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Book Review 

Philosophy with Children and Teacher Education:  
International Perspectives on Critical, Creative, and Caring Thinking 

 
Edited by Arie Kizel 
Routledge, Copyright Year 2023  

278 pages 
Hardcover $128, softcover $39.96, ebook $39.96  
ISBN 9781032080574 

 
 

Review by Aaron Yarmel 
 
 
 

  
n Philosophy with Children and Teacher Education: International Perspectives on Critical, Creative, and 
Caring Thinking, Arie Kizel has curated a collection of 23 chapters authored by 34 insightful 

P4wC theorists in a conveniently slim volume of only 234 pages (absent the reference section). Each 
chapter contains valuable introductions to concepts, perspectives, and projects that can be enjoyed 
without the commitment of a full-length book chapter or article. Since it would be impossible to 
provide each contribution the space it deserves in this brief review, I will instead focus on notable 
examples from each of the volume’s five parts and conclude with a few big-picture comments.  
 

Part 1 is dedicated to the topic, “Transforming Teacher Education and Teacher Training with 
Philosophy with/for Children,” and I will begin by focusing on Viktor Gardelli’s, “Philosophy 
For/With Children, Teacher Training, and Value Transmission: Contradictions, Problems, and a 
Solution.” Gardelli defends P4wC’s inquiry ethics approach, where students learn to reason about 
ethical issues in dialogue with others, against the value transmission approach, in which substantive 
ethical principles are inculcated in students. He argues that the former provides superior training for 
democratic participation and is more conducive to fostering the future wellbeing of students (pp. 19-
20). Although this chapter covers well-trodden ground, it remains an invaluable resource for anyone 
seeking a concise presentation of one of P4wC’s major selling points: due to its reliance on procedural 
values (e.g., coherence, comprehensiveness, and consistency) that guide the structure of philosophical 
inquiries without presupposing the philosophical conclusions that such inquiries will reach, P4wC 
provides an education in moral reasoning without indoctrination.  

 
My only constructive comments for an otherwise excellent chapter relate to Gardelli’s defense of 

P4wC’s procedural values against criticisms. One such criticism is that P4wC’s procedural values 
contain or imply moral content after all, and Gardelli responds along two lines: procedural values (a) 

I 



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can be discussed in the context of an inquiry (rather than merely being imposed on students) and (b) 
are not meant to be used in non-inquiry contexts where they do not apply (e.g., coherence and 
comprehensiveness needn’t characterize make-believe forms of play). While I agree that P4wC’s use of 
procedural values does not amount to moral indoctrination, I found the logic of his response 
unsatisfying. This is because neither (a) nor (b) succeeds in distinguishing between moral and non-
moral values, as both are characteristic of at least one class of ostensibly moral values: role-specific 
moral responsibilities. The moral responsibilities associated with being a tennis doubles partner, car 
mechanic, student, or soldier are specific to particular domains or activities (rather than guides for 
how one ought to behave in all areas of life), and they, along with all other moral values, certainly can be 
discussed in the context of a philosophical inquiry rather than merely imposed. Moreover, it would 
have been helpful for Gardelli to address the sorts of critiques developed by Nell Rainville (2000) and 
Darren Chetty (2018), both of whom have criticized, in different ways, the procedural norms used in 
P4wC on the grounds that they either allow or fail to adequately address objectionable manifestations 
of racism and colonialism. Although such criticisms may not be decisive, it is a mistake for a chapter 
defending P4wC’s procedural values to entirely ignore them (see Amy Reed-Sandoval (2018)).  

 
It is instructive to compare Gardelli’s chapter with the subsequent one: Rhiannon Love’s, 

“Using Philosophy For/With Children in Initial Teacher Education as a Pedagogical Approach to 
Challenge Neoliberalism in Education.” In Love’s view, training teachers in the theory and practice of 
P4wC will allow them to “deliberate collaboratively on issues such as justice, truth, and freedom,” 
learn to see children as “political beings capable of social critique and transformation,” and challenge 
neoliberal performativity (p. 28). Although “performativity” is never defined, it seems to refer to a 
reliance on performance metrics in the evaluation of students, teachers, and schools (pp. 24-25). Her 
chapter is an inspiring celebration of the radical potential of P4wC to direct the power of 
philosophical inquiry towards the political realities in which education takes place.  

 
Nevertheless, Love’s expectation that a philosophical inquiry in the P4wC tradition is a reliable 

method for challenging neoliberal performativity (when construed charitably) struck me as a step too 
far in the direction of a value transmission form of pedagogy in which facilitators intend, from the 
outset, to reach a particular substantive normative conclusion about a politically controversial 
question. This is not to deny that P4wC’s methodological commitments themselves stand in contrast 
to the most pedagogically irresponsible examples of neoliberal performativity (e.g., referring to a 6-
year-old as a failure simply on the basis of her performance on standardized tests), for Love is surely 
correct about this. But my reading of her text—especially in conjunction with her later co-authored 
chapter—is that her point is not quite so modest. A truly open-ended inquiry may, to a facilitator’s 
chagrin, ultimately conclude with novel defenses of (rather than an antidote to) a focus on 
performance metrics and many of the other features that she associates with neoliberalism (e.g., 
markets, competition, and individualism).  

 
The final chapter I will discuss in Part 1 is, “Transforming Teacher Education with Philosophy 

for Children,” in which Lizzy Lewis provides a compelling picture of the ways that teachers are 
transformed through their P4wC training. When teachers learn how to facilitate in the P4wC 
tradition, they are instructed “to engage as themselves” in philosophical inquiries facilitated by other 
people, and this allows them to consider what it means for students to bring their whole selves into a 



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classroom (pp. 52-54). P4wC training also allows teachers to reflect on the possibility of relationships 
and school environments in which students and teachers are genuinely co-inquirers, and it similarly 
opens their eyes to possibilities for modifying and expanding school curriculum (pp. 55-58). 

 
Lewis’s chapter is an insightful and inspiring lesson from a masterful Pw4C theorist and 

practitioner, and my only constructive comment concerns her rather abrupt response to teachers who 
are afraid to facilitate inquiries about sensitive topics like religion and death: “Trainee teachers need 
to understand that it is their duty and responsibility to facilitate difficult conversations with children” 
(p. 54). In the United States, teachers are under threat from well-funded conservative organizations 
and politicians, as well as activists from across the political spectrum, who have mobilized campaigns 
against them simply for teaching politically controversial topics or making genuine mistakes while 
seeking to manage classrooms with sensitivity. In my opinion, greater consideration of the risks that 
teachers face is needed when discussing their reluctance to facilitate inquiries about sensitive subjects.  

 
Let’s now turn to Part 2, “Between Professional Knowledge, Assessment, and Professional 

Development,” beginning with Roger Sutcliffe and Diane Swift’s chapter, “Moving Beyond Official 
Prescriptions Towards a Professional Pedagogy of Reasoning and Dialogue in Initial Teacher 
Education.” Sutcliffe and Swift tell a nuanced story, which I will simplify (while avoiding a sea of 
acronyms) as follows: England has adopted set standards for conferring professional status on 
teachers, but these standards wrongly treat teaching as craft knowledge, such that it is sufficient for 
teachers to know what to do in the classroom regardless of whether or not they understand why they 
are doing it (p. 76). Swift’s teacher training partnership sought to overcome this deficit by introducing 
teachers to a rich conception of pedagogy, which she and Sutcliffe characterize as the theories, values, 
evidence, and justifications behind the concrete actions performed by teachers in their classrooms (p. 
77).  

 
Her partnership introduced explicit training in P4wC and, following the Philosophical Teaching 

and Learning approach, sought to instill a set of dispositions for teaching through Community of 
Philosophical Inquiry (CPI) discussions about the dispositions associated with five core areas: 
assessment, behavior, curriculum, pedagogy, and professional behaviors. Swift’s next chapter, 
“Committing to Concepts: Making Explicit the Significance of Philosophical Dialogues in the 
Professional Formation of Teachers,” is a further exploration of what it means to train teachers in 
pedagogy as opposed to mere craft knowledge (in the sense described above), as well as a practical case 
study in which CPIs were used to help trainee teachers deepen their understanding of the dispositions 
and concepts relevant to teaching. These two chapters are excellent, and, when viewed as a pair, 
present a crucial insight: P4wC’s techniques, and especially the CPI, are not merely useful in the 
education of children; on the contrary, they can also foster the philosophical development of adults.  

 
Part 3 is called, “Embedding Philosophy for/with Children in Teacher Education,” and I will 

focus on the two chapters that seemed most directly to fit within the part’s advertised scope: 
“Embedding Philosophy For/With Children in Initial Teacher Education: A Stealth Model,” by 
Rhiannon Love and Emma Goto, and “Integrating Philosophy For/With Children Within: A Final 
Year Teacher Education Curriculum in South Africa,” by Lena Green and Janet Condy. Love and 
Goto begin by suggesting that P4wC “could be a potential means of resistance to the dominant 



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neoliberal discourse” that they assert is increasingly characterizing education in England (this part of 
their discussion echoes Love’s earlier chapter, so I’ll avoid rehashing that argument here). They then 
describe a 7-year journey to incorporate P4wC into the initial teacher education training program of 
the University of Winchester (UoW). Although they use the terms stealth and subterfuge to characterize 
their approach, such descriptions seem entirely inappropriate in this context, as they connote a level 
of deceit and manipulation that (thankfully) do not actually characterize any of the methods that Love 
and Goto claim to have employed. A more apt description is gradual, as the authors describe a process 
of initially sharing “positive messages” about P4wC with their colleagues, then offering P4wC 
professional development opportunities through SAPERE (with the support of the director of the 
teacher training program), building a partnership between UoW and SAPERE, and finally 
incorporating P4wC into UoW’s curriculum in the form of lectures and modules. 

 
Love and Goto have offered an instructive model for gradually integrating P4wC into teacher 

education programs, and anyone seeking to do the same would benefit from their insights. Green and 
Condy’s chapter is a sober reminder, however, of the fact that Love and Goto’s successes likely would 
not have materialized in an inhospitable environment. Green and Condy describe their experience of 
introducing and repeating a P4wC module in the final year of teacher education training at a 
university in South Africa from 2012 to 2018. As expected, the trainee teachers who experienced the 
module reported a number of benefits: acknowledging “that they had become more metacognitively 
aware” and reporting “that the approach fostered active and critical learning, created a context for 
collaboration and mutual respect, enhanced thinking and reasoning, prepared schoolchildren for 
democratic citizenship, enhanced awareness of different perspectives, and developed language skills” 
(pp. 128-129). Unfortunately, Green and Condy are not optimistic that P4wC will spread in South 
African schools, and this is due to the details of South African teacher training curriculum 
regulations, “the conditions in many South African schools,” and a number of challenges inherent in 
introducing a curriculum and philosophical tradition that developed in the United States into an 
environment where “decolonising the curriculum is emphasised and Western sources tend to be 
suspect” (pp. 131-132).  

 
In Part 4, “Challenging the Curriculum with Philosophical Topics,” we find Susan T. Gardner’s 

excellent chapter, “Education in the Context of Uncertainty.” Gardner begins by noting a tension. 
On the one hand, educating young people to find employment requires the assumption of stability: 
we predict the conditions that will characterize their futures and present them with information that 
will foster their success in those specific conditions. On the other hand, the messy, uncertain, and 
absolutely crucial project of determining and discovering “who it is that we are becoming” is 
undermined by an education grounded entirely in this assumption of stability. An education system 
grounded in the assumption of stability can prepare a student to know “the beliefs of the world’s great 
religions” and “the causes of climate change,” but, due to its inability to “predict what sort of 
situations any of us might find ourselves in, given our unique strengths and weaknesses, the varying 
interpretations of stakeholders, unpredictable consequences of interconnected possible responses, and 
so on,” it cannot tell a student what she should do if her friend “smokes marijuana after school” or 
what he should do if “a schoolmate makes fun of [his] turban” (p. 167).  

 



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Schools ought, for this reason, to educate students to navigate a world of uncertainty, and 
Gardner’s recommendation is to use P4wC to nurture agency: roughly, the ability to objectively 
describe and continuously evaluate the reasonableness of one’s intended actions (p. 169). In 
particular, Gardner defends dialogue-based education programs with two features: (1) “facilitated 
dialogue focused on truth within the context of community” and (2) “dialogical engagement focused 
on potentially personally challenging situations” (p. 170). The former requires students to listen to 
and critically evaluate the viewpoints in their school community and, in response, intentionally 
change their minds when warranted. The latter feature ensures that the students are becoming 
authors of the stories of their own lives by facing, and determining their own responses to, genuinely 
complicated and character-building scenarios (i.e., as opposed to merely working through abstract 
thought experiments that are never connected to their lives). 

 
Gardner’s chapter begins a conversation that, in many ways, Kerstin Michalik and Claire 

Cassidy take up in subsequent chapters: “Philosophising with Children: Uncertainty as a Challenge 
for Teachers and a Learning Opportunity in an Age of Risk” and “Philosophy for/with Children and 
Learning for Sustainability,” respectively. Michalik describes a set of novel challenges, such as 
pandemics and global climate change, that will introduce unprecedented levels of disruption and 
uncertainty into the lives of everyone living on our planet. For this reason, preparing children to 
navigate uncertainty will become ever more urgent as the century progresses. Cassidy, instead, focuses 
on the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations, which seek to eradicate poverty, 
reduce inequalities, counter climate change, etc. Michalik and Cassidy believe that the P4wC 
approach provides legitimate methods of preparing students to engage with their respective topics of 
concern, and they describe initiatives to build P4wC into initial teacher education programs in 
Germany and Scotland.  

 
Despite my enthusiasm for these three chapters, I have one broad piece of constructive criticism: 

when asserting that P4wC can play a role in preparing students to address important social problems, 
we ought to carefully consider and respond to counterarguments inspired by the relevant empirical 
literature. For example, due to the phenomenon of moral licensing, the apparently positive cognitive 
and emotional changes that occur within philosophical inquiries may actually produce subsequent 
negative behavioral changes in other contexts. This is because the acts of recalling past moral behaviors 
and (most importantly) even simply expressing support for moral behaviors and attitudes have been shown to 
lead people to engage in future immoral actions because they are thereby less concerned about feeling 
or appearing immoral. Katherine O’Lone (2019) surveys a range of studies that examine this 
phenomenon with respect to beliefs and behaviors regarding the environment, race, sex, food, and 
consumer behavior (p. 283). To be clear, I am not suggesting that the phenomenon of moral licensing 
undermines all attempts at moral education, but rather that P4wC theorists ought to be more careful 
when speculating about the impact of philosophical dialogues on broad social phenomena without 
considering empirically supported counterarguments.  

 
As someone who is lucky enough to present P4wC workshops to international audiences of 

educators, I was hoping that this volume would help me reflect on the unique cultural challenges that 
teachers around the world face when implementing P4wC in their communities. Part 5 provided 
exactly this sort of opportunity with respect to Japan. In “Challenges and Opportunities: Becoming a 



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Philosophy for Children Teacher through Informal Training: Challenges, Opportunities, and 
Conducive Conditions,” Kei Nishiyama et al. present their analysis of interviews that they conducted 
with three Japanese P4wC practitioners. All three teachers noted significant clashes between P4wC’s 
methodology and the cultures within their schools. For example, P4wC’s openness to discussing the 
legitimacy of particular school rules contrasted with the expectation that teachers will “rebuke” 
learners for violations of rules and take “the side of the school” (p. 210-211). Moreover, P4wC’s 
emphasis on dialogue conflicted with a “conditioned fear of uncertainty and distrust in students” that 
manifested in a reluctance to allow students to speak in class (p. 210).  

 
Nishiyama et al. note that informal workshops were helpful for all three interviewees because 

they afforded opportunities for networking, collaboration, skill development, and solidarity in the face 
of common struggles (pp. 210-214). While these outcomes are valuable, the authors do not provide a 
clear account of how informal workshops actually helped the teachers address the central problem 
that they reported: the conflicts between P4wC and their environments. For example, did the teachers 
ultimately find it important to modify P4wC practice in order to continue functioning within their 
schools? If so, did these modifications sacrifice the core commitments of P4wC? In the end, I was left 
with more questions than answers.  

 
Wakako Good and Eriko Yamabe offer a close look at four beginner teachers in Japan. Teachers 

A and B were the first teachers in a junior high school in Fukushima Prefecture to use P4wC methods 
in their classrooms. In contrast to the clashes between P4wC’s commitments and the school’s ethos 
that Nishiyama et al. discuss in their chapter, Teachers A and B found themselves in a school that was 
undergoing a shift in the direction of P4wC’s pedagogical commitments. I appreciate this contrast 
because it productively complicates the overall picture that the volume presents of Japanese education 
in a way that frustrates hasty generalizations. Teacher A experienced an initial frustration with “the 
lack of objectives in the P4C classes” because he was used to designing lessons for reaching prescribed 
learning outcomes. He described eventually arriving at the conclusion that, rather than identifying 
and pursuing precise learning outcomes, “the goal of P4C is to think,” and this belief led him to 
transform his teaching approach by seeking materials that present diverse and overlooked perspectives 
(pp. 227-228). Teacher B more readily embraced P4wC’s pedagogical commitments, but she struggled 
to identify philosophical questions and to judge when to intervene when facilitating inquiries.  

 
Unlike teachers A and B, teachers C and D received significant training in P4wC at Tsuru 

University before accepting their teaching positions. Teacher C showed enthusiasm for P4wC, but, 
due to the large number of students she was assigned to teach, she struggled to move beyond 
remembering her students’ names and rudimentary practices like asking why questions (p. 230). While 
the extent to which Teacher D actually implemented P4wC in her classrooms is unclear, Good and 
Yamabe report that she experienced a significant amount of anxiety due to a lack of sympathy for 
P4wC’s approach from her colleagues and the parents of her students.  

 
Good and Yamabe conclude that these vignettes show that “undergraduate programs of P4C 

enable smoother transitions,” but I am not convinced that their data support such an optimistic 
conclusion. Clearly, both A and B would benefit from P4wC facilitation training. In particular, A 
would benefit from clarity about how facilitators conceive of and pursue P4wC-specific learning 



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objectives in the special context of CPI sessions; B would benefit from a robust theory of how and 
when to intervene during inquiries. But it’s also true that neither C nor D were prepared to handle 
the educational environments into which they were placed: C lacked an understanding of how to 
modify P4wC’s approach when working with large classrooms, while D was unable to respond to what 
she perceived as a hostile environment for P4wC’s methodological commitments. In other words, 
regardless of the fact that C and D studied P4wC at Tsuru University, none of the teachers in this 
study received adequate preparation for practicing P4wC in the real world.  

 
This book review could easily have been three times as long as it was, and, while I regret that I 

have not discussed more of its 23 insightful chapters, it is now time to conclude with a few big-picture 
reflections. Overall, I am pleased to include this volume in my library because every single chapter has 
something valuable to offer. In particular, I plan to use specific chapters to help me describe the P4wC 
method to potential community partners and introduce trainee teachers to P4wC’s radical potential 
and applicability beyond the education of children.  

 
That said, my enthusiasm is attenuated by two factors: the large number of critical comments 

that I expressed above and, to be blunt, the lack of polish in the volume as a whole. I have only the 
utmost respect for every contributor to this volume and its editor, and it seems plausible that, given 
more space to develop ideas and consider counterarguments, many of my critiques would have been 
addressed. As a reviewer, however, my role is to evaluate the quality of the collections of words 
contained in the physical object sitting on the desk in front of me. Finally, although some chapters are 
perfectly edited, a significant number range from having small errors, of the sort that I would expect 
to find in uncorrected proofs, to containing numerous and serious grammatical errors. Routledge has 
a well-deserved reputation as a stellar academic press, and I would expect a more polished final version 
of all articles within a published anthology. 
 

References 

 

Chetty, D. (2018). Racism as ‘reasonableness’: Philosophy for children and the gated community of 

Inquiry. Ethics and Education, 13(1), 39–54.  

Kizel, A. (Ed.). (2023). Philosophy with children and teacher education: Global perspectives on 

critical, creative and caring thinking. New York, NY: Routledge.  

O’Lone, K. (2019). Understanding the psychological mechanisms that constrain the transfer of 

dialogue effects. Journal of Dialogue Studies, 7, 277-292. 

Rainville, N. (2000). Philosophy for Children in Native America: A post-colonial critique. Analytic 

Teaching, 21(1), 65–77.  

Reed-Sandoval, A. (2019). Can philosophy for children contribute to decolonization? Precollege 

Philosophy and Public Practice, 1, 27–41.  

 
Address Correspondences to:  
Dr. Aaron Yarmel 
Associate Director, Center for Ethics and Human Values 
Lecturer, Department of Philosophy 
The Ohio State University 
email: yarmel.2@osu.edu 


