Research projects

The Educational Role of Friendship in the Classroom

Research on children’s friendships suggest that they positively impact social-emotional well-being and academic achievement. But friendship is also important to moral education and education for citizenship. Evoking Arendt’s characterization of school as an intermediate space between home and the public sphere, Anastasia Anderson is developing a philosophical perspective on school friendships that suggests that they create an educational space between the caring relationships one finds between parent/child and the political relationships between fellow citizens. Building on her presentation (The Educational Importance of Friendship) for the Association for Moral Education Conference, she is developing an analysis and defense of the claim that teachers should strive to create classrooms of friends and that this can be achieved through creating communities of philosophical inquiry.

Characterizing the Cognitive Processes Underlying Ownership Reasoning in Childhood

Dr. Madison Pesowski is an Assistant Professor in the Psychology department at UFV and is the director of the Kids in Developmental Science (KIDS) Lab (https://www.ufvkidslab.ca/). Her research investigates the development of social cognition; specifically, how young children reason about people’s emotions, actions, and mental states (e.g., ideas, beliefs, preferences, goals), and how they integrate their understanding of the physical world in this reasoning. Her research project titled, "Characterizing the cognitive processes underlying ownership reasoning in childhood", recently received a $180,000 grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).

Intensive Resonances: A Deleuzian Pedagogy of Difference in Philosophical Inquiry with Children

Dr. Arthur Wolf’s current research reconstructs and rethinks core concepts like immanence, affect, thinking, time, childhood, learning and embodiment within political and educational contexts. Drawing on Deleuzian thought, phenomenology, and hermeneutics, his work examines the existential stakes of the relationship between children and education and develops arts-based practices to support philosophical inquiry with children of all ages. This line of research culminates in his forthcoming book Intensive Resonances: A Deleuzian Pedagogy of Difference in Philosophical Inquiry with Children (Bloomsbury, 2026).