John Dewey's Imaginative Vision of Teaching

Combining Theory and Practice

Deron Boyles

• Publisher: Myers Education Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781975502942
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Formación del profesorado

John Dewey's Imaginative Vision of Teaching explores key philosophical topics in John Dewey's work, including epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics, and relates them to teacher practice and education policy. Each chapter begins with theory and ends with practical implications. While there are numerous books on Dewey, there are relatively few that connect his philosophy of education to actual practice. By linking primary fields of philosophy with classroom teaching and education policy, Boyles suggests that the binary between theory and practice is a false chasm that can and should be bridged if teaching and learning are to change into more dynamic, reflexive, and authentic interactions. Perfect for courses such as: Becoming a Teacher | Applying Theory to Practice | John Dewey and U.S. Schools | Historical and Philosophical Ideas In Practice | Progressive Teaching

CHAPTER ONE

JOHN DEWEY’S IMAGINATIVE
VISION OF TEACHING

JOHN DEWEY WROTE EXTENSIVELY about all sorts of philosophical and educational topics. I assert that his insights into imaginative teaching are best understood in relation to the works spanning some of the central fields in philosophy. Dewey wrote on everything from epistemology, the ontology of naturalism, ethics, and ecology to sociology, psychology, aesthetics, and ethics. Some of his work is limited to a few articles, other work includes multiple books and book revisions. I link his philosophical and theoretical points with practical experiences of my own in working with teachers and parents at the Dewey-inspired school, Chrysalis Experiential Academy.¹ My goal in this chapter is to clarify some of the central ideas necessary to understand Dewey’s imaginative vision of teaching and learning. I begin with what’s arguably Dewey’s most popular work in philosophy and education, Democracy and Education, first published in 1916.

Dewey’s Democracy and Education includes so many important concepts that it might be surprising to note that specific references to teaching are few.² Between “teacher” and “teaching,” there are only four single pages (17, 71, 160, and 163) and one span of three pages (4–6) noted in the index. In a work that’s 360 pages long, why did Dewey give so little explicit space to teaching? Beyond index issues, I argue that Dewey’s imaginative vision of teaching is fully integrated throughout his book. It also provides an important alternative to traditional teaching—both from Dewey’s time and what we generally understand teaching to mean 100 years later.³ Like the rest of the chapters in this book, I provide parts or sections to clarify Dewey’s thought. My goal is to explain his thinking so you can follow his argument and his logic. By breaking down some of the more complex ideas, it should be easier to understand what Dewey meant and how his ideas relate to teaching.

This chapter proceeds in three parts. First, I argue that Dewey’s initial view of teaching-as-transmission is an intentional trick. He meant to make teaching-as-transmission a point and a theme he could attack. By making teaching-as-transmission so obvious and clear, Dewey then distinguishes traditional teaching from his view of authentic, good, and imaginative teaching. I also explore Dewey’s distinction between maturity and immaturity, educative experiences, and interdisciplinary content to clarify the imaginative teaching he wanted. Second, I utilize what’s known as Dewey’s transactional realism to identify what Deweyan teaching requires. Transactional realism is just another way of talking about teachers and learners in a form of interaction that continually expands inquiry into the world around them (see chapters 3 and 4). Their mutual, dialogic exchanges about real problems that interest them is the process the phrase “transactional realism” tries to capture. Finally, I call on my experiences as the president of the advisory board of the Dewey-inspired Chrysalis Experiential Academy in Roswell, Georgia, to provide illustrations of the continuing struggles teachers confront in transforming teaching from transmission to transaction, from traditional teaching to imaginative teaching. Part of these struggles, as will be shown, include clarifying with (as opposed to for) teachers what Deweyan experiential education requires and what imaginative teaching both includes and excludes. I pay special attention to what elements of traditional schooling are maintained but transformed in imaginative teaching practice. The Deweyan project of reforming teaching means getting rid of or altering almost everything we know teaching to include. Some traditional aspects of teaching are OK, but most are not. I identify the important elements of traditional teaching that should be kept and those elements of traditional teaching that should be transformed if we want to demonstrate Dewey’s imaginative vision of teaching.

Section I: Teaching as Transmission

At the beginning of Democracy and Education, Dewey notes that the transmission and communication of values and the essential or characteristic customs and conventions of a community are basic for society. Parents and teachers tell students the way the world is. There are seven days in a week and twenty-four hours in a day. Like parents who teach their children manners and ways of behaving, teachers do something very similar. They transmit basic information, social conventions, and rules. This isn’t a problem for Dewey. He specifically claims that “So obvious, indeed, is the necessity of teaching and learning for the continued existence of a society that we may seem to be dwelling unduly on a truism.”⁴ A truism is a truth that is so obviously true that it doesn’t have to be highlighted or explained. I believe Dewey ultimately operates on this assumption of transmission as necessary in society but not enough to characterize teaching and learning. That is, though communicating values and rules are necessary for social groups, such communication is merely one facet of human interaction. More is required for the kind of transaction and inquiry that’s better than transmission. In other words, transmission may be necessary, but it is not sufficient for good teaching. “Schools are, indeed,” notes Dewey, “one important method of the transmission which forms the dispositions of the immature; but it is only one means, and, compared with other agencies, a relatively superficial means.”⁵ Of course, teachers establish rules of behavior. Of course, teachers tell students basic information they need to navigate the classroom, the school, and even the broader society. But there are limits to telling. There are dangers, too.

One of the limits to telling is that one teacher’s view of the world or the way the classroom should be is not always shared by other teachers. A teacher’s rules may not be shared by parents, either. Then what? What happens, for instance, when a teacher corrects a student’s pronunciation of basic terms? A student asks to go to the “bafroom” or wants a drink of “wooder.” Does the teacher correct the student and point out that the proper pronunciation is “bath-room” and “wa-ter”? Is the teacher demonstrating a form of bias against dialect or folkways of speaking? Or is it the responsibility of the teacher to correct pronunciation, so that pronunciation conforms to standard English? These may seem like minor issues. Alone they are. But taken together, they are a major part of what Dewey understood as the social role of education: building community.

To paraphrase Dewey, living close to one another is not the same as being in community. Efficiency and effectiveness in carrying out key functions of and for the community are also not important enough to determine or characterize what is meaningfully social. The teacher correcting pronunciation risks turning imaginative teaching into a rote or routine process. Here’s where Dewey draws on machinery to make the point: “The parts of a machine work with a maximum of cooperativeness for a common result, but they do not form a community.”⁶ He goes on: “Individuals use one another so as to get desired results, without reference to the emotional and intellectual disposition and consent of those used.”⁷ How do teachers interact with their students in correcting pronunciation? Is the interaction a “because I said so” command to correct “bafroom” to “bath-room,” or does the teacher understand what code-switching is and whether the meaning of the term is still conveyed and understood? What’s the role of cultural sensitivity, understanding, and appreciation? There’s a qualitative difference in these options of communication. One is dry and harsh, the other humane and empathetic.⁸ The goal may still be to clarify standard or status quo pronunciation, but if in the process teachers destroy community, Dewey isn’t happy. Neither are students.

More broadly, but related, Dewey’s perceptive about issues in education like grading, tracking, school-to-school test score comparisons, and international rankings—all of which may indicate something about what goes on in the school. Teachers and students may participate in these rituals and restrictive habits, but they’re effectively gutted of humanity and community in the process. Teachers and students become reduced to material ends, mere “resources,” in a process called schooling that is overburdened by imposed and formulaic rules. Teachers and students also become pawns in the broader assumption about the purpose of schools: Teachers tell students what skills they will need to get a job in a global economy. Dewey warns us not to overemphasize capitalism, hyper-vocationalism, or some other assumed goal for schooling that dismisses teachers and students themselves (see chapter 5). Teachers and students already bring experiences and values into the classroom. But a class isn’t a community until experiences are understood and values are shared. Understanding and sharing aren’t always pleasant and lovely, either. We debate and argue about what the rules should be, whether they should change, and who gets to make the rules in the first place. One risk is seeing debate and argument as competitive and negative. Schools in general suffer from discussions about education that are mired in comparative-competitive modes of production. Schools suffer because the evaluative criteria for judging schools in the first place (i.e., in determining whether they are “failing” or “succeeding,” “top 25” or “#1 in offering Advanced Placement courses,” “innovative,” “a school of excellence,” etc.) are restricted to measurement standards that favor economic analyses and business rationales that alter what it means to be in community with one another. We’re reduced to—and reduce each other to—merely human resources.

Teaching and learning, as a result, tend to be reduced to processes of production that must meet market goals of transfer efficiency and quality control. Cover the material and test it. Grade students, pass or fail them, and move on to the next class. Such forms of teaching and learning favor corporate interests and privatization efforts because the form of the measurements of knowledge (standardized, scientific, objective), is the same form of measurements used on durable goods and hard services. One problem is that teaching and learning are reduced to structures that are stand-ins for community, inquiry, imagination, and growth. Teachers and students in non-Deweyan schools tend to execute and perform roles that are predefined and imposed, thus transmitted and restrictive of potential. What I mean is that the structure of schools forces teachers and students into roles that may not reflect who the teachers and students actually are. The roles inhibit growth and Dewey was nothing if not a champion of growth. Dewey wants a very different understanding of teaching and learning.

Section II: Teaching as Transactional

Dewey’s imaginative vision of teaching is centered on the transactional realism that is both his epistemology and his ontology, as chapters 3 and 4 show in more detail. That is, Dewey has a theory of knowledge (epistemology) and a theory of reality (ontology). These theories applied to classroom life inform what teaching and schooling mean. Transaction, as opposed to transmission, requires movement and change from contextual situations upward and outward. In classrooms, meaning emerges from student and teacher experiences and is not confined to an imposed view of what others think students should learn and teachers should teach. This point is significant because it highlights the dramatic difference between imposition and transaction. Most schools, most of the time, in most of the United States, are bounded by external learning objectives (think Common Core) that must be confined to lesson planning and, thus, conform to the assumption that, for example, “best practices” already exist and need only be adopted for good teaching and learning to take place. In the typical classroom, teachers talk and students listen, rules of order are followed, quizzes are taken, grades are noted, and students and teachers become habituated to routines that, in a circular fashion, reinforce more routines. Teachers are arguably more like data-entry clerks than engaged co-learners with their students. This reality is the opposite of Dewey’s imaginative educational vision.

Classrooms are supposed to be places where transacting what he called “existing capacities” of children with the social setup of situations, including others (teachers too), leads to worthwhile experiences. Traditional schools, Dewey complained, provided an environment, but one that was so transmission-oriented, so stacked with inauthentic and contrived exercises that what was determined to be worthwhile was left to the teacher or, worse, to administrators and politicians: Students are primarily a source of problems to overcome or an unruly force to be subdued. Dewey partially blamed Johann Friedrich Herbart for what we now know as “scope and sequencing” in teaching. Bear with me as I include an extended quote. It’s helpful for clarifying why teaching as transmission and traditional schooling are so problematic.

The fundamental theoretical defect of [teaching as transmission] lies in ignoring the existence of a living being of active and specific functions which are developed in the redirection and combination which occur as they are occupied with their environment. The theory represents the Schoolmaster come to his [sic] own. This fact expresses at once its strength and weakness. The conception that the mind consists of what has been taught, and that the importance of what has been taught consists in its availability for further teaching, reflects the pedagogue’s view of life. The philosophy is eloquent about the duty of the teacher in instructing pupils; it is almost silent regarding his [sic] privilege of learning. It emphasizes the influence of intellectual environment upon the mind; it slurs over the fact that the environment involves a personal sharing in common experiences … It insists upon the old, the past, and passes lightly over the operation of the genuinely novel and unforeseeable. It takes, in brief, everything educational into account save its essence,—vital energy seeking opportunity for effective exercise. All education forms character, mental and moral, but formation consists in the selection and coordination of native activities so that they may utilize the subject matter of the social environment. Moreover, the formation is not only a formation of native activities, but it takes place through them. It is a process of reconstruction, reorganization.⁹

Instead of “accidental” learning, classrooms should be environments that are extensions of nature. Classrooms should be ecological spaces for conjoint inquiry where that inquiry is neither canned nor prepackaged, in contrast to much of the curricula in the United States today. More is said about this in chapter 4, but just as Dewey denied that schools are separate from society, classrooms are not separate from the broader environment or culture either. The relevance of this point is pretty straightforward: We should see classrooms as reconstructed, organic spaces safe for and encouraging of transactions between and among students, teachers, and emergent content.

The problem, of course, is that in most schools the comfortable routines, traditional attitudes, and entrenched expectations of preparing kids for future jobs reinforces a contrived and imposed understanding of the nature of teaching and learning. The challenge may be huge in terms of changing the worst elements of traditional practices in schools, but this does not change the fact that Dewey’s imaginative view of education significantly alters what it means to teach. As he notes, “what conscious, deliberate teaching can do is at most to free the capacities thus formed for fuller exercise, to purge them of some of their grossness, and to furnish objects which make their activity more productive of meaning.”¹⁰ What most traditional schools reinforce is the idea that producing productive workers is the singular goal of education. Schools, in this view, exist to transmit the necessary skills students will need to get a job. It’s an economic view of the world. Teachers and children are exploited by such a view, if hegemonically so (see chapter 5). That is, by reinforcing teaching and learning in transmission-oriented, economistic, reductionist ways, teachers and students learn what their roles are supposed to be and, with perverse energy, enact or perform those roles willingly. Teachers come to believe that “best practices” exist and that formulaic lessons plans are necessary. Worse, arguably, they largely agree that the overall purpose of schooling is about preparation for a future life—a point Dewey directly challenges. In “My Pedagogic Creed,” Dewey wrote the following: “I believe that education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future livi...