ABSTRACT
The broad brush outline of the community of inquiry from the last chapter leaves it still a rather nebulous notion. Drawing explicitly on the work of Peirce, Dewey and Vygotsky, the Philosophy for Children movement has adopted the phrase ‘community of inquiry’ and applied it to the classroom. The founder of Philosophy for Children says:
we can now speak of ‘converting the classroom into a community of inquiry’ in which students listen to one another with respect, build on one another’s ideas, challenge one another to supply reasons for otherwise unsupported opinions, assist each other in drawing inferences from what has been said, and seek to identify one another’s assumptions. A community of inquiry attempts to follow the inquiry where it leads rather than being penned in by the boundary lines of existing disciplines. A dialogue that tries to conform to logic, it moves forward like a boat tacking into the wind, but in the process its progress comes to resemble that of thinking itself. Consequently, when this process is internalised or introjected by the participants, they come to think in moves that resemble its procedures. They come to think as the process thinks.
