Imagining with Purpose in Childhood: Children as Emerging Agents Envisioning Lives Worth Valuing

(Hardback)

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Imagining with Purpose in Childhood explores the question: How might moral imagining be conceived to support the cultivation of responsible autonomy in childhood It argues that when conceived as a conscious, flexible process, moral imagining may contribute to childrens emerging agency by expanding and enriching their envisioned options for what they believe is worth valuing within their current and future circumstances, thereby helping to make their autonomy more responsible. Natalie M. Fletcher proposes the conception of deliberate moral imagining, understood as the purposeful envisioning of a given context from multiple frames of reference in response to a real-world encounter, with the goal of bringing to light possibilities for what seems reasonable to value in order to broaden the moral lens through which lived experiences are approached and assessed. This book explores how deliberate moral imagining may assist children in confronting some important challenges to responsible autonomy that risk constricting their envisioning of the overarching contexts most influential in childhood: their relation to others (how they view and treat them), their relation to self (how they perceive and value themselves) and their relation to knowledge (how they learn and what they claim to know about the world). In response to the respective challenges of narrow empathetic scope, conversion inhibition and inaccurate pseudoenvironments, deliberate moral imagining may help enrich childrens mental landscape by cultivating relational openness through three crucial autonomy supports: empathic engagement, self-efficacy and reasonableness. The book draws on three theoretical frameworksneo-Aristotelian virtue theory, the Capabilities Approach and classical pragmatismand includes a case study of the Philosophy for Children program as an illustrative example of deliberate moral imagining in action.

Reviews

Natalie M. Fletcher has delivered a conceptual blockbuster, argued with rigorous cogency, which lays the theoretical groundwork for an emergent philosophy of childhood and a corresponding philosophy of dialogical education. She tracesthrough the canons of moral philosophy from Aristotle to Dewey and beyondthe normative concepts of responsible autonomy, emergent agency, empathic engagement, and epistemic flexibility as they figure in childrens developmental processes as moral agents. Most valuably, she applies her thorough theoretical exploration of what she calls imaginative practice to the concrete project of organizing communities of philosophical inquiry for children, a project that represents an evolutionary advance in the principles and practice of moral education. * David Kennedy, Montclair State University, USA *
Fletchers adventurous philosophical practice with children and adolescents is utterly inspiring, and this book offers us a written expression of this work in the form of a thoughtful manifesto for the vibrancy of childhood/s. Fletchers attention on the role of moral imagination and particular qualities of empathic engagement, self-efficacy, and epistemic flexibility is an insightful, stirring and timely contribution to the re-imagination of childhood/s and the growing movement for childism. * Joanna Haynes, University of Plymouth, England. *

Author Bio

Natalie M. Fletcher is affiliate professor in the department of philosophy at the University of Montreal, Canada.