Wondering Aloud: Philosophy With Young People
So far it’s been a beautiful September here in the Pacific Northwest. School has started, and I’ll be back in both an elementary school and a university classroom next week. I’ve been working away on my book this summer, and hope to have it finished this year and published in 2012. The past few weeks […]
I have written elsewhere in this blog about the “Beautiful Songs” activity we often use in our classes at the University of Washington, and a lesson plan appears in PLATO’s Toolkit, as well as in the textbook Philosophy in Education: Questioning and Dialogue in Schools that Michael Burroughs and I co-authored. This powerful activity, created by […]
Last week I had conversations with both a 4th grade class and a 5th grade class about what makes some things beautiful and some things ugly. Here is a sample of some of the things they wrote: “Love is beautiful because most of us are here because of love — we can’t be standing here without […]
The “Blind Painter” activity, created by my colleague David Shapiro, is a creative and engaging exercise that always inspires a lively conversation and is a great tool for building community. The activity focuses on two key skills, both important for doing philosophy — clear communication and active listening. When we do philosophy, it’s very important that we learn to […]
Exploring the nature of artistic inspiration and the relationship between art and life, the picture book Emma by Wendy Kesselman tells the story of Emma, who is seventy-two years old, lives alone with her cat and sometimes is “very lonely.” For her birthday, Emma’s family gives her a painting of her childhood village, and Emma […]
I Want to Paint My Bathroom Blue by Ruth Krauss (illustrations by Maurice Sendak) tells the story of a young boy who dreams of painting his bathroom blue, kitchen yellow, ceilings green, etc. He imagines what his ideal home would look like, all in the context of being informed by his father that he can’t […]
What makes something beautiful?Each year one of the paper assignments I give to my undergraduate students is as follows: 1. List 10 songs that you think are beautiful and 10 songs that you think are ugly. 2. For each song, write two-three sentences about why you think it’s beautiful or ugly. After the […]
I write a lot about picture books and the role they can play in encouraging children to develop their philosophical thinking. I’ve been thinking about the special role of picture books for inspiring inquiry about aesthetics. Picture books are a unique mixture of literature and visual art, and generate the discovery of meaning through a […]
Peter Reynolds’ picture book ish tells the story of Ramon, who loves to draw and draws all the time. Then one day his older brother laughs at one of his drawings, and Ramon becomes preoccupied with making his drawings “look right.” Finally he decides to stop drawing. His younger sister picks up one of his […]
The Obstinate Pen by Frank Dormer is a new picture book about a pen with a mind of its own. Each adult who ends up with the pen finds that it won’t write what the adult intends, but instead writes what seem to be the pen’s own thoughts and observations, which are often insulting and […]
I’m going to write a series of posts about the philosophy of art unit I’m doing with sixth grade students this fall. Yesterday was the first session of the unit. We started by listing some of the things the students said they would consider art, which included paintings, sculpture, music, and poetry and also rocks, […]
I decided that the second class of the philosophy of art series should involve actually looking at visual art and talking about it. I thought about taking the students to a local art gallery, and then decided that it would be fun for them instead to visit our local junior/senior high school (where they will […]
Jana Mohr Lone is the director and founder of the University of Washington Center for Philosophy for Children, an academic research center dedicated to research and practice in philosophy for children and philosophy of childhood, and she is an Affiliate Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Washington. Jana is the author of Seen and Not Heard (2021) and The Philosophical Child (2012). She co-authored the textbook Philosophy in Education: Questioning and Dialogue in Schools (2016) and co-edited the collection of essays Philosophy and Education: Introducing Philosophy to Young People (2012). Since 1995 she has taught philosophy in classrooms from preschool to college and beyond. A frequent writer and speaker about precollege philosophy, Jana is the founding president of PLATO (Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization) and the founding editor-in-chief of the journal Questions: Philosophy for Young People. Follow her on Twitter: @JanaMohrLone