Philosophy Of Childhood Research Articles

The Philosophy of Childhood in the Digital Age

The article is centered at the main approaches to the definition of the concept of a child within the framework of the philosophy of childhood. The position of child in the contemporary society is ambiguous: on the one hand, the life of a child is often placed above the life of an adult, or at least is valued higher than his expected contribution; on the other hand, the interests and desires of children are not really significant for adults and are not taken into account in the process of making decisions, even when they touch the children’s essential needs. One of the main modern approaches in the field of the philosophy of childhood, which is an attempt to explain this fact, suggests that a child is a future adult, first of all. Despite the obvious advantages of this approach ‘child as a little adult’, this concept does not fully meet the requirements of the contemporary digital age; it is rather evident when analyzing the interaction between a child and an adult, since this approach is not able to adequately meet needs and values of the modern digital society. Quite contrary to this, we suggest to consider the concept of childhood within the framework of the cultural-historical ideas by Vygotsky and his followers, which suggests that the central concept in this theory is the idea of development, not limited to growing up as a way to shape an adult from a child, but considered as an unconditional right and a biological norm, as well as an integral part of childhood. This will help to improve interaction with a child, increase the standard of living of a certain child, as well as the flexibility and integrity of the individual, especially under the uncertainty of the expected transformational processes of the contemporary digital age.

Introduction to the suite: The Child as Reader, Philosopher, and Social Critic: Evaluating the Vision of Gareth B. Matthews

Abstract Gareth B. Matthews (1929–2011) was a specialist in ancient and medieval philosophy whose conversations with young children led him to discover their penchant for philosophical thinking, which often enriched his own. Those conversations became the impetus for a substantial component of Matthews’ scholarship, from which our book, Gareth B. Matthews, The Child’s Philosopher, features essays spanning the length of his career. Contemporary contributors to the book critically evaluate Matthews’ scholarship in three fields he helped to initiate: philosophy in children’s literature, philosophy for children, and philosophy of childhood. They assess where he broke new ground and identify developments and debates in those fields. In the reviews that follow, Harry Brighouse, David Bakhurst, and Sheron Fraser-Burgess respond to Matthews’ original essays and those of the contemporary scholars. While recognizing Matthews’ significant contribution to advancing philosophy in the lives of children, all three reviewers indicate ways to push his agenda forward. We read Brighouse as calling for engagement with philosophy in media (including television and film) beyond classical and contemporary children’s literature. Bakhurst explicitly calls for further empirical study of children’s philosophical thinking to support more realistic conceptions of childhood and philosophy—including when philosophy might not be appropriate for children. Fraser-Burgess calls for an accounting of the ways that philosophy for children may reinscribe unjust hierarchies of race, gender, and culture, and of the ways it can be used to confront and combat them.

Parental Love and Filial Equality

AbstractIt is widely accepted that parents have a fundamental moral obligation to consider and treat their children as each other’s equals. Yet the question of what grounds the equality of status among children in the eyes of their parents has so far been largely neglected in the literature on the philosophy of childhood and the ethics of parenthood. This paper fills this gap by developing a novel theory of the basis of filial equality: it argues that parents ought to consider and treat their children as equals by virtue of loving them. Parental love is the basis of filial equality.

Philosophy of childhood and children's political participation: poli(s)phonic challenges

What challenges does the political participation of children pose to the Philosophy of Childhood? What challenges does the Philosophy of Childhood pose to children's political participation? This text is inspired by the idea that “research is not about enumerating situations, but making researchers lose their sleep”. It is divided into two distinct parts. In the first, we introduce the theoretical framework that orients our research group and our work with children in the philosophical research community. We posit a link between listening to children's voices, the conditions of listening, and the location of their political participation in public space. The second part is comprised of a creative illustrated narrative in the form of a dialogue. From the coast of what could be called the territory of political participation, two characters - Sentinel and Walker - discuss the waves of children that crash onto the territory. To what extent does creating space and time for listening to children open polyphonic movements and enable the construction of new forms of polis: poly(s)phonies? In what ways does the Philosophy of Childhood challenge itself in the creation of poly(s)phonies where the participation of children sets the tone? In what ways does the Philosophy of Childhood in turn challenge us to create poly(s)phonies?

Metaphysics of Children's Literature: Climbing Fuzzy Mountains by Lisa Sainsbury

Reviewed by: Metaphysics of Children's Literature: Climbing Fuzzy Mountains by Lisa Sainsbury Samantha Piede (bio) Metaphysics of Children's Literature: Climbing Fuzzy Mountains. By Lisa Sainsbury. Blooms-bury Academic, 2021. Lisa Sainsbury's Metaphysics of Children's Literature: Climbing Fuzzy Mountains is, as the author aptly explains, "a book about something and nothing"—in the most literal sense (11). The book takes seriously problems of ontological "fuzziness"—the nebulous territory of "being"—embedded within children's literature, as well as its role in stimulating a child's philosophical wonder (5). In the introduction, Sainsbury finds such "fuzziness" in Tove Jansson's Comet in Moominland (1946), when characters Moomintroll and Sniff embark on an "irregular journey" to the Lonely Mountains. She notes that "much of the language accompanying their expedition exacerbates this sense of something murky and increasingly strange in the world about them," though this eeriness never takes clear form (4). She holds that what these characters have encountered is a "fuzzy mountain": something imbued with "vagueness." But in what sense? One could argue, Sainsbury notes, that such vagueness is best explained by philosophers Tim Crane and Kaitlin Farkas's concept of "borderline cases, whereby the identity of entities is difficult to establish" or, alternatively, by Gareth Evans and David Lewis's [End Page 434] notion that such vagueness stems not from the nature of the world, but from its relation to language. However, for Sainsbury, such solution-seeking may be beyond the point. She notes, "The purpose of this poetic and visual language … is not to find a solution to philosophical problems—in the manner attempted by Quine and company—but to identify and engage with such conundrums through the conditions of children's literature" (5). In the case of Comet in Moominland, and many of the other titles cited within this ambitious book, Sainsbury highlights the vast potential of children's books to "make an ontological philosophy of childhood through their metaphysical groundwork and an engagement with childness in the astonishment of being" (7). Throughout the book, Sainsbury avoids classifying certain children's books into a uniquely "philosophical" genre and instead explores metaphysical structures embedded within children's literature of varying forms and styles: young adult novels (The Wild Robot, The Nowhere Girls), picture books (The Baby's Catalogue), poetry (Cicely Mary Barker's Flower Fairies series), comics (Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes series), and many staples of the Western children's literary canon (e.g., Joan G. Robinson's When Marnie Was There, Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows). The bibliography is notably limited to English-language publications (including translations), which Sainsbury claims "acknowledges links between a regional literature and a Western philosophical tradition" (8). Though Sainsbury does not expand heavily on this point, her book illustrates that, indeed, writers of children's literature are not merely informed, but in many ways bounded by their philosophical and cultural traditions. Sainsbury's text is both centrally concerned with children's literature and deeply anchored in theory. She consistently demonstrates ways in which children's stories are informed by—and reflect—developments in contemporary metaphysics: for instance, how parental absence in Sonya Hartnett's Thursday's Child reflects "a Sartrean 'origin of nothingness'" and how picture books "convey directly a connectedness between different entities" with Emanuele Coccia's sense of metaphysical immersion (189, 110). By consistently drawing out these theoretical parallels for readers, Sainsbury establishes that such metaphysical insights in children's literature are not simply trivial whimsies. Sainsbury offers several ways in which children's literature is perhaps even "less daunted by metaphysical mess than [many traditional] philosophies" (118). One metaphysical structure Sainsbury identifies as a central concern in children's literature is what she refers to as "ontological exchange"—an "ontic encounter between self and other, whereby being is tested and made aware of its status as being" (11). This, she finds, plays a central role in Mary Norton's The Borrowers (1952). The book follows the adventures of a tiny humanoid heroine, Arrietty, and her family, who have taken up residence under the floorboards of an English country home. Readers find themselves charmed by, and relating to, her precociousness [End Page 435...

Gareth B. Matthews, The Child’s Philosopher, by Maughn Rollins Gregory and Megan Jane Laverty (2022), Routledge.

In the latest publication from their series on the founders of the Philosophy for Children (P4C) movement, Maughn Rollins Gregory and Megan Jane Laverty (2022) have offered us an exceptional gateway into the life and work of Gareth B Matthews. Matthews’ work can be divided into three distinct areas of research—philosophy and children’s literature, philosophy for children, and philosophy of childhood—which Gregory and Laverty distribute across the volume’s five parts. Each part includes representative publications by Matthews preceded by commentary and critique from experts in the field. In this review, I will evaluate this work primarily from the perspective of a practitioner in the P4C movement and explain why it is a valuable resource for anyone with such a relationship to the field.

Family learning and working in lockdown: Navigating crippling fear and euphoric joy to support children's literacy.

This paper offers a nuanced perspective of two families’ lockdown literacy journies with their young children during the COVID 19 pandemic. We present informal home learning examples stimulated by play and by school-sanctioned synchronous and asynchronous activities from homes geographically miles apart yet close in terms of shared experience. In response to the catch-up and learning loss narrative which threatens to overshadow some of the positive learning experiences taking place at home, we redirect the ‘catch-up’ narrative towards a nuanced understanding of family learning at home by articulating the complexity of circumstance. Methodologically, drawing on Autoethnography, we present vignettes of lockdown life from Scotland and Michigan, USA. Throughout this paper we articulate challenges with the catch-up narrative and root our conclusions in the early childhood philosophy that learning extends beyond the mind to a whole body, holistic experience.

Walter benjamin: “infância, uma experiência devastadora”

Built on the dialogue between the processes of institutionalization of childhood and educational practices, this article considers data from a research project that aimed to gather knowledge of the experience of childhood in early childhood education (ECE) settings. The empirical basis of our study is a collection of observational fieldnotes gathered in 21 public ECE institutions that serve the city of Rio de Janeiro. In order to understand children’s experience in these settings, our theoretical framework is supported by a reading of Walter Benjamin's philosophy of childhood, by sources in the sociology and anthropology of childhood, and through an analysis of the political contexts that influence the practices of institutionalizing young children. The quote adopted in this text represents the results of a comparison between the speech and interactions of the children in the schools participating in the research and textual fragments from Benjamin’s “Obras Escolhidas I e II.” We drew on the concept of childhood experience present in the work of this philosopher in order to explore how children experience their childhood within the context of the school environment. When thinking about childhood through the lens of children’s experience, we draw on the legacy attributed by Benjamin to Kant's work on the concept of experience itself. Here, the latter is understood, not just as an event, but as something that unites/brings us together through the intersection of generation, history, and narrative. Regardless of the format of children's institutionalization–that is, whether they attend daycare centers, exclusive early ECE settings, schools or elementary schools that have preschool classes–based on our reading the fieldnotes we conclude that the experience of childhood takes place in the context of relationships with others, with objects, with culture, with society and with nature. Our research showed that, like the child as characterized in the work of Benjamin, the children of our day care centers and schools are attracted by what he calls “debris”and what the latter present to them as possibilities for action. They do not directly reproduce the world of adults; rather, they establish a new relationship with what the world offers them, which is not exactly coherent with that world. What children produce in their interactions is the result of a refined process in which collective and individual experience intersect, with culture as a meeting point.

The Child's Philosopher ed. by Maughn Rollins Gregory and Megan Jane Laverty

Reviewed by: The Child's Philosopher ed. by Maughn Rollins Gregory and Megan Jane Laverty Claudia Mills (bio) Gareth B. Matthews, The Child's Philosopher. Edited by Maughn Rollins Gregory and Megan Jane Laverty. Routledge, 2022. Throughout my career as a philosophy professor who is also a children's book author, and a children's book author who is also a philosophy professor, I have often been asked about what seemed to many an odd pairing of professions. I'd answer that philosophers were just the grownups who kept on asking the childlike questions that the other grownups had long ago abandoned. Gareth B. Matthews (1929-2011) was a highly respected philosopher specializing in Aristotelian metaphysics who forged a pioneering path by responding to children's philosophical questions with extraordinary respect and deep seriousness. In books such as Philosophy and the Young Child (1980), Dialogues with Children (1984), and The Philosophy of Childhood (1994), he analyzed conversations with his own children and grandchildren as well as schoolchildren in both American and international settings, arguing that even young children are capable of conceptual reasoning and their philosophical speculations are worthy of adult attention. His work as a visionary leader in the Philosophy for Children movement is given appreciative (but also critical) examination in this title in Routledge's new series on Philosophy for Children Founders. Following the series format, the volume on Matthews is organized into sections featuring different aspects of his work, each with a substantial introduction by a prominent scholar who situates his writings in a wider context and provides an extensive bibliography of relevant literature, followed by a selection of Matthews's essays curated by that scholar. The introductions are uniformly well researched and thoughtful, striking a tone that is both celebratory of Matthews's work and willing to note its limitations, among these that his evidence for the "naturalness" of children's philosophizing is a product of specific culture factors that he ignores. But it is Matthews's own words that are rightly the star of this excellent collection. His clarity of thought, droll but provocative examples of the children's insights he recorded, and bold positions advanced with disarming charm make for delightful reading. Part I, on philosophy and children's literature, reflects Matthews's view that "authors of children's books are more likely than psychologists, educational theorists, or even philosophers to be sensitive to philosophical thought in young children" (44). In his seminal 1976 article "Philosophy and Children's Literature" which, according to section editor Karin Murris, "inaugurated the study of philosophy in children's literature" (47), he highlights children's books that raise philosophical questions in a style he calls "philosophical whimsy." The Bear That Wasn't by Frank Tashlin engages [End Page 337] themes of "dreaming and skepticism," "being and non-being," "appearance and reality," and "the foundations of knowledge" (61). Rich philosophical insights abound in Baum's Tin Woodman (personal identity), Thurber's Many Moons (perception and illusion), and the Roo-capturing scene in Winnie-the-Pooh when Pooh ponders the "Aha!" that he's supposed to say to Kanga and wonders whether he can make it mean all the elaborate things Rabbit has told him it needs to mean; Matthews likens Pooh's speculations to questions about meaning posed by Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations. A second essay in this section contrasts the condescension toward children of "Questions" in Jean Van Leeuwen's More Tales of Oliver the Pig, which offers a "phony contrast between naïve ignorance in children and patient wisdom in adults" (69), with Arnold Lobel's invitation for readers of all ages to join together in exploring puzzles about the nature of causation posed by Toad's mistaken reasoning in "The Garden" in Frog and Toad Are Friends, where Toad thinks his "hard work" of singing and reading to his seeds has caused them to grow. Matthew's essay "Children, Irony and Philosophy" (reprinted in the section on developmental psychology) employs this same story to refute theorists who argue that preschoolers cannot understand irony. Part II, on children's philosophical thinking, is replete with children's philosophical questions and comments that demonstrate remarkable imagination and insight...

Infância e crianças: entre movimentos, limiares e fronteiras

We present the dossier “Studies of Childhood: movements, limits and frontiers”, a theme discussed in the III Brazilian Congress Childhood Studies (CEI). The Congress was organized by members of the Department of Childhood Studies (DEDI) and the Graduate Program in Education (ProPEd) of the State University of Rio de Janeiro. The articles that compose the dossier review the debates that took place during the event in the fields of education, international relations, and ethno-racial issues. In this presentation, inspired by Mario Benedetti's poem “The Bridge”, we explore the power of three words to think about childhood and the relationship we establish with children: borders, strangeness and movements. How many borders do childhood and children cross into the political, cultural, social, and biological order of life? Which movements or changes do they produce, reproduce, and spread? How to destrange childhood, in the sense of challenging the actions and discursive productions that promote exclusions of various forms? Which movements – in the field of research and in society in general – are instituted to encourage the agency of childhood? Starting from the idea that both our culture and our subjectivity are constituted in the relationship between an interior and an exterior that are placed in tension, we draw on philosophy, literature, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies to explore these questions. In this dossier, the texts compose a set that dialogues with the philosophy of childhood and goes beyond conceptual and methodological limits, in the sense of making moves to understand children and childhood through their perspectives, actions, languages and positions, in an objective and subjective form.

Agents of settler colonialism?: childhood, time and exclusion in the fairbridge scheme, 1913–1924

ABSTRACT Drawing from Kingsley Fairbridge's writings, this article explores the first Fairbridge Farm School from its establishment in 1913 until Fairbridge's death in 1924. Fairbridge's scheme sought to turn poor, urban British children into agriculturists who would occupy contested land in the colonies. Fairbridge attempted to instil the children with ‘love of the land’ by determining their conditions of existence in quite complete ways. I draw from the history and philosophy of childhood to understand how Fairbridge – much like A O Neville – targeted childhood as a distinctive site of ideological intervention. At his first farm school, Fairbridge sought to exclude the person that each child was going to become. But this explicit repression of existing urban identities often failed; most of the first thirty-five farm school alumni elected to live in Australian cities. Just one member of that group ran a successful farm, and only one other worked as a farm hand into middle age. Ultimately, though, the children's escape from the life that Fairbridge attempted to impose on them did not mean escaping the settler colonial structure; most remained in Australia throughout their lives. Nonetheless, many felt the loss of family and the person they might have been.

Teaching STEM through play: conditions created by the conceptual PlayWorld model for early childhood teachers

ABSTRACT While evolving societal needs have created a demand for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) outcomes in early childhood, research indicates a deficit view on early childhood teachers’ ability to teach STEM. Existing teaching models are primarily developed from school-based research, conflicting with the early childhood philosophy of play. This paper examines the conditions created by the Conceptual PlayWorld model for early childhood teachers, to understand if and how this model can shift teachers’ motive orientations towards increased STEM engagement in play-based settings. The educational experiment involved a professional development workshop, followed by implementation of the model across two early childhood settings. Interview responses of four teachers regarding their experience of STEM engagement through this model are reported. The findings of the study highlight how this model can create the conditions for a positive shift in the motive orientations of early childhood teachers towards the possibility of re-engaging with the intentional teaching of STEM, while also increasing their confidence and competence. Findings suggest that as a play-based STEM teaching model for play-based settings, this model takes a positive step towards engaging young children with STEM, enabling teachers to meet the societal demand of increased STEM outcomes in early childhood.

Spinoza on children and childhood

Baruch Spinoza, the 17th century philosopher best known for his metaphysical rigor and the radical heterodoxy of his conception of God as Nature, did not say much about children or childhood. Nevertheless, his few mentions of children in his masterpiece, the Ethics, raise fascinating questions of autarky, rationality and mind-body relations as they are perceived in the contrast between children and adults. Generally, philosophical theories of childhood benefit greatly from a strong metaphysical foundation. Spinoza’s philosophy, which has recently been gaining considerable attention by contemporary neuroscientists and psychologists, can serve as stable and fertile ground for developing a strong philosophy of childhood. In this paper I address the Spinozistic conception of a flourishing, happy human and the way this understanding of human excellence reflects on his understanding of children and childhood. I argue that the use of Spinozistic concepts can be valuable in the analysis of children and childhood—especially essence, striving to persevere in being, and the nature of the imagination. Spinoza’s epistemology can explain the unique rationality of children, and provide a metaphysical basis for normative behavior. Moreover, it can help us as caregivers better understand and empathize with children, by explaining the similarities and differences between children and adults.

Recognizing Children as Agents: Taylor’s Hermeneutical Ontology and the Philosophy of Childhood

ABSTRACT Within his earliest contributions to the human sciences, Charles Taylor challenged dominant behavioral views by advancing a hermeneutical conception of human agency. For Taylor, persons continually navigate their meaningful worlds and make sense of things and act in light of background horizons of significance and social imaginaries. Yet, conceptions of children have lagged as dominant outlooks construe young people as immature and incapable – perpetuating behavioral approaches to controlling their actions rather than hermeneutic ones that recognize them as agents. Working with Taylor’s ideas, I discuss a Childhood Ethics ontological approach to understanding children and childhood. Specifically, I: (a) draw on Taylor’s critique of naturalistic approaches to the human sciences to highlight problems that underlie universalist claims about all childhoods; (b) relate Taylor’s articulation of human agency, centered on strong evaluation and human linguistic capacity, to the Philosophy of Childhood and Childhood Studies to address current questions regarding our understanding of agency within childhood; and (c) describe a hermeneutic ontology that can inform the development of empirical research, policy-making and practices that relate to children. I close with an outline of priority questions that can orient future investigations within this area of inquiry.

Authenticity as an inarticulate ideal in the contemporary discourse of good childhoods

This paper consists of an initial investigation about the meaning of a good childhood following the ethical ideal of authenticity. In this introduction to a philosophy of childhood and authenticity, the central theme is to investigate how the authenticity ideal is already presupposed in the contemporary discourse on what constitutes a good childhood. In the emerging field of philosophy of childhood, the capacities of children for agency, autonomy, and committing and the fundamental role of parents in guaranteeing possibilities to exercise them are being increasingly highlighted, together with a discourse that there are some intrinsic goods of childhood. These developments parallel contemporary reconstructions of authenticity as an ethical ideal. Current debates emphasize the importance of a person finding, creating and constructing their originality, and how to realize it. At the same time, this search must recognize demands emanating from something more than human desires: from one’s culture and community. The parallel dynamics between these two discourses - children-parent and individual-society - point to a direction that applying the concept of authenticity to the construction of novel interpretations and practices of a good childhood can bring fruitful results. After examining such parallels, some of these practices that emerge from the analysis of good childhoods as authentic childhood are pointed out, such as the importance of cultivating children’s moments of caring and committing, and the development of personal projects. The paper concludes by exploring some limitations of the applied methodology and how it can be a strength in future research on this topic.

Notes on Contributors

Previous article FreeNotes on ContributorsFull TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreMatthew Bennett is a senior research officer on the Competition and Competitiveness project at the University of Essex UK. He works in moral psychology, ethics, political philosophy, and the post-Kantian history of philosophy, with particular focus on Nietzsche and the limits of morality. [email protected]Sophia Dandelet is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on the ways in which ethical considerations inform our second-order decisions as epistemic agents: not our decisions about what to believe, but our decisions about how to decide what to believe. [email protected]Jeremy Fischer is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. [email protected]Anca Gheaus is an assistant professor at the Central European University in Vienna. She is mostly interested in theories of justice and, in particular, in justice in child-rearing and gender justice. She coedited The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Childhood and Children (2018) and is currently working on a coauthored book on surrogacy and writing a monograph about child-centered child-rearing. [email protected]Jacob M. Nebel is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California. [email protected]Katherine Ritchie is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine. Her research is focused on the nature of social groups, social language, and the ways that a better understanding of our linguistic and mental representations can inform successful social-political projects. Previously, she taught at the City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center. She received her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. [email protected] Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Ethics Volume 131, Number 3April 2021 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/712574 Views: 425 © 2021 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Social Injustice of Parental Imprisonment

Abstract Children of prisoners are often negatively affected by their parents’ incarceration, which raises issues of justice. A common view is that the many negative effects associated with parental imprisonment are unjust, simply because children of prisoners are impermissibly harmed or unjustly punished by their parents’ incarceration. We argue that proposals of this kind have problems with accounting for cases where it is intuitive that prison might create social injustices for children of prisoners. Therefore, we suggest that in addition to the question of whether children of prisoners are impermissibly harmed, we should ask whether the inequalities that these children endure because of their parent’s incarceration are objectionable from a social justice perspective. To answer this latter question, we examine the negative effects associated with parental imprisonment from the perspective of luck egalitarianism. We develop a luck egalitarian account that incorporates insights from the philosophy of childhood. On our account, children of prisoners might endure two different types of objectionable inequalities, since they are often deprived of resources that are important for ensuring fair equality of opportunity in adulthood, but also because they are likely to suffer inequalities in terms of childhood welfare. After defending this account, we explore its implications for policy.

Childhood philosophy: a CASE for environmental ethics at basic education in Nigeria (Africa)

The need to instil philosophical thinking in children is supported by the phrase ‘catch them young’. Children do have inquisitive mind which is one of the bulks philosophers are made. To harness this virtue through the introduction of philosophy at the basic education levels will be a great milestone in the quest for human development and environmental protection and sustainability. Thus this paper believes that such will equip the future leaders with critical thinking tools necessary in a fast and dynamic society faced with serious climate change challenges.

НЕПРОМИНУЩЕ ЗНАЧЕННЯ ДОРОБКУ ВАСИЛЯ СУХОМЛИНСЬКОГО ДЛЯ РОЗБУДОВИ НОВОЇ УКРАЇНСЬКОЇ ШКОЛИ

У статті обґрунтовано непроминуще значення доробку українського ученого-педагога і письменника Василя Сухомлинського для розвитку вітчизняної освіти та науки. Виокремлено, проаналізовано й інтерпретовано з позицій сучасної педагогіки ідеї та положення, суголосні нинішньому реформуванню галузі й значущі для розбудови Нової української школи у контексті освітньої євроінтеграції. Розкрито шляхи їх імплементації. Визначено перспективи подальших досліджень доробку великого педагога в аспекті висхідного розвитку освітньої галузі.

Parental choice and perceived benefits of Reggio Emilia inspired programs

ABSTRACT Despite credible research to support a constructivist-based approach in early childhood programs, policymakers continued to push for a more academic-based philosophy in an effort to reach standardized testing goals. Reggio Emilia, a constructivist-based early childhood philosophy that originated in Northern Italy, has been shown to be an excellent model to facilitate optimum learning in young children. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to investigate parental experiences when choosing the constructivist-based early childhood program, Reggio Emilia, for their children and to explore parents’ perceived benefits after their children attended. Five parents who had enrolled their children at a Reggio Emilia inspired program, Foundations Early Learning Center, in the American Midwest for a minimum of 6 months participated. Results indicated parents identified an overall satisfaction for choosing a Reggio Emilia experience for their preschool children. Ten perceived benefits were associated with their children after they attended the Reggio Emilia inspired program. Findings of the current study favour the choice of a constructivist-based Reggio Emilia inspired program over alternative options.