Some people who watch ants in their back yards or plant gardens or follow the caterpillar’s transformations until it emerges as a butterfly get hooked on their subject and devote their lives to learning more about natural systems and to advocating for the preservation of non-human spaces. Biographies are written to help children see how such careers start, how they might move on from their own initial thoughts to deeper engagement. The next category explores that sort of literature: the children who kept asking questions.
It seems important to invite beginners to reflect on the kinds of interests and enthusiasm that lead people to spend their lives engaged with natural phenomena, to invite them to try on some of these ways of thinking. Often, hero stories point out differences between the heroes and ordinary people, celebrating the hero as an adult, in full mature splendor. But some stories show how a life-long interest began, how children persisted in their first questions and widened those questions over time. This might lead to a discussion of what starting points are present in each student’s life, in this classroom, and how those initial impulses might be pursued. Sometimes, people just need to know that it is possible for people like them to become interested in something in nature, and to pursue that interest in simple ways.
This sort of book isn’t much explored in philosophy for children practice, so we don’t have good information about how to approach it. The standard Mat Lipman approach is to read it and ask, “What’s worth talking about?” – and then work through the responses in a receptive way. Another thing to try: ask everyone, including the teacher or leader, to tell a story about a time when something in nature made them curious or interested. Then, read the book, and see how much the character’s way of thinking is like what came out in the stories. What questions do you have in common, and how might you investigate them. There might be interesting follow-up activities to try outdoors. Sometimes, a well told story of a curious person infects other people with a similar curiosity.
Here are some examples we found.
It seems important to invite beginners to reflect on the kinds of interests and enthusiasm that lead people to spend their lives engaged with natural phenomena, to invite them to try on some of these ways of thinking. Often, hero stories point out differences between the heroes and ordinary people, celebrating the hero as an adult, in full mature splendor. But some stories show how a life-long interest began, how children persisted in their first questions and widened those questions over time. This might lead to a discussion of what starting points are present in each student’s life, in this classroom, and how those initial impulses might be pursued. Sometimes, people just need to know that it is possible for people like them to become interested in something in nature, and to pursue that interest in simple ways.
This sort of book isn’t much explored in philosophy for children practice, so we don’t have good information about how to approach it. The standard Mat Lipman approach is to read it and ask, “What’s worth talking about?” – and then work through the responses in a receptive way. Another thing to try: ask everyone, including the teacher or leader, to tell a story about a time when something in nature made them curious or interested. Then, read the book, and see how much the character’s way of thinking is like what came out in the stories. What questions do you have in common, and how might you investigate them. There might be interesting follow-up activities to try outdoors. Sometimes, a well told story of a curious person infects other people with a similar curiosity.
Here are some examples we found.
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Boy Whose Head was Filled with Stars: A Life of Edwin Hubble (2021) by Isabelle Marinov
Maughn Gregory
Barely a hundred years ago, Edwin Hubble changed the way we understand the universe and our place in it more dramatically than almost anyone else has ever done. As this picture book biography shows, his mind-boggling discoveries can be traced back to childhood questions. The discovery that the world is bigger than we had imagined happens in many ways, and learning that we have some choices in deciding how new facts, new experiences, and new perspectives can matter to us is a necessary part of education.