It is often said that education is a right and not a privilege. This should not be just a declaration, but a guiding principle of axiomatic value in every society. It is of the outmost importance that every educator has this at the forefront of their mind. It is an educator’s civic and moral duty to make sure that every child exercises this right to its full potential. This duty probably carries the most weight in early school education, because the elementary school system is the backbone of every democratic society. It is a key factor in the process of primary socialization, an environment where the child acquires the fundamental social and learning skills and appropriates the values that are the building blocks for a compassionate, tolerant, independent and critical thinker – a responsible and engaged citizen that understands the importance of his/her role in the community.
Introducing Philosophy with Children (PwC) in the curriculum of primary schools is still one of the primary recommendations for early education in order to develop critical thinking, accept democratic values, achieve gender equality and develop skills for peaceful intercultural dialogue. In 2016, UNESCO opened a Chair for practicing PwC, understanding this discipline as a basis for intercultural dialogue and social transformation. Matthew Lipman’s pioneering endeavors in the 1970s have shown that children who have had the opportunity to learn philosophy from an early age thrive in two important ways: they are capable of clear, precise, reasoned, and critical thinking, but they are also open to the ideas and attitudes of others. This discipline has evolved over the decades, but with the recent rapid technological development, the changing educational practices in the new (post) pandemic world and the increasing needs for wider social inclusion, there is a need for transformation of the curriculum for PwC following exactly these educational and cultural changes.
Еducational innovation and reform tends to focus on urban areas with little attention to rural spaces. Sometimes, rural schools have the status of forgotten educational institutions. There are countries in which the number of rural schools surpassed the number of urban schools, for example, in N. Macedonia there are 578 rural schools and 221 urban schools, which is an indicator of the importance of their full inclusion in the national educational development plans. In order to achieve equity in educational opportunity and economic prosperity for this population, pursuing innovations in the rural context is essential. Thus, following the maxim that education is a right and not a privilege, we will focus our innovative educational inputs to be applied in primary schools in rural areas.
We envision Sophie, our project’s heroine (and motive for our logo), as mindful, brave and humble girl, ready to face life’s challenges in her own particular and unique context.
Objectives
The objectives of SOPHIE are oriented towards fostering quality improvements, excellence in innovation and exchange of good practices in practicing PwC. These improvements will be achieved by emphasizing the profound embeddedness of philosophical education in broader sociocultural contexts and the diversity in the classroom community of inquiry. The development of innovative PwC curriculum and teaching materials, that is projected as one of the main intellectual outputs of SOPHIE, is designed to be pertinent to the experience, culture and language of the practitioners. Promoting common values of equity, freedom, tolerance, peace, non-discrimination and eco-awareness through education which are already main objectives of the general practice of PwC in the world, will be further accentuated by their contextualization. SOPHIE aims to foster critical, attentive, connected, cooperative and collaborative thinking skills; encourage experimentation and creativity; foster social skills based on mutual respect, understanding, empathy and sense of social responsibility and ability to include ethical decision-making for effective engagement in local communities.
One of the objectives of SOPHIE is to train 9 trainers and 30 teachers as a part of their continuous professional development improving their level of competences. By developing these competences, teachers will improve their competences and skills for stimulating critical and creative thinking in pupils by using new and innovative education tools and to make better connections between different types of formal and non-formal learning, even beyond SOPHIE’s lifetime. The far reaching objectives of these improvements are pointed towards contributing a change in the atmosphere at school and improving the relations between pupils with the introduction of gradual creation of a so-called Philosophical Community. The piloting of the curriculum will further link the objectives of social inclusion and promote common values that will be implemented in primary schools in rural areas. Some of the practices and assistive technology for UDL (Universal Design Learning) will be used to enable all pupils to fully access the curriculum according to their needs and abilities. SOPHIE will create digital ways for sharing effective and innovative methods in learning which will extend the range of available OERs in the field of Digital Humanities.
SOPHIES’s project management objective is to foster regional cooperation that will not only deepen the relationships on a professional, but also on a cultural and societal level.
Target groups
SOPHIE targets two groups: Primary and Secondary (Supportive).
The Primary target group is consisted of Pupils, Students and Practitioners (9), for whom the activities are designed and among whom the activities will have effect:
-
- Pupils (aged 9-10, 4th-5th grade) from primary schools (total of 7) which are going to be part of the piloting of the previously developed innovative PwC curriculum;
- Philosophy graduates (total of 30) that have motivation to be trained to be able to practice PwC through the new curriculum that will be developed;
- PwC practitioners (total of 9) that are motivated to go through the training and become trainers of the PwC practitioners.
The Secondary (Supportive) target group includes all the individuals that are supporting SOPHIE’s activities success:
-
- Primary school staff;
- Experts in the field of philosophy, didactics and experiences experts, and practitioners of PwC.
- Educational experts, educational policy-makers, NGO representatives, sponsors, informal groups, volunteers, media, representatives of national agencies or other organizations.