Being a Person in the World: Merging Philosophy and Fieldwork

• In Event: Philosophical Inquiry and Empirical Research

Abstract

My remarks as a member of the panel will stem from a longitudinal study of what it means to be a person in our contemporary world. The study combines fieldwork in schools, discussions with teachers, and philosophical inquiry. My two doctoral research assistants and I have recently concluded the second year of the endeavor.

The project began with a pilot study in a local elementary school in 2011-2012, where we tested ideas about personhood and how to think about it through the vehicle of fieldwork in schools and talks with teachers. During our second year, we have been observing life in the classrooms of sixteen teachers from eight public schools in New York City. We are identifying ways of thinking about how children and youth express their evolving, or emerging, personhood through the vicissitudes of the highly complex social life, which their day-after-day attendance in school makes possible. We have also met for dinner-discussion meetings with the teachers. Drawing heavily upon their testimony about their experience, we have addressed with them the question of being and becoming a person. We have endeavored to listen to how the teachers perceive the questions of ‘who’ their students – and they themselves – are as well as who they might be becoming.

The inquiry takes its point of departure from cosmopolitanism understood as an educational orientation toward experience. In this orientation, people learn to fuse reflective openness to new people, ideas, practices, and values with reflective loyalty to local commitments and forms of life. However, in the project my assistants and I are not ‘applying’ the idea of cosmopolitanism. Instead it serves as one core source among several (which include our own experiences as teachers) for generating questions and perspective. Our approach merges empirical and philosophical anthropology. The former examines actualities: how people lead their lives and talk about them. Philosophical anthropology addresses possibilities: who and what people might become in light of actualities while not being determined by them. Through our observations and talks with teachers, we are imagining possibilities for what it means to be a person in the world today, and how formal education can figure into the equation.
In the session, I will touch on the core elements of our intensive fieldwork in the teachers’ classrooms, especially how philosophy guides both our perceptions and interpretations. I will also address our dinner-discussions with the teachers. As mentioned, they have centered on the question of becoming a person in today’s political and cultural environment. Finally, I will also raise questions having to do with the concepts person and becoming a person, and what it means to combine fieldwork in schools with philosophical inquiry.

Authors

• David T. Hansen, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Ana Cecilia Galindo Diego, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Jason Thomas Wozniak, Teachers College, Columbia University