Page - 58 - in Reflective Cosmopolitanism - Educating towards inclusive communities through Philosophical Enquiry

58 REfLECTIvE COsMOPOLITANIsM Exercise: Exploring concepts You can start with a drawing activity. Children can make a drawing of a familiar object such as a tree. • Then the drawings are collected and displayed so that everyone can see them. • Invite the children to talk about the differences and similarities. • Their attention can be shifted to the fact that although the trees on their drawings are all different, the drawings all represent trees – that means that there is some- thing the same about them all. Now the children can explore the shared characteristics of a concept like with re- spect to “their trees”.This exercise helps to understand what concepts in general are by exploring a familiar concept the children have and use already. Leading Idea 2: Language and diversity People who grow up in different countries or different communities often learn different languages as well as different social and linguistic conventions. They are familiar with different rules for acting, for dressing; they have different beliefs and values. They are in- troduced to different texts for different purposes and go to schools that privilege different kinds of knowledge. These are just some of the differences that produce human diversity. As we all are different, diversity includes everyone. People are born into an environment and come to know the world differently. How- ever when people move outside their country or community they learn different ways of being in the world. But also through stories or books we can imagine different ways of living. “Going visiting”, as the philosopher Hannah Arendt puts it, is the way that enables us to make individual and particular acts of judgments. Discussion Plan: Language and diversity 1. What is diversity? 2. Are there some things that are common in every language? 3. Is it important to know more than one language? 4. Are there some features that unite languages? 5. Can we learn from differences? 6. Do you know about the language diversity in your class? Leading Idea 3: Analogies An analogy represents a cognitive process when you transfer information or meaning from one particular context to another one. Analogies express resemblances between two re- lationships or sets of relationships and can be seen as a way of articulating correspond- ences. Analogies demonstrate a type of accordance of objects because they have similar attributes. An analogy can act a model to enrich our understanding through achieving a new way of looking at things. We can make some creative conceptual links between ideas. You can find another exercise about analogies in the manual to Christian, episode 1.