Experience indicates that the questioning and democratic nature of the community of enquiry can be demanding and unsettling for teachers, presenting unaccustomed challenges and moral dilemmas. This paper argues that such significant episodes in the practice of Philosophical with Children (PwC) offer rich opportunities for wider critical reflection on epistemological and pedagogical questions for teacher education and continuing professional development. We illustrate the nature of this ongoing work through noticing and focusing on critical incidents drawn from our lived experience of PwC with learners, students, teachers and fellow practitioners in the UK and in South Africa, identifying common themes and offering an account of their origins. The article proposes a way of developing and refining educational practice through a grounded and collaborative practitioner action research orientation, investigating common themes that emerge from significant events in practice and mirroring the process of PwC itself. We conclude that the recurrent themes we identify show the value of PwC in opening up a transformative critical space in teacher education that disrupts prevalent epistemological frameworks and suggest that a deconstruction of the role of the educator, and the epistemological shift it provokes, is the hub of the project of bringing philosophy into schools and universities, and into the professional development of PwC teacher educators. POSITIVE CHALLENGESPhilosophy has not been part of the school curriculum in most countries. Over the last three decades interest in Philosophy with Children (P4C/ PwC) 1 has grown. It has stimulated rich debate about the nature of philosophy, philosophy with children and philosophy in school curricula. The practice has been dismissed by some as faddish, therapeutic navel-
Censorship of children's voices takes many forms: restricting access to texts, constraining the space in which they are viewed, failing to validate children's responses, interpreting their ideas within limiting perspectives on children's thinking. This paper considers the educator's role in discussion with children, drawing out the connections between the ethical commitment to listen to child/ ren and beliefs about forms of knowing that underpin pedagogy. In our professional development work we have noticed that children's responses to picturebooks can evoke sentimental reactions from adults. Such sentimentality leads adults to distance themselves from child(hood) and to miss opportunities for philosophical exploration. Moving away from developmentality, and inspired by semiotics, this paper offers alternative readings of children's responses to picturebooks, in the context of philosophical talk in an early-years setting. The framework for analysis of children's work with Tusk tusk by David McKee is informed by Fricker's (2007) notion of 'epistemic prejudice'.
This paper emerges from experiences of putting picturebooks, philosophy with children and posthumanism into play. Responding to Derrida's notion of a ‘return to childhood’, we propose a different move of ‘re-turning to child/ren’, drawing from various entangled sources. First, the figuration of posthuman child (Murris, 2016) disrupts the conception of temporality that takes development and progress as inevitable. The posthuman child expresses the idea of the knowing subject as an unbounded sympoietic system. We put to work Miranda Fricker's notion of epistemic injustice to reanimate thought, with Tim Ingold and Jane Bennett. In respect of children's animistic philosophizing, our writing explores the materiality of philosophizing between adult/s and a class of 4–7-year-olds enquiring through an animated picturebook called Corduroy (Freeman, 1976). They are engaged in an epistemology of learning with, rather than about, the world. Ingold proposes that ‘knowing is movement to be taught by the world’ (2013:5) and that our inquiries should not set out to describe or represent the world but rather to open our perception to what is going on there, so we can respond to it. Making enquiries draws attention away from description and re-presentation to the movement, plurality and animatedness of knowing.
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Soon it would be dusk: the liminal hour-the Daylight Gate. He did not want to step through the light into whatever lay beyond the light. (Winterson, 2012:3) This paper is concerned with troubling emotions felt or aroused in all aspects of academic practice, including teaching, learning, research and relationships. It discusses the emergent processes of a research group whose multidisciplinary interests coalesce around discomfort, disturbance and difficulty in the processes of higher education. We talk about what happened in the space when we explored the liminal landscapes of troubling knowledge. The paper draws upon social, philosophical and psychodynamic perspectives on emotions (Boler, 1999; Pitt and Britzman, 2003) and Shotwell's (2011) epistemology of 'knowing otherwise'. In this paper, we discuss ways in which we created and worked with the permissive and loose space of our collaborative pedagogical research group. In this compassionate learning atmosphere, we shared stories of 'troubled' academic work. Through this paper, we seek to contribute to a critical understanding of troubling emotions and the work of compassion in higher education. We do this by exploring their educative value in different learning spaces, and by sharing the sense of quiet hope that has enriched our everyday lives.
This article discusses the idea of intra-generational education. Drawing on Braidotti's nomadic subject and Barad's conception of agency we consider what intra-generational education might look like ontologically, in the light of critical posthumanism, in terms of natureculture world, nomadism and a vibrant indeterminacy of knowing subjects. In order to explore the idea of intra-generationalism and its pedagogical implications we introduce four concepts: homelessness, agelessness, playfulness and wakefulness. These may appear improbable in the context of education policy making today, but they are born of theorising our practices in the age-transgressive field of Philosophy with Children. We argue that these concepts help to re-configure intra-generational relations, ways of being and becoming. They express the longing, corporeality and visionary epistemology of nomadic enquiry. These inventions express a non-hierarchical philosophy of immanence. We draw some tentative conclusions about educational practices more generally.
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