aporetic support in philosophy for children and adolescents (ppea) or how to improve children and teenagers thinking by putting their understanding in embarrassment

Abstract

To develop children’s critical thinking to make them able to think autonomously, here is the goal many educational actors try to reach. This finality can be reached using appropriate methods. Practicing Philosophy for Children is as such a favoured method to reach this goal. Among the methods featuring a research community that philosophises, aporetic support favours the emergence of contrast, differences of perspective, reasoning limitations, and others reasoning contradictions among the children involved in the philosophic discussion. It uses the aporia, if we suppose that meeting the otherness makes the deepening of thinking patent, encouraging it to get out of the trouble it is in. In a first time, we will present the theoretical fundaments of aporetic support that are Platonism and its Socratic dialogue, the inference logic and its operational process of conceptual identifications premised on opposition, the social constructivism and its sociocognitive conflict, and the speech act theory and its illocutionary and perlocutionary values. In a second time, we will present the practicability of aporetic support in Philosophy for Children, evoking the state of mind, but also the tools that the adult has to use to lead a discussion and master aporia as if he was controlling a lever facilitating the autonomous thinking of children.