Elbra-Ramsay, Caroline ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7281-0166 (2025) Finding Their Voice: How Children Experience Philosophical Dialogue as a Path to Liberation. Education 3-13.

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Abstract

Philosophy for Children (P4C) is an educational approach centred on dialogue and Socratic discussion. Communities of Enquiries are used as a core strategy to explore questions developed by the children. The teacher's role is to facilitate a collaborative, critical, caring and creative dialogue through a staged response to the question. This study seeks to examine how children conceptualise this dialogue. Sixty 9-10 year olds from a UK school undertook P4C over a fifteen-week period. The children were then interviewed in small groups. Initially using Batkin's work on dialogism, a phenomenographic approach was used to capture the ‘essences’ of the dialogue. Not only did analysis identify that these were conceptualised as largely dialogic, using the work of Freire, 3 broader themes were identified indicating that philosophical dialogue was liberating. This supports the view that P4C is concerned with social justice where everybody has an equally valid participating voice.

Item Type:	Article
Status:	Published
DOI:	10.1080/03004279.2025.2463968
Subjects:	L Education > L Education (General) L Education > LB Theory and practice of education L Education > LB Theory and practice of education > LB1501 Primary Education
School/Department:	School of Education, Language and Psychology
URI:	https://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/11124

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