Philosophy for teachers (P4T) in South Africa–re-imagining provision to support new teachers’ applied ethical decision-making

Conventional teacher education programmes do not equip practitioners adequately to navigate ethically complex situations that arise in teaching (Maxwell et al 2016). One initiative responding to this deficit is ‘Philosophy for Teachers’ (‘P4T’), a twenty four hour residential approach to community philosophy. Piloted originally in England (Orchard et al 2016), a further workshop took place in South Africa in October 2017, comprising student teachers, teacher educators and philosophers from three historically different universities in the Western Cape . Significant new insights to emerge included greater clarity on the respective contributions of P4T and other initiatives already applying ‘P4C’ to address professional ethics (e.g. Murris 2016) within teacher education. In particular, P4T re-framed within this new context can be seen to create shared space for reflection on teacher identity and the complexity of difference amd ‘otherness’ in classroom practice.