Searching for (our own) words: philosophy and subjectivity

Writing about philosophical practice with children requires a memory of the body, a body that holds on to what is important to itself. My memory begins with my contact with the ideas of Matthew Lipman and the new ideas brought by his words, and continues with the need to change some of them and assign different meanings to others. Since my reading of the thinkers of the so called "Frankfurt School," some words have taken new meanings to me, and have informed the way I now understand the practice of philosophy with children and its relationship to issues like educational "formation," as well as others. Philosophical practice is unique, and needs to be thought, felt, and experienced; it has its own time and involves the construction and transformation of subjectivity itself. As such, to search for words in philosophy means to chose those words that can help us make sense and give meaning of what we do and think, allowing us to work with our thinking and with its forms of expression, beyond its technical dimension. In this sense, the usual emphasis of philosophy in its more technical dimension leads to an impoverishment of formation as experience, for the latter, which is a fundamental dimension of our lives, is rendered secondary. This has implications for the relationship between adults and children. When they reduce philosophy to a study of the formal capacity of thinking, teachers put students in the condition of a minority, and therefore in some way also put themselves in such a condition. In this paper, the activity of writing - as a way of expressing thought - allows me to conduct a tour my own subjectivity, and to encounter the words that express the meanings that inform what I think and do about my practice with philosophical novels, and about the value of generating texts related to philosophical practice, formation and assessment.