philosophy for children goes to college: transformative changes in philosophical thinking when college students practice philosophizing with young children

A major aim of a college-level philosophy of education course is not only to inform but also to engage transformation of how one thinks. Students are being introduced to the array of philosophical positions in education, but more importantly, they are also learning ways of thinking philosophically about issues in education. The question is how to best foster the growth of philosophical thinking in the limited weeks of a college semester with a diverse group of students. In our view, the transformative growth we are seeking happens when our students engage in philosophical discussion with groups of children in communities of inquiry. We find that this practice assists our college-age students in understanding, appreciating, and enjoying the work of philosophical thinking within the dynamics both of our courses and within their own spheres of educational work and practice.

The following project presents our reflections on field experiences as two faculty members, one on the faculty of education of a private, liberal arts college, the other on the faculty of philosophy of a comprehensive state university. Both of us require that students in an introductory Philosophy of Education course spend a certain amount of time philosophizing with younger students at local elementary sites.

We cannot answer whether or not this is the best way to ensure changes in philosophical thinking in the college course, rather we aim at recording the transformation in our students' philosophicality. ² We want to trace and recognize the becoming of philosophical thinkers, not simply the acquisition of learning thinking skills. We hope this reflective inquiry will motivate ourselves and our students to be always "becoming philosophical", because this aim requests constant practice. Our wish is that this essay will highlight the importance for collegiate faculty to study how dialogue with children works to transform courses in philosophy and education.

Beginnings

The theoretical framework for this project is informed from research on community of inquiry evidenced in the work of Matthew Lipman and Ann Sharp. The idea of a community of inquiry stems from the pragmatist tradition and is recognized as a method whereby knowledge is founded within the social and linguistic paradigms of a group. A community of inquiry is built upon a recognition that the teacher is a guide but the students control and lead the questions and problems, that knowledge is problematic and fallible, that the process is not about knowledge gathering but finding relationships and reasonableness. In the context of education, Lipman and Sharp recognize that both the community and the knowledge built co-exist and inform one another. Lipman writes:

The community of inquiry is in one sense a learning together, and it is therefore an example of the value of shared experience. But in another sense it represents a magnification of the efficiency of the learning process, since students who thought that all learning had to be learning by oneself come to discover that they can also use and profit from the learning experiences of others (LIPMAN, 2003, p. 93).

As the dialogue moves and builds, students not only forge relationships between one another but they form expansions of thought, building concepts to form ideas and arguments. Lipman also refers to this as a 'snowballing' effect (2003, p. 104). It is the connection between thinking well and thinking well with others that enables philosophical rigor and depth. In short, it is the community aspect of community of inquiry that ensures not simply the transfer of critical thinking skills, but enables a transformation of what it means to think philosophically.

In our experience with college students philosophizing with young children, we find that communities of inquiry where adults and children interact offers additional layers of epistemology and ontology upon which to question and reflect. We find that as college level students begin to see themselves as community members with children, conceptions of both what it means to be a philosophical thinker as well as what it means to do philosophy begin to change. We claim that, when children become the frame of the Community of Inquiry (from now on indicated as CoI), the adults in the experience are situated to see themselves like children, those who are just 'learning to learn', in that philosophical thinking demands not mastery of knowledge, but something entirely different. Moreover, the CoI with children demands that adults and children establish themselves as interconnected subjects, who seek meaning through interaction and not negation of the 'other', making both adulthood and childhood more permeable to one another.

This last claim is informed by David Kennedy's research on philosophy of childhood, with the insight that relating to children opens up a fertile territory in which adults and children can philosophize together. As Kennedy's analysis shows, children and adults' interactions fashion both subjectivities dynamically, as one understands itself by way of the other. Kennedy sees that the sharp division between adults and children in Western philosophy and history parallels the rise of reason over desire in the history of thought. Because children, and women as well, are located in the wild, the natural, and the body, that is, the places of reason's lack, they are denied subjectivity or personhood. Adults, (i.e.: adult, white men) inhabit personhood. The child historically has been set in opposition to full human subjectivity, the adult. However, as Kennedy notes, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the binary between the white, adult, male, and the 'other' or 'stranger' as foreign, female, and child begins to unravel. The shift shows "the extent to which the adult's construction of the child is at the same time his or her self-construction as an adult -whether through mechanism of distancing children or attempting to re-evoke, or exorcise his or her childhood through them" (KENNEDY, 2006, p. 44) Therefore, for Kennedy, adulthood and childhood are permeable to one another. He explores how children and adults can and do interact with one another, re-organizing, or re-balancing what it means to be 'adult' and 'child'.

We find that the CoI, with its demands upon the communal aspects of thinking well and its refutation that knowledge is about mastery, allows our students access to philosophical thinking. As Lipman writes,

Seldom have I seen children dissatisfied with the product they took from a philosophical discussion, even if it is only some modest philosophical distinction, for they recognize how before that acquisition they had even less. Children, unlike adults, do not look insistently for answers or conclusion. They look rather for the kind of transformation that philosophy provides - not giving a new answer to an old question, but transforming all the questions (LIPMAN; 2003, p. 87).

With children, the collegiate students see and support the budding philosophicality of those they philosophize with, and become concerned and amazed with the becoming of the younger students. The experience is transformative.

tracing our practice

Much research on community of inquiry in the educational context focuses on the dynamic changes that occur within communities of young children as learners, but not on the educators who facilitate and guide the community. Given our role as college educators, we are interested in seeing the changes that our students, as facilitators of a community of inquiry, may undergo. Deborah Britzman's work on practice offers an idea of development that has helped us formulate the focus of our inquiry. She writes,

That is, learning to teach is not a mere matter of applying decontextualized skills or of mirroring predetermined images; it is time when one's past, present, and future are set in dynamic tension. Learning to teach-like teaching itself-is always the process of becoming: a time of formation and transformation, of scrutiny into what one is doing, and who one can become. (BRITZMAN, 1991, p. 31).

Although not all of our students will move on to become professional educators, we see in Britzman's description a way to understand what it means to learn and become while teaching. Our hope is to understand aspects of philosophical 'becoming' as our students undergo experiences in their challenging role of facilitators. We begin with a question, "How might we see philosophical growth in our students?"

In the following section we offer two reflective practices that, for us, began to surface from the quiet or sudden shifts and movements of philosophicality that occur when college level students facilitate community of inquiry sessions with young children. We believe that tracing philosophicality is best served by locating the narratives of doubt and uncertainty that emerge in our classroom practices. These narratives serve as a foundation for us to uncover, through sustained dialogue, reflection, and action-research with our students, ways to trace the becoming of philosophical thinking.

Our course assignments moved away from traditional essay assignments. Instead we asked our students to collate portfolios of their experience and we asked them to look at their own changes in practice over time. Exam questions were reflective in nature, offering places where students could share how they were coming to certain conclusions. Course conversations were motivated by student concerns and questions. And finally, as active practitioners of community of inquiry, we ourselves shared our own reflections throughout the duration of the course.

We are entering the research conversation about reflective methodologies as philosophers of education, situating reflection as philosophical practice. Claudia Ruitenberg asserts in her piece, Introduction: The Question of Method in Philosophy of Education, that

[methods are] the various ways and modes in which philosophers of education think, read, write, speak and listen, that make their work systematic, purposeful, and responsive to past and present philosophical and educational concerns and conversations. (RUITENBERG, 2009, p. 316).

By treating reflection as a methodological research practice we hope to assist fellow faculty engaged in philosophical coursework to entertain new possibilities and dimensions for what it means to engage college level students in philosophical discussion, as a pedagogy.

Our methodology then is subscribed in this unknowing and unbalance. We are seeking to see transformations that take place within a structure built on what seems to be shakiest of grounds. Rather than be dismayed with this sort of foundation we recognize, as Lipman, that philosophical research in education is not necessarily about moving from a foundation, but that instead within the method, reasonableness emerges. Thus, we do not set our sights on recording every aspect of dialogue or data point of our course. What matters to our methodology is having our students voice, through writing and speech, these points where unbalance and uncertainty have pointed us and them not to despair, but to question anew their interactions with one another, with the children, and in their own philosophical thinking. In short, those places where philosophicality bubbles to the surface. In the following section, we share two reflections, one which concentrates on a narrative of how student's concerns resonated within the course dynamics, and the second reporting on the reflections that stemmed from student written and portfolio work.

Negotiating Control

The students in my course had the option to either participate in a philosophy for children field experience at either an elementary school in a third grade classroom during a school-wide response to intervention time³ (30 minutes) or an afterschool program for second and third graders, run by a local non-profit at another elementary school (60 minutes). The students self-selected sites based on interest and scheduling concerns. During the course of the term the students overwhelmingly enjoyed their field experiences across both sites. Students often came into class excited to plan for the next week.

At the local elementary school, the classroom educator is a veteran teacher who works with students from the local college every year. She is supportive of novice teachers and innovative programs and curriculums. Her students are used to a variety of visitors from many universities and college across the state. My students were so welcomed into the site that I often felt like the outsider when I was facilitating. I kept thinking, what is my role here, in this space with so many different educators? The children began to self-regulate their own CoI within the first 4 sessions. At one point they devised a way to indicate whether or not, when they wanted to speak, whether the point that they would raise would either be a new point or add on to the original thought (either one or two fingers raised). My students started to bring this practice into our course discussions and when I visited this class later the next term, this procedure was still in place during all kinds of class discussions.

I saw that my students were amazed at how attentive the children were to the stories and how deeply appreciative they were to a story being read to them. They had voiced a prior conception that the children would think the stories beneath them or 'too young'. The teacher in the room had also expressed concern that we would be using picture books during our sessions. I needed to play a hand in negotiating the use of picture books that both the veteran educators and my pre-service educators did not believe were grade appropriate. The elementary students loved the books though and really enjoyed being read to. I wondered why choosing the material was such a sticky point for many of us adults! I wanted the young students to be exposed to the beautiful art and imagery that is held by the authors and illustrators of 'early childhood' literature. Of course, the third grade educator was thinking about the needed third grade vocabulary her students needed exposure too. My students were worried about boredom and feeling the need to do recognized 'grade-level' work. We had so many concerns about what would be good for the children. And, I realized later that not one of our party had ever handed the question to the elementary students. We had no idea what they wanted to read. Children have so many choices made for them in terms of curriculum and I wonder about the ability of philosophy opening up some of these choices for them. As a faculty member in education, I spend some time in methods courses discussing academic vocabulary as an obstacle and vehicle for learning. As we kept raising concerns about grade level suitability, vocabulary, and common understanding I started to recognize that I too, held deep assumptions about what a certain group of students, 'should know'.

Recognizing this as 'sticky' point, my students and I spent a course day discussing the use of grade level reading in classrooms at the elementary level. We spent a significant portion of that discussion thinking about how words can be either or both linguistically or conceptually difficult. After this discussion, the college students in this group, after reading One Hen facilitated a dialogue about borrowing, lending, and community needs. Though the third graders were able to discuss borrowing and lending when pressed, my students realized that they had a lot of variance when it came to the differences between gifts giving freely and gifts that came with obligation and responsibility. It was a turning point for my students as they recognized that they too, when faced with the questions raised by the book, had to critically reflect on what it meant to give, to receive, to borrow and to lend, words they would have previously said that they understood. I began to keep track of the common terms that my college-level students started to question and am looking forward to seeing how working with children can cause college-level students to question their own mastery of vocabulary.

At this site my students were often amazed how well the children listened to them and were able to critically respond to their questions. Their amazement at the 'good' behavior sustained many discussions in our classroom, as my students facilitating during the after-school program had a lot of logistical and behavioral issues. While the children at the after-school site were often excited to interact with my students and were always willing to play the icebreaker activity or game (and to play it at a critical level) the children often exhibited behaviors that distracted the group from sustained conversation.

Despite the behavior issues that my students grappled with at this site they too experienced delight in working with the children. And, just as in the in-school group the children they were working with readily enjoyed the story reading. The children were absolutely attentive during this time.

Neither of the groups were able to leave regulation of the group structure or social norms to the children, entirely, and this bothered my college students. My students were very concerned with behavior, control, and discipline. We had numerous discussions about boredom and motivation to participate. I fielded questions and concerns constantly about how teachers would know when to hand over 'control' or to manage difficult children in a community of inquiry. I constantly wondered about my own expectations about behavior in my own classroom. Was I not able to show that my students, as members of their own CoI were regulating behaviors, just as their own young elementary students were? So many of our questions were about control!

Though each of my students had specific personal questions both about procedures and about the content of their facilitation one running concern that I had early on was whether or not the college age students could ask hypothetical questions that would support the growth of counter-examples and critical inquiry by the community. Thus, for example, asking the children after reading One Hen such questions as, "What if we lived in a world where there was no lending or borrowing, that you could only buy things directly?" or after reading the Giving Tree, "What would our world be like if trees could talk, how would our world change?"

It is a kind of thinking that is often difficult for communities of philosophical inquiry, even long-standing ones. It was also a kind of thinking that many of my college-age students had difficulty with. During the term, about midway through, we spent time building exercises with each other that used hypothetical reasoning to use during field experiences. The students expressed that this was a kind of reasoning and thinking that was very new to them. Over time however, I realized that my course notes contained more and more examples of my students offering hypothetical reasoning. And, I saw that by helping young students develop this skill, my own students' skill in this way of thinking was building. More and more our conversations turned towards thinking about ways we could change the world of education rather than an acceptance of what normal classroom practice was. As an example: after we had watched a clip of Malala Yousafzai speak about her activism we thought about the kind of power she seemed to have, as a young child and we ended the day wondering, "What would happen if children were listened to and heard all over the world in their everyday lives, how would our world be different?"

After this specific class, I realized that this specific line of hypothetical questioning was important to my class because it again resonated with concerns about control and negotiating control of children, qua adults. My initial frustration about always coming back to questions of 'control' in my classroom gave way to a realization that this coming back was in essence the philosophical growth that I hoped to see in my own students as they worked with young children philosophically, in action, in their initial foray into community of inquiry and philosophical thinking. As with Lipman's snowball analogy, as we moved together, negotiating control about curriculum, exercises, and questions we should and should not facilitate with elementary students, we expanded and deepened our thinking about the children, thinking, and our own philosophical selves. Rather than hoping to resolve the question however, we were learning together to ask questions about control in different ways: our philosophicality was in transformation.

Reflections With Student Work

This part incorporates the instructor's reflection on final reflective reports written by students in a Philosophy of Education course taught at a comprehensive state University in the East Coast of the U.S.A. So it is a square reflection, or perhaps, a play of mirrors in which the original image may get lost.

Students had been required to complete at least four visits either at the local elementary or at the local high school, in which they facilitated philosophical discussions with younger students. Their reflective portfolio was composed of four parts, a) narrative of the experience, b) materials c) connection to course readings d) questions: what have you learned about "philosophy" in your experience? How do you see it informing your teaching and learning in the future?

One main emotional tone in students' responses was surprise at the pleasantness of the experience. The expressed relief at "being in a classroom without the pressures of a curriculum" and enjoyment at a "sense of openness within the classroom". Reading their responses felt to me as if for a moment we had managed to open the windows of a stuffy room and let some new air breath in.

Students were quick to connect this sense of openness to a perception that philosophy is not really about problem solving (even though, this old instructor feels the need to note, it makes you better at it) but rather it is about, paraphrasing their words, the reasoning behind one's thoughts that is just as important as the claims one makes. As another student remarked, "philosophy results in unrestricted minds". It seems that the rigidity of the place in which we were welcomed, the unavoidable structure of the public k-12 education, by contrast highlighted the freedom of philosophical thinking. Of course, the rigidity was not total and probably not fully embraced, or the school would not have made room for us and would have not gifted us the opportunity to spend time with their children.

Students really relished the possibility to know and listen to children. They mentioned that connecting with children made their experience very valuable and they were amazed at their own capacity to understand children's reasoning. They realized that the content of discussion needed attention to vocabulary and word choice but it was nevertheless reaching the same depth as the discussions we were having, in parallel, in our classroom. They instantly started caring for younger students' intellectual freedom, expressing a desire for children to form their own thoughts independently. They also realized that philosophy can be done at any age because each of us thinks philosophically without knowing it. As their professor, I enjoyed seeing them become increasingly responsible for assuring that freedom to think was respected in the classroom. I recall one of those occasions, when the discussion with children seemed to wander away from factual information to a degree that was difficult for the classroom teacher to tolerate. We had to watch the teacher interrupt and assert the primacy of correct answers. The first grade was trying to understand whether children were animals or whether they were their own category. Discussion was lively as this was a real question and was being treated as such. After a few minutes, a kid said that the science teacher had told them that people are animals so she thought that mean that kids were animals as well. The teacher who was attending the class stepped in and said, "Finally! That is correct. Can you please stand up and repeat your answer? And children, let's give her a round of applause when she is done". I sat down and watched. My students were silent. As we witnessed philosophicality take a hard blow, we remained mindful of the fact that we were being kindly hosted in this teacher's first grade, and that any activity would have to be incessantly parlayed and balanced amongst diverse pedagogical expectations and beliefs. I also knew from personal conversation with the teacher, that it had been important for him to understand the different way that philosophical matter works and how this had taken much effort on his side. When we left the class, my students were bursting. They kept telling me, "I cannot believe this happened!" They were scandalized. I found myself taking pride in their outrage. What I valued most in that moment is what they were learning about the freedom of philosophical inquiry and also the damage that even a well-meaning teacher can comport.

Watching them (my students) learn and grow as thinkers while they were facilitating philosophical discussions with younger students, listening to them debrief and share with their peers the day after school visits, I could see them develop their philosophicality in new unscripted ways. Thinking with children taught them much not only from the point of view of pedagogy but also and primarily from the point of view of their philosophical growth.

At the end of the experience, one student said that all of the words spoken from others aided her to further her own thoughts. That is how she felt and learned after philosophizing with younger students, and I take it to be a good testimony of what I was hoping to see happen.

Moving Forward

We end both the narrative summary and this reflection on student work truncated, to be continued. As faculty we look forward to building on these practices of narration and reflection, that allow us to better see and understand the development of philosophicality within our students. We seek to further understand what it means to record the growth of philosophical thinking in our students. Importantly, we want to also recognize that there may be impact on our own philosophical growth as thinkers and educators.

One way that we think we can continue trace this growth is to help our students tell the narratives of their philosophicality. By building places during the course to help our students name, consider, and present emotions and perceptions of the thinking by both the young children and themselves, we think that our students will see philosophy in action. Modeling the telling of these stories supports our students' understanding that they too, are, beings in transformation, learners-learning, or as Britzman might put it, "in development" always with their past and future. Learning to be aware of how the self changes as a learner seems just as important to us, as philosophers, as it does to become aware of the pitfalls of logical fallacies!

If the researcher in each of us was surprised at how often the words "pleasant", "surprised", "conflicted", or "angry" came up as we moved through the course, the human in each of us was not. Too often, we take the emotions that underlie philosophy for granted. Part of our purpose in telling the stories of our course experience was to openly report the emotional aspects of tracing changes in thinking, both as a learner and educator. Reporting our emotions played a part in helping us see the points at which our students needed support, were challenged, or had made a shift in thinking. So too was the recognition that though the course moved chronologically, our thinking, as philosophers and educators, did not, because continually we thought that telling the story necessitated both a looking back and forward. This seems most apparent when we look back at our students' reflections and we think forward as to how we might change the course components for next years. Learning to tell narratives that can capture how shifts in thinking are not always linear seems one of our next challenges.

At least as importantly, we hope that this project will pose a way for the field of teacher educators and educators of philosophy to recognize that there is a strong pedagogical relation between facilitators of philosophical dialogue with children and the children themselves, as offered by Kennedy's reading on the relationship between adulthood and childhood. To become an adult, and particularly, an adult educator, is not simply a matter of turning an age or being inscribed into certain societal roles. In essence, adulthood is about one's dynamics both with one's social and cultural childhood and the way one interacts with children in their present. Without this awareness, children and adults are strangers to one another in a way that contributes to the fantastical notion that learning is about mastery of a certain dimension or skill. Instead, when adults and children work within their relationship between one another, as familiar others, what it means to learn is itself up for question and transformation. Our hope is that coursework that builds reflective practices on this specific aspect might engage the university in transforming education across ages and domains.

We expect, as we move forward with these concerns, to better trace transformative changes in college-level students' ability to reflect, ask questions, and manage ambiguity by using our students' reflective work and narratives of experience. We also expect that by assisting our students in narrating their own reflections on thinking, they will be able to recognize better differences between others' and their own thinking, and to detect those moments in which their own philosophicality erupts and bubbles to the surface. We hope this and future study will motivate ourselves and our students to be always becoming philosophical, because this aim requests constant practice.

References

BRITZMAN, Deborah. Practice Makes Practice: A Critical Study of Learning to Teach. Albany: University of New York Press, 1991. p. 8.

KENNEDY, David. The Well of Being. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006.

LIPMAN, Matthew. Thinking in Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

LIPMAN, Matthew; SHARP, Ann. Growing up with Philosophy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978.

MATTHEWS, Gareth. Philosophy and the Young Child. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1982.

MILWAY, Kate. One Hen. Toronto: Kids Can Press, 2008. Online Etymology Dictionary. Available in: <Available in: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=-ity> Accessed on: June 1st 2016.

RUITENBERG, Claudia. Introduction: The Question of Method in Philosophy of Education. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 43 (3). 2009, p. 316.

SILVERSTEIN, Shel. The Giving Tree. New York: Harper and Row, 1964.

Notes