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This thesis explores the practice of Philosophy for/with Children (P4C) in Irish Educate Together schools through teacher perspectives, encompassing wider themes of education and democracy in Ireland. Within this exploration is a focus on the articulation and analysis of teachers’ accounts of how they reconcile P4C pedagogies with their own educational outlooks within a P4C/Educate Together context, comprised of both their particular Educate Together school and the movement as a whole. The historical, social and political factors that led to the Educate Together movement’s development are charted, alongside other factors related to distinctive approaches to P4C practice in Ireland. The outcomes of this study show that focusing on child-centered perspectives expands and extends democracy as emergent and democracy as ‘a way of life’, particularly in terms of the possibility of democratic education in Ireland, enabled and enhanced through a P4C/Educate Together context. This research is a lived enquiry, involving deep immersion in the research environment as an embedded extern – that is, as both a researcher and a P4C practitioner. The ‘livedness’ of this research incorporates the social dimension of John Dewey’s theory of enquiry, where a combination of lived experiences and dialogic exchanges were fused together by the social relationships forged throughout my research journey. A thematic analysis of participant interviews encase the unfolding events of this reflexive practitioner research. This study reveals an interrelationship between P4C and Educate Together that encompasses the shared territories of dialogue and child. Such an interrelationship enables the creation of democratic spaces, inhabited by both adults and children, and facilitated by Irish Educate Together teachers engaging in P4C within their classrooms, expressed through the idea of democracy as ‘becoming’. Such a contextual space provide opportunities for adults and children to live and learn in and through democratic processes. By showing how democracy can be enacted as a living value in this way, the implications of this study point towards the importance of educational policy and practice at a time when global educational policy seems to be moving further and further towards a market-led consumer-based idea of education, where standards of attainment, centralised models and technical rationality is priority. Further implications of this study relate to educational research, particularly practitioner research, with regard to the depth of insight revealed through a lived enquiry as an embedded extern, and concern the conceptualisation and realisation of an emergent sense of democracy where children are central.

The aim of this study was to design and research an intervention to develop the dialogic thinking skills of children in Key Stage 1. Dialogic thinking was conceptualised by drawing on strands of research from critical thinking and dialogic theory, together with argumentation and Philosophy with Children (PwC). The study took a Buberian stance to dialogue as oscillating between dialogic and non-dialogic relationships. The research methodology was design-based research (DBR) in order develop and trial an intervention within authentic settings and with practitioners as research collaborators. Following initial field and scoping work, the Playground of Ideas intervention was designed. It is a picture-based intervention that is used with PwC questions to explicitly teach children dialogic thinking skills. It was then trialled in a local context and an extended context with 10 classes across England. Revisions were made to improve the design following these iterations, and the intervention was evaluated. Children took a non-verbal reasoning test individually and groups of three, and their pre- and post-test scores were compared. The group tests were also video recorded and analysed to identify changes in the children's talk. Children's reasoning scores in both tests increased following the intervention, and also there was a great variation in children's dialogue patterns to problem-solve and the roles that they took within the dialogue also showed greater variation: initiator, corroborator and questioner roles were distributed among the group members. This indicates that children were not positioning themselves or others 'as' a particular role, and that this resulted in a variety of strategies. A further outcome from this iteration was to use these insights to generate a new means by which teachers can assess if children are developing dialogic thinking in small group settings. This was theorised as oscillating asymmetry in peer relationships by building on Buber's concepts.

Erika Cudworth's Developing Ecofeminist Theory provides a helpful foundation for a non-essentialist, properly intersectional ecofeminist account of oppression, marginalization, and domination, but her rejection of what she refers to as "postmodernism" appears to be based on a misreading of Judith Butler. I attempt to provide a synthesis of Cudworth's framework with Butler, particularly through the use of Karen Barad's agential realism, in order to provide possibility for new alliances between ecofeminism and other anti-oppressive frameworks. I then examine what it might look like to do ecofeminist praxis, given the complex view of agency, ontology, and intersectionality rendered by such a synthesis. I draw from bicycling as an example from which to extrapolate what it means to resist oppression, and then draw from the Philosophy for Children movement to consider what such resistance might look like within the classroom. This dissertation thus attempts to move from theory to practice, recognizing that "the real world" is both always at hand and also subject to performative deconstruction.