Karin Murris

How can education make room for children’s enquiries about the meaning of existence in a fragile world? Responding to this question, the paper thinks-with Emmanuel Levinas and Karen Barad and reimagines ‘responsibility’ and ‘response-ability’ in times of ecological crisis. Re-turning data from Small Matters, a research project on young children’s philosophical enquiries into multispecies death and dying, we illustrate through a vignette of how the Community of Philosophical Enquiry (CoPE) pedagogy enables ‘thinking-with-hands’ that troubles human exceptionalism and adult-centrism. Levinas’s ethics of alterity and Barad’s agential realism inspire a posthumanist reading of Aatu’s existential play with a LEGO miniature skeleton. We argue that cultivating response-ability requires slowing down, attuning to the small (child, iPhone, paper, white tack, pencil …), troubling anthropocentric temporalities, and tracing phenomena ad infinitum. We conclude that re-turning to the data excavates a multiplicity of layers of reality – a worlding process critical for justice-to-come.

This paper emerges from experiences of putting picturebooks, philosophy with children and posthumanism into play. Responding to Derrida's notion of a ‘return to childhood’, we propose a different move of ‘re-turning to child/ren’, drawing from various entangled sources. First, the figuration of posthuman child (Murris, 2016) disrupts the conception of temporality that takes development and progress as inevitable. The posthuman child expresses the idea of the knowing subject as an unbounded sympoietic system. We put to work Miranda Fricker's notion of epistemic injustice to reanimate thought, with Tim Ingold and Jane Bennett. In respect of children's animistic philosophizing, our writing explores the materiality of philosophizing between adult/s and a class of 4–7-year-olds enquiring through an animated picturebook called Corduroy (Freeman, 1976). They are engaged in an epistemology of learning with, rather than about, the world. Ingold proposes that ‘knowing is movement to be taught by the world’ (2013:5) and that our inquiries should not set out to describe or represent the world but rather to open our perception to what is going on there, so we can respond to it. Making enquiries draws attention away from description and re-presentation to the movement, plurality and animatedness of knowing.

In this paper, we give a flavour of how, against the odds, Reggio-Emilia-inspired pedagogical documentation can work in reconceptualizing environmental education, reconfiguring child subjectivity and provoking an ontological shift from autopoiesis to sympoiesis in teacher education. Working posthuman(e)ly and transdisciplinarily across three foundation phase teacher education courses at a university in South Africa, we situate our teaching within current environmental precarities. We show how we stirred up trouble in and outside our university classroom and provoked our students to “make kin” with children, each other, other animals, and the more-than-human, but also to stay with the trouble, that is, to learn to be truly present in colonized spaces.

Philosophy with children (P4C) 1 presents significant positive challenges for educators. Its 'community of enquiry' pedagogy assumes not only an epistemological shift in the role of the educator, but also a different ontology of 'child' and balance of power between educator and learner. After a brief historical sketch and an outline of the diversity among P4C practitioners, epistemological uncertainty in teaching P4C is crystallised in a succinct overview of theoretical and practical tensions that are a direct result of the implementation of P4C in mainstream education. These recurring pedagogical tensions in my practice as P4C teacher, teacher educator and mentor of teacher educators cause disequilibrium that opens up rich opportunities for philosophy of education in supporting novice P4Cers. Disequilibrium is a positive force that opens up a space in which educators need to reflect upon their values, their beliefs about learning and teaching, and ultimately encourages educators to rethink their own role. Plato's metaphor of the stingray highlights the role of the P4C teacher educator as model of the P4C teacher in any setting: 'to numb and to be numbed'. The P4C community and its institutions need to address the questions arising from these pedagogical tensions; and this needs to be done with integrity, that is, in communities of enquiry that include children. If not, in the long term, a more instrumental version of P4C may prevail.

The philosophy for children curriculum was specially written by Matthew Lipman and colleagues for the teaching of philosophy by non-philosophically educated teachers from foundation phase to further education colleges. In this article I argue that such a curriculum is neither a necessary, not a sufficient condition for the teaching of philosophical thinking. The philosophical knowledge and pedagogical tact of the teacher remains salient, in that the open-ended and unpredictable nature of philosophical enquiry demands of teachers to think in the moment and draw on their own knowledge and experience of academic philosophy. Providing specialist training or induction in the P4C curriculum cannot and should not replace undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in academic philosophy at universities. However, although for academic philosophers the use of the P4C curriculum could be beneficial, I will argue that its use poses the risk of wanting to form children into the ideal ‘abnormal’ child, the thinking child—the adult philosopher’s child positioned as such by the Lipman novels. The notion of narrativity is central in my argument. With the help of two picturebooks—The Three Pigs by David Weisner and Voices in the Park by Anthony Browne—I illustrate my claim that philosophy as ‘side-shadowing’ or meta-thinking can only be generated in the space ‘in between’ text, child and educator, thereby foregrounding a ‘pedagogy of exposure’ rather than ‘teacher proof’ texts