Doing more with less is one way to progress in P4C. This week, an example of an enquiry with Year 5, starting from absolutely nothing, which provides a structure you can use over and over again to explore important concepts. There are three stages:
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- Choose a concept
- Identify its ingredients
- Explore their relations
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For each stage, Iโve given the sort of language I would use with the class to introduce it. I happened to do this whole enquiry with the group standing up, which helped to make it pacey.
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1. Choose a concept
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You can choose the concept yourself and move straight to stage 2. With younger children, friendship is always interesting.
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โWhat we need is a big idea to talk about. Something that you canโt see or touch, but that is really important. So an abstract noun like beauty or truth. The sorts of thing that often has an opposite, like happiness vs. sadness. Something where different people have different ideas about what it means, like โsuccessโ which can mean different things to different people.โ
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After getting a few examples, they can talk in pairs or groups. Hear four or five, politely discard as โinteresting but wonโt work for this particular sessionโ any suggestions that donโt meet the criteria, then vote: a quick show of hands, not a long ritual.
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In the session Iโm recalling, the concept they settled on was โlifeโ.
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2. Identify its ingredients
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โWhat does it take to make x?โย or, the variation I used in this case,ย โWhat does it take to make a good x?โย Talking about a good life, rather than just life, avoided a rehearsal of biological ideas and moved us on to the list of ingredients pictured below. Capture the ideas on mini- whiteboard. You donโt need as many as this, and my usual rule is to stop at four or five, but this was a particularly rich and complex concept.
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3. Explore their relations
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Must-have ingredients (necessary conditions)
โWhich of the ingredients is a must-have ingredient of x?โ โIf it didnโt have friendship, it wouldnโt be a good life.โ
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โEnoughโ ingredients (sufficient conditions)
โAre any of the ingredients enough for x?โ โIf youโre happy, thatโs enough for a good life.โ
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Jointly sufficient conditions
โIf you put some of these ingredients together, are they enough for x?โ โI think happiness and a bit of suffering are enough, because if you donโt have any suffering you donโt understand people who have difficult livesโ
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Counterexamples
โDoes anyone have a counterexample, of how you could have x without y?โ โAre there any good lives that are not happy lives?โ
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Emerging Questions
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Sometimes, as with any enquiry, a question may emerge that takes you past the initial analysis of the concept and becomes the focus. In this discussion, one girl thought that suffering was a must-have ingredient, because if you had never suffered, you wouldnโt have empathy for people who had, and that would make you uncaring about them.ย โDo you have to have suffered to understand other peopleโs suffering?โย was an interesting question we could have used in a subsequent session, perhaps finding a stimulus to suit the question that had already emerged.
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Best wishes,
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Jason