Entering, Deepening and Furthering the Dialogue: Relaxation as a Preparation for Doing Philosophy

Abstract

Introduction:  During the 1984, '85 and '86 school years, I trained a number of teachers in the White Plains School District to work with the Pixie, Harry and Lisa programs.  One of the teachers, Nancy Gumbinner, was so impressed with the quality of the discussions she had with her fourth grade students in the district's More Able Student Program during the 1984-85 school year that she decided to use some of the exercises from the Pixie manual to see if she could promote similar discussions the following year with a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, heterogeniously grouped class of fourth graders at the district's Post Road School without using Pixie.  To enable the children to enter into a reflective, critical and eventually autonomously dialectical mode of thinking without the help of the models provided by the novel, Nancy decided to train them in some basic relaxation techniques which would enable them to become aware of, reflect upon, criticize and share both their thinking and their thinking about their own and one another's thinking.  She did this in three ways: physically, imaginatively, and intellectually.