Philosophy in Children's Literature

Philosophy in Children's Literature

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  • Author: Peter R. Costello
  • Publisher: Lexington Books
  • ISBN: 0739168231
  • Category : Literary Criticism
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 355

This book allows philosophers, literary theorists, and education specialists to come together to offer a series of readings on works of children's literature. Each of their readings is focused on pairing a particular, popular picture book or a chapter book with philosophical texts or themes. The book has three sections--the first, on picturebooks; the second, on chapter books; and the third, on two sets of paired readings of two very popular picturebooks. By means of its three sections, the book sets forth as its goal to show how philosophy can be helpful in reappraising books aimed at children from early childhood on. Particularly in the third section, the book emphasizes how philosophy can help to multiply the type of interpretative stances that are possible when readers listen again to what they thought they knew so well. The kinds of questions this book raises are the following: How are children's books already anticipating or articulating philosophical problems and discussions? How does children's literature work by means of philosophical puzzles or language games? What do children's books reveal about the existential situation the child reader faces? In posing and answering these kinds of questions, the readings within the book thus intersect with recent, developing scholarship in children's literature studies as well as in the psychology and philosophy of childhood.


The Philosophy of Childhood

The Philosophy of Childhood

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  • Author: Gareth Matthews
  • Publisher: Harvard University Press
  • ISBN: 9780674664807
  • Category : Philosophy
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 152

Adult preconceptions about the mental life of children tend to discourage a child’s philosophical bent. By exposing the underpinnings of adult views of childhood, Matthews clears the way for recognizing the philosophy of childhood as a legitimate field of inquiry and conducts us through influential models for understanding what it is to be a child.


Ethics and Children's Literature

Ethics and Children's Literature

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  • Author: Claudia Mills
  • Publisher: Routledge
  • ISBN: 1317141407
  • Category : Literary Criticism
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 278

Exploring the ethical questions posed by, in, and about children’s literature, this collection examines the way texts intended for children raise questions of value, depict the moral development of their characters, and call into attention shared moral presuppositions. The essays in Part I look at various past attempts at conveying moral messages to children and interrogate their underlying assumptions. What visions of childhood were conveyed by explicit attempts to cultivate specific virtues in children? What unstated cultural assumptions were expressed by growing resistance to didacticism? How should we prepare children to respond to racism in their books and in their society? Part II takes up the ethical orientations of various classic and contemporary texts, including 'prosaic ethics' in the Hundred Acre Wood, moral discernment in Narnia, ethical recognition in the distant worlds traversed by L’Engle, and virtuous transgression in recent Anglo-American children’s literature and in the emerging children’s literature of 1960s Taiwan. Part III’s essays engage in ethical criticism of arguably problematic messages about our relationship to nonhuman animals, about war, and about prejudice. The final section considers how we respond to children’s literature with ethically focused essays exploring a range of ways in which child readers and adult authorities react to children’s literature. Even as children’s literature has evolved in opposition to its origins in didactic Sunday school tracts and moralizing fables, authors, parents, librarians, and scholars remain sensitive to the values conveyed to children through the texts they choose to share with them.


Thinking Through Stories

Thinking Through Stories

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  • Author: Thomas E. Wartenberg
  • Publisher: Routledge
  • ISBN: 1000544729
  • Category : Education
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 139

This book provides justification and instruction for exploring philosophy with children, especially by using picture books to initiate philosophical discussion. By demonstrating to teachers, and others that picture books often embed philosophical issues into their narratives, and that this makes picture books a natural place to go to help young children investigate philosophical issues, the author offers a straightforward approach to engaging young students. In particular, this volume highlights how philosophical dialogue enhances children’s sense of self, provides a safe space for the discussion of issues that they are confronted with in living their lives, and develops an admirable method for resolving conflict that the children can use in other contexts.


Philosophical Children in Literary Situations

Philosophical Children in Literary Situations

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  • Author: Peter Costello
  • Publisher: Lexington Books
  • ISBN: 9781793604545
  • Category :
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 0

This book is a series of readings of phenomenological texts and novels for children that carves out an interdisciplinary space that allows phenomenology to offer provocative literary analyses.


Gareth B. Matthews, The Child's Philosopher

Gareth B. Matthews, The Child's Philosopher

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  • Author: Maughn Rollins Gregory
  • Publisher: Routledge
  • ISBN: 0429800452
  • Category : Education
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 265

Winner of the 2022 Book Award of the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia, Gareth B. Matthews, The Child's Philosopher brings together groundbreaking essays by renowned American philosopher Gareth B. Matthews in three fields he helped to initiate: philosophy in children’s literature, philosophy for children, and philosophy of childhood. In addition, contemporary scholars critically assess Matthews’ pioneering efforts and his legacy. Gareth B. Matthews (1929-2011) was a specialist in ancient and medieval philosophy who had conversations with young children, discovering that they delight in philosophical puzzlement and that their philosophical thinking often enriched his own understanding. Those conversations became the impetus for a substantial component of Matthews’ scholarship, from which this book features essays spanning the length of his career. Contemporary contributors to the book critically evaluate Matthews’ scholarship, showing where he broke new ground and identifying developments and debates in the fields he helped to initiate. They take up pressing challenges, including biased idealizations of childhood in children’s literature; the tensions between teaching philosophy to, and doing philosophy with young people; the merits of theorizing childhood without theorizing children; and how professional philosophy at once desires and resists a return to childhood. This second volume in the Philosophy for Children Founders series is an important resource for philosophers, educators, and anyone interested in children’s philosophical thinking, developmental psychology, what it means to philosophize with children, the nature of childhood, and how children’s literature goes philosophical. It will guide and inspire those who share Matthews’ conviction that the impulse to philosophize begins in early childhood. Contributors (in addition to Gareth B. Matthews): Stephanie Burdick-Shepherd, Cristina Cammarano, Claire Cassidy, Stanley Cavell, Maughn Rollins Gregory, Jennifer Glaser, Walter Omar Kohan, Megan Jane Laverty, Jana Mohr Lone, Karin Murris, Peter Shea, Susan M. Turner, Susannah Sheffer.


The Philosophy of Childhood

The Philosophy of Childhood

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  • Author: Gareth Matthews
  • Publisher: Harvard University Press
  • ISBN: 0674265858
  • Category : Psychology
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 152

So many questions, such an imagination, endless speculation: the child seems to be a natural philosopher--until the ripe old age of eight or nine, when the spirit of inquiry mysteriously fades. What happened? Was it something we did--or didn't do? Was the child truly the philosophical being he once seemed? Gareth Matthews takes up these concerns in The Philosophy of Childhood, a searching account of children's philosophical potential and of childhood as an area of philosophical inquiry. Seeking a philosophy that represents the range and depth of children's inquisitive minds, Matthews explores both how children think and how we, as adults, think about them. Adult preconceptions about the mental life of children tend to discourage a child's philosophical bent, Matthews suggests, and he probes the sources of these limiting assumptions: restrictive notions of maturation and conceptual development; possible lapses in episodic memory; the experience of identity and growth as "successive selves," which separate us from our own childhoods. By exposing the underpinnings of our adult views of childhood, Matthews, a philosopher and longtime advocate of children's rights, clears the way for recognizing the philosophy of childhood as a legitimate field of inquiry. He then conducts us through various influential models for understanding what it is to be a child, from the theory that individual development recapitulates the development of the human species to accounts of moral and cognitive development, including Piaget's revolutionary model. The metaphysics of playdough, the authenticity of children's art, the effects of divorce and intimations of mortality on a child--all have a place in Matthews's rich discussion of the philosophical nature of childhood. His book will prompt us to reconsider the distinctions we make about development and the competencies of mind, and what we lose by denying childhood its full philosophical breadth.


Children's Book of Philosophy

Children's Book of Philosophy

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  • Author: DK
  • Publisher: Penguin
  • ISBN: 1465442502
  • Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 145

This fun and informative introduction to the history of philosophy and its key figures and movements, from stoicism to existentialism, is for any child asking "what is philosophy?" Questions like "who am I?", "why does the world exist?" and philosophical theories from Plato to Sartre are made easy to understand using clear examples, timelines, and at-a-glance facts. If your child is curious about the world and the thinkers who shaped it, the Children's Book of Philosophy is for them.


Philosophy in Classrooms and Beyond

Philosophy in Classrooms and Beyond

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  • Author: Thomas E. Wartenberg
  • Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
  • ISBN: 147584459X
  • Category : Education
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 120

The contributors to this volume describe a range of programs that use picture books to teach philosophy to diverse audiences. From a pre-school program in which college students to do the teaching to a program focused on overcoming the legacy of violence and genocide in Mali in which the teachers write and illustrate their own picture books, the authors demonstrate the impact that learning philosophy has on diverse communities of young students and their teachers.


Big Ideas for Little Kids

Big Ideas for Little Kids

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  • Author: Thomas E. Wartenberg
  • Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
  • ISBN: 9781475804454
  • Category : Children's literature
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 0

Big Ideas for Little Kids includes everything a teacher, a parent, or a college student needs to teach philosophy to elementary school children from picture books. Written in a clear and accessible style, the book explains why it is important to allow young children access to philosophy during primary-school education. Wartenberg also gives advice on how to construct a "learner-centered" classroom, in which children discuss philosophical issues with one another as they respond to open-ended questions by saying whether they agree or disagree with what others have said.