In Community of Inquiry with Ann Margaret Sharp

Ann Margaret Sharp, American philosopher of education, believed that friends could, in fact, be quite critical of one another. Writing in her essay, “What is a Community of Inquiry,” she states,

. . . but children know that the group has taken on a great significance for them: each one’s happiness means as much to each of them as their own. They truly care for each other as persons, and this care enables them to converse in ways they never have before. They can engage in inquiry without fear of rebuff or humiliation. They can try out ideas that they never would have thought of expressing before just to see what happens.

(45)¹

I am grateful to the friends of Sharp who spent time in pursuit of understanding her work and its intersections with the fields of philosophy of education, childhood studies, and educational theory in the book, In Community of Inquiry with Ann Margaret Sharp. The work is a welcome addition to any practitioner of Philosophy for Children, students working in philosophy and childhood, and scholars of pragmatist movements in the United States, especially those working within the intersections of feminism and education. It seems that Sharp is quite right—friends, in particular philosopher friends, can offer a discipline a quite serious body of work.

In the following essay I consider some of the ways this book sheds light on, in Matthew Lipman’s words, ways that, “graceful errors can correct the cave” (41). Here also, I think the errors of the cave itself are being dealt with gracefully. For the clearest point that this work makes is that philosophy for children (like all academic fields) contains gaps, hidden knowledge, and is blind to aspects of its own creations. And what it is more, it takes cultivated inquiry to shed light on errors of its own discipline and practice. Sharp practiced in this field for many years and was recognized as its international champion, but she was, as this work shows, adding and expanding to its scholarship the entire time. It is beyond time that Sharp be recognized for her important intellectual work. This book stands as a graceful correction to the history of philosophy for children.

In particular, in this review I look at some of Sharp’s scholarship and how it might provide ways to examine positions on personhood and ethics that seem fundamental to addressing the future practice and theory of philosophy for children, as well as the future of teaching and education. Sharp was quite clear that she saw the community of inquiry as offering just this—opportunities for the world to correct itself, to make itself right, however slow that process might be.

Sharp was one of those teachers who saw each of her students as whole persons—messy, complicated, always growing folk. She easily expanded this worldview to recognize children as full persons. As a scholar in this field, I am increasingly interested in locating ways that we might see children’s capacity to act, even within systems of power and oppression. And as Maria Teresa de la Garza argues in her essay “Education for liberation,” Sharp’s work, though not appearing overtly political, resided in a deep commitment to recognizing that those who are oppressed must have justice. Hers was a steady commitment to hear the voices of children and women, to show an underlying argument that the purpose of education is to free. This theme runs throughout Sharp’s earlier writing and her later educational theory, and is well explored in de la Garza’s essay as well as in the commentaries by Jenifer Glaser and Stephan Olivero. As de la Garza writes, “[Sharp] worked tirelessly to allow the unheard voices of women and children to resound loudly and clearly all over the world” (134). One clarification that de la Garza in particular helps readers recognize is that Sharp’s liberatory commitment goes beyond the simple view that children and women are epistemologically privileged by their oppression. Rather, Sharp, according to de la Garza, specifically sees in children the capacity of the critic as a progressive change...