IAPC Visiting Scholars Oral Histories

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  Cam, Philip Interview 27 May 2025

  Philip Cam

  In this IAPC Oral History Interview, Philip Cam, Honorary Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Languages at the University of New South Wales, reflects on his intellectual, professional, and personal journey into philosophy and philosophy for children (P4C). Beginning with his early identity as an artist and secondary school art teacher in Australia, Cam recounts his gradual turn toward philosophy through formative encounters with books, mentors, and academic study in philosophy and psychology. He describes his involvement with P4C as a recovery of childhood curiosity and a way of uniting teaching, philosophical inquiry, and humane education. Cam discusses his early engagement with the IAPC, including his time at the IAPC Seminar at Mendham, New Jersey, his collaboration with figures such as Matthew Lipman and Ann Margaret Sharp, and the tensions between philosophy as an academic discipline and philosophy as a pedagogical practice. He reflects on curriculum development, teacher education, and the creation of classroom materials, as well as the global spread of P4C through workshops across Europe, Asia, and Australia. The interview concludes with Cam’s reflections on education, dialogue, intellectual community, and his later return to art, emphasizing philosophy as a lived, social practice at the heart of democratic and humane schooling.

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  Morehouse, Richard E. Interview 6 November 2025

  Richard Morehouse, Peter Shea, and Maughn Rollins Gregory

  In this IAPC Oral History Interview, Richard “Mort” Morehouse reflects on his formative role in the development of Philosophy for Children (P4C), the Community of Inquiry movement, and the institutional histories that shaped them. Morehouse traces his entry into P4C through gifted education and curriculum reform in the late 1960s, highlighting early classroom implementations of Harry Stottlemeier’s Discovery and the influence of teacher education and educational psychology on his work. He discusses key professional relationships—with Matthew Lipman, Ann Margaret Sharp, Ronald Reed, Judy Kyle, and Ruth Silver—and emphasizes the importance of conferences, workshops, and informal networks in advancing the field. The interview documents the origins and evolution of Analytic Teaching (later Analytic Teaching and Philosophical Praxis) and the North American Association for Community of Inquiry (NAACI), situating it within debates over, situating the latter in debates about pluralistic approaches to P4C. Throughout, Morehouse offers a reflective, candid account of the contingencies, collaborations, and values that have shaped Philosophy for Children as an international educational movement.

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  Jackson, Thomas E. Interview May 2024

  Thomas E. Jackson and Maughn Rollins Gregory

  In this interview, Dr. Thomas E. Jackson talks about philosophical wonder he experienced as a child around the experience of suffering, and how that followed him into his university studies. He describes his undergraduate and masters studies in medicine, psychology, and philosophy at the University of Toledo, and his formative encounter with Professor Ramakrishna Puligandla, who introduced him to Hindu and Buddhist philosophy and contemplative practices. Jackson took his PhD in comparative Asian and Western philosophy at the University of Hawai’i, after which he co-founded the Hawaiian international film festival. After meeting Dr. Barry Curtis, who had introduced philosophy for children on Hawai’i’s “Big Island,” from the University of Hawai’i’s Hilo campus in 1978, Jackson attended the three-week summer seminar in philosophy for children in Mendham, New Jersey, run by the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children (IAPC) at Montclair State College. There he met and was mentored by Matthew Lipman and Ann Margaret Sharp. Jackson brought “small-p” philosophy to schools in and around Honolulu as a faculty specialist in the philosophy department at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa. He discovered commonalities between philosophy for children and Hawaiian culture and found ways to adapt the former to the latter. He created a unique philosophy in the schools program, “P4C Hawai’i,” which was funded by the Hawaiian Department of Education for many years. In the program, teachers facilitated philosophy sessions once each week on their own, and another time with a visiting philosopher or philosophy graduate student. Teachers also met together once a week for a “Philosophy for Teachers” session and received university credit. Jackson created a university course to prepare philosophy graduate students to work in the program and invented several innovations to the Montclair model, including “magic words” like IDUS (I don’t understand), the WRAITEC: The Good Thinker’s Toolkit, and a Philosophy in Schools Startup Kit. https://p4chawaii.org/wp-content/uploads/colvin.pdf”> In 1995 Jackson conducted the first philosophy for children workshop in China. He mentored the first doctoral dissertations on philosophy for children to come from the University of Hawai’i’s philosophy department. In 2005 Jackson met Mr. Eiji Uehiro, founder of the Uehiro Foundation on Ethics and Education in Tokyo, Japan, who offered support for P4C Hawai’i and in 2012 the Foundation gifted $1.25 million to fund https://p4chawaii.org/”>The University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Uehiro Academy for Philosophy and Ethics in Education.

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  Lipman, Karen Interview 22 August 2023

  Karen Lipman, Peter Shea, Maughn Rollins Gregory, and Walter Omar Kohan

  Karen Lipman is the daughter of Matthew Lipman, co-founder of the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children at Montclair State University, and Wynona Moore Lipman, the first African-American female Senator of the State of New Jersey. In this interview by Peter Shea, Maughn Rollins Gregory, and Walter O. Kohan, Karen shares memories of her parents and talks about what she learned from each of them. This interview was conducted on 22 August 2023 in preparation for the international celebration of Matthew Lipman's Centenary two days later.

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  Pritchard, Michael Interview 13 September 2023

  Michael Pritchard, Maughn Gregory, and Peter Shea

  In this IAPC Oral History Interview, Michael Pritchard discusses his career as a philosopher specializing in ethics, moral psychology, and precollege philosophy. He describes using children's books to teach university philosophy classes and his involvement with the first doctoral program in philosophy for children at Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. He shares his views on children's moral education. Pritchard's books include Philosophical Adventures with Children (University Press of America, 1985), Reasonable Children (University Press of Kansas, 1996), and On Becoming Reasonable (University Press of Kansas, 1991).

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  Oyler, Joe Interview August 2019

  Joe Oyler and Peter Shea

  In this 2019 interview, Dr. Joe Oyler reflects on his professional trajectory from doctoral research in dialogic teaching and philosophy for children to a faculty position at Maynooth University in Ireland. He describes the formative influence of sustained work with teachers, school partnerships, and the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children community, alongside the tensions between administrative responsibilities and a desire to pursue classroom-based research. The interview traces Oyler’s decision to leave the United States academic context, the opportunities presented by Ireland’s evolving educational landscape, and the emergence of philosophy as a sanctioned subject within secondary education. Central themes include dialogic pedagogy, inclusivity, open-ended inquiry, and the role of the teacher as facilitator rather than authoritative expert. Oyler articulates cautious optimism about embedding philosophy for children values within Irish teacher education and professional development, while remaining sensitive to issues of authority and advocacy as an academic outsider. The latter part of the interview focuses on Oyler’s research agenda, particularly the challenge of empirically identifying what is distinctive about philosophical inquiry as compared with other forms of critical and dialogic thinking. He outlines an ambitious vision for mapping conceptions of philosophy across pre-college programs and developing empirical measures of philosophical quality in educational practice.