Wondering Aloud: Philosophy With Young People
The 2010 film Inception is a philosophically provocative film that’s been very popular with teenagers. The film is about an “extractor,” Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), someone who is able to take ideas out of people’s minds when they are dreaming and at their most vulnerable. On the run from the authorities, Cobb is hired by […]
Infinity and Me is a new book, written by Kate Hosford with illustrations by Gabi Swiatkowska, that explores the nature of infinity. Uma, an eight-year-old girl, begins wondering, as she looks up at the sky one night: How many stars were in the sky?A million? A billion?Maybe the number was asbig as infinity. I started to […]
This will be my last blog post until the fall, and I wanted to explore further some of the issues I began examining in my last post. In particular, I have been thinking more and more about the marketing of philosophy and the ways in which those of us in the field talk about philosophy, […]
In a couple of final 2020 Zoom classes with a group of fifth grade students, we played a version of the “Reality Scavenger Hunt,” a game my colleague David Shapiro created. In small groups, the students come up with examples that fit into these five categories: 1. Something that isn’t real but seems to be […]
I had a marvelous philosophy session with a fourth grade class at Whittier Elementary School yesterday, in which we read the chapter of E.B. White’s Stuart Little in which Stuart becomes an elementary school substitute teacher for a day. In the chapter, Stuart asks the class to reflect on what the “important things” are. After […]
“. . . That slight uncertaintywhich makes us sure.” From Advice from the Museby Richard Wilbur The start of the school year and planning for the year’s philosophy classes. Usually I start my philosophy classes by asking students to offer some possible answers to the question, “What is philosophy?” (Of course there is no incontestable […]
Just Now In the morning as the storm begins to blow awaythe clear sky appears for a moment and it seems to methat there has been something simpler than I could ever believesimpler than I could have begun to find words fornot patient not even waiting no more hiddenthan the air itself that became part […]
The Snow Man One must have a mind of winterTo regard the frost and the boughsOf the pine-trees crusted with snow; And have been cold a long timeTo behold the junipers shagged with ice,The spruces rough in the distant glitter Of the January sun; and not to thinkOf any misery in the sound of the […]
Let Evening Come Let the light of late afternoonshine through chinks in the barn, movingup the bales as the sun moves down. Let the cricket take up chafingas a woman takes up her needlesand her yarn. Let evening come. Let dew collect on the hoe abandonedin long grass. Let the stars appearand the moon disclose […]
ochikochi ni taki no otokiku wakaba kana fresh young leaves –the sound of a waterfallboth far and near Yosa Buson June Birthdays June 5 Charles Hartshorne (American, born 1897) and Adam Smith (Scottish, born 1723) June 6 Isaiah Berlin (British, born 1909) June 9 Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov (Russian, born 1829) June 14 Bernard Bosanquet (British, […]
Benny and Penny in Just Pretend, by Geoffrey Hayes, is an early-reader graphic novel about two siblings and the efforts of the younger child, Penny, to join her brother in “playing pretend.” Constructing pretend worlds is part of many children’s childhoods – I remember when my children wouldn’t answer me unless I addressed them as […]
What’s the right thing to do? Harvard professor Michael Sandel has been teaching a moral philosophy course at Harvard for almost 30 years, with 1,000 students at a time often taking his popular class. This class is now online and is also airing on many PBS stations for 12 weeks this fall. Taped in Harvard’s […]
Let’s Do Nothing by Toby Fucile illustrates the perplexity of the concept of nothing. The book tells the story of two boys who, after concluding that they have “done it all,” decide to do nothing. The trouble is that doing nothing is not easy. If you blink, you’re not doing nothing. If you open your […]
Since my previous post about the role of the facilitator in philosophy sessions, I have been thinking more about listening and specifically the roles of listening and of silence in discussions. This is the subject of the last chapter of my new book, which will be out this spring. Almost by definition, listening requires attentiveness […]
From an editorial in the Wall Street Journal yesterday entitled “Our Childish Gun Debate,” by William McGurn: Quick show of hands for those with children: How many of you look to your teens for political wisdom, whether it’s the daughter obsessing over her Snapchat streaks or the son who would spend his day eating Doritos […]
Somewhat frequently I receive email messages or other communications from parents asking me about how to introduce philosophy into their conversations with their children. The main advice I give people is to listen for the philosophical questions kids ask. I don’t believe that bringing philosophical dialogue into your relationships with your children is about teaching […]
The picture book Little Bird by Germano Zullo, published this year, has few words and many colorful, vibrant illustrations. It tells the story of a truck driver who, coming to the edge of a cliff and unable to go any further, opens the truck’s back door and out fly a flock of birds. As the […]
Another Leo Lionni book, little blue and little yellow tells the story of two friends, both blobs of color, who love playing together, and one day hug each other so much that they both become green. Their parents declare that they are no longer who they were. Like all the Lionni books I’ve been reading, this […]
During the pandemic, the topics of loneliness and isolation came up in many of the Zoom conversations I had with children. The six-minute film “Baboon on the Moon” is about a baboon who lives alone on the Moon. Wordless and moving, the video portrays the baboon as full of longing for the Earth, struggling with feelings […]
In our second session at Thurgood Marshall Elementary School, we read the story Looking Like Me by Walter Dean Myers. In the story, a boy looks in the mirror and then talks with family, friends, and people he knows, in an effort to try to describe himself. After we read the story, the students completed […]
Last week I read the story Love, Z by Jessie Sima with a group of 9-11 year olds. The story is about a young robot, Z, who finds a bottle with a message inside that is indecipherable except for two words: “Love, Beatrice.” Z wonders what love means. The robot asks all the other robots, but […]
In this picture book by former British Children’s Laureate Quentin Blake, after a very windy night Angela finds a baby bird who has fallen from his nest. She takes him home and cares for him, feeding him, bundling him in warm blankets so he doesn’t catch cold, and naming him Augustus. She buys a stroller […]
Between What I See and What I Say. . .for Roman Jakobson 1Between what I see and what I say,between what I say and what I keep silent,between what I keep silent and what I dream,between what I dream and what I forget:poetry.It slipsbetween yes and no,sayswhat I keep silent,keeps silentwhat I say,dreamswhat I forget.It […]
From BlossomsFrom blossoms comesthis brown paper bag of peacheswe bought from the boyat the bend in the road where we turned towardsigns painted Peaches. From laden boughs, from hands,from sweet fellowship in the bins,comes nectar at the roadside, succulentpeaches we devour, dusty skin and all,comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat. O, to […]
Since our seminar session at UW last Thursday, I’ve been thinking about meaning in education. We spent the first part of the session talking about Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and enlightenment, the relationship between appearance and reality, knowledge, and human development, and then moved into examining the nature of thinking and thoughts. It was […]
The nature of sadness. Michael Rosen’s Sad Book describes how sadness feels and tries to understand it. “Sometimes sad is very big. It’s everywhere. All over me.” Michael Rosen’s son, Eddie, died, and that, he tells us, is what makes him most sad. “Sometimes I’m sad and I don’t know why. It’s just a cloud […]
Pen and inkdrawingby Mollie Hunt8th grade student Winthrop, WA, 2008 I grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust, learning about the horror of it as an elementary school child, experiencing recurrent childhood nightmares about the Nazis. For years I stayed away from the subject, avoiding books and films that dealt with it. After the […]
This morning I taught the second class of the “Moral Philosophy and the Holocaust” unit to two eighth grade classes. This class is an introduction to moral philosophy, a way to give the students some background before we launch into the issues raised by the Holocaust. We began by talking about Plato’s Ring of Gyges […]
I spent the morning last Friday with two eighth grade classes in the first sessions of a unit I teach every year on “Moral Philosophy and the Holocaust.” I teach the unit with Jane Orme, the eighth grade language arts teacher at Liberty Bell Junior High School, and over the past four years we have […]
When Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968, Jane Elliott, a third grade teacher in Iowa, decided to implement an exercise in her classroom to help her students understand racism and discrimination. She divided the class into students with brown eyes and students with blue eyes, and spent one day discriminating against the brown-eyed students […]
Why do people obey authority even when they sense that what they’re doing is wrong? Central to the conditions that allowed the Holocaust to occur was people’s tendencies to conform to the situations in which they find themselves. In this class we watch a clip from the film Obedience, which documents the Milgram experiments. In […]
In this class we view the film Heil Hitler: Confessions of a Hitler Youth. The film is an interview with Alfons Heck, who describes his childhood experiences as a member of the Hitler Youth and his rise to prominence as a leader in the organization, and then his shame and revulsion as he realized after […]
Why did some people become rescuers during the Holocaust? What makes some people, despite the risks, act to prevent moral wrongs? Is being a bystander morally wrong? In this class we see the film The Courage to Care, involving profiles of individuals during the Third Reich who helped protect Jews in France, Holland and Poland. […]
Can one person make a difference? The last class for the Moral Philosophy and the Holocaust unit involves watching the film Not in Our Town, which describes a series of hate crimes that took place in Billings, Montana, in the 1990s, and the town’s reaction to these events. The people in the town really came […]
I had a lively conversation yesterday with a group of fifth graders about how we can understand, respect and evaluate cultures other than our own. The conversation took off when one student asked, “Why do we have so many different cultures in the world?” The students pointed out the ways in which the diversity of […]
My previous post explored the meaning of “alone together,” a phrase used in, among other places, Arnold Lobel’s story “Alone” in Days with Frog and Toad. In the Center’s annual workshop for educators this week, we watched a video of the story and talked about the ways solitude is viewed in our society. Our society tends […]
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 […]
Last week fourth grade students at John Muir Elementary and I talked about the story Frederick by Leo Lionni. (I have written about this story in a previous post.) We began talking about why it’s important to Frederick to collect words and colors, as opposed to foraging for the food the family will need for […]
The short novel My Friend the Monster by Clyde Roberta Bulla is about the young Prince Hal, whose parents, the king and queen, think he is “ordinary” and have no time for him. They will not let him spend time with the children he sees playing in the courtyard because these children are the children […]
It has been over a year since my last post, primarily because I have been working hard to finish my new book, Seen and Not Heard, which is now with my publisher in the editing stage! Here is a description: How might society benefit if children were recognized as independent thinkers, capable of seeing clearly and […]
I have had a number of inquiries recently about this blog and the time lapse since my last post. I have not been posting since the spring because I been working on a new book, which will be out this month! http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1442234784/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1442234784&linkCode=as2&tag=stehac-20&linkId=XAF3AVY3FUZIQB6I I hope to return to posting more regularly in 2016. Happy holidays to […]
I am living it up in Italy at the moment, but thought I would write this post to note that the New York Times published an article last week about philosophy in elementary school classrooms: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/education/edlife/18philosophy-t.html
Center for Philosophy for Children just received a three-year grant from the Squire Family Foundation! The grant funds a summer workshop for teachers that will take place this June, and also provides money for graduate student involvement in the program, materials and website support, and three years of transportation for UW students to get to and from […]
During Wind and Rain They sing their dearest songs–He, she, all of them–yea,Treble and tenor and bass.And one to play;With the candles mooning each face….Ah, no; the years O!How the sick leaves reel down in throngs! They clear the creeping moss–Elders and juniors–aye,Making the pathways neatAnd the garden gay;And they build a shady seat….Ah, no; […]
My November Guest My Sorrow, when she’s here with me,Thinks these dark days of autumn rainAre beautiful as days can be;She loves the bare, the withered tree;She walks the sodden pasture lane. Her pleasure will not let me stay.She talks and I am fain to list:She’s glad the birds are gone away,She’s glad her simple […]
To Autumn Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel […]
October 1 Catharine MacKinnon (American, born 1946) October 4 Richard Rorty (American, born 1931) October 14 Hannah Arendt (German, born 1906) October 15 Friedrich Nietzsche (German, born 1844) and Michel Foucault (French, born 1926) October 18 Henri Bergson (French, born 1859) October 20 John Dewey (American, born 1859) October 29 A. J. Ayer (British, born […]
The Institute for the Advancement for Philosophy for Children, in Montclair, New Jersey, is offering a fall online class on “Teaching Children Philosophical Thinking.” Here is the description of the class: This innovative course prepares teachers and philosophers to facilitate philosophical dialogue with children and adolescents, in classroom settings and elsewhere. The course is suitable […]
People often ask me about finding philosophy resources online. There is now a multiplicity of online resources available for free — online philosophy classes, lectures, materials, etc. This is a sampling: http://www.epistemelinks.com/index.aspx (thousands of links to philosophy audio and video, course materials and other philosophy resources) http://broodsphilosophy.wordpress.com/2006/06/15/online-videos-of-philosophical-lectures/ (list of online videos of various philosophy lectures) […]
Otter and Odder, by James Howe, was introduced to me recently by one of my undergraduate students. The story is about Otter who, looking for food, falls in love with the fish he is about to eat. Told by his community that this is not “the way of the otter,” and characterized as “odd and […]
Sharon Draper’s Out of My Mind is the story of eleven-year-old Melody, born with cerebral palsy and unable to walk, talk, feed herself, or take care of any of her basic needs. Doctors, many teachers, and a host of other adults assume she is incapable of learning, but Melody is highly intelligent and thoughtful, with […]
Leo Lionni’s Pezzettino is the story of the small Pezzettino (which means “little piece” in Italian), who is a small orange square surrounded by other beings who are all made up of many different-colored squares. Pezzettino observes that everyone around him is “big and [does] daring and wonderful things.” He concludes that he must be […]
The first day of fall and it’s a beautiful clear day in northeast Washington State. I am returning to this blog after spending much of the summer working on the book I am writing for parents about ways to inspire philosophical conversations with one’s children. One of the ideas on which I’ve been spending a […]
When teachers and family members ask me what is needed to foster philosophical conversations with children and youth, I usually talk about what I call philosophical sensitivity. I have written about the concept in this blog in the past. I don’t think you need a degree in philosophy or a deep background in the history […]
Why do I do what I do? I’ve been doing philosophy in schools for almost 14 years now. At a conference in Memphis this past weekend about doing philosophy with young people, the participants suggested varied justifications for doing what we do. And I’ve been thinking since about the central reasons that I believe that […]
I recently had a conversation with Christopher Wiley, whose num de plume is Mortimus Clay, the author of the young adult fantasy novel The Purloined Boy. The novel was a finalist in the Young Adult Fiction category of the National Best Books 2009 Awards from USA Book News. The plot of the book utlizes themes […]
When, in our first class together, I asked the fifth grade students with whom I’m doing philosophy this winter what they imagined was the definition of philosophy, one student volunteered that he thought philosophy was “a way of life.” Of course, I loved the sophistication of this answer, and there are philosophers who hold this […]
On Tuesday afternoon we had a “philosophy cafe” in the 5th grade. I brought cider and cookies, and told the students that in parts of the world adults went to cafes and had something to eat and drink and talked about philosophy. It created a really different kind of environment for our conversation, very relaxed […]
This week and next students in our Philosophy for Children seminar at the University of Washington will be doing philosophy lessons in a variety of public school classrooms around Seattle, from 5th through 10th grade. We have been meeting for seven weeks now, and in the seminar we’ve discussed topics ranging from the nature of […]
The 2012-13 school year is off to an energetic start! For teachers and others interested in learning about doing philosophy with children, the new national organization I’ve been involved in founding, PLATO (Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization), is now accepting members. Click here more more information on the organization and membership: http://plato-philosophy.org We are holding a […]
This fall a reporter called and asked me if I had any philosophical quotes from children that I particularly liked. Of course I do! For example: and For more: http://www.businessinsider.com/philosophy-quotes-kids-profound-2016-9/#-9
Recently the fourth grade students at John Muir with whom I’ve been doing philosophy and I taped a segment for the radio show Philosophy Talk. We talked about personal identity, the mind-body problem, and the nature of happiness. The students were so impressive! We all had a great time. Here is a recent University of […]
A good resource for thinking about what questions to ask when talking to students about philosophy is Philosophy Talk, a weekly one-hour radio series exploring issues of philosophy. Calling itself “the program that questions everything . . . except your intelligence,” the series is very engaging and most past shows can be downloaded online. I […]
You can now listen to the Philosophy Talk radio show on pre-college philosophy, taped at the University of Washington in November: http://depts.washington.edu/nwcenter/resourcestalkradio.html
After 13 years of working in this field, I continue to analyze the most effective ways to make philosophy a more common offering in K-12 schools. Working with teachers to help them to develop the skills necessary to teach philosophy is the most obvious way to make a large impact, but my experience has convinced […]
As we head back into classrooms after the summer, I thought the topic of warming up to philosophy would make for an appropriate first fall blog post. When I am regularly in a classroom facilitating philosophy sessions, I try to develop a consistent structure for the session. This does not involve an attempt to control […]
Created by 5th grade students Methow Valley Elementary School Winthrop, Washington I was reflecting this morning about a conversation I had last week, in which I was asked by an acquaintance about my work. Her response to what I do was, “Philosophy? I took one philosophy class in college, but it was so difficult!” I’ve […]
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 […]
After almost two years of work, the new national organization for pre-college philosophy in the US, PLATO (Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization), has been born! PLATO is a national support, advocacy and resource-sharing organization for teachers, parents, philosophers and others involved in teaching philosophy to pre-college students. Launched by the Committee on Pre-College Instruction in […]
For most of the 15 years that I’ve been involved in this field, there have been an isolated few of us around the country working to introduce philosophy to pre-college students. But in the last few years, over a dozen new pre-college philosophy programs have begun, and I now hear regularly about additional new efforts […]
The Center’s Education Director, David Shapiro, has written a wonderful book – Plato Was Wrong! Footnotes on Doing Philosophy With Young People – that compiles activities and games he’s created over the years to inspire philosophical inquiry with young people. These activities can be used as a starter in a philosophy session or as the […]
I taught my first couple of elementary school classes in the last week, both with fourth grade students in Seattle. It is always amazing to me the level of philosophical interest and understanding shown by children. Yesterday I had a discussion with about 30 fourth graders about Plato’s “Ring of Gyges.” In our conversation, the […]
The World But Seems To BeThe world but seems to beyet is nothing morethan a line drawnbetween light and shadow.Decipher the messageof this dream-scriptand learn to distinguish timefrom Eternity. — Fakhruddin ‘Iraqi (Fakhr al-din Ibrahim) English translation by William Chittick and Peter Lamborn Wilson
A couple of years ago I created a series of ethics puzzles to introduce various moral questions to two fourth grade classes. I adapted some of these scenarios from puzzles created by others and made up the rest. I found that formulating dilemmas that would be easily recognizable to ten-year-old students was an effective way […]
For the past month I’ve been working on the chapter of my book that examines what I’m calling the “philosophical self.” This part of us, that is naturally inclined to ponder the deeper questions raised by the strangeness of finding ourselves alive in the world, fails to develop for many (most?) young people because cultivating […]
I was involved in founding the journal Questions: Philosophy for Young People ten years ago. The journal began as a project of the American Philosophical Association’s Committee on Pre-College Instruction in Philosophy. We conceived it as a way to illustrate the philosophical work that young people are capable of doing. The mission of Questions is […]
Randall’s Wall by Carol Fenner is a book for upper elementary school students about a young boy who lives inside an invisible wall, which protects him from the cruelty of his classmates. The wall also helps him from focusing on his abusive father and frail mother, and his house that lacks running water for bathing […]
Yesterday in an online philosophy session, the children and I played a game created by my colleague David Shapiro, the “Reality Scavenger Hunt.” This has been a popular philosophy prompt for years, and since the pandemic began, I have been adapting the game for virtual settings. First, I divide the children up into groups of 3-5 […]
The picture book Really, Really BIG Questions by British philosophy professor Stephen Law is an engaging introduction to philosophy for anyone from elementary school age through middle school. With drawings and information about science, history, literature and the history of philosophy, the book explores questions such as: How can something come from nothing? What is […]
Earlier this year I had a conversation with a classroom of fourth grade students about death. It began when we read a chapter from Natalie Babbit’s Tuck Everlasting, which raises interesting questions about death, living a mortal life, and the possibility of becoming immortal. I have posted about this book in the past. The students wondered […]
Recently I led discussions with two different classes of fourth and fifth grade students about the meaning of respect. We began each session by talking about what makes us feel respected. Common responses from the students included “when people listen to me,” “when people pay attention to me,” and “when people accept me for who […]
I’ve been re-reading fairy tales and exploring their philosophical potential. So many questions, especially about ethics, are raised by these stories! I just read a version of the Brothers Grimm story Rumpelstiltskin, as retold and illustrated by Paul Zelinsky. The story can be read, of course, as a morality tale about the greed of Rumpelstiltskin […]
Yesterday I showed up in the fifth grade classroom in which I’ve been teaching, prepared to talk with the students about whether you can get something form nothing, whether everything has a beginning, and related questions. When I arrived, the class informed me that they had just had a discussion about an ethical problem related […]
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 […]
Last month saw the release of my new book Seen and Not Heard: Why Children’s Voices Matter. The book describes and analyzes conversations I have had with children over the past 25 years about their philosophical questions and ideas. Here is an excerpt: In the following conversation about the ethics of attending friends’ birthday parties, some […]
I am working on a new book, Seen and Not Heard, which will be published by Rowman & Littlefield next year. The book considers the ways in which children, with a particular focus on children ages 5-12, are often not listened to, not take seriously, because of their status as children, and how life might be different if this […]
The Railway Children When we climbed the slopes of the cuttingWe were eye-level with the white cupsOf the telegraph poles and the sizzling wires. Like lovely freehand they curved for milesEast and miles west beyond us, saggingUnder their burden of swallows. We were small and thought we knew nothingWorth knowing. We thought words travelled the […]
Children’s points of view and ideas have changed the way I think about many subjects. Friendship is one of them. I think that children’s thoughts and observations regarding friendship are particularly insightful because friendship is so central in their lives. Especially once they begin school, children spend most of their waking hours with their peers, much more […]
The traditional model for philosophy sessions in schools involves verbal communication, typically in the form of large group conversations, often in a circle. While this method of leading philosophy sessions has much to offer, not every student is immediately comfortable with this approach. The larger the class size, for example, the more challenging this model […]
The video “Snack Attack” portrays (without words) an elderly woman inside a train station, who buys a packet of cookies at a vending machine, putting them in her purse. She then heads outside to sit on a bench and wait for her train, sitting next to a teenage boy. Picking up the packet of cookies […]
Soap! Soap! Don’t Forget the Soap! is an Appalachian folktale, brought to life in a great read-aloud picture book by Tom Birdseye with illustrations by Andrew Glass. The story’s main character, Pug, is a young boy “with such a poor memory some say he’d forget his own name.” One day Pug’s mother, who believes in […]
Nothing there is beyond hope, nothing that can be sworn impossible, nothing wonderful, since Zeus, father of the Olympians, made night from mid-day, hiding the light of the shining Sun, and sore fear came upon men.Archilochus (description of the total solar eclipse of April 6, 648 BCE) A complete solar eclipse will take place Wednesday […]
This week in the 5th grade the students and I talked about whether the universe began at some point or has always existed. This is often a somewhat delicate discussion, because it can easily slide into religion and raise what especially in public schools can be thorny issues. But in this conversation, the students quickly […]
Happy autumn! The school season is starting off with enthusiasm and hope for a year with way more time in classrooms and way less time in online settings. After 18 months of only seeing children in our philosophy classes through screens, I am very much looking forward to being back in a classroom this month. […]
The picture book Stellaluna, by Janell Cannon, is a wonderful book for inspiring discussions about what makes something what it is and about friendship. It tells the story of a young fruit bat who becomes separated from her mother and lands in a nest of baby birds, becoming an adoptive member of the bird family. […]
I have used Michele Lemieux’s book Stormy Night in elementary school philosophy classes. It’s a great resource for an introductory session to help the students start to recognize philosophical questions and to think about the questions they have. Stormy Night is wonderfully illustrated with black and white line drawings. It starts off with a young […]
For the first time this summer, there will be a teaching and learning seminar for high school teachers at the American Association of Philosophy Teachers (AAPT) Conference. The seminar will be funded by the Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization (PLATO), the American Philosophical Association (APA), and AAPT. The AAPT Conference is a well-regarded biennial family-friendly event […]
I taught my first philosophy session at the school at Seattle Children’s Hospital this morning, which I will be doing every Tuesday. We started with Plato’s Ring of Gyges, which led us into a conversation about whether possessing something like Gyges’ ring could end up taking over your life. Frequently when I discuss this allegory […]
Recently I’ve begun working on a book for parents and other adults about ways to inspire conversations about philosophy with young people. As part of this work, I’ve been thinking about the ways in which all of the philosophy discussions I’ve had over the years with my three children have contributed to creating an open […]
Andrew Pessin’s The 60-Second Philosopher is a series of 60 very short chapters (each two pages) that provide ideas for thinking about a wide range of philosophical topics (time, color, various ethical questions, knowledge, free will, etc.). The first chapter, “The Philosopher Within You,” begins: There’s the legend of the fish who swam around asking […]
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