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Early Child Development and Care

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The realm of meaning: imagination,

narrative and playfulness in
philosophical exploration with young
children
a b
Joanna Haynes & Karin Murris
a
Faculty of Health, Education and Society , School of Education,
Plymouth University , Plymouth , UK
b
School of Education , Graduate School of Humanities, University
of Cape Town , Rondebosch , South Africa
Published online: 20 Jun 2013.

To cite this article: Joanna Haynes & Karin Murris (2013) The realm of meaning: imagination,
narrative and playfulness in philosophical exploration with young children, Early Child Development
and Care, 183:8, 1084-1100, DOI: 10.1080/03004430.2013.792256

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 Early Child Development and Care, 2013
Vol. 183, No. 8, 1084–1100, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03004430.2013.792256

The realm of meaning: imagination, narrative and playfulness in

philosophical exploration with young children
Joanna Haynesa and Karin Murrisb*
a
Faculty of Health, Education and Society, School of Education, Plymouth University,
Plymouth, UK; bSchool of Education, Graduate School of Humanities, University of Cape
Town, Rondebosch, South Africa
(Received 30 October 2012; final version received 1 April 2013)
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Censorship of children’s voices takes many forms: restricting access to texts,

constraining the space in which they are viewed, failing to validate children’s
responses, interpreting their ideas within limiting perspectives on children’s
thinking. This paper considers the educator’s role in discussion with children,
drawing out the connections between the ethical commitment to listen to child/
ren and beliefs about forms of knowing that underpin pedagogy. In our
professional development work we have noticed that children’s responses to
picturebooks can evoke sentimental reactions from adults. Such sentimentality
leads adults to distance themselves from child(hood) and to miss opportunities
for philosophical exploration. Moving away from developmentality, and inspired
by semiotics, this paper offers alternative readings of children’s responses to
picturebooks, in the context of philosophical talk in an early-years setting. The
framework for analysis of children’s work with Tusk tusk by David McKee is
informed by Fricker’s (2007) notion of ‘epistemic prejudice’.
Keywords: philosophy with children; P4C; epistemic injustice; developmentality;
meaning-making; picturebooks

Introduction
In 1995, this journal published a special issue on the theme ‘Young children as emer-
gent philosophers’, featuring many well-known thinkers in the field, including Matthew
Lipman and Ann Margaret Sharp (Fields, 1995). The term ‘emergent’ was in frequent
usage during that period to describe young children’s status in respect of formal
domains of learning, implying the position of a beginner demonstrating partial charac-
teristics and behaviours associated with the domain. The journal reported on the project
of reconstructing the discipline of philosophy (Philosophy for Children), so that chil-
dren might engage with it through processes of philosophical enquiry, reflection and
dialogue, and the ways in which this could help to foster children’s thinking and
their social and moral development. Philosophy with children (PwC), as we understand
and practise it, goes hand in hand with a democratic approach to classroom life. This
step from ‘for’ to ‘with’ is a fundamental one that underlines the fallibility of the
teacher in genuinely open-ended enquiries with children: a distinctive epistemological
and ethical standpoint. The question of how to listen without prejudice – not as though
we already know and understand what is about to be said – has been a central and

*Corresponding author. Email: karin.murris@uct.ac.za

© 2013 Taylor & Francis

 Early Child Development and Care 1085

enduring interest throughout our experiences of philosophical enquiry with groups of

young children and the practitioners who work with them.
In educational settings, adults’ responses to children’s contributions in conversa-
tions are influenced by prevailing social perspectives both on child1 and on ways of
knowing. Such views tend to permeate institutional expressions of authority in ways
that can be more or less acknowledging or dismissive of children’s experiences. We
cannot seriously engage with children in authentic searches for understanding if we
have already decided that children lack true authority to speak from their experience
or that they lack the competence to make choices about questions they want to
pursue. Neither can we treat them fairly unless we recognise the individualities of chil-
dren, their family and community connections, and their cultural and social contexts:
the plurality of their childhoods.
In order to listen to children’s ‘voices’, we must constantly question the pigeon-
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holing of child thinking: as naïve, as other or as mere indicator of a pre-determined

developmental phase. We also need to consider how we create experiences of thinking
and learning that have meaning in the here and now, and what matters to them, as well
to keep an eye on what young children are carrying into their futures. In order to explore
how and what children know, it is necessary to enter into dialogues that are ‘sympath-
etic’ to the multiple ways in which very young students in classrooms re-present their
knowledge and understanding. ‘Listening’ and ‘voice’ remain problematic aspects of
early childhood practice, yet they simultaneously provide us with opportunities to
carve out new and fairer ways of working (Haynes, 2008, 2009).
In our experience of philosophical enquiries, educational interactions with young
children that seem most likely to evoke defensive or ambivalent responses from
adults are in the realms of fantasy, magical thinking and anthropomorphism. In pro-
fessional exchanges we have noticed that such domains of human experience may be
associated exclusively with early childhood; they often provoke sentimentality and
laughter as well as references to immature thinking, stages of development and other
distancing moves that contrast adult and child thinking in absolute terms. Such
responses tend to close off the realm of magical thinking as a place of meaningful
human exploration, and bring the wider enquiry about adults’ roles in such enquiries
to an abrupt end. Adult authority is often bound up in literal rationality. An exception
is when teachers introduce magical elements through storytelling for example – a situ-
ation in which they assume even greater authority by choosing the material and by
being the storyteller or puppeteer. We find these ambivalent positions both intriguing
and troubling.
What can help subvert discourses that sideline or fail to engage young children’s
ideas, expressions and reflections on experience? What will help to validate and
keep open the realm of imaginative thinking? In this paper we explain and discuss
the critical and creative pedagogy that has taken us on a certain path of exploration
of these domains. We want to argue that it is possible to open spaces and create con-
ditions within which we might begin to tackle this question of listening and taking
part in reciprocal enquiries with children. We indicate how semiotics2 is helpful in
looking afresh at how people make meaning, especially when using picturebooks.3
Regardless of age group, this has entailed a very playful, exploratory and imaginative
form of philosophising as well as an inventive pedagogy, closely associated with our
adoption of picturebooks as philosophical texts, and our critical analysis of explicit
and subtle forms of censorship in educational settings (Haynes & Murris, 2012). It is
a critical practice in the sense that it calls into question some of the naturalised
 1086 J. Haynes and K. Murris

assumptions made about young children’s capacities to take part in philosophical

enquiry and dialogue. It seeks to avoid replacing such assumptions with new claims
about the essence of childhood. We bring into play some alternative readings of
exploratory philosophical talk with children.
Our theoretical perspective on child/hood and children’s thinking is influenced by
critiques of developmentality. We provide some brief background on our work and the
rationale for our approach to PwC and our work on picturebooks as philosophical texts.
Drawing on Fricker (2007) and a semiotic perspective on education and learning
(Stables, 2008), we make the case that philosophising with young children is a practice
that both exposes forms of epistemic injustice against children as well as showing us
possible ways to aim for more empathetic and fair understanding of children’s thinking.
We take the example of fantasy and magical thinking in particular as a likely site of
epistemic prejudice with respect to children’s thinking. We have chosen some brief
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examples from Karin’s recent classroom research to illustrate these issues.

The problem of developmentality

Discourses concerning children’s thinking have been formed by developmental psy-
chology, supported by empirical work seeking to establish universal accounts of the
maturation process as a series of stages. This paradigm essentialises ‘child’ and fails
to take into account the capabilities and the lived experiences and contexts of individual
children. From a sociological standpoint, as long ago as 1984, Walkerdine provided an
analysis of the impact of developmentalism on educational practices, referring to it as
the dominant discourse of pedagogy that describes children as minds to be formed,
bodies to be measured and as objects of study.
Matthews (1994, p. 66) argues that the universalising tendency of western develop-
mental psychology encourages educators to ‘distance’ themselves – ‘both from the chil-
dren around us and from our own childhood selves’. Such distancing often leads to
‘condescension’, which Matthews argues is ‘morally offensive’. He suggests that tea-
chers should engage with individual children as rational, active, collaborative partici-
pants in knowledge construction as their ‘simple directness’ often ‘bring us back to
basics’ (1994, p. 67).
From within the field of psychology, Burman (2008a, 2008b) has presented a
thorough-going deconstruction of the discourse of developmentality. Dahlberg and
Moss (2005) have shown how discourses of developmentality and governmentality
continue to operate in the domain of early childhood policy and practice. Burman
characterises the idea of ‘development’ within the discourse of developmentality as
follows:

Development is typically portrayed as an isolated activity, as an epic odyssey or journey, a

trajectory that seems to speak of the specific child, but is in fact a methodological abstrac-
tion, a statistical fictional ‘individual’ synthesised through analysis of multiple patterns of
populations in the course of which she has been stripped of all that tied her to her time,
place and position, but which retains traces of a very particular set of cultural values.
(2008b, p. 167)

Children are routinely described and treated as ‘other’. One expression of this
difference, which looks benign, is the sentimentality often associated with children’s
thinking, and referred to in this paper. Burman characterises this sentimentality as a
‘distancing move’ that re-inscribes power relations between adult and child, a move
 Early Child Development and Care 1087

which, in repudiating identification, gives way to the expression of both separation and
aggression (2008b, p. 149).
Fricker (2007) focuses attention on epistemic practices through which knowledge is
acquired, and their social situatedness, which exposes their ethical and political dimen-
sions. She argues that social identity and social power are involved in ‘two of our most
basic epistemic practices: conveying knowledge to others by telling them, and making
sense of our own social experiences’ (Fricker, 2007, p. 1). She suggests there are two
types of epistemic injustice that involve moral wrongdoing to a person in their capacity
as a knower: testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. In cases of testimonial
injustice a prejudice (e.g. accent or age) will lead a hearer to assign a deflated level of
credibility to a speaker’s utterance, and ‘sometimes this will be sufficient to cross the
threshold for belief or acceptance so that the hearer’s prejudice causes him to miss
out on a piece of knowledge’ (Fricker, 2007, p. 17).
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There are further consequences: in the absence of epistemic trust and equality, a
person’s confidence in interpreting their own social experiences gradually diminishes,
and self-confidence as a knower is worn away. While Fricker’s work mainly concerns
prejudices associated with race and gender, we believe her arguments can be extended
to the forms of ageism that are normalised in educational settings and that help to under-
pin developmentality (Murris, 2013). One very common example of such a practice is
the routine disbelief of what children say, on the sole grounds that they are children. For
example, David Kennedy argues that child is often regarded as epistemically incom-
plete: the child as the naive, the irrational other, the magical thinker (Kennedy,
1996). Andrew Stables argues from the premise that ‘living is semiotic engagement’,
and that because children are fully alive, they are as ‘fully “semiotic engagers” as
adults’. Therefore, ‘children are not incomplete, unprepared, or lacking purpose’
(Stables, 2008, p. 4).
If we accept the arguments above, it is clear that professional educators have signifi-
cant choices to make, and that these choices impact on the lives and experiences of chil-
dren. Burman argues:

As adults in positions of relative power, we have responsibilities to explicate (rather than

eschew) our commitments; and we also have power to negotiate and consult with, and to
provide opportunities for those for whom we speak to make their views known. (2008b,
p. 174)

A significant part of our project in the field of PwC has been to seek to understand
and act upon such a critique of developmentalism and a commitment to providing
opportunities for children to make their views known in our everyday practice. This
entails questioning the everyday authority adults often assume in the presence of chil-
dren with regard to what can be claimed as true: a stance of fallibility. The case study
below exemplifies such a stance, and shows a practical way of thinking with children
without age prejudice, and works on the assumption that young children are equal part-
ners in meaning-making. Such epistemic trust informs not only our pedagogy but also
the resources chosen for our philosophical work with young children.

Philosophical work with picturebooks

Over the years we have come to recognise that we look for particular qualities in the
selection of picturebooks with which to introduce as philosophical texts. We do not
have the space in this paper to discuss these qualities at length (see Haynes &
 1088 J. Haynes and K. Murris

Murris, 2012), but they include ambiguity and complexity; the ability to make the fam-
iliar appear strange; playfulness; provoking questions that cannot easily be settled
through empirical investigation; engaging the emotions and the imagination; featuring
‘contradictions’ between the images and the text. We also look for picturebooks that
question power relationships between adults and children and that are uncondescending
in tone and those that also blur the boundaries between social and anti-social beha-
viours. We seek out narratives that offer the reader the opportunity to become immersed
in other places, times or characters and that invite critical reflection. From an aesthetic
perspective, choosing those that feature high-quality artwork is vital, just as we seek to
represent a wide variety of styles and cultures.4 From an epistemological point of view,
the inclusion of the visual arts in developing thinking highlights other distinct ways of
meaning-making and knowledge construction.
In much of our previous writing we have proposed that picturebooks act as alterna-
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tive philosophical texts that can help open the kinds of spaces in which children5 and
adults can engage freely with philosophical thinking (Haynes & Murris, 2012; Murris,
1997; Murris & Haynes, 2002, 2010). Using picturebooks philosophically foregrounds
the importance of pedagogy and how people make meaning imaginatively when pre-
sented with a complex and interdependent mixture of images and text. In their influen-
tial article on picturebooks, Nikolajeva and Scott (2000, p. 238) argue that ‘children’s
literature speaks to both adults and children’, and that ‘the two audiences may approach
textual and visual gaps differently and fill them in different ways’. However, as literary
critics, they do not unpack the educational implications of this art form. For us, the par-
ticular characteristics of these ‘highly sophisticated aesthetic objects’ (Sipe, 2012, p. 4)
have profound epistemological implications that include making room for the magical,
the visual and the imaginative in what it means to be rational, as an integrated dimen-
sion of ethical educational practice.
In picturebooks the meaning of the two different sign systems (the written and the
visual) is far from fixed. As Lewis (2001, p. 74) explains metaphorically:

Words are never ‘just words’, they are always words-as-influenced by pictures. Similarly,
the pictures are never just pictures; they are pictures-as-influenced by words. Thus the
words on their own are always partial, incomplete, unfinished, waiting the flesh of the pic-
tures. Similarly, the pictures are perpetually pregnant with potential narrative meaning,
indeterminate, unfinished, awaiting the closure provided by the words. But the words
and the pictures come from outside the picturebook.

What strikes us in particular in Lewis’ ecological metaphor is his claim that ‘the
words and the pictures come from outside the picturebook’. Meaning is constructed
in the process of reading images and words by drawing on prior situated knowledge/
s and experiences. Also like ‘a natural eco-system of a pond’, the ‘relationships
between words and pictures can change from one double page spread to the next just
as relationships are constantly changing’ (Sipe, 2012, p. 8).
There are not just two languages (Lewis, 2001). The most obvious ones of course
are the words and the images. However, in semiotics there are infinite sub-sign systems,
e.g. use of colour, place on a page (Doonan, 1983), choice of art style6 (Browne &
Browne, 2011) and the shapes. How these signs ‘interrelate, connect, and influence
each other’ depends on what children bring to the narrative themselves. The role of
inviting children to make their own drawings (and of the arts in general) as part of
this cognitive process is still undervalued and underexplored (Narey, 2009). Patricia
Whitfield argues that the arts are ‘an essential component in children’s ability to
 Early Child Development and Care 1089

make meaning of their world’ and she emphasises the role of narrative in constructing
reality (Whitfield, 2009, p. 156), as illustrated below.

Classroom episodes
This philosophical work was carried out at an independent, co-educational school in
Johannesburg, South Africa. A contextual feature of the study is the University of
the Witwatersrand’s creation of ‘good practice’ audio-visual resources to be dissemi-
nated to all higher-education institutions in South Africa, of which this classroom
case study is a part. This initiative is part of a much larger EU-funded initiative to
boost the quality of initial teacher education of students who are specialising in the
Foundation Phase.7 With the exception of one girl of Indian origin, all of the children
were white and aged between seven and nine.8 There were 21 children in this class. The
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children in this particular school in the East Rand had been doing philosophy for four
months before Karin visited the school and led six philosophy sessions over a period of
three weeks.
For this ‘good practice’ school project the particular text that had been chosen for
the sessions opens up an explicit secret space for the main characters of the story – a
group of elephants. Readers of Tusk tusk (1978),9 written and illustrated by David
McKee, are positioned to hypothesise and use their imagination when a group of
‘peace-loving’ animals flee into a maze (see Figure 1) to escape from groups of
more aggressive black and white elephants.
As readers, we are not privy to what happens in this maze, but years later grey ele-
phants appear. At first they live in harmony until the elephants with the big ears start
exchanging strange looks with those with small ears. Black and white elephants
attack each other (see Figure 2) by turning their trunks into fists and other weapons

Figure 1. The maze.

 1090 J. Haynes and K. Murris
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Figure 2. Elephants and the birds.

until they are all dead. The story ends with uncertainty about the future of the remaining
elephants.
The story is sometimes chosen for its themes of tolerance of difference, and conflict
resolution. However, it is also avoided by teachers because the story has no clear happy
ending and can easily provoke discussion about race and sex, and the intersection of the
two: sexual relations between people of different colour.
After reading the story, collaborative open-ended questions were created by the
children and collected to give a focus to the classroom collaborative search for under-
standing. These questions are always posed and selected by the children. It is their curi-
osity that drives the philosophical enquiry, not that of the adult. Working
democratically as a group not just in groups offers rich decision-making challenges
and educational opportunities as it raises awareness of how power can operate in col-
laborative thinking. Burgh and Yorshansky (2011, p. 437) argue that deliberation, as an
essential part of the social process of PwC, ‘determines the quality of the decision-
making processes’. They regard ‘mutual respect of students towards one another,
and students and teachers towards one another’ as a necessary condition for the
distribution of power and as we interpret it, one of the means to prevent epistemic
injustice.
Unsurprisingly, some of the learners connected in a particular political manner
with the narrative as they are situated with their conscious and unconscious minds
and bodies in post-apartheid South Africa. Some children in a group they had
named ‘Cool Bananas’ suggested a solution to the fighting problem in the shape of
a question: ‘Why didn’t the black elephants stay on one side of the jungle and why
didn’t the white elephants have one side of the jungle?’ It was unclear from the
other children’s responses whether they recognised and sympathised with Cool
Bananas’ ‘apartheid’ proposal. Some adults who had been observing the lesson
 Early Child Development and Care 1091

expressed their discomfort with this question and also their relief when the other chil-
dren chose not to discuss it.
In the plenary discussion one girl shyly suggested that ‘the elephants could have been
mating’. The mere possibility of such comments to emerge in class has made some tea-
chers in our courses decide against using this particular book.10 Again, if children are not
allowed to propose such readings, opportunities are missed to hear children’s thinking
and to appreciate the reasoning contributions they make. However, in this case, the chil-
dren had also been given the opportunity to express their thinking through drawing and
writing activities and were allowed to remain in the fantastical realm of the story of the
elephants without insistence that links were made to ‘real life’. Karin had stopped the
reading of the story when the elephants disappeared into the maze (Figure 1) in a delib-
erate effort to collect their ideas without being influenced too much by the storyline. The
children were asked to speculate in pairs what might be happening in the maze space, to
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draw the images in their minds and to talk about these first. This was followed by indi-
vidual artwork and writing (of choice) back at their own desks. Their imaginative and
diverse ideas re-emerged often in the remaining sessions like threads producing a
cloth – they created their own ‘text-ile’ (Sipe, 2012 inspired by Lewis, 2001).
The next day the mating theme surfaced again in the plenary dialogue when the chil-
dren tried collaboratively to answer one group’s question: ‘How did a baby get born if
all the elephants were dead?’ It was suggested that two black elephants could have
escaped into the jungle and had babies. Some suggested that it could not have been
the white and black ones as they – logically following from the story – would fight.
The maze was conceptualised by several as a ‘hiding place’ and later as a ‘place for
play’. Karin probed on both occasions by asking the conceptual questions about
whether animals can hide and/or play and whether elephants can perhaps be both
hiding and playing at the same time? The others were asked to respond directly to Has-
siena’s11 observation earlier that elephants are big, so the maze is too small for them as
a hiding place. She picks up again her original concern with one of the proposed
answers to the question of how the elephants were grey:

Hassiena: But how can you get married when the white and black ones hated each other?
Bronwen: … if they fight why would they love each other, because the parents they
would just be unhappy together.

Karin reminded the class to consider Hassiena’s earlier remark that day about the
possible relevance of the elephants’ skin colour. This pedagogical intervention may
have influenced Charne Steyn’s follow-up writing that day. She picks up the mating
theme again and connects this with the puzzling title of the book (Figure 3).
Through the linking of race and gender she proposes a very creative, logical and
thought-provoking solution to the problem of how the elephants emerge grey when
they enter the maze as black and white elephants.
The use of the well-known storytelling device of interrupting the reading of a story
out loud, and letting them speculate various story-endings, supported the philosophical
work. Without knowing what was going to happen, and looking at the double-spread
page of the maze only (Figure 1), the children suggested some of the following rich
narrative scenarios: the black and white elephants are fighting, making friends,
mating, sleeping in the middle, having wars over the golden treasure and they are
jealous. The last suggestion is like a miniature story. One boy suggested that the
black king is jealous of the nice white king who has the gold.
 Downloaded by [McMaster University] at 13:06 08 December 2014

1092

Figure 3.
Charne Steyn’s writing.
J. Haynes and K. Murris
 Early Child Development and Care 1093

Their maze drawings offered opportunities to the children to construct their own
meanings, and to link the story with prior knowledge and experiences. The drawings
show a wide variety of binary narrative scenarios ranging from happy, peaceful
spaces where people live in dens, play and read, love each other, make babies, get
married and are friends, to also include dangerous, scary, confusing places with difficult
tasks set to complete the journey. Many drawing narratives include blood, ghosts,
robots, spiders, sharks, dark tunnels, bats, pumpkins, snakes, skeletons, poo, lasers
and dragons. One drawing proposes that a maze could be a place where there is love
as well as a spot where ‘you will die!’ (Figure 4). In another drawing the suggestion
is made that one half of the maze is hell and the other is heaven.
These enormously varied interpretations of the maze kept weaving themselves into
the five sessions as the children were often connecting laterally with what was emerging
in the oral dialogue. When Karin discussed some of her interpretations with their
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regular teacher they discovered that merely reflecting on short episodes of transcripts
gave a false impression of how these children were thinking and reasoning. When con-
sidering all sessions together, certain patterns about the maze space emerged and it is
these threads that create the text-ile which allows different kinds of readings – one
of connectedness, building on ideas, temporal sequencing, sometimes logical, some-
times trying out several (sometimes contradictory) explanations and hypotheses.
For example, when Leanne proposed an alternative explanation for why the ele-
phants were fighting (see Figure 2 for the artistic positioning of the birds on the
page), the following brief exchange emerged:

Leanne: I think that the birds were irritating them and then the white and black elephants
got the jungle to hurt them.
Bridget: But in the book it said.
KM: Can you remember where this was? Can you show us?
Leanne [Reading out loud]: ‘Once all the elephants in the world were black or white. They
loved all creatures’.

In this episode above, an alternative reading was possible, but the suggestion was
also put to the critical test and supported by looking for evidence in the book.
Drawing on Roland Barthes, Sipe argues that words and pictures limit each other, at
the same time, but in different ways (2012, p. 10). In other words, the interplay of these
two sign systems introduces criticality and sets limits to creativity. Importantly, oral
work involves a different kind of temporal sequencing – it is like a line or a chain.
Visual art, on the other hand, involves more diffuse cognitive activities. Readers of
images tend to ‘gaze on, dwell upon, or contemplate them’, while verbal narratives
spur readers in a forward, linear direction (Sipe, 1998, p. 100).
We propose that the drawing activity did at least two things. First, it imaginatively
set boundaries to what might be possible by drawing attention to the spatial conditions
of the story interpretation. For example, after making the drawings, the children
expressed ideas like: the elephants might get stuck, the maze is too small for elephants
to live and elephants cannot get married because they are too big for a wedding dress
and besides they have no hands for a wedding ring. Second, the drawing activity pro-
voked further questioning. One boy wrote: ‘Why did they want to be in peace?’ and
‘How do the elephants play in the maze?’ In other words, the different spatial and tem-
poral dimensions involved in the various sign systems influence the kinds of opportu-
nities for meaning-making and provide an epistemological context that is always
shifting, evolving and indeterminate – like Lewis’ pond ecosystem mentioned earlier.
 1094 J. Haynes and K. Murris
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Figure 4. Troy Wiggill’s drawing.

Commentary
The particular expertise these young children brought to the classroom was their
capacity to make meaning across a variety of sign systems, including the visual. Our
analysis of the practical examples supports Andrew Stables’ proposal to regard children
 Early Child Development and Care 1095

as ‘semiotic engagers’ (Stables, 2008, p. 4) as an alternative to the kind of deficit think-

ing (not yet like that of an older child or an adult) that developmental theories tend to
suggest.
Putting effort into validating a classroom space for children’s thinking is crucial.
This means inviting learners to be curious, to be surprised and to formulate questions
that will provide the basis for discussion. It also involves normalising disagreement
and, most importantly, it requires the teacher to let go of solely content-based objectives
and to learn how to follow the children’s thinking. Finally, it implies allocating and pro-
tecting the necessary regular slot in the timetable and making various means of artistic
expression routinely available.
By focusing initially on the oral work usually associated with PwC, Karin had
missed many of the creative, lateral and critical connections the children were
making across the various sign systems. Linking the five sessions afterwards through
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the examination of what the same children were saying, either in pairs, small groups
or plenary, and comparing these with their drawings and written work, revealed the
children’s developing thinking, which otherwise would have gone by unnoticed or dis-
missed as contradictory or fanciful, magical and not to be taken seriously. Balancing the
critical and the creative is delicate, uncertain and complex, foregrounding a critical and
reflexive pedagogy. As Van Manen (1991, p. 150) proposes, being alongside children,
we soon ‘start to question and doubt ourselves. Pedagogy is this questioning, this
doubting’.
These episodes highlight the importance of carefully examining the complex web of
verbal and written signs, the illustrations as well as the children’s drawings, in an effort
to prevent epistemic injustice. Interpreting the undetermined interplay between the
different sign systems provokes infinite readings ‘beyond’ the text and opens up pro-
found beliefs about how young children’s ideas might bring something new and pro-
found into the world. Especially in the early years, this kind of PwC practice can
provoke profound disequilibrium and create an ethical and epistemological agenda
for teacher education about intricately related topics such as the nature of knowledge,
educational progress, children’s ownership, meeting the unexpected and avoidance of
the unknown.12 Collaborative thinking between teachers and children is a social,
rational, affective and imaginative practice. Its identity is explicitly and implicitly
shaped by teachers’ ideas, and therefore informs what is ‘worthwhile’ in class. Often
unexamined beliefs, one’s own school experiences and deep-seated emotions, con-
nected with freedom, control, power and social status, influence how we conceptualise
education, how we decide what is worthwhile and who is worth listening to from an
epistemic perspective.
We try to work for thoughtful and inclusive practice that values the magical spaces
that are opened up through picturebooks, and that provokes children to use their
imagination, to think out loud, to suggest ideas that are not necessarily their own
and to test their ideas playfully with others. This requires adults to take up a listening,
guiding and co-enquiring role, and to make space for fantasy as a meaning-making tool
– to impregnate (following Lewis’ metaphor) words and pictures with children’s own
fictional and real-life narratives. PwC builds on young children’s often experimental
stance with new ideas, their ability to think out loud and to change their mind often
without strong attachment to particular beliefs.
The narrative maze device turned out to trigger very diverse and imaginative ideas.
These young children had seemed very absorbed and motivated to fill in the deliberate
semantic ‘gaps’ made by the artist between words and images and by deliberately
 1096 J. Haynes and K. Murris

withholding information in both sign systems. The readers of the story had to figure out
for themselves the problem of how the elephants happen to be grey; it is in this sense
that picturebooks can be a powerful vehicle for developing thinking.
Creating meaning through stories involves not only making logical connections
between abstract concepts, but also making imaginative, affective connections. The
everyday and the unfamiliar can be topics for philosophical investigation when
offered in the contexts of a narrative and people’s own storied experiences. As theorists
such as Egan (1991, 1995) have argued, narrative understanding is fundamental to the
ways in which human beings make sense of their lives. Presenting de-contextualised
arguments for logical analysis strips philosophical practice of meaning and can lead
to unhelpful abstractions. The body, the emotions and direct reference to lived experi-
ences are all central to the process of meaning-making in philosophical enquiry and are
necessary to reasonable judgement and practical wisdom.13
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Conceptions of childhood and implicit and naturalised discourses about child

inform how adults experience and interpret their educational encounters with children
(the empirical bodies of a certain age in their classrooms). We used Fricker’s (2007)
notion of ‘epistemic injustice’ to argue that philosophising with young children is a
practice that both exposes forms of epistemic injustice against children as well as
showing us possible ways to work with epistemic trust and epistemic equality in the
classroom. The blurring of reality and fantasy in Tusk tusk allowed the children to
feel at ease in the playful and intellectual juggling of ideas that the complex
artwork provoked. The various dialogues were engaging for young and adult, and
were also memorable because of the space between the imaginative and the everyday,
through ‘what if’ kinds of questions and through the construction of other possible
worlds. Elephants as narrative characters that love, marry, fight, hate and kill
express the kinds of metaphorical thinking that gives rationality life, colour and
meaning (Egan, 1991, p. 86).
Anthropomorphism is part of many cultural traditions, enabling expression of the
complexity of human relationships with nature and with reality. As a literary technique,
it extends our ability to use language to create meanings that we struggle to express in
literal terms. It is found in many works of literature that are aimed at adults. Corradi-
Fiumara (1995, p. 72) explores metaphor as interaction between language and life, a
process that bridges the segregated classes of body and mind and the accustomed dis-
tinctions of rational versus instinctual. She suggests:

Through a metaphoric appreciation of language, knowledge is seen not so much as the

task of ‘getting reality right’ but rather as the enterprise of developing linguistic habits
for coping with whatever reality-in-the-making we may have to confront.

In terms of children’s ‘voices’ in philosophical enquiry, different ‘readings’ of

classroom dialogues can be more or less sympathetic, expressing either distance or
proximity between adults and children. Each reflects an epistemological position.
Some interpretations are much closer to concern with the expression of children’s
voices, highlighting the interrelationship of ethics and epistemology so clearly
shown by Fricker’s (2007) work discussed earlier. We are interested in ‘readings’
of interaction with children that penetrate what Gaita (2004) refers to as ‘the realm
of meaning’. Gaita draws on his contemplation of the relationship between humans
and animals to explore what it means to be fully human and to track the foundations
of ethical thought. He argues that this understanding is often shaped by stories and
 Early Child Development and Care 1097

that it is an error to assume that the cognitive content of such stories has to be
extracted from its storytelling form, as science and philosophy are wont to do, in
order to arrive at its factual or conceptual value. The literary or artistic forms of
such stories are critical to the sphere of human meaning to which they relate. Gaita
(2004, p. 105) suggests almost everything important in human life occurs in the
realm of meaning. He reminds readers:

Think how often literature and art more generally give us reason to say that we have come
to see meaning where we had not before, or deeper meaning than we had thought possible,
or even sometimes sense where we had not seen it. These are ways of seeing that are
characteristic of the realm of meaning.

Woolley’s (1997, p. 992) psychologically based research on magical thinking

suggests that ‘children live in a world in which fantasy and reality are more intertwined
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than they are for adults’. She concludes that differences between adults and children are
both cultural context and domain specific. However, she also argues that explanations
of the world in terms of magic, science and religion co-exist in the minds of children
and adults alike. The human capacity to creatively manage the co-existence of these
different ‘domains’ of thinking, ‘rational’ and ‘imaginary’, has been part of the argu-
ment of this paper.

Conclusion
Although it is tempting to respond to the children’s ideas about elephants with endear-
ment and sentimentality, we have argued that a reflexive analysis of some classroom
work reveals a more complex picture. PwC can help both to expose and to interrogate
dominant forms of discourse and their interpretation. ‘Philosophy’ and ‘child’ form a
creative collision that reveals political discourses of rights, power, rationality, knowl-
edge and competence. We agree with Kohan (1998, p. 7) who suggests that:

Children will build their own philosophies, in their own manner. We will not correct the
exclusion of children’s philosophical voices by showing that they can think like adults; on
the contrary, that would be yet another way of silencing them.

In saying ‘think like adults’ Kohan is not seeking to amplify differences

between child and adult thinking, but to question the practice of measuring all phi-
losophical thinking against a certain yardstick of narrow rationality associated with
particular forms of ‘adult’ discourse. This is a significant point as many proponents
of PwC tend to stress the need for accelerated acquisition of tools of logic and argu-
ment associated with some schools of academic philosophy. Our work within the
international field of PwC has been to question such narrow and instrumental
views. Inspired by semiotics, it proposes alternatives, while trying to avoid new
forms of marginalisation for young children. We seek to challenge the preoccupa-
tion with age and to propose inter-generational enquiry. We argue that PwC can
be transformative, providing a key to more inclusive and meaningful experiences
of education through imaginative and responsive forms of enquiry. The likelihood
of such imaginative philosophising seems to hinge partly on whether adults have
the confidence, knowledge and resourcefulness to respond creatively and playfully,
rather than work exclusively to promote children’s so-called skills in the perform-
ance of thinking.
 1098 J. Haynes and K. Murris

Acknowledgements
We are very grateful to Troy Wiggill and Charne Steyn for the use of their work to support the
arguments in the paper. Special thanks to the principal of Woodland Primary School in Johan-
nesburg and in particular the Grade 2 children and their teacher Robyn Thompson for their gen-
erous permission to work with and to learn from them. Also, thanks to Prof Graham Hall for the
audio-visual support. Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to David McKee and
Andersen Press for their permission to reproduce the two illustrations from Tusk tusk
(McKee, 1978).

Notes
1. Throughout our work and this paper we have adopted the use of the term ‘child’ without
including an article ‘the’ to try and distance ourselves from the practice of talking about
‘the child’ as having a set of essential and universal characteristics, and often resulting
in the marginalisation of children, but still to allow discussion of the concept: ‘child’.
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‘Children’ denotes particular children, living in particular times and places.

2. Semiotics is the study of signs and sign processes and the shared and shifting meanings
attached to them. Semiotics has become a very significant source of understanding in the
development of contemporary theories of reading development, particularly in the
context of the kind of multi-modal and multimedia texts that children encounter and
the meanings they attribute to those texts as independent thinkers and in the context of
their conversations with others. Many writers in the field of reading development and
in the field of childhood studies draw on semiotics to support the argument that children
are active meaning-makers.
3. We have adopted the term ‘picturebook’ in our publications and following some others in
the field of picturebook scholarship. This is to help characterise and denote an emerging
and highly distinctive genre of literature.
4. See Part 1 of our Picturebooks, pedagogy and philosophy (Haynes & Murris, 2012) as
well as the summary of criteria for selecting picturebooks for philosophical enquiry on
pages 119–121.
5. This paper concerns work with young children but we have also found that picturebooks
are powerful philosophical texts for all age groups.
6. See in particular Browne’s fascinating autobiographical reflections on his choice of art
styles for his picturebook Little beauty (Browne & Browne, 2011, pp. 218–224).
7. In South Africa this phase encompasses the ages four to nine. Karin was full-time
member of staff at the University of the Witwatersrand until June 2012.
8. This is a Grade 2 class and four of the children have repeated a year at some point in the
Foundation Phase, which is quite common in South Africa.
9. For explicit support in using this picturebook philosophically, see Murris and Haynes
(2010).
10. For more examples of this kind of censorship see Haynes and Murris (2012).
11. Pseudonyms have been used for the examples, but not when referring to the copies of the
children’s work that have also been included in this paper.
12. For an in-depth discussion, see Haynes and Murris (2011).
13. See in particular Chapter Four of Picturebooks, pedagogy and philosophy for an elabor-
ation of our discussion of narratives and philosophical enquiry with children and the
notion of picturebooks as philosophical texts.

Notes on contributors
Dr Joanna Haynes is Associate Professor in Education Studies and directs the PhD Programme
in the School of Education at Plymouth University. Working in collaboration with Karin Murris
since 1994, Joanna and Karin have made a distinctive contribution to theory and practice in the
field of philosophy with children. Joanna has researched and published widely in the field. She is
author of Children as philosophers (2002, 2008, Routledge), which has been translated into
several languages, and recently co-authored Picturebooks, pedagogy and philosophy (2012,
Routledge Research in Education Series).
 Early Child Development and Care 1099

Karin Murris (PhD) is Associate Professor at the School of Education, University of Cape Town
(UCT), and programme leader of the PGCE Foundation Phase. Her research interests include
philosophy of education, philosophy with children (P4C), Reggio Emilia, child and childhood
Studies, children’s literature, school ethics, ethical decision-making, censorship, corporal pun-
ishment, early literacy, research ethics. Karin pioneered the use of picturebooks for P4C and
helped conceptualise and implement the teacher education of P4C in the UK before moving
to South Africa in 2009. She has extensively published professional articles and academic
papers (see: www.karinmurris.com) as well as books Teaching philosophy with picture books
(1992), and (with Joanna Haynes) Storywise: Thinking through stories (2002), Picturebooks,
pedagogy and philosophy (2012; Routledge Research in Education Series). Teaching philos-
ophy with picture books formed the basis of an early literacy research project in West Wales
in 1994/1995.

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