Opening the Space for Children's Thinking

This paper was originally presented at the United Kingdom Reading Association Conference held at Christchurch College, Canterbury, England in 2000. It emerges from the authors’ extensive experience of doing Philosophy with Children (P4C) and of providing initial training and continuing professional development for teachers across the UK and beyond. It presents educational, political, moral and philosophical reasons for the use of good children’s literature to provide a space for children to enquire philosophically and to develop confidence in exploring and expressing their ideas in dialogue with one another. It provides the rationale for the authors’ distinctive approach to P4C, referring to the wider literature on picturebooks, and explaining the critical role of the teacher as a listener and facilitator, as children’s thinking is necessarily connected with questions of the teacher’s authority, children’s rights and beliefs about knowledge.