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This paper is the result of reflections inspired by observing and participating in dancing sessions with children. Our experience of the latter led to the production of images that provoked a variety of questions, and invited us to think about the relationships between bodies, dance, and various forms of education. Among these questions were: what clues about the experience of human embodiment are given through observing children's dance? What can children teach us through participating with them in this performative medium, and what are its implications for education, most especially in light of our observations of children's inventiveness in this regard? Our impressions resonate and find expression in the oeuvre of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Michel Foucault, Jan Masschelein and Manoel de Barros. Placing ourselves under their influence, we mobilized our thinking and opened ourselves to the emergent character of their ideas, resulting in what might be called a form of "dancing-writing" in which those two forms of expression interact. This dancing-writing is informed by and imbued with children's lived experience: step by step, we walked the paths that they opened, recording as best we could their multisensorial approach to the world--gaze, taste, smell, sound, touch, movement. Ours was an experience of research on movement, with movement, in movement. As such, we harbor no intention to present final answers, but rather offer the reader an invitation to think philosophically and childishly. Ours is an invitation to dance with and among the questions which that very dance inspired. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article intends to discuss processes of political subjectivation of children and young people based on excerpts from a research carried out within the scope of a master's degree in education, presenting a cartography of the political participation of children and young people living in vulnerable territories of the municipality of São Vicente, on the south coast from São Paulo, members of collectives and educational actions of the Instituto Camará Calunga. The concepts of mobilization and subjectivation are presented as important elements of politicization processes, portraying the way in which children and young people engage politically in different ways, coordinated or supported by adults, representing themselves or supporting adults in their demands, opposing the notion that children do not act politically or that the ideal way for children and young people to participate would be to produce consensus and there would be no room for contestation. The research took place in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, essentially in a virtual way, but it traces a continuity with the Institute's participation practices in the pre-pandemic period. The research made use of the cartographic method, in a virtual and face-to-face way, in the context of live work, of daily living with children, young people and educators from Camará, through semi-structured interviews and field diaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By publishing this dossier, it is intended to put in place a series of investigations whose challenges and approaches, problematizations and experiments take into account the broad spectrum of necropolitics. However, when emphasizing the places of contemporary childhoods in such a setting, it underlines the complex nodule that black children occupy in the necropolitics. In one way, because they are, against their will, human capacities and decisions, inheritors of a historical-social situation of a necropolitical matrix. Black children are born, thus, territorialized in an unequivocal necropolitical context. In another way, children make a relevant nod in the formation of tension and modification strategies in the necropolitical frameworks. If children learn to be racist, since the first socialization, in the broad necropolitical logic, they can also learn not to be racist. To inquire for other possibilities, taking children as centrality, is to pay attention to all the experimentation that children are able to undertake as a necropolitical deterritorialization. For such, it is maintained that other possibilities for a life community driven by affection politic, sensitive to human singularities and differences, producing values beyond the deep pit of the cursed colonial heritage, are not possible without education. Thus, the succession of articles presented in this dossier, from multiple and different perspectives, with peculiar approaches and concerns of their own, emphasizing varied and original emphases, brings a collective effort to produce other possibilities for children in the contemporary world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research seeks to understand the relationship between philosophy and the formation of concepts in childhood from the perspective of Matthew Lipman. As our own research in the area of philosophy of education, we pose the following question as a problem to be analyzed: how can philosophy contribute to the concept formation process in childhood according to Lipman? The development of this problem was organized in five stages. A first seeks to understand and deepen Lipman's conception of Philosophy for Children, especially the idea of thinking skills and philosophical dialogue in the research community; the second stage consisted of planning philosophical practice with the children at school, in a class with 32 students from the 3rd year of elementary school in a public school in the city of Londrina / PR, in the period of one semester; the third was to carry out the classroom experience with the students and the teacher from the previous stages; the fourth step was the evaluation of the practice and the planning of the following classes after each meeting; and the fifth stage was concerned with the registration, analysis and systematization of the observed. In order to investigate the contribution of philosophy to the concept formation process in childhood, according to Lipman, part of the research methodology was qualitative, analyzing the concepts of philosophy, thinking and the research community of this philosopher. For this, his main works and those of his commentators were consulted. Action research procedures were also employed through the practice of students from Elementary School I, in order to carry out an experience of the analyzed concepts. As a result of the research, it is possible to highlight the fundamental role of Lipman's Philosophy for Children in the formation of concepts, because, through philosophical practices, the children were more reflective in approaching concepts that in their daily lives could go unnoticed. The work of questioning and dialogue in the research community made it possible to highlight the difficulty of conceptualizing at the beginning of the work, the progress along their approach and the need to seek more in-depth answers. With that, it can be highlighted that the Philosophy classes contributed to such advances and that without them the skills would remain stagnant. This study is added to the philosophical educational movement of teaching philosophy from childhood, which is considered essential for the formation of more reasonable subjects, and most importantly, with the acquisition of skills that will facilitate life in and out of school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, two different philosophical proposals to introduce and carry out philosophy in school spaces which include the participation of children are compared. These are: Philosophy for Children (P4C), mainly developed by Matthew Lipman and Ann Sharp, and Philosophy with Children (PwC), which is actually a set of "second generation" (counter)proposals--as described by Vansieleghem and Kennedy (2011), based on Reed and Johnson (1999)--among which those created by Walter Kohan and Karin Murris, to mention a few, stand out. The text begins with some similarities between both proposals, before comparing them in each of their dimensions. First, P4C is discussed. Second, PwC. Their ideas about education, school, philosophical education, their concept of childhood, the role given to teachers and their relation with politics are the main focus. Third, PwC's critique of the P4C program is studied. Finally, the paper concludes with some ideas on the issue of introducing philosophy in the school space. Particularly, PwC's proposal is supported, fundamentally because of its coherent acknowledgment of the autonomy of teachers and of the political element in education, and since philosophical experience with children is characterized in particular by questioning and critiquing, and, therefore offers the possibility of bringing about important transformations, at both the personal-individual and the collective levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

(Lesbians, Gays, transsexuals and Bisexuals) in relation to the corporality expressed in the school settings. The narratives that were produced over the course of 2012-2013, and our focus on corporality is one of many that allude to the binary classification and separation of sex-gender construct, man / woman and masculine / feminine, in this case, reproduced by subjects whose forms and desires do not conform to the established ones. This trope referred to in the narratives allows us to reveal both the gender constructions of LGBT subjects, as well as the experiences of themselves that occur in circumstances in which difference and visibility are repressed and subalternized by a normalizing pedagogical practice. The "pen" is an unwanted or unexpected irruption, which obtains as a response to homo / lesbo / bi / trans phobic practices that emerge to hurt anyone who dares to appear in front of others in their difference or from a divergent position. This trope would appear be one of the many that allude to the classification and binary separation of sex-gender, man / woman, male / female, in this case, reproduced by subjects whose forms and desires do not conform to established conventioins. As such it can be seen in the narratives that the presence of the pen is not completely transparent, and creates lacunae and contradictions, in addition to persisting in its resistance to recognizing the diversity of bodily materializations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article combines thoughts about childhood, visual culture and education. It is known that we live among multiple images that shape the way we see our reality, and researchers in the visual culture field investigate how this role is played out in our culture. The goal is to make some applications those ideas, to think about the relationship between the images and education. This article tries to grasp what visual culture is and in what ways presumptions about childhood generate and are generated by this association. It also discusses the genesis of these presumptions and the images they generate through a philosophical approach, questioning the role of education in a culture tied to the media, and about how children, who are familiar with multiple screens, presage a new visual literacy. We see how images play a fundamental role in the way children give meaning to the world around them and to themselves, in the context of their local culture. Given this context, it is necessary to consider how visual culture is tied to the elementary school, and what challenges confront the generation of wider and more creative ways to approach visual framing in children's education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses how assumptions about the nature of childhood have been triggered in the confrontations about the legitimacy of gender and sexuality themes in education in contemporary Brazil. We analyse two practical-discursive pitfalls that have been consolidated in these confrontations. The first, forged by anti-gender discussion and education activists, consists in the narrative construction of vulnerable childhood to be protected, and triggers moral panic at the prospect of discussions about gender and sexuality in schools. The second, more subtle trap, concerns the situation of passivity attributed to students in the school context, who are considered to be the subjects of instruction by teachers, including those moments when gender and sexuality issues are addressed in the classroom. The image of a child-prisoner, passive and in danger made-up by the "gender ideologues," populates the narratives analysed in the first part of the paper. It allows us to discuss the political uses of the hyperinflation of this idea of child vulnerability. However, even in educational practices that invest in working gender and sexuality matters in school setting, we observe that children can be conceived as lacking agency, such as discussed in the paper's second part. In order to challenge these logics, we highlight the ludic dimension and playing with conceptual and methodological tools that can contribute to a non-pedagogizing approach to gender and sexuality in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philosophy and literature are linked by strong ties that are evident in both disciplines: there are numerous literary and philosophical works in which reciprocal influences can be traced. This philosophical experience with children started from a classic work, Peter Pan, to motivate elementary school students. The goals were a) to develop critical thinking skills and ethical problematization around school issues; b) to develop analysis, synthesis, inferring, debate, questioning, and creative thinking skills; and c) for students to make connections between their daily experiences and the situations discussed in the story. Peter Pan portrays a popular kind of character of our times: the leader. Peter is smart and friendly, possesses enough courage and charisma to entice lost children, the Red Skins, and Wendy and her siblings. His imagination and passion for adventure make him even more appealing. Peter also embodies flaws commonly seen in numerous leaders: vanity, selfishness, and lack of responsibility. To exert control he relies on the submission of lost children. While both behaviors may seem natural to us in the story, in real life at school we would label them with words like bullying, abuse, aggression, victims... This experience showed that literary works can trigger deep thinking and debate in students that apply to dilemmas in both school and everyday life; it prompted questioning regarding relationships and points of view; it was also possible to appreciate the possibilities that this space opened to encourage imagination. Educators could witness and see evidence of the power of questioning even though only a few of them had learned these skills. Limited background in critical thinking reduces the ability to implement strategies that contribute to the growth of the above mentioned skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to present a methodology developed collectively within the discussions of the "Childhood and Contemporary Culture Research Group", institutionally linked to the Postgraduate Program in Education of the State University of Rio de Janeiro and explored - in a particular way - in the context of a doctoral research field. In addition, it proposes to know about the experiences of displacement of children who move to a new residence. The expression "to be dead" in the title is based on Italo Calvino' s tale that brings forth, in Palomar's reflection - a literary character whose life is marked by the singular way in which he sees the world -, the possibility of creating a perspective of seeing that implies perceiving a reality in which one's presence does not determine in a directive way the course of the experiences, although it implies a material change in the lived time and space. Thus, when he talks about learning to look at the world as someone who is dead, Palomar provokes us to think of ways of getting to know others which demand a not exempt observation and therefore does not disclaims responsibility from the researcher of the relationship that he establishes with his interlocutors. The following reflections come to compose our questions: When the child attracts our gaze in the quotidian of a time marked by acceleration, in which to look at others has become loss, be it of time, money or ethics that advocates considering others in the decisions we make individually? How does childhood show itself to us in the movement of life? What is it possible for it to tell us, even if the proposal is to postpone direct interlocution, lingering in the observation that, mediated by what affects us, it also provokes a dialogical movement? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present text is an essay on childhood and teacher education, making approximations and meetings that put in question the school, the education, the teaching, the time. Childhood is not considered a category of chronological time, but an establishing force of possibility, impossibility, questions, interruptions. Childhood is affirmed beyond an age, understood as existence, life, embodied in any body and in another temporality. It is interesting to ask about the childhoods that go through the teacher formation and, perhaps, think not only how we form childhood, but how childhood forms us. How do they potencialize teachers work? Under what conditions do these childhoods arise? Is the teacher becoming a maturation of childhood, childhood or childhood? What gestures tear and explode with the ways we get used to being with the children and the ways we are used to becoming teachers? These questions have accompanied me in the challenge of devoting sensitivity, attention and listening to the senses emanating from childhood, and the childhood that emanates from the senses, in the exercise of being a teacher of Early Childhood Education. Therefore, this work is inspired by the childhoods of children of the Secondary Education of Pedro II College, in childhoods of my teaching with these subjects, in beginnings, openings and beginnings that potentiate to inhabit the school and become a teacher in a childish way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present in this article a discussion about gestures produced from the childhood entry in the interface with the experience of school time. It is a discussion woven inside the center for studies and research in education in particular, the times group of the faculty of education of the federal university of Juiz de Fora/MG. Throughout history, time has been discussed in various ways and still is, as well as childhood, conceptually constructed as a result of social, political, religious, and cultural influences. In the attempt to "start thinking", we ask ourselves about what theoretical formulations have been based on childhood at the interface with school time in the field of education? We defend the central thesis that childhood, in a western cut, has been presented in productions still as social time. It is a recent movement to consider childhood as an event, experience, as opposed to the idea of childhood as the stage of life. As a result, considering infancy related to the tension between social time and time as intensity of the present, implies the need for pedagogical gestures that think this tension and, thus, consider the children of the current, narrowing their relations with the school, with knowledge and with life. To enlighten the issues sewn from our concerns, we chose authors such as Agamben, Leal, Bakhtin/Volochinov, Kohan, Vieira, Bento and Meneghel, Kramer, Borba, who focused on childhood and education. In order to problematize the time category, we dialogued with St. Augustine, Oliveira, Marques C. and Marques L, Skliar. The reading of our interlocutors and our listening with/to the school could subsidize the thought that we can invent ways not only imagined as possible with the perspective of reflecting time, childhood, experience and school on other bases. The interrogation, not the conviction, enables the sense of knowledge in the materiality of our practices, produced inside/outside the university. These are underprivileged subjects in curriculum matrices and disciplines that address the issue of children, their childhoods and temporalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sacred and secular aura of innocence around childhood is still nowadays well preserved, having a strong impact on social discourses of protection; care and education. Conjugated to this aura is the child developmental discourse; very crucial to psychology and education; which strives to thoroughly describe and characterise childhood as a "life stage"; in order to claim "truths" about subjects who live it and how they "must" live it. In this way; our proposal with this work is to question the discursive production of "innocent child"; in psychology and education fields; through a feminist perspective and the childhood studies. Therefore; we assume as principal question figures gender and sexuality as possibilities to construct different views on childhood by looking over the experiences; the knowledge and senses that children are sharing in their playing cultures. The scenes we bring up as supports to our reflections come from researches with children in pre-school municipal public institutions; in Rondonópolis; Mato Grosso; Brazil; conducted in the scope of Childhood; Youth and Contemporary Culture Research Group (GEIJC). The main questions we raise with gender and sexuality as markers; when we take them to the scholar context; are: (1) the children's place in their right of expressing their genders and sexualities in this context; (2) the possibility of these expressions to be recognized and have despatologised and viable existences in learning contexts; as well as their detachment from moral and excluding values; and (3) the possibility of recognition; by the school and cognitive politics produced in this context; of different trajectories of gender and sexual expressions in children. In summary; our inquiries are directed to question the developmental idea as a progress to a "must be" oriented by linearity and universality of gender and sexual expressions; which debouch intensely in pedagogical discourses in search of a phallocentric; masculinist; heteronormative; binary and bourgeois identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we work on bringing together, throughout five sections, philosophy, education and neuroscience, through thoughts of some authors such as Nietzsche, Spinoza, Deleuze, Bergson, Jaspers, Hannah Arendt, Ortega Y Gasset and Kapur. In the "Some kind of difficulty to understand attention" section we approach concepts related to Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). We suggest that a pharmacological treatment using psychostimulants may be understood as a way to program affections, since it interferes with the neural mechanism of the salience coding. We warn, in the segment "Some knowledge about the bodies", about how the ability to pay attention or to stay focused is connected with how much affirmative engagement there is between the affected body and the body or the object affecting it. The characteristics of studying and of the student are problematized in "Some understading about education", and we affirm: students study to learn about their own strengths and sensitivities, to reach the required competence to satisfy their needs, not someone else's. In "A way to wander and learn", we talk about the cartographic capacity of the bodies -- the ability to wander and select what raises the potency of thinking, experimenting and living. Lastly, in "Other possible paths" we resume ideas, we intertwine issues, and we ask about paths, routes, changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biesta raises questions about the relationship between thinking and education. He wonders whether there are dimensions of education that cannot occur through the advancement of thought alone. In this paper I consider this prospect in relation to the community of philosophical enquiry and also take up Biesta's comment about liking gardens in schools. This is not in order to assert a particular analogy between gardens and gardening and the school and teaching, but rather to explore the possibility of there being practical resemblances between the existence of a garden and the human activity of gardening, and how a school should exist and the kinds of activities taking place in schools. By the close of this short paper I will have opened for further discussion the possibility that there may be some resemblances between what teachers and gardeners need to do, for example the attentiveness to uniqueness as well as creative forces outside human control. I show there is already an awareness of these concerns present in Ann Sharp's writing and close by discussing the implications for this in terms of the role of the teacher in the community of philosophical inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People who attended the ICPIC conference last summer were given a opportunity to consider some perspectives offered by the acknowledged scholar and educational thinker, Gert Biesta. His presentation in Madrid focused on exploring the educational significance of doing philosophy with children from a particular viewpoint. Biesta addressed the question of whether Philosophy for Children (P4C) movement can offer something more than a clear head, that is, a critical, creative, caring and collaborative thinker. To get the message through, he analysed some wider patterns in the educational field, namely the rise of the language of learning in various educational environments. According to Biesta, this shift has created tendencies towards egocentrism in education. He articulated a subject position from which we can also start addressing the heart and soul of others. In what follows, I will explore this different take on positioning students basing on my reading of the scholarship of P4C and the talk of Gert Biesta accompanied with reading of his other works. I will offer a few views that seem to entail connections between the scholarship in P4C and Biesta. Furthermore, I will pose some questions the talk provoked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gert Biesta claims that education involves introducing young people to a pathway from what they want to what it is good for them to want, offering the conditions for children to cross from the former to the latter. This shift from a realm of individual desires to the realm of the desirable constitutes a "de-centered existence". Since there is an undeniable normative dimension in this view, it seemed important to search for the guiding values or principles that frames it. In his ICPIC talk, G. Biesta refers to the Levinasian concept of responsibility, identifying individual desires (children's desires) with the egological way of existence. In his 2014's book, The beautiful risk of education, Biesta mentions the concept of educational wisdom (educators' wisdom), through an Aristotelian standpoint. In either perspective, the author grants normative privileges to adults, claiming that, in an educational environment, adults have the responsibility to be educators and not learners. We follow from here to question Biesta's statement of education as a risk, since if there are evaluative standards according to which educators can orient their practices, as well as students behaviors (either the responsibility in face of the Other or the ability to make good and wise judgments), how can one still talk about a risk in education? We end up our commentary by looking for deeper meanings for the concept of risk in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The thought that children should be given greater opportunity to participate meaningfully in affairs which concern them and to show their capacity for reasonable measured thoughts and choices has been displayed by many others (COHEN, 1980; FARSON, 1974; KENNEDY, 1992). It has also been suggested than in order to ensure that we are fair to all individuals, regardless of their age, that our primary consideration should be the capacity for decision making and agency. However, whether or not children are indeed capable of this kind of decision-making and developed agency is greatly contested (most notably perhaps by Plato and Aristotle), and so too are the reasons for this. In what follows then, I will examine the ways in which children may be encouraged to gain this kind of agency, and what our role in facilitating this may be. Moreover, I will show that while difficult, it is possible to approach 'teaching' young people to become autonomous agents in ways that do not interfere with their agency, either presently or in a future-oriented sense. Establishing this is essential as in order to make authentic choices, and allow for holding individuals responsible for their choices, they must be a result of the deliberation of their own choices, and not some other influence, be that external or internal. Finally, in relation to educative aims as a whole, I will follow Seneca's statement above: that education should go beyond inculcating only learning and practises that are of immediate use to the institutions in which they are learned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we discuss two research programs - MELARETE (Verona, Italy) and Philosophical Ethics in Early Childhood (PEECh) (State College, Pennsylvania, USA) - and an emerging international research collaboration based on the benefits of practicing philosophy for meaning in early and middle childhood education. We argue for the good of philosophical thinking and its benefits to young students, with a particular focus on ethical development and meaning. We contend that through philosophical pedagogy we can make learning, meaning, vital to students. This is particularly relevant when dealing with questions of ethics and virtue, questions that are close to the lives of children from their earliest years. By discussing these questions and advancing philosophical ethics and virtue programs philosophers can play a central role in the development of responsible and ethical persons in the world. In order to do this, we contend, it is important that philosophy be introduced to children from a young age, in the early stages of schooling. Following a discussion of our respective research and education programs in Italy and USA, we discuss our current and ongoing plans for an international research collaboration on ethics and philosophy with children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay addresses a writing experience constituted during a research project inspired by the relationship between education, childhood and Gaston Bachelard's poetic imagination phenomenology. From the bachelardian suggestion of replacing in face of the world the perception with admiration, to retain the values of what is perceived, emerges a writing dyed both by the encounters of babies, small children and teachers and by the rêveries of the first author from photographic records of children's play with clay. In order to describe and think the complexity of the rêveries possibles from a childhood experience, we opted for the bachelardian phenomenology of poetic imagination. To assume the admiration as a possibility to surpass the perceived, as a way to reencounter and extend - through imagination - the forces that are in the world, it's to transgress a writing that explains and verifies to highlight the movement between dreaming and thinking provoked by the values of a childhood that animate reserves of enthusiasm that invite us to inhabit and to take part in the world with another words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this text, we present reflections and analyses based on the philosophical and sociological fields about the childhood education, taken from the relation among the concepts of ethics, esthetics, affect and amorousness. Initially, we postulate that education of children should involve, necessarily, the collective conception of an ethical and affective curricular plan, able to welcome and to explore the vital force of childhood as a fundamental educational component. Thus, we evaluated as essential to the achieving of this affective learning mode, the constitution of a differential modality of amorous interactions (either between children and adults, whether among themselves, and from them to the world and the life), capable of engendering the singularity through which the ethical-aesthetic and political movement of an education for the childhood's potency can be conceived. From these referrals, we dedicate to the drawing of the basic principles able to sign a possible conceptual image for an ethical-affective children's education. This education is oriented to take on the children's playing as a pure plan of the uneven experimentation, opened to the come-to-be indetermination's forces - inherent to the sensitive, imaginative and intellectual relations - that articulate social and culturally the act of learning and teaching. Our effort was to put in discussion the imperatives of an education based on precepts and practices that try not to eliminate or minimize, but to establish a positive, attentive and sensitive relationship with the differences that childhood and children forcibly impose on us. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this paper is to comprehend the rise of discourses about brainhood and its eventual relation to contemporary biopolitics and the ways in which individuals conduct themselves once called to answer the competitive demands of job market, to invest in themselves, and become small entrepreneurs of themselves. Through the discourses on brainhood, it seems that the possibility to review and strength individuals' capacities and skills is a certainty, so they become more productive and efficient. There is a clear relation between the ways in which brainhood is characterized and supported, and the investments on human capital. In a society structured by the logic of performance, it becomes clear that the processes of medicalization for brain efficiency aim at the increase of work performance and learning processes. It creates a kind of "behavioral extra value" and "performance surplus." It is also based on this logic that it is stated that inefficient brains ought to be repaired. It seems reasonable to recognize that the findings in the field of cognitive neuroscience and the proliferation of discourses around these discoveries have produced a new type of emerging life, based on brain functioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The human being is a protean being whose reality is change and transformation. Transformation is unpredictable. Being human is being different. This adaptability to change is only one of the characteristics of being protean and the misfortune of peoples and countries occur as its consequence. In other areas, such issue was referred to as resilience. To live better, we must learn to minimize the possibility of accidents, can and must learn to take care of ourselves and of others (especially in societies as giddy and subject to change as ours). Within the adaptability to change, there exists the possibility of a destructive ability to change which is responsible for the separation between before and after, between subjectivity and life. Whether we are or not to face this reality of what occurs by accident, we should nonetheless, educate for resilience. Both subjects are equally important: the fragile nature of humankind together with its strength to overcome incidents and to move on. Inadequacy is not only available for some but instead, it is part of human nature. This puts us in another point of view, in which the inadequacy is not the other, but we are all, beings made of scraps that have been affirmed in the becoming, denying possibilities and can be reconstituted every time, incomplete, insufficient and partial beings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article explores Merleau-Ponty's philosophy, in particular his work on the ontology of perception, in a search for new educational forms. In investigating the idea of infancy, the text looks for alternate possibilities for thinking an educational process more adequate to nature itself, to child's nature, and to the nature of education. Departing from the traditional occidental dichotomy between body and spirit, matter and form, existence and essence, and drawing on contemporary phenomenological theory, the paper identifies various theoretical conceptions that may make for a clearer understanding of the relation between our presence in the world and our intellectual capacities. As Merleau-Ponty's ontology shows, there is no separation between pedagogies that aim to foster autonomy and those that develop our capacity to understand others. Therefore, the questions raised here are both ethical and ontological. Children, by living at school, acquire more than objective knowledge of the world; they learn to live together as well, and how they come to understand the world will influence the way they understand their social, personal, and professional relationships. A theory that embraces both existence and essence more completely will help us to find more consistent support for our best educational practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many educators will be familiar with the power of stories to stimulate rich and meaningful philosophical enquiry on ethical issues with of children. In this paper, I present a view of the nature of narrative and ethics -- and the relationship between the two -- that attempts to explain why this is the case. It is not an accident that ethical matters are illuminated to children and adults alike in stories, nor is the explanation of this fitness for purpose, merely pragmatic, or a matter of convention. Narrative, I argue, is at the heart of ethical life and learning. We live and learn by virtue of the stories we tell and the stories that are told to us. This is possible not only because these stories present us with vivid ethical content, but also because successful engagement with and enjoyment of these narratives requires the exercise of capacities that also help us lead good lives. Narrative is central, in two respects, to learning how to live a good live and living it: it is both source and a method of ethical knowledge and understanding. Crucially for educators narrative is a rich and abundant source and a method that can be easily grasped and then practiced and improved upon. For those who find this account persuasive, I conclude with some suggestions about how best to practice Narrative Ethical Enquiry in ways that acknowledge, actualise and maximise the power of narrative, whilst bringing it to bear fruitfully in everyday ethical life and learning. I propose 'Narrative Ethical Enquiry' a pedagogy that aims to develop three virtues: ethical awareness, narrative competence and critical, self-conscious enquiry. I have found that the philosophy classroom is an ideal crucible for the combination of these three elements. However, elsewhere in my work I argue that that Narrative Ethical Enquiry is not restricted to the philosophy classroom, or any classroom for that matter. It is equally at home in domestic, community, religious, professional or political contexts where people use stories to represent ethical experience, explore ethical issues and share what they have learnt. I am not advocating something radically new in this paper, but rather observing something that spontaneously exists in those places where human beings seek to order, comprehend and communicate ethical experience; and to learn how best to pursue a good life. Here I am merely proposing that this phenomenon -- of ethical enlightenment through narrative -- be recognised more widely, and capitalised upon by educators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author and her colleagues have been conducting philosophical experiences with children and teenagers in the city of El Bolson, Río Negro, Argentina, since 2007. During 2011 and 2012, we worked on different levels--with kindergarten students, in primary and secondary schools and in colleges--and also held regular meetings with all the teachers involved in the experience. A rigorous, in-depth analysis of these meetings allowed us to establish a common list of criteria, so as to arrive at a systematic way of evaluating the quality of our own work with children. The general criteria were: 1) What does the facilitating adult want to know, and how are her questions related to the child's? 2) What can we learn about the evolution of the child's thinking when he is faced with the "big questions" about human life and gives us his point of view? How do these responses differ according to age? These criteria allow us to study children's representations and their evolution over time. 3) What internal changes do children experience as a result of the experience of doing philosophy? This question relates directly to the discoveries children make about themselves during the philosophy workshops, and it evokes the fundamental question at the heart of our research: what is the use of these workshops? What aspects of child development do they serve, how do they influence the images that children are able to make of their own capacities and of their own culture? The specific criteria designed for each grade level and some of the results of our analysis are also discussed in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we will study the constitution of the subject as described by Foucault in L'Herméneutique du Sujet and we will try to establish the relation between this constitution and the political gesture - called Parresia in Le courage de la Vérité-- which irrupts in everyday life and which sets subjectivity in opposition with the actual culture or society. The parresiastic act, which disrupts the social order by its affirmation of subjectivity, is a risky act, which puts the subject in the limit situation of a self-affirmation that goes against that which we may understand as a social or political act. It frees the subject from local and cultural conditions so that it can seek a realization of the highest freedom of expression and action. The subject of such an act takes this position as its own reference, allowing it to acquire a character that reveals the issues of a civilisation while at the same time becoming the representative of an emancipated and free humanity. Democracy, understood in its most rigorous sense in this perspective, depends on the possibility of parresia, which effect is to open a dialogue between society and the political subject. The importance of such phenomenon is immense when we try to think about education and its social and political effects. The relation between education and democracy is the condition for true democracy, one in which the citizen is included in the community in total freedom and is aware of her participation in the common task. But, as suggests Foucault's analysis, this political and social insertion, which is also a cultural insertion that depends on education, doesn't happen as a natural and linear process which would correspond to the simple fact of going to school or being present in socially formed groups. On the contrary, it's in rupture, in opposition, in the violent and irrevocable subjectivity's affirmation, against what is generally admitted, that the subject erects itself upon the immediate situation to defend what it estimates as outside the range of established social rules and historical conditions. We want to indicate here, and if possible understand better, this paradox of a subject that realises itself against a society to which it belongs, but through acting in such a way, opens the possibility to free its members from the weight of institutions which could be denatured or corrupted, constituting and founding an opening which would make possible a new social structure, one which is more democratic and which respects the nature of humanity. If parresia really possesses the needed notes for the constitution of democracy how can we apply it to an educational domain? How can we conciliate knowledge transmission, the learning of social rules and usages, with the possibility of a free action, independent from these same rules? These questions will be raised to open a discussion upon the relation between subjectivity, society and education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the intersection of world history and biological boundaries Hannah Arendt (1906- 1975) sadly never had the opportunity to experience maternity; nonetheless, this did not prevent her from writing, with passion and promise, about the miraculous responsibility of childbirth and childrearing. What may come as a surprise to those unfamiliar with her work is that her views on children are to be found throughout her political writings. It is thus the first task of this piece to articulate the connection, within Arendt's project, between children and the political. After this, I intend to develop two of her political arguments, the first her well known critique of the contemporary discourse on human rights, and the second on education. I will use these to argue that the vision of children's rights, as put forward first by Janusz Korczak in the 1920's and later codified in the 1959 declaration of the UN Rights of the Child, is being destroyed by the refusal of all adult citizens (parents, educators, politicians, etc) to grow up. At the heart of Arendt's political writings, especially those concerning children, is a sincere plea to address the crisis in responsibility in our contemporary society. As citizens we must accept that only by limiting our own childish desires to be free of responsibility and accepting the burden of being an authority is there a chance that children might have the right to be children. All rights are meaningless illusions unless they are founded upon relationality and responsibility. It is this preamble, which is sadly absent from the 1959 declaration, that Arendt would argue is necessary not only for the sake of children but also for that of the shared world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]