As you will know, the foundations for all learning are personal and social skills and communication and language skills. Within the EYFS the social building blocks come under the umbrella term ‘Personal, Social and Emotional Development’. This is further broken down into ‘Making Relationships’, ‘Self Confidence and Self Awareness’ and ‘Managing Feelings and Behaviour.
There are so many opportunities for philosophical enquiry with relation to Personal, Social and Emotional Development. After all, the whole area is subjective and open to personal interpretation. What seems obvious to one child might be a foreign concept to another. By the time a child comes to you at age 3 or 4 they have had all sorts of different input (or lack of input). Children may come from a language rich environment, they may have been at home with a stay at home parent, at a childminder or a nursery. They might live with one, both or none of their parents, they might be an only child or one of many, they could have parents that are young, older or anywhere in between. Maybe English is not their first language or they are on the autistic spectrum. Maybe they are shy or overly confident, caring or lacking in empathy. With children so far ranging in their backgrounds and personalities how can we possibly hope to get them all to the Early Learning Goal in one or two years? It can be frustrating to have a child who achieves in all areas but may not get a ‘Good Level of Development’ (what a soul destroying phrase!) because they have struggled with their social skills. Philosophy is made for areas like this. Not only does it teach the children to follow rules it allows them to question why we need rules. Not only does it show them that they should be helpful but it allows them to explore what helpful means. Remember – the idea of a philosophical question is not to find the ‘right answer’ or the ‘truth’ but rather to allow children to explore concepts for themselves and build on each other’s ideas. This is why you should make an active decision about whether a question is going to be philosophical or not. For example you might have the question “Why do we have rules?” during a carpet time session when setting your class rules. This will not be a philosophical enquiry. In fact this is a definite time for ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ answers. Why do we need rules about using the scissors? So Katie doesn’t cut Tom’s hair and so Javed doesn’t use our favourite picture book as collage material. You could easily have this as a philosophical enquiry at a different time though, perhaps the week before you set your class rules or during the year when the rules have slipped a bit. The tangents you might take would be to explore what a rule is, what would happen if we didn’t have rules, is it ever ok to break the rules, what is most important; following the rules or doing the right thing, etc. Not all questions can be used for a philosophical enquiry but most can, if rephrased. For some more specific ways to use P4C to support PSED please check out the other PSED entries.
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AuthorMiss Magical Mess is a pre-school teacher and P4C Level 2B facilitator. After a shaky start as a P4C facilitator (P4C with 3 year olds... are you kidding?) Miss Magical Mess created her own approach to P4C and enquiry model and is now a big fan. Archives |