PUPILS’ AGE AND PHILOSOPHICAL PRAXIS: TWO FACTORS THAT INFLUENCE THE DEVELOPMENT OF CRITICAL THINKING IN CHILDREN

"One of the fundamental objectives of Philosophy for Children (P4C) is the cognitive development of pupils. In this text, we examine to what extent the age of the children and the number of years of praxis in P4C influence the development of their critical thinking. Participants were groups of pupils (vs. individuals): 13 groups from preschool to the end of elementary school. These groups originated from two schools, one in Quebec and one in Ontario. At the time the data were collected, the Quebec school gro ups had one year of P4C praxis , whereas the Ontario school groups had two years of praxis . The content analyzed was the philosophical exchanges among pupils. As an analysis grid, we used the model of the developmental process of dialogical critical thinki ng (DCT). The model includes four thinking modes (logical, creative, responsible and metacognitive) and six epistemological perspectives (egocentricity, post - egocentricity, pre - relativism, relativism, post - relativism/pre - inter - subjectivity and inter - subjec tivity). With regard to the thinking modes, it emerged from the exchanges analyses that age may have an impact on the mobilization of the logical mode, and the number of years of philosophical praxis may have an impact on mobilization of the metacognitive mode, however, in all the cases studied, these factors could not be considered particularly determining. With regard to the epistemological development, results showed that the age factor is observable in the lack of mobilization of the more complex persp ectives (i.e. post - relativism/pre - inter - subjectivity) in preschool and the beginning of elementary school classrooms. And the impact of the number of years of praxis is observable in the increasing sophistication of DCT. In the groups with one year of phil osophical praxis , the transition from simple perspectives such as pre - relativism to more complex perspectives such as relativism or post - relativism, appeared in the 4 th grade, whereas in groups with two years of praxis it appeared in the 3 rd grade, one yea r earlier."

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