Duration: 2022 – 2024
Principal Researcher
Magda Carvalho
Team Members
Tiago Almeida
Funding
Direção Regional da Ciência e da Tecnologia
Research line:
Education, Citizenship and Inclusion
The Escuto.te project is based on the Master's Degree in Philosophy for Children, from the University of the Azores (UAc), an innovative program in the panorama of specialized training nationally and internationally, which over the last 6 years has brought together students, teachers and specialists from several countries around the intersections between philosophy and childhood. As a research infrastructure, NICA (UAc) has promoted research and dissemination activities in the area, fostering the pioneering work of the RAA in Philosophy for/with Children and in the Philosophy of Childhood. Thus, the UAc today has a qualified group of researchers in different geographical and educational contexts, reaffirming Philosophy as an opportunity to claim the importance of listening to children and the need to promote different expressions of their voices.
The rapprochement between philosophy and childhood is an innovative educational line, constituting an internationally disseminated movement and a field of study with great projection. The aim is to assume the specificity of the UAc's work in this area and, based on voice and listening, to think about a redefinition of educational relationships. Understood as a mark of a plural singularity that occurs in a collective space, the voice communicates and constitutes the very subject that speaks. It is therefore essential to consider its political potential as a critical resistance against the massification and manipulation of thought in the public space. In turn, listening is a specific way of relating to others, in a permanent attention to what is created and reverberated whenever someone speaks. Listening is paying attention to what is not immediately and permanently accessible (as is the case with vision), to what each person is responsible for in the shared space of intersubjectivities and to what each person is (beyond what is verbalized).
Contrary to a vertical dynamic of communication and seeking to ensure that the project is a body for what it intends to study, methodologies will be adopted in which the voice of all those involved, especially children, is considered. The aim is not to research about childhood or for childhood, but with childhood. Thus, the presence of philosophy in Pre-School Education and the 1st Cycle of Basic Education is an opportunity for significant involvement and a privileged space and time for the redefinition of childhood.
The aim is to bring together a group of researchers who will promote different philosophical activities with children (in different geographical and cultural locations) where voice and listening are explored cartographically as political practices in (and of) childhood. From there, priority areas of their school experiences will be identified, encouraging a critical look at discourses and practices through diverse activities and languages. At the same time, formal and informal movements will be tested in which these voices can resonate and affect institutional environments, transforming them into a source of knowledge and viable and legitimate decisions.