a choice between colliding with a car full of cats and dogs or an elderly person, how should the car’s algorithm be programmed? Many of the group argued that the elderly person should be saved at the expense of the animals, but some students spoke passionately about sentience – that the animals should be saved because a life is a life and there are more of them – it was quite a lively debate!

What’s challenging is to stop being emotionally involved with the question and to apply objective analysis. It really helps when we look at exemplar work – what the differences are between essays that have scored a first or a 2:1 or 2:2.

We often come to the conclusion that the philosophical and ethical theories don’t work – again, that’s quite a challenge for the students – to find out that there’s not actually a right and a wrong answer in these situations. That’s the beauty of ethics – life is messy – sometimes both outcomes are unappealing!

Thanks to Gordon for giving us an insight into the work that The Brilliant Club does. It’s excellent to hear that the academic progress and employability skills of our students are being stretched and challenged not just in their lessons and by in-school activities, but in all sorts of other ways – The Brilliant Club being a brilliant example!

To find out more about The Brilliant Club go to this link:

https://thebrilliantclub.org