Experiencing Dewey

Insights for Today's Classrooms

Donna Adair Breault, Rick Breault

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135019778
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Experiencing Dewey: Insights for Today's Classroom offers an inspiring introduction to one of the most seminal figures in the field of education. In this collection of essays, contemporary authors consider their favorite quotations from John Dewey's bountiful works and share how Dewey has impacted their teaching practices. Responses are organized around the themes introduced in the first edition: active learning, the educative experience, critical thinking, inquiry and education, and democratic citizenship, plus a new section on accountability added for the second edition. Quotes and responses are kept deliberately brief as an effective way of inviting readers to reflect on and experience Dewey.

Co-published with Kappa Delta Pi, International Honor Society in Education, Experiencing Dewey remains a powerful resource for current and aspiring teachers. This thoroughly updated edition also includes online resources for teacher educators to help facilitate the book's use in higher education courses.

Part I
Accountability

Accountability: To whom, for whom, and by whom?

Rick Breault

Most avid followers of Dewey have probably speculated as to how he would be responding to the testing and accountability movement if he were alive today. Given that Dewey’s last writings were produced more than 30 years before A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983) and its fallout, we can only speculate as to the exact nature of his critique and response. In light of everything he did write and the language of growth, experience, and educative experiences that permeates his educational philosophy, we can be pretty sure that he would find little to support in the ways that learning and accountability are determined in present-day schools. On the other hand, I think Dewey would be greatly concerned about teacher accountability … just not in the limited way it is currently being discussed.

In Democracy and Education (1916/1980), he writes passionately about the accountability (not his word) the philosophy of education has to the social necessity of the curriculum: “As formal teaching and training grow in extent, there is the danger of creating an undesirable split between the experience gained in more direct associations and what is acquired in school” (p. 10). Dewey also writes repeatedly about our accountability to the individuals in our charge.

Education, therefore, must begin with a psychological insight into the child’s capacities, interests, and habits. It must be controlled at every point by reference to these same considerations. These powers, interests, and habits must be continually interpreted—we must know what they mean. (Dewey, 1897/1972, p. 86)

In addition to our accountability to the society and the individual, Dewey reminds us that we who teach are accountable to the methods and insights of science. His words are especially relevant at a time when masses of scientific findings related to issues like global warming or the teaching of evolution are ignored or manipulated in the name of ideology, politics, or religion.

If ever we are to be governed by intelligence, not by things and by words, science must have something to say about what we do, and not merely about how we may do it most easily and economically. And if this consummation is achieved, the transformation must occur through education, by bringing home to men’s habitual inclination and attitude the significance of genuine knowledge and the full import of the conditions requisite for its attainment. (Dewey, 1910/1978, p. 78)

Or in another place, he wrote:

There is but one sure road of access to truth—the road of patient, cooperative inquiry operating by means of observation, experiment, record and controlled reflection. (Dewey, 1933/1986, p. 23)

Most important, in terms of the educational project, Dewey reminds teachers in The Sources of a Science of Education (1929/1984) that if they do not consider their accountability to the processes and findings of science, instead seeing themselves as “mainly channels of reception and transmission” of scientific conclusions, those conclusions “will be badly deflected and distorted before they get into the minds of pupils” (p. 24). What results is teachers who want only recipes and not the “illumination and liberation” (p. 7) that could come from the proper use of science.

Additional reading of Dewey’s work would also find an accountability to the democratic structure of society, to our own need for growth, to the consideration of “a plurality of ideas” (1938/1988, p. 131), and more. In this section we have tried to capture this broad sense of what it means to be held accountable in Deweyan terms. To do that, however, it might be helpful to think more in terms of responsibility than of accountability. The term accountability carries with it images of a narrowly focused bottom line or an assumption of failure. When you search a thesaurus for synonyms for accountability, you find words like answerability, liability, and culpability. All of these speak of punitive consequences and the need to force compliance to policies with no inherent value or larger significance. Responsibility, at least as is used throughout the contributions that follow, speaks more to the obligation we have to our young people, our profession, our craft, and our future. It speaks to what we might think of as a higher calling, a more noble cause.

In Democracy and Education (Dewey, 1916/1980), we are reminded that the purpose of formal education is indeed a noble and, perhaps, irreplaceable one.

As a society becomes more enlightened, it realizes that it is responsible not to transmit and conserve the whole of its existing achievements, but only such as make for a better future society. The school is its chief agency for the accomplishment of this end. … The inclination to learn from life itself and to make the conditions of life such that all will learn in the process of living is the finest product of schooling. (p. 24)

When we take this role seriously we see that we are responsible for far more than any single battery of tests can measure. Considered in light of the rest of Dewey’s writing, we know that we are responsible for a young person’s growth as a moral being; an aesthetic being; a political being; an intellectual being; and, of course, as a being who lives in democratic community with other beings. He knew well, however, how easy it was for schools—even before A Nation at Risk or No Child Left Behind—to lapse into a narrow focus on what is easiest to teach and test but most distant from the child’s lived experience.

There is the standing danger that the material of formal instruction will be merely the subject matter of the schools, isolated from the subject matter of life-experience. The permanent social interests are likely to be lost from view. Those which have not been carried over into the structure of social life, but which remain largely matters of technical information expressed in symbols, are made conspicuous in schools. (Dewey, 1916/1980, p. 325)

More than 20 years after writing those ideas, as Dewey considers the threats to a new education based on the experiences of young people, he makes what I have found to be his most explicit statement about the accountability of individual teachers. He believes that if the newer education ideas he advocates eventually fail, it would be due to the “failure of educators who professedly adopt them to be faithful to them in practice” (Dewey, 1938/1988, p. 61). In 1938, Dewey could not have foreseen the extent to which federal and state governments and even private business and foundations would eventually take top-down control of public education, leaving individual teachers relatively powerless and educational philosophers relegated to the academic margins. Still, his speculation has always left me with a nagging question. If we had taken his caution seriously, if professional educators—teachers, researchers, teacher educators, union leaders—had indeed devoted “ourselves to finding out just what education is and what conditions have to be satisfied in order that education may be a reality and not a name or a slogan” (Dewey, 1938/1988, p. 62), when we had the chance, maybe we would still have control over our own accountability.

References

Dewey, J. (1972). My pedagogic creed. In J. A. Boydston (Ed.), John Dewey: The early works, 1882–1898: Vol. 5. 1895–1898 (pp. 81–95). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. (Original work published 1897)

Dewey, J. (1978). “Valid knowledge and the “subjectivity of experience.” In J. A. Boydston (Ed.), John Dewey: The middle works, 1899–1924: Vol. 6. 1910–1911 (pp. 70–79). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. (Original work published 1910)

Dewey, J. (1980). Democracy and education. In J. A. Boydston (Ed.), John Dewey: The middle works, 1899–1924: Vol. 9. 1916 (pp. 1–370). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. (Original work published 1916)

Dewey, J. (1984). The sources of a science of education. In J. A. Boydston (Ed.), John Dewey: The later works, 1925–1953: Vol. 5. 1929–1930 (pp. 1–40). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. (Original work published 1929)

Dewey, J. (1986). A common faith. In J. A. Boydston (Ed.), John Dewey: The later works, 1925–1953: Vol. 9. 1933–1934 (pp. 1–58). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. (Original work published 1933)

Dewey, J. (1988). Experience and education. In J. A. Boydston (Ed.), John Dewey: The later works, 1925–1953: Vol. 13. 1938–1939 (pp. 1–62). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. (Original work published 1938)

Dewey, J. (1988). Freedom and culture. In J. A. Boydston (Ed.), John Dewey: The later works, 1925–1953: Vol. 13. 1938–1939 (pp. 63–252). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. (Original work published 1939)

National Commission on Excellence in Education. (1983). A nation at risk: The imperative for educational reform. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education.

1
A Call for Creativity and Freedom in the Midst of Accountability

A Teachable Moment

Maggie Allison

Finally, I saw how inconsistent it was to expect this greater amount of creative, independent work from the student when the teachers were still unemancipated; when the teachers were still shackled by too many rules and prescriptions and too much of a desire for uniformity of method and subject matter.

—The Classroom Teacher, Middle Works 15: 187

Recently, my 9-year-old daughter, who is in third grade, brought home a social studies quiz on a unit about communities. The quiz was a single paper among many in a folder labeled “Graded Papers.” The quiz appeared to be a typical, book-generated quiz: 10 fill-in-the-blank questions where students had to circle the “correct” answer. At the top of her quiz, the teacher had written, “9/10 B.” In usual fashion, my daughter and I proceeded to review the question she got “wrong” to be sure she understood why. The question she got wrong read:

Citizens / Laws help keep order in a community.

My daughter circled Citizens and the “correct” answer was Laws. When I asked her about her thinking on this question, she offered a very plausible response. She said that people such as policemen and firemen help keep order and that’s why she circled Citizens.

I rarely choose to interfere in school matters mostly because my daughter loves school and she experiences much success; however, it just didn’t seem right to me that there was necessarily a right and wrong answer in this case. After all, citizens can help keep order in a community, as can laws. So I wrote a note to the teacher. In my note I pointed out the problematic nature of a “correct” answer given that both laws and citizens can and do, in fact, help keep order in a community. I asked the teacher whether the aim of the quiz was to assess learning or whether it was to trick students. I attached the note to the quiz and sent it back to school in the “Graded Papers” folder. When my daughter arrived home, I checked the folder anticipating the teacher’s response to my note. To my dismay, I received a one-sentence reply: “Sorry, I went with the book’s answer key.”

It strikes me that this scenario in my daughter’s third-grade class illustrates the very essence of Dewey’s quote. Dewey believes that teaching is an art, requiring much freedom. To carry out the art of teaching, Dewey advocates that teachers ought to be in charge of their own work. They ought to have the freedom to think for themselves about subject matter rather than resorting to carrying out recipes that are prescribed by others. However, with freedom comes much responsibility. As educators, we cannot hope to inspire creativity in our students unless we approach our craft creatively, and we need to be empowered in order to do so.

The teacher’s response to my inquiry about the social studies quiz violated both the need for creativity and freedom within the classroom. The problematic quiz question might have provided a “teachable moment” for students to discuss how both laws and citizens help to maintain order within a community. Or better yet, in lieu of the quiz on the concept of communities, the teacher might have found a more creative means of assessing student understanding. For example, why not allow students to write their own laws to be followed within the classroom to show how members of the school community share ownership in maintaining order within the school? Either one of these assessment methods might have demonstrated a mindful effort on the part of the teacher to design an educative experience that allowed for greater potential for creativity. Based on the teacher’s decision to strictly adhere to the answer key, my conclusion is that for this teacher, there is either little freedom of method or little sense of responsibility, or possibly both.

The teacher’s lack of freedom and responsibility in the aforementioned educative experience is precisely what Dewey warns about when he makes his claim in an address to teachers at the Massachusetts State Conference of Normal School Teachers in 1922. In fact, Dewey might acknowledge the social studies quiz as a “mis-educative experience” in that it served to stunt the intellectual growth of the student. For Dewey, the responsibility of determining subject matter and method ought to be in the hands of the teachers who do the work. And for Dewey, the work of teachers is to create rich, educative experiences for students. Dewey defines the method of an educative experience as being critical thinking (Dewey, 1916/1980). When teachers are thoughtful and creative in designing learning experiences for their students, students will consequently have a better opportunity to become creative and thoughtful members of the learning community and, eventually, society. Conversely, when creativity and freedom are lacking in the design of educative experiences, the ability of students to think creatively and critically is stifled.

Although Dewey’s words were spoken nearly a century ago, they are arguably just as relevant today. Academic standards and other legislated accountability measures demand action on the part of the classroom teacher, but this action ought not to be to make all teaching look the same. Although academic standards might provide a framework for sch...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of Figures
• Sources for Dewey Quotes
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I Accountability
• PART II Active Learning
• PART III Critical Thinking
• PART IV Democratic Citizenship
• PART V The Educative Experience
• PART VI Inquiry and Education
• Editors and Contributors
• Transcript of Personal Letter
• Index