Philosophy for Global Citizenship Project
The P4GC Project
This was a recent one-year project iin 2004-2005 funded by OXFAM and implemented by SAPERE in collaboration with the Development Education Centres in Cumbria CDEC and South Yorks DECSY. The project has evolved from a conference on P4C and Global Citizenship initiated and funded by Oxfam Education, and hosted by CDEC in Carnforth, Lancs, in November 2002.
The School Inclusion Project is an article by Marjorie Drake about how Philosophy and Global Citizenship were used to “include the excluded” following her involvement with this project.
P4C (originally short of ‘Philosophy for Children’ but now referring more widely to ‘Philosophy for Communities) has often been portrayed as a ‘Thinking Skills programme’, but it is increasingly obvious from practice in over 60 countries that it impacts as much on emotional, social and moral development as it does on cognitive development. This may be attributed to its holistic and person-centred pedagogy, known as ‘community of enquiry’, a phrase used by John Dewey in his famous book, ‘Democracy and Education’, but given fresh force and application by the originator of P4C, Matthew Lipman, a successor of Dewey at Columbia University in the late 60’s.
The democratic and community aspects of this pedagogy always made it of potential value within the context of GC education, concerned as that is with promoting social justice and equity, and with reducing our negative impact on the planet. However, it is only relatively recently that work has been done in Cumbria and elsewhere in the UK to link P4C with GC. The P4GC project is building on the promising start made in those areas.
The P4GC project had four main aspects:
A pilot 15-hour training course, validated by SAPERE
Subsequent collaboration between course delegates, in suitable pairs or clusters, to take forward the practice of P4GC in schools
Dissemination by CDEC of information and news about such, and similar, practice to other DECs and interested parties
An open conference in April or May of 2005 to draw delegates together again, to celebrate progress and to set in motion further developments.
The course leaders were Roger Sutcliffe, a former English teacher, and now President of SAPERE and of ICPIC, its international equivalent, and Mary Young, formerly of Oxfam Education, now working in London and the South East regions for the Enabling Effective Support Strategy funded by DfID.
Each course consisted of a balance of delegates (all of whom had already shown some commitment to either P4C or GC or both) from the following groups:
practising teachers
teacher educators
LEA advisors
development education workers
curriculum policy-makers or designers
Filed under: Projects