thinking with perceptual skills in philosophy for and with children (p4wc)

Starting from Lipman’s interest in acquiring a balance between the cognitive and affective, the conceptual and the perceptual in the practice of P4C, we explore some possibilities of integrating Betty Edwards’s framework for training perceptual skills as a means of enriching the traditional construction of problems in the community of philosophical inquiry (CPI). To do so, we parallel Lipman’s and Sharp’s views on multidimensional thinking with insights from embodied learning and philosophizing, from the use of gestures, artistic illustrations, and drama, to drawing in the curriculum, in order to suggest ways of enriching discussion plans in the CPI. Often, the compatibility between the multidimensional thinking approach in P4C and a more experiential and embodied learning is natural: for example, caring thinking, which entails developing moral attitudes and a relational consciousness may need more attention to children’s expression of emotions, and mobilize more stimuli to complement the traditional dialogue. The interdependence between problematization, creativity and affectivity can also be illustrated with insights from Betty Edwards’s training perceptual skills’ method: our focus is to use the method as a resource for the development of philosophical problems in the CPI. We argue that, in addition to building a better relationship with one’s creativity, learning to see better may translate into better understanding the process of constructing philosophical problems, and, inspired by the specific perception skills developed by the method, we may add a more relational and situated framework for philosophical questioning.