When did you join The Philosophy Foundation as a specialist?

I trained at the end of 2016. In 2017, I began doing occasional one-off days and short blocks of sessions, and then began working far more regularly from 2021, once both my children were at school.

What made you choose philosophy with children as your path?

I fell in love with philosophy aged 19 when, on my gap year, I picked up the book Think by Simon Blackburn and found myself instantly hooked. All these questions I'd asked myself since early childhood – things I'd been caught daydreaming about – were legitimate, they had been asked by plenty of other people too and, most excitingly, there were many systematic, logical and quite beautiful ways to explore them. A revelation! That day, I experienced sudden onset 'philo-philosophy', followed quickly by the sneaking suspicion that I'd just accepted a place on the wrong degree course... Luckily, it all worked out well in the end, but I wish I'd had the chance to partake in collaborative philosophical enquiry in school.

I believe that the benefits for participants of our sessions are innumerable, and I often think I am witness to some of these in real time. However, what made me choose philosophy with children as my path was, quite simply, my own experience of how life-enhancing philosophy has been for me. There’s this amazing thing and I wish it for everyone else too!

I think I use philosophy in my own life in two contrasting but positive ways. On the one hand, when I want it to be, it’s a tool to help me navigate my thinking about important things, whether personal or work-related (even in my previous ‘non-philosophy’ job). It can offer perspective, bring about acceptance, enable rational decision making (sometimes), help me manage competing priorities and identify when something is pointless or self-defeating. I find I leap into the abstract to help guide living in the concrete quite regularly, and this feels to me like a good habit to have.

On the other hand, philosophy offers a route to pure escapism from the everyday as well. A bit like sitting down to do a puzzle, it can be a light-hearted and entertaining activity of distraction. ‘Is the hole part of the doughnut?’ ‘Is my phone part of my mind?’ Or a personal favourite – which I enjoy asking my family and Google Assistant on a regular basis – ‘is water wet?’ (I’ve changed my decades-long answer to this very recently, by the way; a monumental shift that came about because my husband provided a very simple argument for the opposite position and, as far as I can see, it’s ‘watertight’, which is frustrating...)

I find that having this rich mental life and being comfortable in my own thinking (this includes being comfortable thinking that my thinking might be mistaken) is hugely empowering, and I’d love this for everyone, particularly young people growing up in today’s complex world.

 

What classes do you teach and where?

Across this academic year, I’m working with three Year 5 classes, Years 7-9 at a medical pupil referral unit (PRU), and a Sixth Form enrichment group. I’m also running an online course for 7–11-year-olds. I’ve done a few short runs of sessions with other secondary years too. In the past, I’ve worked with a variety of groups, mostly in mainstream primary and secondary settings, but also with an online class for children affected by the war in Ukraine, and I’ve led an evening group for adults.

 

Each group brings its own challenges and joys. I also find that each has its own dynamic and personality, the nature of which can’t be predicted until you have had that first session. Two classes in the same year group at the same school can be totally different in character from one other. While keeping the core mechanics of our enquiry method intact, I find you can adapt and tailor what you do to suit each specific group. Working in the PRU has been one of my biggest challenges. It’s required me to create a more fluid, conversational style, while still upholding the enquiry basics. Whatever session I’ve planned for the PRU, I’m totally willing to throw it out of the window and go where the students go – to follow their interest, whatever it is – while keeping it gently philosophical. We also have little moments of levity, where I lift my foot off the pedal and we just have a chat about something else for a few minutes, before getting back to it. I find that works well there, but I wouldn’t do it with a class of 30 Year 5s!

Do you have any interesting/amusing anecdotes from your classroom experience?

It’s always interesting how often young children unknowingly espouse the ideas, sometimes even the arguments, of famous philosophers. Descartes might have spent considerable time and thought before concluding X, but this 9-year-old child has got there by 10.15 am on a rainy Wednesday in South London! However, no matter how many times I’ve run a particular session, I find it’s not all formulaic and rinse and repeat. No two enquiries are the same, and I still encounter pupils approaching questions in ways that are new to me. When this happens I find I think about it for a while after the session’s ended.

It’s lovely when we all enjoy a joke during an enquiry. Just the other day, I put a statement on the floor in a Year 5 class and asked everyone to stand nearer to it the more they agreed with it, and further from it the more they disagreed. One child, who’d spent the last 10 minutes arguing ardently against classmates who’d supported something similar to what the statement said, got up first and just left the room entirely. That stuff is great fun, provided we’re all in on it and playing by the rules.

Of course, sometimes things are funny that shouldn’t be, and you have to deal with that responsibly, even if you want to laugh too. I was with Year 12s and using a stimulus I’d never used before. I’d shown them a picture of an office scene – three men, two women, computers, phones, desks, plants – and asked them to count all the potential minds in the picture. It ended up sparking a fascinating discussion around AI, group-minds, panpsychism, and the mind-body problem, etc, for a whole hour and a half. However, it didn’t get off to the best start, when one of the students answered, “There are five minds in the picture. Three men and two plants.” Suffice to say, half the class laughed, and I didn’t, until I got to my car...

Quite often in this niche but wonderful job, I’m the only person in on the joke. With a Year 13 group (at another school), we were going to do a session on determinism, and I’d noticed in the previous weeks that every student had always sat in exactly the same place. I got there early that day, wrote the students’ names on post-it notes and stuck them under the chairs I was expecting them to sit on, with high hopes of a bit of philosophical fun to come. However, that afternoon, everyone went to a different seat from usual, someone didn’t come, and a new person joined! Of course, I could still have shown them what I’d done, but instead I forgot all about it until I was on the train home. Later, the  teacher received an apologetic email from me and had an annoying job to do before the end of the day...

Finally, I haven’t yet forgotten the day I convinced myself I was locked out of a school – no buzzer or intercom in sight – without even touching the gate in front of me. Had I done so, I would have discovered it was unlocked and openable. Even at the time, it wasn’t lost on me that I was supposed to be doing the Happy Prisoner session on the other side of that gate in a matter of minutes, yet in a strange symmetry, I’d found myself the Unhappy Non-Prisoner on the wrong side of it. I guess, in spite of all the life-enhancing thrill of philosophy, occasionally us philosophers will find ourselves trying to think our way through an unlocked gate, instead of just giving it a push. However, I’ll take that, and I wish that for the generations to come.

Do you have any hopes/dreams for philosophy with children?

My dream is that philosophy with children finds its way into every education setting in the world and embeds itself there! However, I think there’s a common misconception that philosophy in schools is simply an exercise in opinion-sharing, like a glorified ‘carpet time’. There’s also another untruth that permeates, which is that real philosophy is this lofty, inaccessible, other-worldly intellectual activity done by only a very small number of people who predominantly reside in university philosophy departments. I think both these misconceptions probably need to be corrected widely before world-domination is a viable option, but maybe we’ll get there one day. We’re on the right track.

Is there anything you would like to say to parents, teachers or children who are thinking of getting into philosophy for children?

Do it!

Anything else you would like to add?

No!