What we aspire to with our children, our friends, our students: to bring them into the inquiries that matter to us – as full partners, despite differences of experience and intellect and age. Philosophy has this potential; it’s what Socrates was trying to do with random people on the streets of Athens – to enlist them in very long inquiries. In the late sixties, the Philosophy for Children movement revived this idea about philosophy. The founder, Mat Lipman, wrote children’s novels designed to draw children in to exploratory conversations with each other and with their teachers and parents. He marketed those as skill-building, partly because of how teachers in New Jersey at that time saw themselves – as informers, as coaches, as wise guides. But this other idea of forming a community of inquiry with children was always underneath what he did.
As he wrote these novels, his colleague, Gary Matthews, was raising his kids, with a similar aspiration or hope, and he turned to children’s literature for material, finding those books that worked to set up questions and problems for children and adults to work on together. He reviewed these for Mat’s new journal, Thinking, and they became an archive of thought-provoking material, eventually landing in a review website, Thinking in Stories, which I now curate. This website serves an international group of teachers and parents who have this same hope of cooperating with younger people in shared inquiry.
In the last few years, people have asked us to create sections within the website devoted to topics they need to talk about. The first such request came from teachers in the Ukraine, and we constructed a bibliography of stories that start discussions about war and displacement. Then, we began a long, group process to build a bibliography to help people find their way into discussions about the natural world. That bibliography – a set of categories with reviewed examples attached – is now being beta-tested by teachers and parents.
This is where I want to ask for help. I need readers for this bibliography – people to suggest new titles and new categories. Our experience, in developing this list, was that each new suggestion raised important issues: what is inquiry, for this area? What relations between parents and children, teachers and children, are central?
So, I can make this offer: anything you say will be thought about, and any contribution to the project will reach an engaged audience.
Thinking in Stories website: https://www.montclair.edu/iapc/thinking-in-stories/
The war and displacement bibliography: https://www.montclair.edu/iapc/thinking-in-stories-children-war-and-displacement/
The nature bibliography, as of today: https://docs.google.com/
Please send thoughts and suggestions to Peter Shea at shea0017@umn.edu.
No comments:
Post a Comment