Chetty, Darren;
(2024)
The gated community of inquiry:
racism and philosophy for children.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
The founding of the Philosophy for Children movement (P4C) is credited to Matthew Lipman and Ann Sharp, who believed that children could be encouraged to become more reasonable democratic citizens through encounters with philosophical narratives on everyday issues. However, from the start they neglected an important area of their everyday commitments to children in their writing. While in their private lives they were concerned about racism, it makes no appearance in their dialogical approach. Consequently, racism and anti-racism have remained largely overlooked over the last 50 years. This thesis examines P4C’s relationship to racism and how raising the topic of racism has proved divisive amongst its practitioners. It is informed by my involvement in P4C for over 25 years, as one of the few racially minoritised trainers globally. After positioning myself in the field, I historicise the movement. The thesis ends, reflexively, with discussion of the difficulties I encountered while attempting to philosophise about race in the community of inquiry. Methodologically, this thesis might be read as both philosophical and ‘auto-ethnographic’. This narrative analytic approach is both in keeping with P4C’s use of philosophical stories and the Critical Race Theory tradition of generating ‘counter-narratives’. I demonstrate how the materials and prevailing norms in P4C exclude issues pertaining to racially minoritised groups alongside work from racially minoritised philosophers. P4C’s inattention to racism is not ‘merely an oversight’. It results from gatekeeping at odds with P4C’s values of ‘openness’, and in keeping with Charles W. Mills’s account of ‘white ignorance’. My metaphor of the ‘gated community of inquiry’ grounds a critique of the idealism inherent to P4C. My study also presents a ‘road-map’ for a more genuinely philosophical P4C practice that recognises racism as a philosophical topic, as impacting key philosophical ideas, and as a power dynamic that impacts classroom dialogue.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | The gated community of inquiry: racism and philosophy for children |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2024. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Education, Practice and Society UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Arts and Sciences (BASc) UCL |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10200172 |
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