44:1_2 The Philosopher's Pedagogy

Abstract

communities. We soon became committed to creating ways to incorporate p4c Hawai‘i into our practice as pre-service public high school teachers. Now, ten years after Amber’s initial experiences, she continues to use p4c Hawai‘i meth-ods to design and implement curriculum in her social studies classes, while Chad has done the same in his language arts courses. Unlike many educational reform movements, p4c Hawai‘i is not an off-the-shelf program that can be imple-mented directly into the curriculum; it is a transformative approach to teaching that affects the way one teaches. To sustain commitment to improving our philosopher’s pedagogy, we have developed a professional relationship where we continually dialogue, philosophize, test new activities, and critically reflect on the role that p4c Hawai‘i has in each of our classrooms. Some of this inquiry has been in response to questions posed by others, but most of this ongoing dialogue has been driven by our interests in finding ways to rethink and adapt p4c Hawai‘i to more effectively meet the needs of our students, and our goals as teachers. The philosopher’s pedagogy presented in this article, while still evolving, represents the most current state of our think-ing and understanding of this approach to teaching. It is our contribution to the ongoing dialogue concerning philosophy for children and its relationship with philosophy, education, theory, and practice. The ongoing P4C dialogue Our professional dialogue fits into a much larger discussion that begins with the work of Matthew Lipman (1980 with Sharp and Oscanyan, 1988, 1992, 1993, 2008), the creator of the Philosophy for Children program.1 What began in 1969 with a single philosophical novel called Harry Stottlemeier’s Discovery and an accompanying teacher manual, both designed “to help children learn how to think for themselves ” (Lipman, Sharp, & Oscanyan, 1980, p. 53) evolved into a K–12 program composed of seven novels and companion teacher manuals. In 1970, Lipman created the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children (IAPC)2 to advance his call for overall school redesign and “How come your students are so engaged? ” “What are the reasons your students perform so well on the Hawai‘i