Philosophy for Children
This course is designed as a service-learning course. As a service-learning course, learning occurs through service with a critical reflection on that service as it related to the course material. Additionally, as a service-learning course, it is designed to fulfill college-wide experiential learning requirements for graduation.
The first third of the course is dedicated to going through Robert Fisher’s Teaching Thinking: Philosophical Enquiry in the Classroom and learning about the local community we’ll be engaging with. The second two thirds of the course appear on the syllabus more like a topical introduction to philosophy syllabus, but instead of focusing on the content for the sake of the content, we instead focus on what we can draw from the questions being asked in the readings in order to design enriching and engaging programs for children to discuss the philosophical problems together, with my enrolled students as their guides.
At the end of the course, my students walk away with an extensive portfolio of their designed projects and reflections., which can be a useful tool if applying to work with children or in education.
Sample Syllabi
-
Spring 2021
I designed this course in the Summer of 2020 in my position as a service-learning course developer for the Office of Service-Learning and Philosophy Department at the University of Georgia. This is the syllabus from the first time the course was taught. It ran well, though there were many bumps, hurdles, and lessons learned from working with the Athens community during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our community partner for this iteration of the course was Grow It Know It, a sustainability and food-based education initiative for young children in the area. We ran “Phood Labs” philosophy programming alongside Grow It Know It’s afterschool programming at local community centers.
-
Spring 2022
This is the course I’m teaching this Spring 2022 semester at the University of Georgia. Our partner is the Athens-Clarke County Regional Library where we’ll be running an after school philosophy program called “Let’s Talk About That!” for middle school and high school aged students every Wednesday. This course is an improved version of the one I piloted the previous Spring, and makes dialogical feedback with the instructor on lesson materials a more central part of the learning process for the students in my class. I am also continuing to use Slack as a communication and organization tool for the course!