Abstract:

Universities are expected to address student´s mental health not only through crisis interventions, but also through preventive and developmental practices that strengthen resilience, socio-emotional competencies, meaning-making, and help-seeking. In this context, Philosophy for Children (P4C) as an educational strategy created by M. Lipman, particularly through the community of inquiry, offers a structured dialogical educational strategy that can support reflective, participatory, and meaning-oriented forms of student´s support. This theoretical study compares university counselling and possible implementation of P4C into the university setting as partially convergent dialogical practice and argues that their methodological overlap justifies systematic conceptual comparison in higher education. Using a comparative theoretical-methodological design, the paper analyses both approaches in terms of aims, procedures, facilitator roles, participant positions, expected outcomes, ethical boundaries, and institutional applicability. On this basis, it proposes a P4C-informed counselling model for higher education: a low-threshold, group-based, preventive format in which a facilitator introduces a student-relevant stimulus, supports question generation and selection, moderates a structured community of inquiry, and closes with guided reflection and signposting to further support where needed. In practice, such a format could be used, for example, in a university counselling centre or first-year support program, where students collectively face questions of stress, belonging, or academic identity without entering a therapeutic setting. The paper further adapts this model to the Slovak higher education context with reference to Act No. 300/2025 Coll. on Higher Education and the national mental-health policy represented by the Government Council of the Slovak Republic for Mental Health (RVDZ). Although theoretical rather than empirical, the study identifies concrete implications for practice, including the design of preventive group interventions, collaboration between counselling and educational staff, facilitator training, and referral protocols for students whose needs exceed the scope of dialogical work. It concludes that P4C can enrich higher education support ecosystems by expanding reflective and participatory opportunities for mental health promotion without replacing psychotherapy or specialized crisis intervention.

Keywords:

Counselling, higher education, mental health promotion, philosophy for children, P4C, community of inquiry, comparative methodology, socio-emotional development, Slovakia.