International audienceFor centuries, philosophy has been considered as an intellectual activity requiring complexcognitive skills and predispositions related to complex (or critical) thinking. The Philosophyfor Children (P4C) approach aims at the development of critical thinking in pupils throughphilosophical dialogue. Some contest the introduction of P4C in the classroom, suggestingthat the discussions it fosters are not philosophical in essence. In this text, we argue thatP4C is philosophy

The objective of this study is to model the development of critical thinking in groups of pupils aged 4 to 12 years. A previous study, conducted with groups of pupils aged 9 to 12 years who practiced Philosophy for Children (P4C), proposed a model that shows how critical thinking develops in these age groups. The present empirical study was conducted in three geographical contexts (Quebec, Ontario and France) with 17 classrooms of pupils who had practiced P4C. Based on a qualitative method of analysis that stems from the Grounded Theory, analysis of the 17 transcripts of exchanges resulted in a revised model of the developmental process of critical thinking that is defined by four thinking modes and six epistemological perspectives. Using this revised model, a further analysis of the transcripts illustrated that the development of critical thinking occurred through a process of fading and appropriation/transformation, which is associated with “scaffolding”

Situated in the context of children’s rights, this article reports on a study involving children from 11 countries and 5 continents in philosophical discussions about concepts of child and childhood. Here we focus on seven of those countries. In a previous study, two of the authors explored in what kind of society children would like to live. The present study directly addresses one of the issues arising from that study: to investigate what children think childhood is and their place in society. The study raises issues around children’s participation related to their conceptions of child and childhood.

No abstract

Can philosophical dialogue foster the developmental process of certain language and discursive capabilities, such as decentering and abstraction, in four-year old children? And if so, to what extent? In this paper, the authors examine discursive and language competence in a group of four-year-old children during a four-month philosophical praxis (experimental group), compared to that of a group of five-year-old children that experienced no philosophical praxis (control group). The analysis was conducted using two instruments: 1) for discursive competence, the typology of exchanges put forward by Daniel et al. (underlying criteria include the presence/absence of a common problem to solve, centering/decentering of thinking, complexity of interventions and cognitive skills, etc.) and 2) for language competence, the language markers that emerged from the transcripts ("I", "we", "he-particular", "they-general", "you") These two instruments contributed to situating the children's discourse within a process of increasing complexity related to decentering and abstraction. Results indicate that the children in the experimental group engaged in diversified exchanges (three types: anecdotal, monological, dialogical) with a predominance of the monological type and the use of language markers related to the general "they", while the children in the control group engaged in anecdotal exchanges with a predominant use of "I".