Dialogue as a playful and permissive space in communities of philosophical enquiry

’Philosophy with children’ is not only for children, can enable transformative experiences of thinking for participants of any age, and contributes something highly distinctive to the wider pedagogy of dialogue. This reflective paper offers a narrative account of the author’s practitioner research in communities of philosophical enquiry with children, where research is interpreted as phronesis. Illustrating the creation of critical incidents as a research approach, the enquiry is situated within the author’s working life as a university tutor in Education. The author argues that her response is shaped by early experiences and expectations of philosophy, by the aesthetic quality of material chosen to prompt philosophical questioning and by the desire to mediate constraints of the given curriculum in schools and in university based teacher education. In this context, the paper suggests that picturebooks are philosophically inviting, with their complexity and ambiguity in content and form. Critical reflection on significant episodes in the enquiry remains open-ended, dwelling on memories of childhood and on literary, psycho-analytic and philosophical sources, exploring the significance of the metaphorical and symbolic in the realm of meaning and the part these can play in dialogue. The author claims that the community of enquiry pedagogy can free up the teaching and learning space and enable creative mediation of limitations in official curricula. Dialogue is experienced as a lenient and permissive space in which it becomes genuinely possible to ‘play’ with ideas