This is the first in a series of blog postings about teaching using a philosophy for children pedagogy in the British Columbia classroom. Please visit this site again for more content, and make sure to leave a comment below.
The new British Columbia education curriculum is based on competencies rather than merely on content. That is, the goal is for students to gain conceptual understanding rather than merely knowledge. It is one thing to know the year Columbus “sailed the ocean blue”; it is quite another to know the geopolitical reasons for his voyage, as well as the socio-cultural and human impacts of his landing upon North American shores.
Philosophy for Children (P4C) pedagogy was inaugurated and popularized by American philosopher and educator Matthew Lipman in the 1970s. It aims to teach reasoning and argumentative skills to children through the expert teaching of a philosopher-teacher. However, Lipman’s focus was on the application of logical thinking rather than the children’s personal connection to themselves, their community, the norms and values they encountered each day, and the meaning of life. This so-called “second-generation” philosophy for children approach will be the focus of this blog. P4C is not just about highlighting fallacious logic when it occurs – though it is also about that; it is about connecting ideas, people, communities, epistemologies, and ontologies. For example, why is something wrong? What can we point to? Children are often told an action or event is”wrong” without justification. This is not bad, but incomplete. The “why” matters because it plumbs students’ deeper depths of understanding. Instead of stopping at the fact of the matter, students can begin to understand the context. All of a sudden, historical events (for example) are not understood descriptively (this happened, then this happened, and finally this), but substantively as the product of, perhaps, socio-political power dynamics.
P4C also offers, crucially, an emphasis on the power of story and metaphor. This emphasis meshes meaningfully with the new curriculum’s emphasis on Indigenous ways of knowing and the First Peoples Principles of Learning (FPPL). While philosophy itself is sometimes characterized as Euro-centric, the tools of philosophy are perennial: storytelling, self-reflection, critical and creative thinking, and the exploration of a person’s place in the world.
This blog will discuss a number of topics related to P4C in the British Columbia classroom. Among them, the connections to the FPPL, core competencies, and curricular competencies in various subject areas. Additional topics will include: “Do I need a philosophy background?”; “Facilitating P4C discussions”; “What is a philosophical discussion?”; and “Assessment in the P4C classroom?”.
Thank you for reading.
Philosophy for Children in the British Columbia Classroom 