Question hour: The teacher’s role is vital in the P4C method

How do you settle a misunderstanding with your friend? What is the right thing to do? How can you be nice to someone who is unfair to you? These are some questions that often crop up in young minds in their growing years.

P4C or philosophy for children helps children deal with such issues. It is a concept developed by Columbia University professor Matthew Lipman and his colleagues in the 1960s and adopted in over 60 countries. Introducing P4C in Indian schools would make a difference in the way children learn.

P4C is the buzzword in the academic world today. It is a technique — based on the Socratic dialogue method — that enables children to think for themselves, and has proven to be a success in many schools abroad. But the Indian education system, that often encourages rote learning, may be not be amenable to the P4C method of teaching.

Introducing philosophy to children helps them in learning how to think rather than what to think. In a classroom situation, it also helps children to know what their peers are thinking and form their own ideas and opinions fearlessly. The P4C method was introduced as part of the school curriculum in many institutions abroad to facilitate development of the overall personality of a child. Initiating Indian schools into this method will most definitely bring about a positive impact on children’s education. And this is bound to have huge long-term benefits — in helping children grow up into responsible citizens of the country. It may also make the module on ethics redundant in higher education institutes.

So how does a P4C session work?

A P4C session essentially comprises a community enquiry. In a school context, this community consists of students. Children are made to sit in a circle with the teacher acting as a facilitator. They are presented with a stimulus. This stimulus can be a picture, a piece of text, a video clip, a practical demonstration, a poem or a newspaper article. The students are then asked to reflect on the stimulus for three minutes in silence. During this time, they should write down anything that comes to their mind relating to the stimulus. After this brief period of private reflection, the students are grouped into teams of three or four based on common interests, asked to share their reflections and come up with one question that they would like to focus on for enquiry. Each group is required to write down their question on a piece of paper.

A session on bravery, for instance, may throw up questions such as:

Would you consider yourself brave if you can go bungee jumping?

Is someone who lets a spider crawl up his or her arm brave?

Do you ever have to be brave when you are learning in the classroom?

Can an animal be brave? Give some examples.

Who is a hero? Is he or she always brave?

After this, the students are asked to break from their groups and again sit in a circle. One representative from each group reads out their question aloud to the rest of the community. After analysing all the questions, the entire class votes for one question that will eventually be the focus of enquiry.

The teacher now reads aloud the question that has been chosen and begins the actual enquiry. The group that raised the question may start the enquiry and explain its stand. The children may choose to agree or disagree, responding in a healthy manner. Finally, the teacher ends the enquiry by inviting each student to share one last thought. The role of the teacher or facilitator is very crucial here, and it is important that he or she be trained to handle a P4C session.

According to Lipman, P4C enables children to become accustomed to asking each other for reasons and opinions, listening carefully and building on each other’s ideas. The sessions give students the opportunity to voice their opinions and discuss ideas freely in a process that gives them ownership of their learning.

So why is P4C important in the Indian context? Globalisation is a reality that students in our schools need to be aware of. And internationalism in education is an ideal that all schools may benefit from. The International Baccalaureate Organisation in Geneva, a non-profit educational institution, asserts that good education should make students enquirers, thinkers, communicators, risk-takers, knowledgeable, principled, caring, open-minded, healthy and reflective. And P4C offers excellent opportunities to achieve this goal, working as it does towards the overall development of a child. Experts suggest that teachers can, for a start, try to introduce philosophy in classrooms once a week.

Annie Haight, senior lecturer at the Westminster Institute of Education, Oxford, UK, feels that traditional concepts of pedagogy practised in India — where the teacher is the transmitter of content and enforcer of discipline — might be a stumbling block in carrying out P4C initiatives here. P4C is more about the process than content. Hence, teachers need to be properly trained and prepared to use a facilitation approach that is rather different from the traditional front-of-class “chalk and talk”.

Maria Jack, who began her teaching career at a UK primary school in September, feels “P4C is a valuable aspect of learning” and that it will allow children to have greater ownership of their learning as well as enable them to develop a clearer understanding of what they are learning. Although schools abroad are propagating P4C as part of the education process, much needs to be done at the ground level.

The P4C method definitely seems worth a thought, and teacher training institutes in our country would do well to train aspiring educators in imparting philosophy to children in schools.