Communal Philosophical Inquiry Through Ignorance, Invention, and Improvisation: A Latin American Perspective

• In Event: The Role of Philosophy in Elementary and Secondary Education

Abstract

Abstract
In this presentation I describe how Philosophy with Children (P4C) has shaped the content, methodology and pedagogy of a Teacher Education Program based on the historical roots of Latin American Popular Education. The programme’s courses, community of philosophical enquiry pedagogy, assessment and field trips, based on the concepts of ignorance, invention and improvisation, offer student teachers experiences of teaching in schools and at a university that is committed to social justice,
Objectives
The main aim of this presentation is to offer a deconstruction and reconstruction of the ideas of ignorance, invention and improvisation, inspired by S. Rodríguez (2001) to show how they can play a significant role in the theory and practice of a Teacher Education Program structured through communal philosophical inquiry.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
The presentation draws on P4C theorists: K. Murris & J. Haynes (2008); D. Kennedy, (2011) who consider P4C as a means to work more democratically through a playful, exploratory and imaginative form of philosophizing. The presentation also draws on Socrates and J. Rancière to reconsider ignorance as disobedience to the stultifying order of school; S. Rodríguez to consider invention as a form of attention and hospitality to “outsiders,” and on M. Santi (2016) to prize improvisation as a form of the teacher preparing herself to be present in the presence at school.
Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
Our analysis focuses on the questions: what can a teacher do in order to empower children’s thinking in a classroom? We read some bibliographical references (Socrates, Rancière, Rodríguez, Santi) to reconstruct the role of the teacher in philosophical communal inquiry through the concepts of ignorance, invention and improvisation.
Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials
Transcripts from different experiences with teachers and children in the Project “Does philosophy fit in Caxias?” (UERJ, 2017) have been included in the paper to affect the reader viewer by showing how children and teachers of all ages can deepen the philosophical dimension of their practice through considering themselves as ignorant, inventors and improvisers.
Conclusions and scholarly significance of the study or work
This understanding of the role of the teacher in philosophical inquiry with children offers the possibility of deterritorializing and reterritorializing their practice. Ignorance is not understood as “lack of knowledge” nor as the “knowledge of not knowing” (Socrates) but as disobedience to what needs to be disobeyed in order to promote a real philosophical inquiry between equals at school (J. Rancière); invention is not understood as creativity nor innovation as understood in neoliberal educational discourse but as attention to and hospitality toward what has been in-vented (come-in) from the outside; improvisation, considered as not anticipating what is to be before seeing it, is a long preparation for a prepared teacher--a teacher who is prepared to be prepared, to be attentive to what she herself cannot think as thinkable.

Author

• Walter Kohan, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro and University of British Columbia