Teaching Children to Think for Themselves: From Questioning to Dialogue

Haynes, Felicity

doi:10.21913/jps.v1i1.997

Cited by 4 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…9 9 For example, taking just Australian studies: Wilks, 1992; Haynes, 1993; Sprod, 1992, 1995, 1997; Splitter & Sharp, 1995; Cam, 1999; Imbrosciano, 1997; Haynes, 1998; Knight & Collins, 2000; Millett & Kay, 2001; Hinton, 2003a, 2003b; Bleazby, 2004; Collins, 2005; Burgh, Field & Freakley, 2006; Millett & Flanagan, 2007. See also Morehouse, 1995; Lim, 1998. …”

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confidence: 99%

Benefits of Collaborative Philosophical Inquiry in Schools

Millett

Tapper

2012

Educational Philosophy and Theory

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In the past decade well‐designed research studies have shown that the practice of collaborative philosophical inquiry in schools can have marked cognitive and social benefits. Student academic performance improves, and so too does the social dimension of schooling. These findings are timely, as many countries in Asia and the Pacific are now contemplating introducing Philosophy into their curricula. This paper gives a brief history of collaborative philosophical inquiry before surveying the evidence as to its effectiveness. The evidence is canvassed under two categories: schooling and thinking skills; and schooling, socialisation and values. In both categories there is clear evidence that even short‐term teaching of collaborative philosophical inquiry has marked positive effects on students. The paper concludes with suggestions for further research and a final claim that the presently‐available research evidence is strong enough to warrant implementing collaborative philosophical inquiry as part of a long‐term policy.

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confidence: 99%

Benefits of Collaborative Philosophical Inquiry in Schools

Millett

Tapper

2012

Educational Philosophy and Theory

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“…The data in this research corroborated many findings already widely reported in the research literature about the impact of P4C on student thinking: that P4C promotes a range of skills (asking questions , categorising, drawing distinctions, reasoning, active listening, judgement and decision-making) and that it develops intellectual humility that recognises the value of changing one's mind if presented with stronger reasoning for an alternative perspective (Burgh et al, 2006;Cam, 2003Cam, , 2006aHaynes, 2014;Lipman, 1998b;Millett & Tapper, 2012;Sprod, 1998). Similarly, many aspects of the teachers' developing P4C pedagogies in this study resonated with themes highlighted in the literature: that teaching P4C involves discernment on the part of the teacher, it is a form of democratic pedagogy (Burgh, 2018;Cam, 2009), teachers can scaffold and support students to structure their thinking and understanding through board work (Kovach, 2014), the CoI is relevant and valuable when sparked by student questions (Splitter & Sharp, 1995;Topping & Trickey, 2014), and that student thinking and metacognition is supported by teachers encouraging student reflection (Fisher, 2007).…”

Section: Concluding Thoughtssupporting

confidence: 87%

Philosophy for All Children: enhancing knowledge

Austin¹

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<p>Building students’ critical thinking has been a focus in Education around the world in recent years. The New Zealand Curriculum (2007) is no exception, with an emphasis on critical and creative thinking in its vision statement. However, no advice is offered on how to teach critical thinking. This study uses a qualitative case study approach to explore how teachers teach critical thinking through Philosophy for Children (P4C) and offers some guidance on this for teachers. One of the contributions of this thesis is the claim that the P4C approach enhances social justice by supporting diverse learners – children who need support to achieve at school – to develop critical thinking and language capability. The theoretical framework underpinning my research draws on Bernstein’s (2000) ‘democratic pedagogic rights’ to enhancement, inclusion, and participation, and Wheelahan’s (2007), Young’s (2009) and Young and Muller’s (2013) conceptions of powerful knowledge. While much attention has been given to the theory of powerful knowledge in tertiary and secondary education contexts, to date, very little research has explored what powerful knowledge might look like, in practice, at primary school. Therefore this study makes an original contribution by investigating this unexplored area. Participants in this research included 104 primary school students aged between 8 and 11 years old and their teachers (n = 4) from four diverse primary schools in New Zealand. The research data is drawn from four main sources: audio recordings of classroom discussions, semi-structured focus group interviews with sample students, open-ended interviews with teachers, and student thinking journals. Over a period of 6 months, classes held weekly hour-long P4C dialogues with a focus on both philosophical content and developing critical thinking language and skills. Students were encouraged to evaluate their philosophical and critical thinking both verbally and in written form. The methodological approach incorporates sociocultural perspectives highlighting the key role of language as a mediator and tool for thinking (Mercer, 2000; Vygotsky, 1962, 1978). Transcripts of classroom discussions were analysed both inductively and deductively, using Hennessy et al.’s (2016) coding system for analysing classroom dialogue across educational contexts and Daniel et al.’s (2005) matrix outlining the development of the dialogical critical thinking process. Observation of students’ everyday learning in the classroom, together with their and their teachers’ reflections, revealed that teachers played a significant role in shaping students’ language and critical thinking through modelling, facilitating dialogue, establishing a democratic classroom culture, making thinking visible, and innovating and personalising teaching according to their students’ particular needs. Both students and teachers developed a range of capabilities through participating in (or, in the case of the teachers, leading) P4C dialogue: resilience, receptivity, intersubjectivity. This thesis presents one of the first investigations into the practice of teaching powerful knowledge in primary schools and suggests that explicit teaching of disciplinary language enhances students’ critical thinking capability and constitutes powerful knowledge. A new conception of powerful knowledge is advanced, termed enhancing knowledge, which emphasises how disciplinary knowledge enhances and is complementary to other knowledges, such as social or cultural knowledge, without devaluing their importance. This term also seeks to avoid the potential dominant connotations of the word ‘powerful’. The findings of this study suggest that P4C can offer diverse learners access to enhancing knowledge which has the potential to improve equity in education and enhance social justice.</p>

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“…Haynes (2008:48) states that democracy as seen in the CoE is a 'means to manage transitions of power, including the leaking of power from adults to children.' Indeed, one distinguishing feature of the CoE as a pedagogical approach, is the change in power dynamics in the classroom; the power shifts away from the traditional teacher dynamic, to an empowering of the children/students (Haynes, 2014;Haynes & Murris, 2011;Pardales & Girod, 2006).…”

Section: Democracy In Actionmentioning

confidence: 99%

encouraging the teacher-agent: resisting the neo-liberal culture in initial teacher education

Love

2019

childphilo

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Influenced by Sachs’ (2001) ‘activist identity’ I propose that pre-service teacher education or initial teacher education (ITE), as I will refer to it, could, and indeed should, encourage a new form of teacher; the ‘teacher-agent.’ This teacher-agent would be aware of the pressures and dictates of the neo-liberal educational culture and its ensuing performative discourse, and choose to resist it, in favour of a more holistic view of education. This view of education encourages inclusive, creative and democratic forms of education concerned with encouraging a social conscience in children and young people, as well as seeing education as concerned with the whole child. These more holistic approaches to education could include pedagogical approaches such as Philosophy for Children (P4C), Rights’ Respecting Education and Slow Pedagogy, which can not only provide a more balanced understanding and deeper experience of education for both teachers and pupils, but can also help teachers to resist the debilitating impact of the neo-liberal performative discourse, potentially also thus impacting on their wellbeing and ability to retain their integrity as professionals. This may also have the potential to halt the rapid exodus of new teachers from the profession. It is my contention, that engaging with pedagogies such as P4C in this new iteration of ITE could help not only to encourage the Student Teacher-Agent, but also, as a consequence, develop the Citizen-Agent in the children they are teaching. In this paper I consider four key areas where I propose P4C could play a role in this alternative model of Initial Teacher Education; Democracy in action, the teacher as Teacher-Facilitator, a space for co-construction of knowledge, and encouraging Social Justice.

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Teaching Children to Think for Themselves: From Questioning to Dialogue

Cited by 4 publications

References 12 publications

Benefits of Collaborative Philosophical Inquiry in Schools

Benefits of Collaborative Philosophical Inquiry in Schools

Philosophy for All Children: enhancing knowledge

encouraging the teacher-agent: resisting the neo-liberal culture in initial teacher education

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