Abstract

Developmental accounts of intellectual humility (IH) are currently emerging and thus little is known about how children engage in IH and which contexts may support its development. Further, IH has yet to be operationalized within a dialogic context in childhood. Philosophy for/with Children (P4wC) is a pedagogy that has been heavily theorized to foster epistemic virtues such as IH, and may be an informative context within which to study IH in children. The present study is a longitudinal, instrumental case study analysis of the development of IH in the context of P4wC dialogues among five children who participated in activities associated with a P4wC-based charity over four years between 2015-2018. From a situative analytic lens, this study elucidates how children’s participation in P4wC dialogues supports the development of IH. My findings suggest four categories of discursive indicators associated with IH and two broad categories of indicators associated with a lack of IH. The categories associated with IH are: self-correction, openness to others, willingness to doubt and labelling one’s own perspective. Categories associated with a lack of IH are: asserting and defense to disagreement. My findings also suggest potential developmental patterns within indicators of IH, such that meta-cognitive or explicit expressions appeared after time and experience. Furthermore, this study demonstrates how dialogue type and facilitator scaffolding impact indicators of IH. Overall, this study provides evidence to suggest that children are capable of demonstrating and developing IH, and that P4wC is a good pedagogical context to foster and study IH in childhood.