The Contemporary Relevance of John Dewey’s Theories on Teaching and Learning

Deweyan Perspectives on Standardization, Accountability, and Assessment in Education

JuliAnna Ávila, AG Rud, Leonard Waks, Emer Ring, JuliAnna Ávila, AG Rud, Leonard Waks, Emer Ring, JuliAnna Avila, Anthony Gordon Rud Jr., Leonard J. Waks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367621513
  9780367621483
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000464429
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Through expert analysis, this text proves that John Dewey's views on efficiency in education are as relevant as ever. By exploring Deweyan theories of teaching and learning, the volume illustrates how they can aid educators in navigating the theoretical and practical implications of accountability, standardization, and assessment.

The Contemporary Relevance of John Dewey's Theories on Teaching and Learning deconstructs issues regarding accountability mechanisms, uniform assessment systems, and standardization processes through a Deweyan lens. Connecting the zeitgeist of the era from which Dewey's ideas emerged and current global political, social, and economic contexts, the book emphasizes the importance of resilient systems in reconciliating the tension between standardized assessments and individual student development. Contributors provide insights from a range of settings across Pre-K, primary, secondary, and higher education and address topics including teacher agency, voice, leadership, and democracy.

The volume will be of interest to scholars, researchers, and academics with an interest in philosophy of education, education policy and the impact of neoliberal agendas, as well as teaching and learning more broadly.

Section II A Deweyan Vision of Teacher Professionalization

Leonard J. Waks

DOI: 10.4324/9781003108146-8

The six chapters in this section consider the teaching profession in the managerial era. This introduction reviews the concept, and Dewey’s unique conception, of teacher professionalism. Each chapter offers new insights from a Deweyan angle.

Senses of ‘Profession’

When considering teaching as a profession we must consider three related senses. The root sense in English is institutional. A profession is a status, characterized by such features as (1) an abstract knowledge base; (2) a period of educational training typically yielding a university diploma; (3) a commitment to an ideal of disinterested service to clients and society; (4) a community of practice where members communicate and learn from one another, often organized by a professional association; (5) licensure by the state, conferring certain privileges regarding practice; and (6) the capacity to exercise autonomy or discretion in making case by case judgments (Australian Council, n/d; Coles, 2002; Turner & Hodge, 1970).

This institutional sense entered English in the mid-19th century as a truncation of ‘liberal profession’ from the French profession libérale. Until well into the modern era the only liberal professions were divinity, medicine, and law, all associated with specific faculties of medieval and early modern universities, just as the artes liberale were associated with the arts faculty. In the institutional sense, the antonym for ‘professional’ is ‘tradesperson.’

With the emergence of new university-based occupations, such as accounting, management, and engineering after 1870, the term was extended to fields previously regarded as trades, and a new ‘culture of professionalism’ emerged. Since that time, professional status has been extended to new occupations as university-based training programs have been established for them (Bledstein, 1976).

The second sense of ‘profession’ and ‘professional’ may be called the evaluative sense. Here we regard the practice of any art or craft with regard to its technical goodness. A tradesman can act in a professional or unprofessional manner as a licensed professional. We can admire a stonemason as well as a doctor as a ‘real pro.’ In this sense, the antonym of ‘professional’ is clumsy, inept, incompetent, that is, no good.

The final sense of ‘profession’ and ‘professional’ is the career sense; workers are professionals to the extent that they work in the field full-time to provide a livelihood. Here the professional is contrasted with the dabbler or hobbyist, one who practices the field as a sideline or pastime. We may ask of, for example, a writer whether he is a professional or just an amateur.

These senses of ‘profession’ are connected through university-based professional education, which provides career practitioners with knowledge – both formal and informal – of best professional practices. The teacher education program is thus the cornerstone of the professional edifice.

Teaching as a Profession

School teaching was not recognized institutionally as a profession when John Dewey first addressed it. From the beginning, he intended explicitly to lift teaching from trade to professional status. How is this to be achieved? According to Perks (1993), this passage is marked by several milestones: (1) the trade becomes a full-time occupation; (2) as the activity becomes a full-time career, training schools emerge; (3) the training for the activity is incorporated in the university; (4) professional associations are established by recognized leaders; and (5) state licensing laws are established. This progression fits the advance of the teaching profession.

1. Prior to the 19th-century industrial revolution in the United States, the typical school year was only five months. No qualifications existed for teaching. Teachers selected by town leaders moved to town for the school period and boarded around, sleeping in spare bedrooms of residents for a week at a time. Teaching was a trade and a somewhat disparaged one.
2. Starting in the 1820s, productive work was moved from homes and craft shops to factories staffed by full-time workers, and teaching also became a full-time career. The first state training schools for teachers – normal schools – were then established, the first in Lexington, Massachusetts, in 1839.
3. Normal schools, later renamed ‘teachers colleges,’ prevailed throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th. When Dewey came to the University of Chicago as the professor of philosophy, psychology, and pedagogy in 1893, normal schools dominated teacher training. Dewey was among the first university-based professors of education in the United States.
4. In 1902, Dewey furthered his effort to make teaching a university- based profession and led in founding The Society of College Teachers of Education (now the Society for Professors of Education) to establish education professors as distinct academic professionals providing a research base for teaching.¹
5. In most professions, from architecture to nursing, licensure relies on the same test and the passing grade is the same across all of the states – so we can speak of national licensure standards. For teaching, state requirements vary; teacher professionalism has still not achieved the same national status (Mitchell et al., 2001).

Imposing external aims and an accountability regime undermines the ability of teachers to use their judgment and discretion on a case-by-case basis. Instead, teachers are judged by administrators and bureaucrats on the production of externally mandated learning objectives, nullifying their professional education. Or worse, they are replaced by operatives without university training, conditioned to accept such external control, and vulnerable to reprisal or dismissal for acting in a professional manner. This would mark a regression to the disordered situation Dewey confronted at the end of the 19th century.

Dewey and the Teaching Profession

From the ‘Old’ Education to the ‘New’

Dewey began his 1896 essay ‘Pedagogy as a University Discipline’ by deploring the poverty of the ‘old’ education, acknowledging teaching as a trade, and normal schools as training, at best, ‘adequate workmen’ (MW3: 279–285).² He declared the need for a ‘new’ education based on scientific principles. To disseminate this education, a cadre of university- trained professional teacher leaders, inspired by the spirit of science and dedicated to discovery and experimentation, was needed to supplement normal school graduates. Their training would bring them into contact with emerging scientific knowledge, and upon graduation they would introduce knowledge-based practices in the schools, establishing themselves as a broad community of professional education practice.

After 1896, Dewey abandoned this dual approach to teacher education, arguing in 1902 that the apprenticeship model characteristic of the normal school had to be eliminated in favor of laboratory-based training in universities. Schools of Education and their associated laboratory schools would train teachers, develop a distinct body of psychological principles (MW2: 68–72), and disseminate and promote the best new science-based practices of primary and secondary education ‘everywhere’ (MW3: 282). The new Schools of Education ‘signifie[d] a bringing together of all factors of the educational problem (MW3: 279),’ needed for making teaching a profession.

New Teacher Education Programs

From 1902 through 1904, Dewey worked out the details of his laboratory approach to teacher education. Basically, universities would establish close working relationships with ‘laboratory schools.’ Their teacher education programs included (1) academic knowledge; (2) observation and discussion of laboratory school practices; and (3) collaborative work on subject materials for schools.

6. Academic studies. The academic studies in Dewey’s program included extensive study of academic disciplines, ‘calculated to increase and strengthen their scholarship; and particularly to put them in command of the intellectual standpoint and method which are absolutely indispensable in genuine culture’ (MW2: 70). Teachers with an ‘old’ education mindset might object to serious academic study as ‘impractical’ – useless in learning how to teach. Dewey countered two arguments. First, the central office of education is fostering good thinking. Good academic scholars are models of the best, most exciting, and rigorous thinking. Thus, studying with them is practical teacher education of a high order (MW3, 263–266). Second, teachers need academic insights to recognize the relevant interests and talents of individual students. The ends of instruction are excellences inherent in the arts and sciences – teachers aim at making pupils good at math, science, history, arts, and so forth. Teachers thus must be able to see in each child a budding Mozart or Einstein. The arts and sciences ‘reveal the real child to us,’ by showing us lucidly ‘the germinating seed or opening bud’ of such excellences, the ‘fruit to be borne’ (MW2: 282).
   Dewey’s academic curriculum also included what today we call the ‘foundations of education’ disciplines: history, philosophy, psychology, and sociology of education (MW2: 71). These studies are essential for professional educators as true ‘students of education,’ not mere workmen. For Dewey, practical teaching skills are best developed through actual teaching experiences, but foundational studies – the abstract knowledge base for teaching – can only be acquired in the university during professional training.
7. Work in the laboratory school. Instead of a practice teaching apprenticeship, Dewey’s program required periods of observation, discussion, and inquiry in laboratory schools. Teacher candidates did not teach classes, but observed teachers and students and investigated psychological principles of learning. They also assisted teachers, for example by tutoring pupils, especially slower ones, to observe learning at close quarters. Finally, they studied their own behaviors as these affected the pupils because teacher interactions with learners were, and are, among the most potent psychological factors in learning (see MW6: 218).
8. Collaboration on instructional materials. The candidates ‘work[ed] upon subject-matter with reference to its use in … schools’ (MW2: 71). The importance of this phase of the teacher education program becomes clear as we turn to Dewey’s vision of professional instruction.

Professional Practice of Teaching

A Line that Defines Instruction

Dewey stated that just as two points determine a line, the ‘point’ of the child’s present understanding and the ‘point’ of emerging adult knowledge in use ‘defines instruction’ (MW2: 278). Teachers cannot shape aims unless ‘adult knowledge is drawn upon’ as revealing the desired end (MW2: 284). ‘The organized subject-matter of the adult and the specialist cannot provide the starting point. Nevertheless, it represents the goal toward which education should continuously move’ (LW13: 57). The psychology of learning aids teachers in drawing the line of instruction. Teachers have to ‘psychologize’ knowledge – ‘to take it and to develop it within the range and scope of the child’s life’ (MW2: 291). This psychologizing ‘follows its actual growth; it notes steps actually taken, the uncertain and tortuous, as well as the efficient and successful’ (MW2: 284).

The starting point, the child’s understanding, does not rest in abstract concepts but is rooted in their actual experiences. In their primary school years, children remain closely attached to their homes and families. Educators must begin with activities already familiar and attractive to the child. Thus, Dewey’s primary school (MW1: 49) contained a kitchen and dining room, a shop and a textile room – activity areas young children were surrounded with at home. As children mature, their worlds expand and their school must also expand to include new activity centers and ‘occupations’ (MW1: 53).

These adult activities or ‘occupations’ are full of potential connections with school subject matter disciplines: math, chemistry, history, and literature. At early points, teachers create school attachment points in familiar outside of school experiences: school history may begin with recalling family stories;...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface: Accountability, Standardisation, and Assessment in Education: A Persistent Problem
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• SECTION I Post-Standardization Approaches to Accountability
• SECTION II A Deweyan Vision of Teacher Professionalization
• SECTION III Praxis for Democratic Ends in the Context of Standardization
• Index