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John Dewey, Inquiry, & Progressive Education (Part 1)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 30 ธ.ค. 2014
- This is part one of a two-part lecture on John Dewey's writings as they relate to education. This talk is designed for student-teachers in a Philosophy of Education course who are embarking upon their studies in completion of a BEd.
I'm doing my master for education, and your video helped me a lot about Dewey! Thank you! :D
Thank you Sean! I finally understand progressive education and this video has made so much sense. I really appreciate it and will definitely use it when I am teaching.
Thanks for this lecture, Sean. Reading Dewey in my teacher's college classes is pretty frustrating, and I kept falling asleep! But your lecture on him helped me a lot.
James Pseudos Hello James,
Yes, Dewey is very dry reading indeed! And my lectures on him are long as well. Glad you stuck it out and found them useful.
OHHH, IT MADE ME GET MORE ABOUT DEWEY AND HIS PHILOSOPHY.
Great job. Thank you, this is very meaningful.
You're welcome. Glad you've enjoyed the lecture. If you're interested in education philosophy more broadly, I have a book called The Pursuit of Wisdom and Happiness in Education (SUNY Press, 2014) that you might enjoy. There is a section on Dewey. Also, I'm currently completing a manual for student-teachers to help them experiment with/practice "loving wisdom"/philosophy on a daily basis in their classroom practices. This book is tentatively called Teacher Education and the Pursuit of Wisdom: A Practical Guide for Education Philosophy Courses. It will (hopefully!) be available next year through Peter Lang Publishing.
Best wishes,
Sean
Sean Steel Thank you, professor! I'll definitely check it out.
Wow, this is great man :)
Absolutely excellent
Thank you for sharing this.
I hear a lot of what to do and very little about how to do it. How might one establish a "democratic" practice which meaningfully appeals to diverse students within a classroom yet give students an accurate representation of how democracy works? Furthermore, Sally has great marks based on her assessments, but doesn't remember anything long-term. How might you address our current methods of assessment in terms of Dewey's assertions? How would I apply it? You refer, mockingly, to Dewey's marriage of science and knowledge. Might this be an effective means to teach science? Furthermore, it could provide great context for discussions on the Nature of Science and explicit reference to epistemology. What is the value of taking a scientific approach to the given topic? What then might be the outcome if we took an artistic, or dare I say religious approach?
Ethan Bandow Hello Ethan. Yes, these are all very good questions you have asked. And obviously, a person can't give just one/two lectures on an author who has written so voluminously in a way that answers every query, or that takes readers/listeners down every tributary. You are right: Dewey has much to say that is positive and worthwhile about democracy and democratic education. Same goes for his advocacy for scientific method as the main model for student inquiry. I also agree with you about Dewey and assessment: that Dewey has helped us to improve our assessment practices (mostly). I'd go further and say that some of the recent trends in education that are hyper-assessment crazy ... that these folks have largely forgotten one of Dewey' s major insights (which, actually, he shares with Plato and most of the great educational thinkers): namely, that education is all about "dispositions," and that dispositions aren't the same thing as the marks and scores that we use to measure students, and that are also meant to keep us teachers accountable in our jobs. And yup: I'd also agree with you that Dewey's way IS an effective way to "teach science." But these are all ideas that, if we had a class together, we'd take up conversationally, eh?
Really, the first lecture on Dewey is more about exposing student-teachers to the overall structure/processes of inquiry-based learning that they could use to organize learning in their classrooms. If the lecture was a bit long on the "what to do" and short on the "how to do it," as you say... well, maybe that's because there are LOTS of ways to do it, aren't there? Just think about the teachers you've had in the past who were good inquirers, or who were able to lead their students in inquiry-based practices. It didn't always look the same, did it? And yet, there was a kind of basic, underlying process. That's what the Deweyan model offers us: a kind of "what to do" as opposed to a "how to do it." This will vary with your students and according to your own personal teaching abilities/interests, etc. Organically, when I help student-teachers learn about these things, we practice them together, eh? We lesson plan/unit plan. We try things out; we go back and forth with questions and comments, revising and making adjustments. It's a learning process that you kind of have to wade through... you can't "get" it from a couple TH-cam lectures, I think.
Same goes for the Alberta Circle of Inquiry diagram that I discuss in the lecture, and that is modeled on Dewey's work. This circle gives student-teachers basic information about how to plan for inquiry in the classroom: what sorts of processes to backward-plan for, what sorts of scaffolding devices they'll need to develop, and so forth. But they learn the "how" by doing it, by trying it out, by discussing and revising... Does that sound reasonable?
When you say that I mock Dewey, to a certain extent I think you are correct. But I hope you can see that my reasons for doing so aren't because of a failure to see the good things that Dewey has to offer us and to teach us. There are many things that are good about his work, and I've only highlighted a few in the lecture: like the importance of student interest, of inquiry based learning, and of "dispositions" in education. For ME, when I get a bit perturbed with Dewey is when his reductionism/positivism gets in the way of learning. Dewey is good on a lot of things, but there are entire vistas of knowing and knowledge that he seems unwilling to acknowledge. Entire realms of being, of self-knowledge, and aspects of the mind that are simply rejected by him. He's a very modern writer, after all, so he shares a lot of the modern pretenses to knowing that cause him to reject so much of the ancient and medieval ways of understanding the world... so much of our world-wide philosophic and religious heritage. He's pretty scornful of it if you read him carefully; and yeah... Dewey is an important democratic educator, but part and parcel of his democratic understanding involves chucking out any ideas about leisure/schole simply as elitism (which they are not when you are careful to understand them).
I can't guarantee that you'll be moved by it, but I've discussed Dewey's work a bit more intensively in my longer series of TH-cam lectures on "Modern Views of Wisdom in Education" (th-cam.com/video/HROxtloYx2g/w-d-xo.html). There's also a chapter section devoted to Dewey in my book, "The Pursuit of Wisdom and Happiness in Education" (SUNY Press, 2014). That might be interesting?
If you like Dewey (and it sounds like you do), maybe you'd like Douglas Lawson as well? He's a Dewey-ite that says plainly some of the things that Dewey says a bit more obscurely. I also like Glen Gray, partly because he affirms some of Dewey's ideas, but also because he's able to see the problems with Dewey, and he struggles courageously to deal with them in his own authentic way.
Good luck with your studies!
Sean
Sean Steel Thank you very much for taking the time to make these clarifications and recommendations!
I enjoyed learning more about Dewey :)
+Judi Treble
I'm glad, Judi. We certainly have much to learn from Dewey.
Hi, and thank you for a great video.
I intend to reference you in an assignment, so If you could provide some information about yourself, that would be great. Are you a teacher or university professor or something ?
Hello there,
Glad you found the lecture helpful. Yes, I am a high school teacher in Calgary, AB, and I am also a university instructor. If you are interested in learning more about Dewey, I have a book called The Pursuit of Wisdom and Happiness in Education (SUNY Press, 2014). There is a chapter about Dewey and some of his followers. Good luck with your paper.
Education begins between 8am and 3pm
This guy is pleasantly insane.