[Xmca-l] Re: Doing Philosophy with kids

[Alfredo Jornet Gil]

Hi Kim,

and thanks for sharing your work. I enjoyed the read and I share here thoughts and questions that I came upon while reading it. 

As others have mentioned, I felt that your study positively testifies to the possibility of developing cultures of wonder and dialogue in education. In this regard,  your article (at least to me) describes a history of success, of how those ground rules designed to afford such culture were adopted by the group of learners. However, that successful aspect also let me wondering about the tensions and difficulties, and the work that must have been involved in solving those. 

First, I was wondering to what extent and of which quality difficulties and tensions arose in the process. In an e-mail you mention that there were some difficulties,  someone having troubles to not focus on the "right answer". Did you have experiences concerning how these kind of troubles were managed in situ? I was wondering on the kind of work that it took to move from one culture of (e.g.) finding right answers, to another of philosophizing with others. (not sure if this connects to David's questions about the specific domain of philosophy versus the "civil" or "academic" discourse ). 

Second, and related to the first, I was thinking that, for things to work out, the community of adult/learners studied must have had already some competences/resources for this to happen. So one could wonder which features of the "looking for the right answer" culture, or of their everyday schooling, may have also made it possible the new culture to emerge. You put emphasis on the rules as resource, but I guess there may be some mechanisms, some work, that makes it possible for those ground rules (as they are written or read aloud) to  to actually become functional as part of the community (the rules cannot account for the adoption of the rules). Were there aspects of the traditional schooling culture that you could observe at work and working fine for this?

These were my thoughts/questions, perhaps already addressed in the conversation. In any case, thanks for sharing your work.
Alfredo
________________________________________
From: xmca-l-bounces+a.g.jornet=iped.uio.no@mailman.ucsd.edu <xmca-l-bounces+a.g.jornet=iped.uio.no@mailman.ucsd.edu> on behalf of mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu>
Sent: 09 November 2015 17:54
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Doing Philosophy with kids

Thanks for the extra info, Kim.
More interesting questions than mine have appeared. I'll be interested to
see how the discussion proceeds.

mike


On Sun, Nov 8, 2015 at 8:01 PM, Kim Skinner <kskinner@lsu.edu> wrote:

> Hi Mike,
>
> By your questions I see I need to provide even more background for this
> study, which I did find challenging in the space an article-length
> manuscript provides. This study took place in a Texas public school where
> remedial after school offerings were plentiful and
> often mandatory for certain children but non-remedial opportunities were
> scarce and short-lived. The philosophy club was announced to
> the grade 4 students at a beginning of the year assembly and touted as an
> opportunity for children to talk and think together
> as participants in philosophical conversations once a week, after school.
> As the only school in this district for grade 4 and 5 students, 210 grade 4
> students attended this school. The philosophy club was open to all students
> and the first twenty signed parental permission slips were granted entry.
> (A similar offering for grade 3 and 4 students in a nearby school district
> admitted 30 students but the office had to time stamp the returned
> permission slips and create a waiting list as 62 were returned the first
> day.) What we found was both students and parents had considerable interest
> in unique after school learning opportunities when admission was open and
> without cost.
>
> Attendance did fluctuate slightly over time, primarily due to a few
> children being required by the principal to attend remedial after school
> sessions due to poor grades in either reading or math. While all of the
> children's responses were not included in this article, as I cited in my
> full-length study,
> there was differential take-up of learning opportunities by the child
> participants. In Informal interviews with several key participants, some
> children expressed difficulty not focusing on the "right answer" and one
> child admitted he was uncomfortable voicing his ideas and preferred to
> write them
> in his reflection journals. The children had the opportunity to respond
> orally and in writing each session, though I did not include the reflection
> journal data in this manuscript.
>
> Thank you for sharing the P4C example from a preschool classroom.
> Children's literature as a stimulus for philosophical conversation often
> yields such fabulous results!
> Kim
>
>
>
> Kim Skinner, Ph.D.
> Assistant Professor, Literacy Studies
> Louisiana State University
> School of Education
> 226 Peabody Hall
> Baton Rouge, LA 70803
> 225.578.6709
>
> ________________________________________
> From: xmca-l-bounces+kskinner=lsu.edu@mailman.ucsd.edu
> <xmca-l-bounces+kskinner=lsu.edu@mailman.ucsd.edu> on behalf of mike cole
> <mcole@ucsd.edu>
> Sent: Sunday, November 8, 2015 12:14 PM
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Subject: [Xmca-l]  Doing Philosophy with kids
>
> Kim et al--
>
>
>
> I have long been interested in the philosophy for children ideas of Lipmann
> and Mathews, as well as the potentials of afterschool activities as a space
> in which to enrich children's experiences with the stuff being crammed at
> them in school, so it was especially interesting to see the two combined.
> The collation of ideas from discursive psychology and Vygotskian, as well
> as the toolkit of methods seems to be very helpful in understanding what
> was transpiring.
>
>
>
> But I came away with a few questions.
>
>
>
> Re afterschool. A major question I had as I started the paper was how
> successful a "doing philosophy" club would be for 9-10 year olds (which I
> assume 4th graders to be). In our work we have always focused on the
> voluntary nature of participation, so kids have to want to come. Seemed
> like quite a challenge!
>
>
>
> Am I right that about half the kids dropped out by session 7 or was it that
> attendance fluctuated a lot so that you just happened to have few kids on
> sessions 7 and 19? With respect to the question of opportunities to learn
> that you raise in the introduction, what should we make of this? Only some
> kids like doing philosopy? And of those who liked it,
>
> were opportunities differentially taken up by different kids? It was hard
> for me to follow.
>
>
>
> I have a question about the use of the term, activity, which is very often
> brings me grief when reading Vygotsky and many others because the term
> seems to be polysemic within
>
> texts. For example,
>
> "The expression doing philosophy signals philosophy as an activity, like
> doing work (Wittgenstein) vs : "I considered an event as a set of
> activities bound together by a common theme or purpose."
>
>
>
> Would it be doing an injustice to your thinking to refer to events as
> (collective) actions that are bound together by the common activity of
> doing philosophy"?
>
>
>
> I was impressed after reading through the paper how importantly it
> contrasts with standard education where the most problematic thing a
> teacher can do is to assert that s/he does not know the answer to a
> question or that there is no right answer. It seems as if embedding a
> "doing philosophy" curriculum in schools that can survive in the very
> different set of the ground rules of transmissiong, direct-instruction
> regimes is to embed it in the language arts/literacy part of the
> curriculum, which in different ways by Mathews and Lipman.
>
>
>
>  Below is one of my favorite examples of philosophy in the preschool using
> a book and author for whom so many core philosophical issues appear in
> appealing form.
>
>
>
> Thanks for the informative article.
>
> mike
>
> -----------------
>
> The Kindergartners in Vivian Paley’s classroom are discussing the story by
> Leo Leoni of Tico, a wingless bird who is cared for by his black-winged
> friends. In the story, the wishingbird visits Tico one night and grants him
> a wish. Tico wishes for golden wings. When his friends see his golden wings
> in the morning, they are angry. They abandon him because he wants to be
> better than they are. Tico is upset by his friends’ rejection and wants to
> gain readmission to the group. He discovers that he can exchange his golden
> feathers for black ones by performing good deeds. When at last he has
> replaced all the golden feathers with black ones, he is granted readmission
> by the flock, whose members comment, “Now you are just like us” (Leoni,
> 1964).
>
> *Teacher:* I don’t think it’s fair that Tico has to give up his golden
> wings.
>
> *Lisa:* It is fair. See, he was nicer when he didn’t have any wings. They
> didn’t like him when he had gold.
>
> *Wally:* He thinks he’s better if he has golden wings.
>
> *Eddie:* He is better.
>
> *Jill:* But he’s not supposed to be better. The wishingbird was wrong to
> give him those wings.
>
> *Deana:* She has to give him his wish. He’s the one who shouldn’t have
> asked for golden wings.
>
> *Wally:* He could put black wings on top of the golden wings and try to
> trick them.
>
> *Deana:* They’d sneak up and see the gold. He should just give every bird
> one golden feather and keep one for himself.
>
> *Teacher:* Why can’t he decide for himself what kind of wings he wants?
>
> *Wally:* He has to decide to have black wings.
>
> (Paley, 1981, pp. 25–26)
>
> --
>
> It is the dilemma of psychology to deal as a natural science with an
> object that creates history. Ernst Boesch
>
>


--

It is the dilemma of psychology to deal as a natural science with an
object that creates history. Ernst Boesch