Volume 27, 2008
Philosophy for Children
Chun-Hee Lee, Daeryun Chung
Pages 45-54
Young Children's Caring Thinking
The purpose of this paper was to enhance caring thinking of young children through the community of philosophical inquiry. To find out how young children's caring thinking is expressed in the community of inquiry, the inquiry has been conducted against 5-year old children for 12 weeks a total of 24 times and the whole process has been recorded. Then, the collected data have been thoroughly analyzed. According to the analysis, young children with the community of inquiry showed 5 types of caring thinking and 38 kinds of characteristics. With increase in frequencies of discussion, various characteristics of caring thinking have been observed and a number of caring thinking-related vocabularies increased as well. As caring thinking changes, in addition, a pattern of discussion has also
changed from teacher-child to child-child interaction. In conclusion, research findings indicated that the community of inquiry influenced the improvement of caring thinking. Through the community of philosophical inquiry, young children transformed themselves into thinking entities, showing caring thinking by discovering active meanings on problematic cases requiring care and manifesting it as behavior.