► Versão Em Português

The task implements 32 Philosophy for Children Sessions within the field of Ethics to be delivered twice (in two different school grades) in the school year (both in Lisbon and in Azores). It will require asking permission to parents of the students to film and make a book-DVD at the end of the project.

The first and last session of the school year will be the same and consist on an adaptation of the though experiment of the Veil of Ignorance (Rawls, 1999: 118) as to provide a comparison of the groups before and after. The remaining thirty sessions will cover a variety of issues and be built upon stories and thought experiments from Ethics. For example, one session will be on Kant’s example of two shopkeepers in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (G 4: 397) as to explore the way in which motivation guides action and how difficult it can be to establish the source of motivation.

The construction and application of practical sessions material aims to solidify the theoretical research of the project. First, it aims to establish general criteria for establishing high philosophical quality of the methodology. Second, it aims to mirror the assumptions of the theoretical posture of the Philosophy for Children programme, and verify which aspects need further development to grant the coherence of method and content that Lipman designed. Third, it aims to verify if material can be equally
successfully applied to different age groups given that many practitioners apply the same material do different school grades. Fourth, it aims to provide material for training and further education in philosophy for children. The practical sessions will be filmed to make a DVD with the pedagogical material.

The practical application will also collect material to write a Manual of Good Practice to be added to the DVD and pedagogical material to enable practitioners to correct and improve the quality of their sessions and to provide the wider public interested (parents, school directors, pedagogical councils and museum and theatre directors who hire people to do sessions).

The practical sessions will be evaluated and refined at the turn of each school term. The project team will also collect feedback from parents and teachers in order to gather information in how philosophical dialogues transfer to other learning moments and when it becomes visible that it fosters argumentative skills. All information collected will be added to future DVD-Book to improve and refine the practical material and theoretical support material included. The designed sessions will also be done for the wider public in a museum or theatre for communication of the content and progress of the project. The sessions done in this wider format will be duplicated for parents and educators and for children in order to widen the scope of impact in the wider public.