Wendy Turgeon

In Art and Max1 David Wiesner explores the tools and processes of artistic creation. This book does so in an unusually self-referential way as the very illustrations themselves are the subject focus for deconstructing and reconstructing the meaning of art. While this is a picture book with simple text and most likely aimed at very young children, we can find here a rich mine of ideas for “children of all ages,” any of us who are puzzled by the meaning of art. This text can be a wonderful guide for reflecting on the nature of art, the requirements for artistry, and problematizing of how art relates to the world.

Many teachers who encounter the idea of philosophy for and with children are engaged by the concepts of community, dialogue, questioning, and lived learning. In many cases they discover the idea of “doing philosophy for children” from a book, website, newspaper articles, or attending a workshop. These educators are well skilled in teaching and working with children. They understand the perspectives and needs of their children and young adults; they are versed in cooperative learning and integrative teaching which stress the importance of involving students in reflective inquiry. Teachers perceive themselves to be good listeners and facilitators of children’s learning and philosophy seems like a natural extension of this relational model of education.

My college has been swept by the “assessment” wave, as have many, if not all, colleges in the United States. This passionate attention to assessment goes beyond the tools of classroom evaluation and has affected every aspect of academic protocol: courses, majors, programs, degrees. We now speak of a “culture of assessment” to indicate a thorough commitment to reflexive pedagogy and attentive program design. In its best sense, the assessment movement echoes higher education’s response to society’s call for accountability. We acknowledge that just as we continually assess our students within the classroom, we must also assess our programmatic commitment to the larger community. A “culture of assessment” runs deep into the central meaning of education for student, faculty, departments and the college. All aspects of the college experience must be developed so that there is an assessment protocol in place. However, when the “culture of assessment” devolves into its worst sense, faculty are concerned that the call for assessment at the university level may lead to the problems prevalent at the pre-college level with the legislation of “No Child Left Behind.” Here we have witnessed the potential for abuses of assessment so as to become a punitive and narrowly conceived tool of defining and measuring success. As reflected at the pre-college level, NCLB has been accused of using unilateral models to assess the performances of teachers and schools that ignore the contextual forces of the social milieu in which these schools live and operate and the durational nature of the educative experience. When a teacher or program is summarily evaluated on the basis of poorly designed and implemented assessment standards, we see the devastation that occurs for the students, teachers and schools alike. Living life under a microscope of persistent calibration can be enervating in ways that darken the soul of what we do.

Query any group of undergraduates and you will discover that most of them do not consider themselves to be feminists and will quickly repudiate the title. They see feminism as either reflective of a man-hating attitude or as an outmoded social cause of the 1970sthe distant past. While the opportunities for girls and women have multiplied in many arenas of life, from sports to academic careers to such professions as engineering, the law and medicine, we still witness rigid gender roles subversively at work in schools, workplaces and society at large. What has changed is the way we speak about it. Now the language emphasizes choice and women declaim that they are choosing to adopt certain pattern of being women, often without realizing the iron fist of cultural expectations on these choices. In this paper we will first examine the gender roles and expectations set upon girls and women in contemporary society. A major force today is the media as we shall explore in its influence through toys, television, movies and the creation and sustaining of a celebrity culture. Secondly we will examine the extent to which the educational system has risen to the challenge of educating beyond gender stereotypes, if indeed it has. We will trace the inherent difficulties in introducing these ideas to elementary and secondary students in an atmosphere of cultural and ethical relativism. The main thesis of this paper will be the claim that we need to construct ways to engage young people in careful and nuanced reflection on gender and that philosophical inquiry offers us just such a methodology. In addition to taking a look at materials already accessible, we will sketch out some ideas for the development of materials that will further the enterprise of freeing young men and women to examine with a critical eye the gender roles assigned to them by their culture. However, in doing this, we acknowledge a need to be sensitive to a multitude of perspectives based on our nationalities, religious beliefs and practice, and cultural homes. What directions can and should we explore to work against the juggernaut of media and societys pressures on girls and boys to adopt a particular view of gender and how can we remain open to plural modalities of gender without succumbing to unreflective acceptance of tradition for traditions sake?

Recently fiction has been given a central role in the engagement in philosophical thinking, especially within an educational setting. We find many configurations of this intersection of the narrative and the philosophical and the variances among them need noting if we are to critically examine how each form works. But there remains a troubling question: can fiction really offer up philosophical ideas without failing as literature and missing the mark as philosophy? While allegories and analogies have a long and fruitful history of elucidating complex philosophical ideas, philosophers have taken pains to differentiate themselves from the crafter of tales. Philosophers have tended to prefer clear and sustained thinking through rational arguments over imaginative suggestion. Fiction is not philosophy. This paper will explore the different forms that narrative-as-philosophy can take and offer an assessment of the relative merits of these stories as invitations to philosophical thinking