Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children, Volume 17, Numbers 1 & 237

Expanding the Circle ofInquiry: Introducing Philosophyfor Children in the People’s
Republic of China

Located midway between the countries of Asia andthe United States, the islands of Hawai’i form anatural bridge of sorts between the peoples and cultures of Asia and the West. This meeting of cultures can beseen in the ethnic make up of students in Hawaii’s publicschool classrooms where it is not uncommon to find in asingle classroom children of a variety of ethnic bac kgrounds - Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Vietnamese,Hawaiian, Samoan, Tongan, Euro-American, African
American, Hispanic, Portuguese, and more. And one of thebest things about doing Philosophy for Children in Hawai’iis the opportunity to sit in a circle and participate in an inquiry with such a diverse group of voices.
Over the past decade, the Hawai’i Philosophy in theSchools project has had the unique opportunity to expand
the circle of inquiry by participating in an on-going inquiryon education in the People’s Republic of China. With support from the Beijing Soong Ching Ling Foundation and theUniversity of Hawai’i, teachers, administrators, and educ ational specialists from both Hawai’i and China have visited
each others’ schools, classes, and homes, initiating a fruitful, cultural and educational exchange.
The Hawai’i – China connection began in the early
1990’s through the efforts of Dr. Jinmei Yuan, an award
winning story writer and professor of Philosophy from Nanjing, who left China in 1993 to pursue a Ph.D. in Comparative Philosophy at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.
Having been trained in the practice of Philosophy for Children by Dr. Thomas Jackson, and having spent severalyears in Hawai’i public school classrooms helping teachers
facilitate philosophical inquiries with elementary school
children, Ms.Yuan felt that Philosophy for Children might
be just the kind of program Chinese teachers and researchers were looking for to help their students learn to think
more critically and independently.
The decision by Chinese scholars, educators, and offi-ANDREW COLVIN
cials to explore P4C can be seen as part of a wider trend
over the last several years toward both decentralization andmethodological reform in Chinese education. With its new
found wealth, China was building better schools, and with
their new found freedom, Chinese educators and local officials were actively seeking out alternative ways of teachingwhich might help alleviate what many saw as a nation-wide
problem – namely, that in the course of preparing children
for the college examination system, China’s schools wereproducing students who were good at memorizing, but disinclined to think critically, creatively, and independently.
Another problem faced by Chinese educators was what
had become known as the Little Emperor syndrome. As aresult of China’s one child policy, children were growing
up without brothers and sisters. For most parents there
would be only one child, and for most grandparents, onlyone grandchild. As parents and grandparents foc used alltheir attention and affection on one child, elementary school
teachers in China began to notice an increasing lack of initiative, independence, and responsible thinking in their students.
Through the cooperative efforts of Ms. Yuan, the Be ijing Soong Ching Ling Foundation, the SINOPEC Corporation, and the University of Hawaii, the first team of Hawaii
P4C practitioners arrived in China in 1995. Led by Dr.
Thomas Jackson, Director of the Hawai’i Philosophy in theSchools Project, the Hawaii team traveled to the small
northern industrial city of Yanhua to conduct a week long
Andrew Colvin (acolvin@hawaii.edu) received his Ph.D in Philosophy from the University of Hawaii. He is currently teaching philosophy at Edinboro University in Pennsylvania. His publications include: “The Cultures of the East and West and Their Philosophies.”
A translation (with Jinmei Yuan) of Chapter Two of Liang Shuming’sDeng xi wenhua ji qi zhexue. Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy . Fall 2001 and ”A Review of Lenk and Paul’s Epistemological Issues in Classical Chinese Philosophy.” Philosophy East &West. Vol 46, No 1, 1996. He has been involved with P4C since 1994.

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workshop for local educators, administrators, government
officials, and business leaders. Intrigued with how Philosophy for Children might be adapted to help improve thethinking of children, but still wanting to learn more about
its actual implementation, the Beijing Soong Ching Ling
foundation assembled a team of top teachers from various
provinces and sent them to observe P4C in action in Hawai’i classrooms. Impressed by the safe atmosphere andharmonious relations between teachers and students in theP4C sessions, and by P4C’s ability to inspire both logicaland creative thought, these educators convinced officials
from the government and the Soong Ching Ling foundation
to invite the Hawai’i P4C team to other cities in China, andto make the study of P4C a top priority. Since its first trip toBeijing in 1995, practitioners from the Hawai’i Philosophy
in the Schools Project have made two more trips to China,
giving presentations and workshops in Guangzhou, Nanjing, Shanghai, Wuhan, Zibo, and Jiaozuo.
Of these cities, Jiaozuo, a small mining city of approximately 4 million in northern Henan province, has emerged
as a leader in adapting and implementing Philosophy forChildren. Teachers, administrators, and educational researchers from Jiaozuo were first introduced to P4C in 1997
when the Soong Ching Ling foundation invited Dr. Thomas
Jackson and a team of practitioners from Hawai’i to present
a workshop there on the practice of Philosophy for Children. The following year, 1998, Jiaozuo sent a group ofColvin, Expanding the Circle of Inquiry

educational specialists, teachers,
and administrators to Hawai’i toobserve and study
the actual implementation of Philosophy for Children in the publicschool classrooms. While in
Hawai’i, the Chinese teachers
spent a week living with the family of a teacher,and a week intheir classrooms
where they observed classes,
participated in
P4C sessions, andtaught Chinesesongs and games
to the classes.
Upon returning toChina, this groupconvinced district
education officials to implement the use of P4C in several of Jiaozuo’s
experimental schools. However in attempting to adopt Philosophy for Children, teachers encountered two chief obstacles in the Chinese educational system — class size, and thesizable amount of material teachers were required to cover.
With an average class size of well over 50 students, Chineseteachers found the Hawai’i P4C model of sitting in a circle,and giving everyone the opportunity to speak, difficult toimplement. And with the large body of material they wererequired to cover in a limited class session, the teachers
could find little time to facilitate open-ended discussions ofthings for which the children would not one day be tested.
Unable to regularly conduct open-ended philosophicaldiscussions with their students, Chinese researchers andeducators decided to adapt P4C and some of its tools andprinciples in the various content areas. The result, which
was termed Elic itation Inquiry Style Teaching method (qifatanjiu shi jiaoxue fa), challenges children to seek for themselves different solutions to problems in the content areas.
According to Li Junjie, the assistant Director of the Jiaozuo
Institute of Education Research and chief architect of theElicitation Inquiry method,
For us elicitation entails having teachers stimulate
students to energetically reflect and ponder, and toseek out answers and solutions by themselves. Inquiry entails encouraging students to expand theirThinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children, Volume 17, Numbers 1 & 2

thinking and to take initiative in seeking out different ways to resolve questions 2.
Whether in math, art, science, or literature, teachers following the Elicitation Inquiry method designed lesson plans
and class activities which encouraged students to raisequestions, to engage in small group discussions, and tothink for themselves about possible solutions. For example,
in one class the Hawai’i team visited, children were given
the task of drawing a circle - but unlike the traditionalmodel of education, where the teacher would stand in frontof the class and show the students the proper way to draw acircle, teachers demonstrating the Elicitation Inquiry
Method challenged students to work together in small
groups and to think of as many ways as possible for drawing a circle.
Like P4C, this new method likewise encourages children to seek out clarification, reasons, implications, and assumptions, and to reflect on their thinking. However incomparison to the open-ended model of inquiry practiced in
Hawai’i, in which the teacher does not know in advance thedirection in which the inquiry may go, teachers practicing
the Elicitation Inquiry method in China were expected toplay a more active role in keeping discussions on track andmoving in a particular direction.
This requires teachers to maintain control as theleader, to guide students by way of appropriate andskillful means, to give students an opportunity tounload their thoughts, and to raise questions. In
conducting an inquiry on a question, teachers needto let students think about methods of solving it,

39

but they are not able to permit endless discussion
and ought to make a transition when it is time for atransition2 .
In this way, teachers found that they could adopt the inquisitive spirit of P4C and certain of its tools and principles,but at the same time work with a class of 60 plus students
and still cover required content. According to Li and othereducational researchers in Jiaozuo, this adaptation proved
more successful than anticipated. In the year 2000 twentyone schools took part in an experimental trial of the Elicitation Inquiry Method. In April of 2001 both Jiaozuo’s Municipal Education Committee and its Institute of Education
Research recommended that all schools in Jiaozuo adopt theElicitation Inquiry method in their classrooms.
In the summer of 2001, Dr. Jackson and the Hawai’i
P4C team returned to Jiaozuo to take part in the “First Philosophy for Children - Elicitation Inquiry International Conference,” and to observe the implementation of these twomethods in Jiaozuo’s schools.
Notes
1.
2.

Li Junjie, Jiaozuo Daily (4/6/2000)
Ibid.

1.

Jiu Tuiguang, “Qifa Tanjin Shi Jiaoxue Fa’ Da Jizhi Wen,”
Jiaozuo Ribao (6 April, 2000: A2).

Bibliographic References