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On Becoming both Less and More Open-Minded 

 
 

Lena Green   
 

 
Introduction 

  
first encountered Philosophy for Children (P4C) in the late 1990s. I am not a philosopher, 
but as an educational psychologist fascinated by the notion of learned intelligence, I was eager 

to explore any educational intervention that claimed to improve students’ thinking. There is literature 
since the 1980s (Doidge, 2007; Feuerstein, Feuerstein & Falik, 2010; Perkins, 1995), which argues 
that intelligence is not fixed but modifiable, that we can actually change the way our minds operate 
and in doing so may also change our brains. The P4C curriculum seemed a promising intervention 
strategy with this in mind. As a once-upon-a-time English teacher I loved the idea of using fiction not 
only to engage and motivate, but also to model a form of thinking (reasoned dialogue as a respectful 
community of inquiry) that might change how students perceived their own relationships with 
knowledge and with others and how teachers perceived their role in the classroom.  
 

My introduction to P4C involved a month at Montclair State University, New Jersey, where I 
studied the P4C materials, experienced my first Mendham retreat,1  and was fortunate enough to meet 
and have a few conversations with Matt Lipman himself. I went back to Mendham more than once 
and have published research involving P4C in books and journals. Although I have no formal 
background in philosophy, my work already focused on cognitive development, an area in which 
philosophy and psychology share an interest, albeit from different perspectives. I was granted 
permission to train teachers in P4C and worked with prospective and practicing teachers during my 
years as an educational psychologist and professor of educational psychology at a South African 
university. 
  

This paper addresses two issues that have puzzled or concerned me from time to time during the 
years that I have been involved with P4C. These are: the boundaries of the practice of P4wC and the 
boundaries separating the disciplines that inform the P4wC movement—in particular, the boundaries 
between philosophy and the disciplines of education and psychology. I will argue that the movement 
would benefit from becoming somewhat less open to a wide range of interpretations of practice and 
somewhat more open to insights from related disciplines. 

 
 
 

  

                                                 
1 The Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children, co-founded by Matthew Lipman and Ann Margaret 
Sharp at Montclair State University, runs annual, residential P4C workshops at a retreat house in Mendham, New Jersey. 
 

I 



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Acronyms 
 

The acronym P4C (Philosophy for Children) stands for the name of the comprehensive school 
curriculum and pedagogy developed by Matthew Lipman and his colleague Ann Margaret Sharp, 
which was designed to guide and support teachers trained to introduce philosophy lessons to their 
pupils. The acronym PwC (Philosophy with Children) refers to any form of philosophy practiced with 
children. P4wC (Philosophy for or with Children) emerged subsequently to cover a range of 
philosophical practices with children that includes, but is not limited to, the original Lipman and 
Sharp curriculum and, indeed, sometimes includes similar community of inquiry practices with 
adults. These acronyms will be used throughout the paper.  
 

The Context 
 
Materials Development  
 

Back in Cape Town with my newly purchased collection of manuals and story texts, I took the 
bold step of offering training to the entire staff at one primary school. The teachers who volunteered 
gradually became more interested, and a few introduced community of inquiry sessions regularly. One 
of these teachers commented after a number of weeks, “They [her students] have learned to disagree 
graciously,” and she was moved to write an article entitled, “I discovered a gold mine in my classroom” 
(Kearns, 2004). I soon became aware that it would take more skill than I possessed—and much longer 
than a few brief training sessions—to turn teachers into philosophers. However, if teachers elsewhere 
could, with the aid of the P4C materials, give lessons that began to address philosophical questions as 
a classroom community of inquiry, surely I could use the manuals and original stories to demonstrate 
and model for teachers the practice of P4C, even if the original story texts would have to be adapted 
for children in local classrooms.  
 

Many P4C practitioners in different parts of the world have recognized the need for contextually 
relevant texts and created new stories and other materials to use as starting points for inquiry, some 
more sophisticated and comprehensive than others. I initiated a small project (Green, 2008) to create 
short “snapshots” of classroom life that would appeal to local school children, encourage inquiry, and 
be perceived by teachers as relevant to the curriculum they were required to follow. With the help of a 
volunteer group of experienced teachers to whom I had introduced P4C, I created short, simple 
narratives modelled on the original P4C material, but set in local classrooms. The teachers provided 
the contexts and incidents, and I suggested how they might incorporate some potentially challenging 
philosophical issues. The stories were eventually printed in booklet form, together with simple 
manuals developed with the aid of a researcher at the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for 
Children (IAPC) at Montclair State University.  
 

At the end of the project booklets and manuals were distributed to the teacher-participants’ 
schools. Follow-up with teachers indicated, however, that there was no space for regular philosophy 
lessons in the prescribed new curriculum (at that time a challenge for many teachers), so the story 
booklets tended to be used mainly in conventional reading lessons. The “philosophy lessons,” which 
were never a priority with education authorities, gradually ceased to happen, although I observed a 



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few of the teacher-authors successfully integrating the notion of collaborative inquiry and a few basic 
thinking moves into their language teaching. I doubted, however, whether one could say that they 
were “doing philosophy” with their classes or that I had consistently modelled “what philosophers 
do”, in the short sessions when teachers were available for training or support. At the time I was not 
sure that this mattered. If I could motivate teachers to adopt a more respectful, inquiry-based 
pedagogy and work towards collaborative, reasonable classroom communities it would be worth 
doing, although it was far from all that P4C aims to achieve. I learned a great deal but it is unlikely 
that there was any long-term effect on the children. The intervention with teachers was too short and, 
as Lipman noted in an interview, “…unless the results of such an intervention are reinforced, they’ll 
wash out” (Brandt, 1988, p. 35).  
 
Working with Prospective Teachers 
 

Subsequently, for a number of years I offered, with the help of a colleague, a compulsory annual 
module introducing P4C to final-year education students. The four to five-week module included 
various pedagogical activities such as PowerPoint presentations, video demonstrations, and short 
“thinking” exercises, but a central focus was on having our students experience a different kind of 
learning situation—one that they could later replicate in classrooms. As the “teacher” of these students 
I hoped to model how they might experiment with P4C during their teaching practice sessions in 
schools. I used the P4C storybooks and manuals to plan our weekly three-hour sessions, aiming to 
keep as close to the basic P4C lesson format as possible. It was already clear to me that the content of 
the P4C stories would be unfamiliar to most South African schoolchildren and the reading level too 
difficult for many, so the locally developed materials described above were supplied to students for 
classroom experimentation during their practical teaching sessions. 
 

I was pleased to discover, however, that certain of Lipman’s stories worked well with young 
adults about to enter the teaching profession. Extracts from the storybook entitled Harry Stottlemeier’s 
Discovery (Lipman, 1982), designed for older primary school children, appealed to our students. Year 
after year, with different students, lively inquiry was generated by the chapter about a boy who was in 
trouble at school because his parents’ religion did not permit him to salute the national flag. An 
extract in which the girls at a sleepover discuss what a “mind” might be was another successful starting 
point. I soon realized, as I am sure others have done, that I would have to modify the classic “plain 
vanilla” lesson structure. The entire class of final-year education students was involved in choosing 
questions to inquire about, but the inquiry itself was often undertaken by separate small groups. It 
took too long and was too disruptive to push tables to one side—and move 80 or more students, their 
chairs and their bags into the closest we could come to a circle—in a classroom that hardly contained 
them. Moreover, many students hesitated to speak in front of such a large audience. We settled for 
the occasional “whole group” inquiry but more often divided the class into twelve small groups of six 
to eight students. As facilitator/trainer the challenge was to visit each group briefly, while remaining 
alert to what was going on elsewhere in the room. 
 

The group inquiries were more successful once we had created some structure. Every group was 
given a set of cards on each of which was written a word such as Question, Opinion, Agree, Disagree, 
Connection and Reason. The instruction was that any student who wished to contribute to the 



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inquiry must hold up and display one or more of these cards to indicate to the others in the group 
what kind of contribution was being offered. Students engaged enthusiastically with this activity, 
although it took careful monitoring to encourage the quiet or confused groups, remind the noisy ones 
to stay on track and tactfully challenge one or two students whose attention appeared to be elsewhere. 
Groups presented brief feedback at which time everyone was encouraged to notice similarities and 
differences in the groups’ conclusions and comment on any new questions that had emerged. 
Sometimes students sat in two parallel circles, only the inner one being permitted to speak. The outer 
group’s responsibility was to notice examples of agreeing, disagreeing, making connections, etc., and 
to give process feedback to their peers at the end of the session. Our research (Green, Condy & 
Chigona, 2012; Green & Condy, 2016; Condy, Green & Gachago, 2019) suggested that these 
students had begun to develop as a community of inquiry, had become more thoughtful and could 
dialogue reasonably even when discussing a real-life controversial situation. A planned project to 
follow up on their careers as teachers failed to materialize owing to funding constraints.  
 

I have described the attempt to create materials and the classes with students in some detail 
because I want to argue that what I was doing was a fairly typical example of how practitioners outside 
the North American education context adapt the original P4C materials and practice to suit different 
contexts. Most practitioners who have had adequate training do so, I think, fairly successfully. As 
Sutcliffe (2003, p.75) comments, “teachers within different educational systems absorb the practice in 
different ways,” citing studies in the UK that suggest the community of inquiry approach holds good 
across different teachers’ interpretations, although he recommends more and better research. I 
wondered at times whether or not I was “doing philosophy” with our students, but I do not believe 
that I wandered so far from the original that an observer might say, “This is not P4C.”  
 
Working with Young Adolescents  
 

When I started Philosophy Clubs for young people in my private practice as an educational 
psychologist it was not long before I was aware that, despite the name, I might not be “doing 
philosophy.” Over time I worked with several small voluntary groups of young adolescents who, for a 
variety of reasons, were unhappy in conventional schools. My aim was to use P4C to offer a positive 
experience of intellectual activity during which participants could safely enjoy exploring the content 
and process of their own thinking and, hopefully, become more inclined to think carefully themselves 
and to attend carefully and respectfully to the thoughts of others. Any changes of this nature were 
likely to make social and academic life in school less difficult for them and to help them develop more 
positive self-concepts.  
 

The Philosophy Clubs met weekly but the sessions I planned using the P4C curriculum as a 
guide frequently turned out differently. Was I “doing philosophy” when I discarded my carefully 
planned inquiry with a group of teenage boys in favour of Sean’s urgent need to tell us about how he 
had unexpectedly found his bedroom decorated with condoms by his father? I eventually managed to 
nudge the discussion towards what it means to be a parent but only when our time was almost up. 
Was I “doing philosophy” when I agreed that a group of excitable teenagers could inquire “under 
aliases”, each choosing to speak on behalf of a soft toy that in other circumstances they would 
certainly have despised as “babyish”? We had started off as a community inquiring about loyalty, 



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wondering under what, if any, circumstances it could be right to betray a friend, but the inquiry only 
took off when the group became a community at one remove as they spoke enthusiastically for the 
teddy bear, or somewhat grubby pink rabbit, or other cuddly toy, that each insisted on holding. Were 
they expressing their true opinions, or perhaps creating for themselves the opportunity to try out 
different perspectives safely, or just playing? In retrospect I might have intervened to probe the 
prevalent assumption that all opinions were equally valid, but at the time I preferred not to interrupt a 
pleasing level of engagement, even by those who were usually silent. What about my sessions with the 
twelve-year-old who had suffered a head injury in a motor vehicle accident? He seldom spoke directly 
to me. What he really liked was to speak on behalf of each of a “community” of four dolls, to whom I 
had to address my questions and comments. Did it perhaps help him to concretize and separate 
different thoughts rather than hold them all in mind at once? There was no way of knowing, but at 
least he spoke.  
 

The Question of Boundaries 

 

How far may one stray before one’s practice stops being P4C, or stops being philosophy? The 
question is important to me because I believe it is an issue that it would be valuable to discuss with 
beginning practitioners. I would not wish to encourage false claims to be “doing philosophy” or to 
make such claims myself, or to unintentionally mislead about the meaning of “philosophy.” At one 
point I asked a professor of philosophy how I might judge whether or not I was “doing philosophy”, 
hoping to be offered some criteria. Unless I misunderstood, the answer was that only I would be able 
to tell, a challenge about which I continue to wonder. In the case of the Philosophy Club groups I was 
probably very close to, if not beyond, the dividing line between members and non-members of the 
extended family of P4wC practitioners. I was integrating certain aspects of P4C into my professional 
practice because I perceived their value, but I think I was stretching the concept of “doing 
philosophy,” and I suspect that this might be true of many teachers. As Daniel (2021, pp.10–11) 
writes, “If dialogue and critical thinking are not actualized in classroom discussions, then the 
approach loses its specificity, its meaning, its purpose.” She does add, however, that her research 
found that “during P4C sessions, philosophical dialogue did not manifest itself as soon as pupils 
began exchanging with peers. Rather, it manifested itself after months, even years, of philosophical 
praxis” (Daniel, 2021). 
 

Although with time our sessions might have become more philosophical, I could not avoid 
bringing to my “philosophy” sessions the values and practices of a different discipline and profession. 
The same would apply to teachers, and to other professionals who work with children and 
adolescents. We are all likely to integrate the notion of “doing philosophy” with children with what 
we already know and believe, to assimilate and accommodate and create new schemas, as Piaget would 
say. In addition, therefore, to the necessary context-related modifications that I have discussed earlier, 
there are likely to be different interpretations of P4wC by teachers and others, even by those trained 
in the P4C approach, as well as among philosophers with different orientations who choose to work 
with children. The concept of “family resemblances” is attractively inclusive, but it makes it difficult to 
gain a sense of the limits of what may justifiably be labelled P4wC. This might not have been an issue 
when the carefully structured P4C curriculum was first introduced and philosophizing with children 
was a new concept. The practice was at that time firmly located within traditional schooling in the 



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United States, and the training and mentoring of teachers originally envisaged by Lipman (1987) was 
much more substantial than schools, at least in the South African context, are able to fund and 
sustain.  
 

Variations in the practice of P4wC are inevitable. Since certain variations may have negative 
consequences for participants and/or for the reputation of P4wC, it would be really helpful to follow 
up on the suggestions made by Cosentino in 2010 in an email sent to the community of ICPIC 
(International Council of Philosophical Inquiry with Children) members. He wrote: “It is clear that 
‘philosophical’ has an indefinite number of possible meanings,” and he concluded that “…we [the 
ICPIC community] must point out and separate the ties that mark the borders of our activity (and 
that we consider imperative) from the aspects we think [to] be modifiable” (Cosentino, A., personal 
communication to ICPIC members, 2010), and made valuable suggestions about how this might be 
done. I may have missed further inquiry about this topic, but it seems that, over ten years later, the 
boundaries of the practice of P4wC remain remarkably unclear. If this is simply the nature of 
philosophy it may be one reason why schools have trouble inserting it into the curriculum.  
 
Some Training Implications 

 
The quality of teachers’ philosophizing will surely depend on the modelling and guidance 

received during training and, ideally, monitoring and support thereafter. Moriyon (personal 
communication emailed to members of the ICPIC, 2020), McCall (2009) and Murris (2000) 
emphasize the need to equip teachers with philosophical background. Moriyon sees it as a major 
problem that “most of the teachers in primary and secondary education don’t have any philosophical 
background” (Moriyon, 2020). It very much depends, of course, on what is to be understood by 
“philosophical background.” If there is no widely accepted description of the meaning the P4wC 
community has chosen to assign to the word “philosophy” we cannot know what background in 
philosophy it would be appropriate for teachers, or other non-philosophers, to possess. I surmise, 
however, that experiencing a particular way of engaging with knowledge is more important than 
familiarity with the work of the great philosophers.  
 

Murris (2000, p.45) has proposed that only philosophers are capable of doing philosophy with 
children because only they possess the background in philosophy to be able to influence an inquiry by 
introducing substantive questions of the kind philosophers would ask and to model “the kind of 
behavior s/he would like the children to internalize”. I would, however, modify Murris’ statement and 
conclude that some individuals who are not trained philosophers can engage participants in a form of 
philosophical inquiry, at least some of the time, if they have received quality training and have access 
to quality resources. I cannot believe that experienced language, history, science, mathematics and 
other teachers would not raise “philosophical” questions pertaining to their subjects with their 
students, (although they might not recognize them as such) or that experienced teachers of young 
children would never acknowledge the potentially philosophical questions asked by their pupils. They 
might, however, have some difficulty in remaining open to multiple answers. 
 

The views of the above authors suggest that only philosophers should train P4wC practitioners. I 
acknowledge that there have been times when I have been unable to come up with a relevant 



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substantive philosophical question on the spur of the moment but I imagine this might sometimes be 
true even of philosophers. I should like to argue that academics involved in teacher education should 
be actively encouraged to become both practitioners and trainers capable of modelling P4C or PwC in 
their teaching. It has been my experience that it is easier, for a variety of reasons, to convince those 
about to enter the teaching profession that this different form of education is of enormous benefit 
than to persuade established teachers. If the value of P4wC is not well established through modelling 
at the pre-service level the kind of philosophy in schools that P4wC training offers is frequently 
perceived to be just one more strategy in a teacher’s repertoire. Teachers teach as they have been 
taught (Britzman, 1991). They need to experience a different pedagogy long enough to recognize its 
value and begin to internalize it.  
 

P4wC’s Relationship with the Disciplines of Psychology and Education 
 

I have argued above for a clearer indication of the boundary beyond which practice may no 
longer call itself P4C or P4wC. In this section of the paper I suggest that the P4wC community be less 
inclined to respect some other boundaries, namely those between philosophy and the related 
disciplines of psychology and education. It would be in everyone’s interests if the P4wC community 
were more open to engaging with theory and research in education and developmental psychology. 
“There is much to be gained in the development of educational thinking by going beyond one’s front 
door, and ‘taking cuttings’ from other people’s gardens” (Clough & Corbett, 2006, p. 26, cited by D. 
Thompson in an article about inclusive education). 
 

Firstly, there exists a vast and growing literature on school improvement and the facilitation of 
change in education. Many admirable educational initiatives have not proved sustainable, one 
example being the Dalton Plan (Van der Ploeg, 2013), which offered students choices and encouraged 
them to be independent learners. Founded by Helen Parkhurst in the United States and popular for a 
time, it spread to other countries in the 1920s or 1930s, but was not widely adopted in the United 
States or in the United Kingdom. According to the literature, it is generally believed that one 
important reason for the failure of interventions to survive is the fact that they were not whole-school 
initiatives supported by leadership at school level and beyond. The Thinking Schools movement, 
active in several countries, may not in all ways support the ideals of P4wC, but it offers a good 
example of a well-planned whole school approach. Familiarity with the achievements and challenges of 
other attempts to establish different values and practices within traditional schools could provide 
valuable insights for the P4wC community.  
 

Secondly, there is at this time considerable interest in teacher development and the notion of 
teacher professional learning communities (PLCs) (Carpenter, 2017; Harris and Jones, 2010; Tam, 
2015). It would make sense to introduce P4wC to teachers by suggesting it as an appropriate strategy 
to structure the process of such teacher collaborative communities, which is something that many 
teacher groups initially find difficult. Dempster (2009, p. 7) maintains that “good quality data about 
students’ learning and performance should be coupled with disciplined dialogue if improvement 
actions are to be realistically grounded,” but Carpenter (2017, p. 1069) comments that there is “little 
consensus on what educators actually do in a PLC,” although some protocols have been suggested. If, 
as Green and Collett (2020) claim, the need for teachers to monitor their own thinking and reasoning 



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processes and to engage respectfully with others is implied by such protocols, P4wC would be an ideal 
approach. As Baumfield (2017) argues, community of inquiry pedagogy is a desirable practice for 
teacher education generally, whether or not it can be said to be philosophy. “We cannot advance 
thinking unless we put teachers in the position to be thinkers themselves…” Duffy (1994, p. 22). 
 

Thirdly, it seems unfortunate that philosophers continue to argue vehemently against 
developmental psychology generally, and Piagetian theory in particular, when developmental 
psychologists have, since the 1980s or early 1990s questioned and tended to reject certain of Piaget’s 
assumptions and to replace the “deficit” conception of childhood challenged by Matthews (2009) with 
a more flexible understanding of children, as the quotation below (from a very thorough and detailed 
examination of research on children’s thinking) illustrates.  
 

It does seem to be clear that Piaget painted far too negative a picture of children’s thinking 
in the pre-operational stage (Beilin, 1992; Vuyk, 1981), and we might prefer a model of 
cognitive development which described more pre-school competence and (perhaps) a less 
complete later stage competence.… (Meadows, 1993, p. 210) 

 
Aspects of Vygotskian theory—including the notion of scaffolding, the importance of language and the 
role of more knowledgeable others—have been current in education for more than thirty years, 
although, I admit, not always applied insightfully in schools. Ideas about genetically fixed intelligence 
and invariant predetermined stages of development may still be found in older textbooks and may 
linger among uninformed policy makers and older teachers, but cognitive developmental theorists 
currently tend to be more interested in the modifiability of human intelligence at any age and the 
conditions under which this is possible (Feuerstein, Feuerstein and Falik, 2010; Feuerstein, Klein & 
Tannenbaum, 1991). There are programmes available that address the explicit teaching of various 
facets of thinking in different ways, from which P4wC might gain insights. For example, the work of 
Hyerle (1996) on visual tools for thinking might suggest ideas for community of inquiry sessions. 
P4wC is a very auditory experience, depending a great deal on concentration and memory, and 
practitioners might benefit from some ideas about visual aids based on an understanding of thinking 
processes.  
 

The emphasis in developmental psychology has changed from a theory of invariant stages in the 
development of innate “intelligence” to theories of learned intelligence as explained, for example, by 
Green (2017) and Perkins (1995). From the 1980s onwards there has been significant interest in ways 
of mediating and enhancing “intelligence”, spearheaded by the foundational work of Reuven 
Feuerstein and in the possibility, now well supported by research, that the human brain is capable of 
changing itself in response to experience (Doidge 2007; Falik, 2019). It is frequently recommended 
that metacognitive awareness (the ability to notice and name one’s own thinking processes, as distinct 
from the content of one’s thought) is actively taught because it makes possible the building of a 
conscious repertoire of “thinking tools” to be selected appropriately in response to cognitive demands. 
In the case of the Feuerstein (1991) approach, specific criteria describe the kind of learning 
environment that facilitates successful acquisition of thinking skills, and some of these criteria 
resonate with the characteristics of a community of inquiry (Haywood, 1993). 
 



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I do not deny that from the 1980s educationists in the United States and elsewhere have over-
interpreted the work of Piaget, and that subsequent policy makers have been, and may remain, slow to 
revise their thinking. This is not, however a reason to dismiss or ignore the more recent ideas of 
cognitive developmental psychologists. If P4wC is to change education it would be both possible and 
strategic to align where it can with the theory and research about thinking and learning that are 
currently circulating in education. For example, it might help the internalization of thinking moves to 
emphasize naming and recognizing them during dialogue, although obviously not to the extent that 
meaning is lost. 
 

Fourthly, it would strengthen the case for P4wC in schools if research highlighted how some of 
the findings and issues related to P4wC resonate with findings and issues reported in education 
journals, and with the aims of curriculum developers. Although certain curriculum aims are likely to 
conflict with the aims of the P4wC movement, there are some areas of convergence. Many recent 
curricula stress the importance of “critical thinking” and “dialogic teaching”, although these are also 
concepts with very flexible boundaries that it would be valuable to clarify. Substantial research 
demonstrating the successes over time of P4wC in relation to these specific educational aims would be 
highly persuasive. It is my general impression, and my own experience, that one problem with P4wC 
research is that it often produces exciting short-term qualitative results that researchers do not, for 
whatever reason, follow up over time.  
 

School administrators and curriculum planners are influenced by evidence of successful student 
achievement, but achievement need not be assessed only in terms of academic results in the form of 
grades. Substantial evidence of improvement in critical, creative, caring or collaborative thinking as a 
result of practices that it is possible for teachers to replicate would be persuasive. It is true, of course, that 
like many important educational outcomes, the hoped for “results” will be difficult to measure in any 
reliable way, or invisible unless circumstances happen to call for them. There are challenges here to 
identify contextual factors that may influence success, develop ingenious research designs and have the 
patience to monitor longitudinal studies. A review of how other educational programs are researched 
might suggest directions and help avoid pitfalls. 
 

Conclusion 
 

My first conclusion is that integrating personal experience and theory in an academic paper is a 
difficult project, especially if it involves thinking about years of practice. Having written the paper, I 
do not believe it mattered whether or not I was “doing philosophy” with my Philosophy Club groups, 
apart from the fact that I had publicly labelled our activity as “philosophy”. It did matter when I was 
training teachers. I needed to ensure that I conveyed to them the kind of practice that would be 
expected if they chose to “do P4wC” in their own classrooms. I did not have the background to be 
able to choose among forms of philosophy, but I was able to follow the guidelines of the P4C 
curriculum and draw on my experiences at Mendham. It helped that community of inquiry pedagogy 
has much in common with ideas in psychology about how best to mediate thinking. I do believe, 
however, that guidelines about what doing philosophy is not (for example, telling children what to 
think, which I have observed) would be useful for beginning practitioners and for trainers who may 
not have a comprehensive background in philosophy. I have learned that there are innumerable 



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answers when one asks what philosophy is. Besides such cognitive considerations the recently 
published work on the ethics of doing philosophy with children (Kennedy & Kohan, 2021) suggests a 
number of ethical criteria that it is to be hoped would already be incorporated in the general ethical 
requirements for schools and teachers, the application of which in P4wC contexts may have special 
significance and require vigilance and self-examination. These are matters that should be the subject 
of inquiry during training.  
 

With regard to Philosophy for Children itself, I regret the fact that Lipman’s story texts are often 
rejected in favour of other starting points. Although I understand the reasons for this, something 
important is lost when children are not offered a fictional model of a different type of school 
conversation. A story appeals to the imagination and models in a different manner to the experience 
of a collaborative, inquiring classroom, which may be a once-a-week event if the teacher is not part of a 
whole school initiative. It has been claimed that at one time the values of one part of Russian society 
(presumably those who could read and had the leisure to do so) were shaped by the social norms that 
people read about in novels, which suggests what might be accomplished. I am not familiar with the 
latest work of the IAPC, but I hope that serious attention is being given to updating the P4C 
curriculum and materials, taking into account the digital environment of most schoolchildren, and 
the fact that books are not the only form that stories can take. I am inclined to think that an updated 
P4C curriculum—perhaps simplified, or a similar one set elsewhere—would be a “safer” and more 
coherent option for schools than expecting teachers to identify appropriate sources and plan curricula 
themselves. I would even go so far as to make the heretical suggestion that a first level of training 
might concentrate on community of inquiry pedagogy and a few basic thinking moves, leaving the 
issue of philosophical questions for later. It would be a different matter if resident philosophy teachers 
able to support teachers were appointed at every school. 
 

With regard to training of teachers in P4wC I refer briefly to the education context with which I 
am familiar. The national curriculum is very full and teachers are required to follow it closely. 
Philosophy classes, or a significantly different pedagogy, would need the approval and support of the 
education authorities. It was only when Bloom’s Taxonomy became mandatory in assessment 
planning that most teachers in state schools began to engage with the notion of levels of thinking. 
There have been some P4wC training initiatives with teachers and schools but their impact is very 
limited and research has shown that interventions at an individual level seldom result in system 
change. I have concluded that, if P4wC is to have a major impact on education, the ideal strategy 
would be to introduce it in teacher education and build a cadre of teachers well trained to implement 
community of inquiry pedagogy. Unless prospective teachers are regularly exposed to a different 
pedagogy they are likely to teach as they themselves were taught. The implications are challenging. 
Imagine an Education Faculty whose default teaching mode is dialogic inquiry—unlikely, I know, and 
even more so in the context of a pandemic that limits face-to-face communication. Training would be 
necessary and, ideally, some professors would eventually become trainers themselves. I believe, 
however, that modelling at the level of teacher education is the most likely strategy to produce 
widespread change in teaching. The ability to connect P4wC with some of the ideas already valued by 
education professors might be a starting point for collaborative inquiry, for example, around the 
notion of “critical thinking”. There is a movement in higher education in South Africa, and probably 
elsewhere, to develop interdisciplinary communities of practice to address issues of social justice, and 



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this movement might welcome a different mode of engagement with students and with colleagues. I 
do not imagine it would be productive, however, to begin by criticizing and undermining what 
individuals consider to be their professional expertise.  
 

Finally, I acknowledge that my views arise out of experiences in the context of an education 
system in transition, a transition that has yet to achieve transformation. I continue to believe that, 
despite challenges and imperfections, P4wC could play an important role in influencing the direction 
of change in conventional schools, which, it seems, will survive worldwide in the foreseeable future, by 
both enabling more effective learning and modelling a different form of human society. 
 
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Address Correspondences to:  
Lena Green 
Extraordinary Professor, Faculty of Education 
University of the Western Cape, South Africa 
Email: lgreen@mweb.co.za 


