right under our noses: the postponement of children's political equality and the NOW
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12957/childphilo.2021.55060Keywords:
child, equality, now, postponement, facilitation,Abstract
Responding to the invitation of this special issue of Childhood and Philosophy this paper considers the ethos of facilitation in philosophical enquiry with children, and the spatial-temporal order of the community of enquiry. Within the Philosophy with Children movement, there are differences of thinking and practice on ‘facilitation’ in communities of philosophical enquiry, and we suggest that these have profound implications for the political agency of children. Facilitation can be enacted as a chronological practice of progress and development that works against child, in terms of political agency. This paper theorises practices of facilitation grounded in philosophies of childhood that assume listening to child/ren as equals, as already able to philosophise, and against sameness. We explore the political and ethical implications of the radical posthumanist reconfiguration of the ‘zipped’ body in the light of including the disciplinary, imaginative and enabling energies of chronological time through the concept now/ness. We shift from ethics to ethos, and from ‘zipped’ to ‘unzipped’ bodies, through the notion of affect to explore the temporal and spatial dimensions of facilitation in Philosophy with Children and children’s political agency. We re-turn to David McKee’s Not Now Bernard (1980), getting ‘inside the text’, and attending to the postponement of equality in Philosophy with Children.
References
Alaimo, S. (2010). Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana Press.
Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Barad, K. (2014) Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart. Parallax, 20, 3, 168-187.
Chetty, D. & Suissa, J. (2017). ‘No go areas’: Racism and discomfort in the community of inquiry. In Rollins Gregory, M., Haynes, J. and Murris, K. (Eds.) The Routledge International Handbook of Philosophy for Children. London: Routledge, 11-19.
Ferguson, D. (2020). Not now Bernard...I’M on my iPhone: classic children’s text reissued for digital era. The Guardian. Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/10/not-now-bernard-im-on-my-iphone-classic-childrens-text-reissued-for-digital-era
Green, L. (2017). Philosophy for Children and developmental psychology: a historical review. In Rollins Gregory, M., Haynes, J. and Murris, K. (Eds.) The Routledge International Handbook of Philosophy for Children. London: Routledge, 37-46.
Gregory, M/R. & Laverty, M. (eds) (2018) In Community of Inquiry with Ann Margaret Sharp: Childhood, Philosophy and Education. London and New York: Routledge.
Haynes, J. (2008) (2nd Edn.) Children as Philosophers: learning through enquiry and dialogue in the primary school. London: Routledge.
Haynes, J. (2014) Already equal and able to speak: practising philosophical enquiry with young children. In Sue Robson and Suzanne Quinn (Eds.), The Routledge International Handbook on Young Children’s Thinking and Understanding, London and New York: Routledge.
Haynes, J. & Murris, K. (2012) Picturebooks, Pedagogy and Philosophy, London and New York, Routledge Research Series.
Haynes, J. & Murris, K. (2019) Taking Age out of Play: Children’s Animistic Philosophising through a Picturebook. The Oxford Literary Review 41, 2 (2019): 290–309.
Haynes, J. & Kohan, W. (2018) From Facilitator to Difficultator – the task of the educator. In K. Murris. & J. Haynes, (Eds.) Literature, Literacy and Learning: Reading Classrooms Differently. London and New York: Routledge.
Hohti, R. (2015) Now — and Now — and Now: Time, Space and the Material Entanglements of the Classroom Children & Society doi:10.1111/chso.12135.
Kennedy, D. (2006). Changing Conceptions of the Child from the Renaissance to Post-Modernity: A Philosophy of Childhood. New York: Edwin Mellen Press.
Kennedy, D. (2020). Becoming Child: Wild Being and the Post-Human. In: On Childhood, Thinking and Time: Educating Responsibly. Lanham (Mayland): Lexington Books: Rowman & Littlefield, 191-131.
Kennedy, D., & Bahler, B. (2017). What is the sound of a child growing up? The question of the child. In D. Kennedy, & B. Bahler (Eds.), Philosophy of childhood: Exploring the boundaries (pp. i–vxii). Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Kizel, A. (2016) Enabling identity: The challenge of presenting the silenced voices of repressed groups in philosophic communities of inquiry. Journal of Philosophy in Schools, 3 (1):16-39.
Kohan, W. (1999) What Can Philosophy and Children Offer Each Other? Thinking 14 (4):2-8.
Lin, C. C. & Sequiera, L. (Eds), Inclusion, Diversity, and Intercultural Dialogue in Young People’s Philosophical Inquiry, Rotterdam, Sense Publishers, 2017.
Lipman, M. (1997). Philosophical discussion plans and exercises. Critical and creative thinking, 5:1–17. Birmingham: Imaginative Minds.
Lipman, M., Sharp, A.M., & Oscanyan, F.S. (1977). Philosophy in the Classroom. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Massumi, B. (2015) Politics of Affect. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Matthews, G. (1992) Thinking in Stories Review of Not Now Bernard. Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children 10 (2):1
Matthews, G. (1994) The Philosophy of Childhood. Harvard: Harvard University Press.
McKee, D. (1980). Not Now Bernard. London: Andersen Press.
Murris, K. (1993). Not Now Socrates...(Part I). Cogito, 7 (3): 236-244.
Murris, K. (1994). Not Now Socrates… (Part II). Cogito, 8 (1): 80-86.
Murris, K. (2000). Can Children Do Philosophy?. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 34 (2): 261-279.
Murris, K. (2013). The epistemic challenge of hearing child’s voice [Special issue]. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 32(3):245–259.
Murris, K. (2016). The posthuman child: educational transformation through philosophy with picturebooks. London: Routledge.
Murris, K. (2017). Reading two rhizomatic pedagogies diffractively through one another: a Reggio inspired philosophy with children for the postdevelopmental child. Pedagogy, Culture & Society. 25(4): 531-550. DOI: 10.1080/14681366.2017.1286681
Murris, K. (2021). The ‘Missing Peoples’ of Critical Posthumanism and New Materialism. In: Murris, K. (Ed.) Navigating the Postqualitative, New Materialist and Critical Posthumanist Terrain Across Disciplines: An Introductory Guide. London: Routledge.
Murris, K., & Kohan, W. (2020). Troubling troubled school time: posthuman multiple temporalities, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, DOI: 10.1080/09518398.2020.1771461
Murris, K. & Haynes, J. (2020) Troubling Authority and Material Bodies: Creating Sympoietic Pedagogies for Working with Children and Practitioners. Global Education Review, 7 (2):24-42.
Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. (2012) Acting with the Clock: clocking practices in early childhood. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 13 (2):154-160.
Reed-Sandoval, A., & Sykes, A.C. (2017). Who talks? Who listens? Taking ‘positionality’ seriously in Philosophy for Children. In Rollins Gregory, M., Haynes, J. and Murris, K. (Eds) The Routledge International Handbook of Philosophy for Children. London: Routledge, 219-227.
Reynolds, R. (2019). Making a circle: Building a community of philosophical enquiry in a post-apartheid government school in Cape Town, South Africa. In Childhood and Philosophy, 15: 202-221.
Rollo, T. (2016). Separate But Equal: False equality and the political exclusion of children. On Childhood pp 32-34.
Rollo, T. (2020). Democratic Child’s Play: Natality, Responsible Education, and Decolonial Praxis. In: On Childhood, Thinking and Time: Educating Responsibly. Lanham (Mayland): Lexington Books: Rowman & Littlefield, 145-161.
