Philosophy for teachers (P4T) in South Africa – re-imagining provision to support new teachers’ applied ethical decision-making

ABSTRACT

Conventional teacher education programmes do not equip practitioners adequately to navigate ethically complex situations that arise in teaching. One initiative responding to this deficit is ‘Philosophy for Teachers’ (‘P4T’), a 24-hour residential approach to community philosophy. Piloted originally in England, a further workshop took place in South Africa in October 2017, comprising student teachers, teacher educators and philosophers from three historically different universities in the Western Cape. Significant new insights to emerge included greater clarity on the respective contributions of P4T and other initiatives already applying ‘P4C’ to address professional ethics within teacher education. In particular, P4T re-framed within this new context can be seen to create shared space for reflection on teacher identity and the complexity of difference and ‘otherness’ in classroom practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethical deliberation
• teacher identity
• teacher education
• philosophy
• community of enquiry

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of South Africa under Grant 105899 and the generous financial support of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. We wish to thank Karin Murris, of UCT, who acted as a co-facilitator for the event with great expertise and our PGCE colleagues Kate Angier (UCT) and Conrad Potberg (CPUT) whose support for the event was invaluable. Thanks are also due to Steve Brammell, Richard Davies, Ruth Heilbronn, Carrie Winstanley and other members of the PESGB for their enthusiastic support of the project throughout. Finally, our thanks go to all the participants who engaged so thoughtfully and whole-heartedly with the enquiry process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation [105899].