Book review: Maughn Rollins Gregory and Megan Jane Laverty (eds), Community of Inquiry with Ann Margaret Sharp: Childhood, Philosophy and Education

Abstract

Feminist philosopher–educator Ann Margaret Sharp co-founded the Philosophy for Children Programme (P4C) with Matthew Lipman. They established a trans-disciplinary field of scholarship in philosophy of education, childhood and pedagogy, sparking an international movement (Gregory et al., 2017; Haynes, 2018). Lipman’s name is well known, and he is often given sole credit for the methods of P4C, while Sharp’s educational activism and scholarship in philosophy, education and P4C have rarely been given the full recognition they deserve. Sharp’s ideas have been lovingly assembled in this rich and skillfully edited collection of a range of her writing, interwoven with appreciative and critical commentaries from a selected group of committed P4C scholars who know her work very well and who genuinely engage with her ideas in their own theorising and practice. One of the many achievements of this volume is that the approach to writing and editing has been carried out in keeping with the spirit and process of community of inquiry, so that the content and style are dancing in dialogic harmony, generating new questions for philosophy and education. Sharp’s educational preoccupations lay with growth and love. She is associated with a politicised relational theory, ethics of care and the emancipatory scope and potential of the community of philosophical inquiry. Her enlivened, subversive sense of the community of inquiry emerged through experience of residential work with marginalised teenagers, college teaching, her feminist life, and reading of literature and philosophers that shaped her thinking, including, among others, Nietzsche, Arendt, Dewey and Weil. Sharp saw the community of inquiry as a democratic practice of engaged philosophy and integral part of her teaching and personal life; making for intergenerational connections through shared philosophical dialogue, fed by imagination and experience, pointing to action for the good. Philosopher practitioners have continued to problematise and creatively enliven this method of the community of inquiry, in professional development, teaching and research 1003770 TRE0010.1177/14778785211003770Theory and Research in EducationBook review book-review2021