The purpose of this thesis was to enhance caring thinking of young children through the community of philosophical inquiry, which was developed by the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children(IAPC).
The community of philosophical inqu...
The purpose of this thesis was to enhance caring thinking of young children through the community of philosophical inquiry, which was developed by the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children(IAPC).
The community of philosophical inquiry is defined as a group of people exploring and deducting philosophical concepts through meaningful dialogues, and caring thinking is developing an active propensity toward respect and care with an underlying interest and compassion toward others. There are five types of caring thinking: appreciative thinking, normative thinking, affective thinking, empathic thinking and active thinking.
This research inquiries are as follows.
The first question is whether the community of philosophical inquiry influences caring thinking of young children or not. The second question is about what kinds of and how many types and characteristics of caring thinking appear during the course of the community of philosophical inquiry.
The subjects of this thesis were 45 kindergarten children, 5-year-old children of S Kindergarten located in Seoul. 22 among the subjects were the experimental group and the other 23 were the comparison group. The experimental group participated in the community of philosophical inquiry, while the comparison group was exposed to the normal kindergarten curriculum. A video camera was used to keep track with the experiment performed from April 6th to July 11th, 2007. The experiment was conducted by the researcher herself.
To verify the enhancement of caring thinking, a scaling test for young children’s caring thinking and caring thinking observational indicator for teachers, created based on terms used in types and characteristics of caring thinking by Lipman(2003), were used as the research method.
The community of philosophical inquiry for caring thinking were employed around a philosophical story, ‘The Doll Hospital’(Sharp, 2000), as an educational supplement to create courses such as reading stories, making questions, planning discussion based classes, and participating in advanced activities.
In order to verify the first research inquiry, whether the community of philosophical inquiry influences caring thinking of young children, three kinds of analysis were conducted. First, the young children’s caring thinking was compared using ANCOVA. Second, in order to recognize whether the behavior resulted by caring thinking influenced the kindergarten life of young children, the caring thinking observational indicator for teachers was compared by ANCOVA. Third, to understand the difference on caring thinking and the ability to carry out caring thinking among groups and sexes, 2-way ANCOVA was used for both scaling test for young children’s caring thinking and caring thinking observational indicator for teachers.
To approach the second inquiry, to understand how caring thinking is expressed in young children and the community of philosophical inquiry, the experimental group were filmed. A qualitative analysis was conducted to analyze the type and characteristic of caring thinking and the progress in thinking during the activities, and interactions between young children and teacher during discussions were closely observed as well.
Results of the research are illustrated below.
First, the research indicated that the community of philosophical inquiry influenced caring thinking of young children. Comparison between results from the experimental and comparison group on the scaling test for young children’s caring thinking showed a meaningful difference. The experimental group showed higher scale after the experiment, and four types of caring thinking: affective thinking, active thinking, appreciative thinking, and empathic thinking increased. However normative thinking did not increase meaningfully.
The experimental group showed a meaningful increase in the ability to carry out caring thinking compared to the total average, which was dependent to the community of philosophical inquiry. This represents that the community of philosophical inquiry is an effective educational activity to enhance the ability to carry out caring thinking. Moreover, results from caring thinking observational indicator for teachers of the experimental group show that the ability to carry out affective thinking, empathic thinking and active thinking increased meaningfully. The ability to carry out both appreciative thinking and normative thinking increased meaningfully between the pre-test and the post-test, but there was no meaningful difference among groups. In addition, there was no meaningful difference among sexes on caring thinking and the ability to carry out caring thinking.
Second, the experimental group showed all 5 types and 38 characteristics of caring thinking.
Young children in experimental group, who participated in the community of philosophical inquiry, showed meaningful changes and particular characteristics during discussions and other activities. Young children participated more positively in discussions and enhanced their ability of caring thinking during the community of philosophical inquiry. Not only did they enhance caring thinking but they also showed integrated thinking including critical thinking and creative thinking. Moreover, during the repeated discussions the usage of vocabularies related to caring thinking was increased, and words that better display caring thinking were selected during dialogues. After several discussions, young children displayed self-corrective thinking, a form of thinking allowing the thinker to actively and voluntarily correct one’s thoughts, and the participation rate of young children within the interaction of discussions increased while the participation of teachers decreased. Girls showed a meaningful increase in participation rate. Furthermore, the discussion pattern changed from interactions between young children and teacher to interactions between young children and young children.
In conclusion, research findings indicated that the community of philosophical inquiry influenced the improvement of caring thinking. Through the community of philosophical inquiry, young children transformed themselves into thinking entities, showing caring thinking by discovering active meanings on problematic cases requiring care and manifesting it as behavior. Caring thinking developed by the community of philosophical inquiry was reflected into every day behavior practicing care toward others, confirming that the young children’s ability to carry out caring thinking enhanced meaningfully.