The community of philosophical inquiry as a laboratory of training and active inclusion

Abstract

The article displays the experience of the activation of a community of philosophical inquiry made up of persons with vision disability (blind and partially sighted people) together with sighted persons, starting from the idea, through the theoretical support, coming to experience. This community of inquiry has been formed of adults: if P4Children founds its pedagogical idea on “thinking education” intended as orientation in a develop path of cognitive, creative, caring capabilities, in P4Community we have to mean the idea of a “pedagogy for adults” as a possibility of an active and continuous training. The community of philosophical inquiry represents in this sense an innovative way of training: people can experiment the possibility to actively enter in relationship to other experiences and other “visions of the world”, able to grow the personal knowledge’s baggage, living an experience not limited in the duration of the session or the sequence of sessions but carried into pragmatic living. The experience lived in the context of the community of inquiry is infact always tightly joined to what people live out of the community, in the daily life experiences, and it is transported in it through a dialectical process that renews itself. Being the experience of the community fed by participative dialogue and by join-responsibility in its growth’s process, inclusion conditions among the partaking are spontaneously determinate. It’s a “practical knowledge” gained in a inter-subjective research itinerary, therefore naturally inclusive for all the participants, that results helpful and appropriate to support the complexity of the daily life, mutually fitting each other at disposal questions, knowledge, experiences. This kind of training gives a new value to perceptive experience, because, as the “vision of the world” needs a “multiple sight”, the improvement of the complex thinking in its multiple dimensions, is to be intended as contemporaneous involvement of mind and body, inside and outside. In this perspective of valorization of the differences and of enrichment of knowledge on more levels (cognitive, perceptive, ethic) grew up the idea and embodied the experience to activate a community of philosophical inquiry with persons with visual sense disability (blind and partially sighted) together with sighted persons. This co-operative construction of meaning horizons has to be shared with whom who learn and understand reality through experiences that start from “others” perceptive and cognitive categories, that can give also the opportunity to confront everyone with a “way of living different from that the nature put us in”. The orientation of partakings the community toward the development of the complex thinking happens by the sharing questioning about reality, that in this particular context is “known”, approached, beginning from a different use of the senses. Inquiry and research are originated and defined from the basis of experiences about reality made starting by different consciousness and perceptive prevalence.