About Jason Buckley

In my favourite river, the Wye

I attended a grammar school in the bad old days when that was considered provision enough for gifted children.

Fed up with coasting along, I left to teach myself A Levels and gained a place to read philosophy at Corpus Christi, Cambridge.

After university, I embarked on a curious career embracing firework shops, the manufacture of garden trellis, online voteswapping and rethinking search engines.

Eventually, I went into teaching, culminating in a couple of very happy years teaching English and other subjects at Sutton Grammar School for Boys. There I was able to see the immediate appeal that philosophical problems have for bright children.

During this time I became deeply involved in outdoor education, and progressed to setting up a business to run expedition leadership courses for sixth formers. Sadly, government funding policy changed and that business, for all its community benefits, ceased to be viable.

This rather eclectic CV has given me an unusual set of skills, combining expertise in philosophy and outdoor education with an affinity for the needs of gifted children. While I still run D of E expeditions during the season, most of my work now revolves around Philosophy for Children (P4C), a well-developed pedagogy which is very enjoyable and rewarding for both pupils and teachers.

In 2009 I was fortunate to be able to attend a week-long seminar last June with the International Association of Philosophy for Children at the Mendham retreat  in New Jersey. Last year I presented a paper on my “Philosophy in Role” approach to the conference of the North American Association for the Community of Inquiry, held in Querétaro, Mexico. These events have been a privilege personally and professionally, and they are a chance to re-experience as a participant the intellectual buzz and fellowship that is the aim of a good facilitator. The crickets tasted good too.

P4C is the most collaborative community I have ever worked in, which is why I am at pains to point out that “THE philosophy man” is a moniker of marketing, not megalomania; what Plato described as the “additional art of wages” that sustains a profession, but is not the profession itself. There are many philosophymen and philosophywomen who have been doing this far longer than I have and who have been very generous in sharing their ideas. Some of them are listed in the acknowledgements page for Pocket P4C.

My research and writing interests have converged on an effort to support teachers long-term in making the shift to the very different pedagogy. By “showing my working” in terms of the underlying structures of the stuff I write, I hope to empower teachers to create their own resources as well as providing them with specific, ready-to-go examples. It seems to be working, as I come away from every teacher training course with more resources than I had when I went in.