IAPC Graduate Students Oral Histories

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  Allen, Terry L. Interview 6 May 2025

  Terry Allen, Maughn Rollins Gregory, and Megan Jane Laverty

  In this IAPC Oral History interview, veteran teacher Terry L. Allen tells about learning philosophy for children from a class he took from Dale Cannon at the University of Washington in Oregon while teaching school in Salem, Oregon (see attached articles). He describes his masters and doctoral degrees in philosophy for children at Montclair State University – including his memories of Matthew Lipman, Ann Margaret Sharp, and David Kennedy – culminating in his doctoral dissertation, Exploring Worldview Perspectives with 8th Grade Students: Criteria-Mapping as a Method of Value Disclosure and Worldview Discovery.Allen discusses his 32 teaching at Eastern Christian Middle School in Wyckoff, New Jersey, where he practices a “Pedagogy of Asking,” to engage young people in philosophical dialogue in a community of inquiry to work out their own beliefs and values.

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  Berman, Matthew L. Interview 14 April 2025

  Matthew L. Berman, Maughn Rollins Gregory, and Megan Jane Laverty

  In this IAPC Oral History Interview, Mathew "Matt" L. Berman describes his experience as a student in the Masters of Arts in Teaching Philosophy for Children program at Montclair State College in the 1980s, his use of philosophy as a teacher at the Metairie Park Country Day School in Metairie, Louisiana, and the database of Philosophy and Children’s Literature he created during his 1989 sabbatical funded by the “Teacher-Scholar Program for Elementary and Secondary School Teachers,” awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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  Dianuzzo, Nicholas Interview 17 April 2025

  Nicholas Dianuzzo, Maughn Rollins Gregory, and Megan Jane Laverty

  In this interview Professor Nicholas Dianuzzo describes his recovery from drug dependency, his undergraduate study of philosophy and his experience in the Master of Arts in Teaching Middle School Philosophy at Montclair State College. At the time, he was counseling drug-dependent teenagers and was the first person to use philosophy to do so--an approach he developed in consultation with Colin Clayton, whom he met at the IAPC Summer Course at Mendham, New Jersey, and who became one of the first practitioners of philosophical counseling in the UK. In October 1992 Dianuzzo and Clayton presented their work at the 5th International Conference on Philosophy for Children at the University of Graz. In 1996 Dianuzzo and Matthew Lipman were interviewed about this approach on the public television program Ethics in the 90s (see that episode here).