Citizenship Education KRA and the Centre for Citizenship Education
“Who am I?”: Reflections on
identity, citizenship, and morality
16 April, 2009 (Thursday)
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Chair: Dr. FAIRBROTHER, Gregory Paul
Speaker : Prof. Laurance Splitter
Abstract
In this presentation, I will examine the relationship between being a citizen and being a (human) person, with a particular focus on the question “How do children conceptualize themselves in the world?”. I will argue that a proper understanding of identity implies that such “collective” concepts as citizenship (including global citizenship), culture, religion, ethnicity,… cannot adequately answer the question “Who am I?”, because none of these concepts yields appropriate identity criteria for their individual members. Collective concepts do have value and meaning in our lives, but not because they define who we are (as individuals). The task of self-definition and self-conceptualization is one that classrooms are, perhaps uniquely, suited to. The same is true for the contentious area of moral education where, I will suggest, the concept of personhood offers a more coherent way forward than that of citizenship.
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Prof Laurance Splitter joined HKIEd in September 2008. He holds Honors degrees in philosophy and mathematics from Monash University, and Masters and Doctorate degrees in philosophy, from the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. In 1997, he was elected a Fellow of the Australian College of Education.
His early work in education centred on introducing philosophy into Australian schools and his long-standing commitment to the teaching of higher-order/critical thinking, inquiry and dialogue to children and adults. From 1988 to June 2001, he was Principal Research Fellow and Director of the Centre for Philosophy with Children and Adolescents, within the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER).
Between 2001 and 2008, he taught in schools of education at several universities in New York City and New Jersey. He has conducted workshops, seminars and conference sessions with teachers, parents, administrators and students in many countries, including Australia, USA, Hong Kong, New Zealand, China, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, Philippines, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Iceland, Austria, Canada, and England.
Prof. Splitter has been a visiting scholar at Montclair State University and the University of Hong Kong, and a consultant on education and well-being with the Victorian, Tasmanian, Hong Kong and Singapore Governments. He has published widely in the areas of philosophy for children, dialogue and questioning, classroom environments appropriate for cultivating critical, creative and “caring” thinking, Socratic inquiry, identity politics, gifted education, concept formation, dispositions, authenticity, values and citizenship education, and pedagogy. For more than twenty-five years, he has observed and taught in primary and secondary classes, with a view to modelling what teaching for better thinking looks like in practice.
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