About Jason Buckley

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.

The philosophy workshops that are the bulk of my work bring these three strands together.

Most of my work revolves around Philosophy for Children (P4C), a well-developed pedagogy which is very enjoyable and rewarding for both pupils and teachers.

Last year 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. This 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.

My research interests in P4C centre on creating structures that help teachers succeed after limited training in this very different pedagogy.

I am building a library of Thinkers’ Games to promote dialogue and reflection across the curriculum, and am developing an approach called ‘philosophy in role’ which links philosophical enquiries together through interactive storytelling.

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