Finding Child Beyond "Child": Philosophy With Children in Foundation-Phase Teacher Education in South Africa

• 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 ethics of a teacher education programme in South Africa. The programme’s courses, community of philosophical enquiry pedagogy, assessment and field trips offer student teachers experiences of teaching in schools and at university that is committed to social justice, relational ontologies and multispecies epistemic equality.
Objectives
Misopedy (Rollo, 2016) refers to the denigration and subordination of children and childhood based on a hierarchical relationship between adult and child (with age as the category of exclusion). The objective is to show how against the odds, a higher education curriculum can prepare students for the implementation of P4C as a post-age pedagogy in their future classrooms.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
The paper is grounded in the field of Philosophy for Children (P4C) - an approach to teaching and learning created by Lipman and colleagues at the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children (IAPC) (Lipman, Sharp & Oscanyan 1977). I draw on P4C practitioners and theorists (e.g. Kennedy, Kohan, Haynes and Stanley) who use P4C as a means to work more democratically and regard philosophical enquiries as a playful, exploratory and imaginative form of philosophizing. The paper also draws on the transdisciplinary philosophies of Braidotti (2006, 2013), Haraway (2016) and Barad (2017) for a relational ontology that includes matter and nonhuman animals.
Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
I show through one student’s final assessment, how art workshops, documentaries, films and fieldtrips can be used for P4C as a method for teaching and learning in higher education, and at the same time can teach student teachers how to do philosophical enquiries with children in their own classrooms.
Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials
The impact of the programme is exemplified through one student’s art installation - supported by a link to a spliced YouTube video. Also, images have been included in the paper to affect the readerviewer by showing how student teachers can become activists for a “justice-to-come” (Barad 2012, p.81) through a programme that creates an imaginary for what might be possible - to find child beyond ‘child’ through multispecies relationality during a field trip to an aquarium. In particular the analysis of an image of the external examiner kneeling under the table to access the YouTube video on a laptop takes centre stage.
Conclusions and scholarly significance of the study or work
The evidence in my paper shows how P4C can disrupt the anthropocentric gaze – a gaze that not only puts certain human animals in terms of race, gender and class, but also of a particular age, above other bodies (including the material world). Age categories, numbers and other quantifications (e.g. statistics) materialise ageist pedagogical relationships and cause ontoepistemic and social injustice, because of the ethical hierarchy and biological taxonomy on which it is grounded. P4C deterritorialises the metaphorical and psychological language that has become so naturalised in early childhood, primary and teacher education worldwide.

Author

• Karin Saskia Murris, University of Cape Town