How could a school with a high proportion of pupils speaking English as a second language hope to make the best of Philosophy for Children (P4C), a pedagogy based on everyone talking to each other, often about the deeper, knottier concepts? There were reservations. But SAPERE Trainer Neil Phillipson explains how the risks themselves were transformed into a new sources of inclusion and community.
Case Study
Thirty years of P4C: #13 — A voice for everyone — Summerbank’s story, courtesy of Neil
Teachers from Summerbank Primary Academy had early misgivings about P4C. Back in 2018 they joined colleagues from across The Societas Trust (a multi-academy trust in Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent) for Level 1 training in SAPERE P4C. Summerbank had a high proportion of pupils with English as an additional language (EAL), and the teachers’ disquiet was evident: ‘This sounds great, but how will it look in our school?’
I visited the academy recently for conversations with P4C leaders Sarah Johnson and James Thomas, and pupils Zoya, Khatija, San and Yagen (whose first languages are Urdu, Kurdish and Arabic), about their experiences of P4C. James put the early anxiety into sharper relief: ‘Our school is massively based on inclusion, and everyone has a voice. We were concerned that P4C might be an exclusive practice resulting in a group of children who could access it, and a group of children who couldn’t.’
James and Sarah were colleagues in Year 2 when P4C was introduced to the school. James reflected on their first session: ‘We did have some children who didn’t speak English, but we immediately began learning about the different ways in which we could make the sessions more inclusive, and we felt that we could see the benefits straight away.’ And it wasn’t just James who was persuaded; the pupils were liberated by the idea that P4C was a new learning experience in which there were no limits on what they could achieve – ‘From lesson one, they absolutely loved it,’ said James.
San and Khatija were quick to speak about their own enjoyment of P4C. Khatija told me: ‘I like that everybody gets to join in and people who don’t speak English really well, they know more words because other people are speaking so they get the new words that they haven’t heard before’.
Summerbank achieved their Bronze SAPERE School Award in 2020 and is now on the cusp of applying for a Silver Award. I was interested to know more about how they have adapted their practice over time. One approach that has had a significant impact is the use of ‘wordless’ stimuli, including pictures, short films and music. Yagan explained the benefits: ‘We get to identify the underlying themes for ourselves – what the film is really trying to say’. Care is also taken to make sure that the stimulus materials used reflect the diversity of the pupils so that everyone can see themselves represented in the stimuli and feel that they belong to the community.
Concept matching is another approach that the school has developed. Teachers look ahead through the books being read in class to identify concepts that may cause confusion. Images related to a concept are collected and used to stimulate discussion about its meaning, preparing pupils for an encounter with the word in the text and also supporting them to apply it accurately in their own writing. Inevitably, the different images lead to varying accounts of the concept’s meaning and so to more nuanced understanding for everybody. The concept forms the basis of P4C sessions and may be revisited as pupils progress through the school, with a deepening understanding becoming visible. Sarah has noticed this effect when watching pupils she taught in Year 2 engaging in P4C in Year 4: ‘The difference in the children – their verbal activity, their ability to give examples and link concepts to their own experience is just amazing.’
Making sure that all voices are heard is at the heart of the inclusive ethos at Summerbank; whether it be through responses to ‘yes / no’ questions or through physical movement, every child is given the opportunity to express themselves. Even when pupils don’t speak in a session, they are often celebrated for their listening and the impact that this has on others.
Windows on the world
As the children spoke (about their love of metaphor and about differing translations of words like ‘lonely’, for example), my perspective on P4C in a multi-cultural and multi-lingual environment changed. I had come to Summerbank to enquire about how the challenges presented by such diversity could be overcome (I was looking through a ‘deficit lens’), but had perhaps been blind to the wonderful resources that the children bring to the Community of Enquiry (I lacked an ‘asset lens’). They bring diversity of experience, of course, but also diversity of cultural wisdom and the additional perspective that another language provides. I remember reading the Chinese proverb, ‘To learn a language is to have one more window from which to look at the world’. I think that learning to look at life through different windows is a good way to express the value of P4C; a school full of children who offer us different windows, different perspectives on human experience, seems less a barrier to P4C and dialogue, and more a wonderful and enriching opportunity.
I’ll leave it to James to sum up the impact of P4C at the academy:
‘Summerbank is inclusive and that’s massive when it comes to our P4C sessions. Everyone is valued and everyone is loved in that circle; no matter what ability you are, you are a massive part of what we do… and that is what we feel P4C is all about at Summerbank.’
