Can philosophical dialogue foster the developmental process of certain language and discursive capabilities, such as decentering and abstraction, in four-year old children? And if so, to what extent? In this paper, the authors examine discursive and language competence in a group of four-year-old children during a four-month philosophical praxis (experimental group), compared to that of a group of five-year-old children that experienced no philosophical praxis (control group). The analysis was conducted using two instruments: 1) for discursive competence, the typology of exchanges put forward by Daniel et al. (underlying criteria include the presence/absence of a common problem to solve, centering/decentering of thinking, complexity of interventions and cognitive skills, etc.) and 2) for language competence, the language markers that emerged from the transcripts ("I", "we", "he-particular", "they-general", "you") These two instruments contributed to situating the children's discourse within a process of increasing complexity related to decentering and abstraction. Results indicate that the children in the experimental group engaged in diversified exchanges (three types: anecdotal, monological, dialogical) with a predominance of the monological type and the use of language markers related to the general "they", while the children in the control group engaged in anecdotal exchanges with a predominant use of "I".
Creative thinking is sometimes neglected by schools. Introducing philosophy in schools represents a commitment to balancing the development of logical and creative thinking, currently exercised only orally. In the present study, the focus is on writing. Firstly, the value of authentic pupil writings is underscored. The pupils and students studied wrote texts for "Adolescence et Société", a magazine produced by researchers. 100 students' works, written by philosophizing students in fourth-year college in France, culled from the PreCPhi/Philosophemes Corpus (1,300 texts collected from 43 classrooms) were studied in order to measure the progress of philosophizing students between a pre-test and a post-test following the introduction of a pedagogical tool that unites Art with Philosophy, Philo & Carto. Their writing skills were measured according to the following five dimensions: linguistic, philosophical, cognitive, reflective and creative. Performance measures, calculated on group averages and applied to the group's variance between the pre-and the post-tests, were related to each dimension. Linguistic performance (presence of an introduction and conclusion) did not progress, remaining subject to pupils' academic level. Philosophical, cognitive, creative and reflective performance increased significantly, or at least confirmed the trend. Reasoning, metaphors, conceptual differences and discourse ownership increased, while anecdotal examples decreased. These increases were accompanied by an increase in the post-test variance: gaps between the strongest and the weakest performances widened, except in the case of questioning, personal examples and generation of doubt, which were at the core of the effect produced. The study validates the fact that the Art and Philosophy link promises unprecedented educational prospects with regard to the production of early quality philosophical writings. This will require validation with other samplings.
More and more, education programs from many countries consider Critical Thinking (CT) to be an essential 21 st century competency. Our conception of CT corresponds to a socio-constructivist epistemology and the context of our research is situated in the Philosophy for Children approach. This text presents a study, in which we compared results from two exchanges, one which was conducted with closed anecdotal-type questions, and the other with open philosophically-oriented questions. The analysis tool was the operational model of the developmental process of Dialogical Critical Thinking (DCT), developed and validated in previous studies. Participants were five groups of Moroccan pupils aged 10 to 15 years. Results indicate that in the exchange conducted with closed anecdotal-type questions, the overall epistemology of groups of pupils aged 10 to 15 years was simple, and the dominant epistemological perspective was post-egocentricity. In the exchange conducted with open philosophically-oriented questions, the overall epistemology for the majority of pupil groups was simple with a tendency toward a complex epistemology, and the dominant perspective for the majority of groups was relativism.
The article studies the verbal manifestation of critical thought in a school context. Four modes of thought -logical, creative, responsible, and metacognitive -accompanied by six epistemological perspectives, are studied from 1,730 pupils turns to speak analyzed in eight class groups. The pupils dialog about freedom. Quantitatively and gradually the collective thought gives the lion's share to the manifestation of logical, followed by creative and then responsible thought, and very little to that of metacognitive thought. The study reveals a significant developmental effect for logical and responsible thought -to the advantage of the girls. While each mode of thought evolves following its own developmental path, the epistemological congruence that emerges between the logical and responsible modes of thought on the one hand and responsible and creative on the other seems perhaps debatable. The results lead to a pedagogic proposal which consists in proposing to introduce a cognitive activity of doubt, not spontaneously adopted by the pupils, to favor the advent of a form of critical thinking more balanced as concerns the modes of thoughts of which it composed.Keywords: development; philosophy; critical thought; responsibility; creativity; logic; metacognition IntroductionThe present study, carried out in the context of an international research project (Note 1), contributes to analyzing the development of critical reflective thought between the ages of 10 and 18 as measured from verbal data obtained through a discursive community constructed for the needs of the research. The pupils, attending schools in France, are not involved in any pedagogic program.Critical reflective thought at school and its development are given varied definitions to make it analyzable (Daniel,
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