Gaily-Coloured Creatures E-Book

Mirella Napodano

• Herausgeber: anna ruggieri
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

The book focuses on philosophical research on children, explaining how their main interests, curiosity, discoveries, creativity, wonder, surprises are basic factors and essential requisites to build their philosophical knowledge. The book documents a large number of experimental sessions accomplished since 1996 in Italian primary schools by Mirella Napodano, who designed new methods for philosophical learning and training with children.

Her didactic method is based on peer education through cooperative dialogue and it is made of three modules:

• A) The speculative way: Alice in wonderland;
• B) The way of identity: Alice through the mirror;
• C) The way of friendship: I care.

The book contains a selection of literary pieces, fairy tales, stories, classic myths, Jewish midrash. They are recommended for their philosophical significance, but teachers are free to choose topics and contents of their sessions according to their preferences and pupils interests.

Leseprobe

Mirella Napodano

GAILY-COLOURED CREATURES

Philosophy with children from Primary School

ISBN 978-88-99126-63-6

©Diogene Multimedia

Via Marconi 35, 40122 Bologna, Italy

First digital edition, January 2016

Cover: Giulio Venturi

Ebook developer: Giulio Venturi

Translation by Never Mind di Maria Elena Napodano

http://www.neverminditalia.com

eBook by ePubMATIC.com

Contents

About...

Presentation

Introduction: A world of Gaily-coloured Creatures

Chapter 1: Between wonder and knowledge

1.1 Philosophy comes from marvel

1.2 The uncontainable force of unexpected

1.3 Just a moment, let me think

1.4 The creative imagination

1.5 The learning group as a research community

1.6 The research community as metacognitive laboratory

Chapter 2: Narration and interpretation

2.1 Lupus in fabula: a possible model for interpretative cooperation

2.2 The myth as archetypal narrative product

2.3 The theatrical practice as the space of possible

2.4 Aims and techniques of creative dramatization

Chapter 3: What if thought rides fantasy

3.1 Fabulation and metaphor

3.2 An enchanted world

3.3 Magic tales have philosophical relevance

3.4 Interactive itineraries in stories framing

3.5 Fantasy as in-lusio: having the right to an intelligent game

Chapter 4: Thinking the thought

4.1 Learning to think

4.2 Communico, ergo sum

4.3 Cogitamus, ergo sumus

4.4 Cognitive cooperation from the distance

Chapter 5: The laboratorial proposal

5.1 The theoretic architecture

5.2 Formative aims

5.3 Strategic learning

5.4 A school between laboratory and “garden of thoughts”

5.5 A pretty uncommon alliance

Chapter 6: Operative itineraries

6.1 A curriculum in three Units

6.2 Module A - The speculative routes: In wonder land

6.3 Module B – Identity routes: Throughout the mirror

6.3.a School Holding environment and routes of identity

6.4 Module C – Friendship routes: I care

6.5 The learning Unit

Chapter 7: Setting recommendations

7.1 The laboratory: a metacognitive space

7.2 Learning by doing

7.3 Laboratorial didactics actuation modalities

Chapter 8: Documenting for interpretation

8.1 Documentation between event, memory and narration

8.2 Documenting for interpretation

8.3 Documenting for self-evaluation: the portfolio narratives

8.3.a Individual skills Portfolio

8.4 Evaluation and checks

Chapter 9: An itinerary for teachers’ formation

9.1 The pedagogical equipe as research community

9.2 Analysis of the teacher’s role in Gaily-coloured Creatures

9.3 Operators’ formation

9.4 Architecture of the formative itinerary

9.5 A scattered and mutable work

Bibliography

About...

the book

The book focuses on philosophical research on children, explaining how their main interests, curiosity, discoveries, creativity, wonder, surprises are basic factors and essential requisites to build their philosophical knowledge. The book documents a large number of experimental sessions accomplished since 1996 in Italian primary schools by Mirella Napodano, who designed new methods for philosophical learning and training with children. Her didactic method is based on peer education through cooperative dialogue and it is made of three modules: A) The speculative way: Alice in wonderland; B) The way of identity: Alice through the mirror; C) The way of friendship: I care. The book contains a selection of literary pieces, fairy tales, stories, classic myths, Jewish midrash. They are recommended for their philosophical significance, but teachers are free to choose topics and contents of their sessions according to their preferences and pupils interests.

the author

Mirella Napodano has been Headmaster from 1986 to 2011. She is skilled in philosophical practices and laboratorial didactics and carried on the experimentation of Lipman’s teaching methodology at the Primary school of Montoro (Avellino) from 1990 to 1994. Afterward she developed an original model of Philosophy with Children: the curriculum Gaily-coloured creatures and she piloted it and refined it at the Santa Chiara Primary school (Avellino, 2001/04). The project is thoroughly documented in the book Creature variopinte, (Roma 2004). She published many articles and books in Italian, among others Socrate in classe (Perugia 2008), Per un'educazione al dialogo (2008) e Logos e Melos - Filosofia e musica come linguaggi della mente (2011). Since 2008 she leads laboratorial sessions of philosophy at Bellizzi Irpino’s penal institution. Since 2013 she held classes of dialogical philosophy to educate young people and adults on rights/duties of citizenship. Since 2014 she leads Amica Sofia.

to Elin and Greta

Presentation

Mirella Napodano is Headmaster and Supervisor of the didactic Apprenticeship at University of Salerno - Course of Science in Education. This work is a significant contribute to the theory and practice of a didactic founded on unavoidable vectors of “reflexive rationality”, throughout a wise dosage of variegated but convergent strategies, used by plenty of competence and criticality. It has to do with practicing philosophy in the Socratic form, an emblematic way to do common research, intended as modus vivendi. It is easily assumed that a similar definition represents paradigmatically the educative praxis of the future, as the most recent Italian normative is choosing to lead educative practices.

As we mean it this way, philosophy is due to reaffirm its essential educative role in a renewed appeal for “Know yourself”, recognizing to emotions’ continent (most of whom still to be discovered, actually) a big incidence on cognitive thought, to such a point that affective and intellective resources are considered nowadays inseparable.

For these reasons, in the didactic itinerary here delineated, instead of assigning a predominant role to formal logic, to its laws of inclusion and exclusion between the universals and the particulars, it has been reckoned to verify how the epistemic procedures of the philosophic argument could be practiced by primary school students in the area of a creative thought, at the same time creative and fabulative, that can sustain an authentic affective education, with the support of adequate metacognitive requests and the use of literary material scattered in most part on popular, traditional European culture, that is on the background of the students consignee of the itinerary. The possibilities of success of this kind of methodological approach, who dedicates to affective skills the same effort of defining as already made for cognitive activities, must be found in the deep nexus between imagination and representation, between ideal and real, in order to explore, at the same time, thought and felling areas in which intervene with formative intent. The engagement to listening to student’s thought, leaving them the initiative of philosophic discussion, is a basic element of the laboratory Gaily-colored Creatures because doing philosophy is orienting by training, it is reasoning with the guys, not for the guys. The theoretic issues of this methodology entail the concepts of cognitive educability, educative potential and of mediations able to select, organize, module the stimulus in order to problem solving, for realizing a cognitive practice adequate to our times’ life, which is characterized by an unusual relationship between possible and impossible, reality and virtuality.

Giuliano MinichielloDirector of Science and Education’s Department – University of Salerno.

IntroductionA world of Gaily-coloured Creatures

Ingenuity is the aim, not the originT. W. Adorno

This book comes from a chorus of children voices, from their smiling, greedy of life eyes ring-a-ring-a-roses. They are the Gaily-colored Creatures that – with the ineffable gift of their friendship – have taught me to open my eyes to an always ulterior vision, beyond the rituals of a stately collegiality, beyond the recurring toil and the contradictions of a normative in unending remaking, as it was a bad traced road always about to slide down under the insult of the elements.

In a philosophy session at the end of the year, in a fifth primary school classroom some students – while manipulating objects – realized an installation representing the allegory many times appeared in their dialogs. A big ball of wall was hanging from the chandelier in the middle of the room. The thread that reeled off from it was forming inextricable tangles, reaching one by one the four angles of the walls, where some poster showed the disciplinary itineraries covered. In that period, all the visitors including me had to take a stab at disentangle the thread, while the students were encouraging them. That’s how they invented the interactive metaphor...

I thought that not even a pool of experts could have been doing better in finding a more appropriate analogy for orienting formation.

Surely the education can be invalidated by an ideological fumus – it has already often happened – and the risk of alienation or conditioning can be hidden into the formative route, but education is, for its nature, neither repressive nor ideological.

This is how to say that the symphonic music hurts one’s hears: well, it depends on the volume... We must say no to the ideology of the ideologies: nothing more than this moralism is intolerable1.

Not even a renunciative neutrality creates the ideal conditions for authentic educative relationships, but it is shrewd and hypocrite enough to perpetuate a harmful system of non-authentic social and scholastic relationships. On the contrary, the emotional and relational analysis that students make on their teachers penetrates into the deep and influences them more than one thousand speeches: here begins every possible remark on communication in the school, just to understand the restructuring valence of an authentically ethic dialogue.

Differently, in an educative relationship, adultistic concepts and references take part, as fruit of anticipated and rash judgments and projections. So there comes the risk to neglect or bad interpret all those qualitative dimensions that dodge tassionomies and docimologic scales: plurality of intelligence (both potentials and individuals) creativity, motivation, emotions, enthusiasms, curiosity, tastes, disgusts, unexpected, desires… "The school becomes a ‘primary cause’ of disease in boys and girls, in respect to all the ‘second causes’ that sociology sees at the base of youth deviances… The minute and authentic story of comprehension realized in a moment of a day of school for me is worth a big project and maybe more. Because only in it I have the feeling that there is something which is enough to be told”2.

It is in that perspective that, apart from pedagogic theories and

formative tracks, I let myself go to memories of which apparently no one will ever find ulterior trace in the rest of the volume. Nevertheless, the autobiographic narration, even if cryptic itself, pervades inevitably this work and connotes it from the inside, only sometimes becoming explicit, as when a musical phrase seams to lose into the itineraries of the symphony, to appear again, by surprising the listener with the emotion and the esthetic wonder of a renewed and recovered melody.

It takes to get emotional, indeed, to be able to retake a vision of the education as ethic event, to live the obliged passage that we inevitably have into the encounters and collisions between people, in their relationships as in the inevitable departures or even in goodbyes…

Looking at the significant adult figures, a child asks for revealing looks of a safe benevolence, motivated not as by what he is doing or will do, as by what he is and will be. So he will avoid the dominion of having and sense the primacy of feelings and being before conceptualizing it, trying to define it with a philosophical culture.

If we want to realize all this, we must banish every misunderstood pedagogic show of hyper-efficiency – which is prodigal of notions and abilities, but illusory rather for what it conceals than for what it reveals – and we must align ourselves with a pedagogic model that doesn’t neglect the radical questions of existence, basing this issue on the utopia of the research of peace. In this incurrent prospective – because it is always ulterior in respect to horizon – is collocated the proposal contained in this work, in one of the more unconventional forms of approach to philosophy that reply to an emergent, diffused social request of philosophic thought relied to everyday life and released by academic formalisms. Not for this, by the way, it is due to reckon that a laboratory of philosophy with children is an experience torn off from research purposes. On the contrary, with this work we intend to demonstrate how in the infant mind can subsist complex and suggestive ideas for an heuristic genuinely based and that the different hermeneutic , aesthetic, ethic and metaphysic suggestions contained in a child thought deserve well more attentive remarks by adult people.

Gaily-colored Creatures is a dialogic laboratory fully feasible in the didactic organization designed in the documents of the Italian School Reform for its great flexibility: it provides many aids in this running time for pedagogic innovation in Italian School.

The laboratory is connoted by an itinerary of cognitive empowerment – based on argumentation and philosophic dialogue – throughout the instrument of autobiographic narration and research characterized by spontaneous and creative learning, with prevalence of the enactive dimension. It isn’t an itinerary for highly gifted students at all. The learning units of the three didactic modules must be realized in heterogeneous for performance level groups, as normally classes are. The dialogic structuring and the strongly cooperative character of the sessions (connoted by a symmetric relationship between participants in a climax of scholastic democracy and by the co-presence of both verbal and nonverbal codes) are conceived for the personalization of the didactic itinerary in order to reach a strong auto-expression and the empowerment of the linguistic-cognitive and communicative-relational skills of the students with learning problems. The laboratory is a precious instrument for empowerment, development and linguistic/cognitive recovery, according to the aims defined by Italian reform.

The procedures of active and cooperative didactic described in this text can be used both as methodological guide for the actuation of the Laboratory of philosophy in Primary schools and for manual for teachers’ training. It is indispensable, indeed, for teachers to experiment themselves the same strategies that they are going to use with the students in classroom. Comprehensible difficulty of space don’t allow more theoretic specifics, as all the counterchecks and remarks received by the innumerable people encountered during the researches realized for this book.

In the two years between 2001 and 2003 the didactic itineraries described in this work have been realized in the fourth and fifth class of the Primary School “S. Chiara d’Assisi” in Avellino, during the ordinary time of opening3.

For philosophic consultancy I thank the Professor Luigi Iandoli, president of the Italian Philosophic Society in Avellino – without whom the laboratory couldn’t never be realized. He has followed up the didactic activities and the conduction of experimental dialogic sessions. Many thanks to Maria Lauriola (Sister Emilia, Director of the Scool) and all the teachers, whose cooperation couldn’t be more effective and stimulating, in a Franciscan frame full of a welcoming and joyful atmosphere.

In the end, I must say I’m deeply grateful for the students, unforgettable gaily-colored creatures, who have connoted, with their enthusiastic application, the experimentation. Big gratitude goes to their parents, who have accepted this pedagogic challenge in fully consciousness, by participating with intelligent availability and kind friendship to all the steps of the didactic itinerary and consenting to results’ publication.

M. N.

Chapter one Between wonder and knowledge

1.1 Philosophy comes from marvel

Feeling marvel supports philosophyand dominates it from the beginning to the endHeiddeger

It is of the philosopher own, to feel what you feel: being full of wonder, no other beginning has philosophing, but this.

This simple phrase – ascribed to Socrates who said it to Plato4 - can well define the essential connotation of philosophic experience, from the origins of thought to our days: the wonder of the human being that comes in touch with a reality that never stops surprising and obliges him to appeal to his conscience.

So wondering is the origin of every philosophic approach that wants to attempt to get closer to life in all its essentiality and multiplicity, by perceiving it in its original nudity with the support of both imagination and suggestive symbology of narrative thought. That’s why, in their radical questioning themselves, all the philosophers can be considered contemporaries. A kind of being contemporary that doesn’t deny the time, pluralizing it instead. Similarly, children own the freshness of the original, radical, culture free questioning, not bound to historic and cultural connotations but relied to the actuality of being casted into the existence here and now. They’re able to think what is possible and what is not, approaching the research with an absolute spontaneity, a research of problems (rather than answers) and solutions whose falsification hasn’t been certified yet.

On the scene of life – yes, even of this frenzied life of ours – children find themselves in an original condition of spectators and actors free from prejudices and, not for much longer, freed from ideological superstructures. That is why they are closer to archetypes: their thought is without schemes and does not fall locked in the categorical cages of a gelid and aseptic methodology, expressing instead spontaneously in the and becoming a life style that makes this children become , as Plato would say.