Finding their voice: how children experience philosophical dialogue as a path to liberation

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.