Musings on the theories and wisdom of John Dewey

    I'll be honest with you. Four weeks ago, I could not have told you anything about John Dewey. When pressed, I would have ventured that he was the brain behind the Dewey Decimal System. I would have been wrong. It turns out that it was another Dewey, Melvil (1851-1931), who published that brilliant system for categorizing library books, but I digress...

Image accessible at: http://www.rugusavay.com/john-dewey-quotes/

    For our Ed Tech class this week, we were asked to read John Dewey's "My Pedagogic Creed" (1897), originally published as an article in School Journal. It strikes me that this is best way that a newcomer to the educational profession can become familiar with John Dewey and the impact his work has had on the American education system, since his creed summarizes the heart from which his theories and their implementations flow.
   One of his fundamental beliefs about the purpose of education is summed well in the quote given in this picture of Dewey.  It seems that often the importance of student's work in any given class is "for future use." These statements are familiar in chemistry classrooms: "You'll need this to get into a good university.", "You'll be expected to know this when you get to Physics next year, "You'll need to know this for the test."... Dewey's works anticipates the many steps we have taken toward educating for knowledge-acquisition as a nation, but his writings suggest that there is an alternative route to be chosen.
   Dewey focused instead on "three elements of education: school, society and children" (Rich (2006), p. 55). I thought it was notable that teaching-for-knowledge did not make this list. It was notable to me, because this idea of education as knowledge-transfer has been hard for me to shake, to let go of, after a number of years of schooling where it seemed that the tests, and not the students or the society, took center stage. I think Dewey would have agreed with the Ball and Cohen article that stated that we need to shift our thinking of teaching from being a "rhetoric of conclusions" to an "narrative of inquiry" (Ball and Cohen (1999), p. 16-17). It's an exciting, but scary thing to learn to throw out a lot of my understanding of education for a philosophy that puts the child, their experiences and social development into the middle of education.
  Technology has the potential to help me as a teacher draw on my students' previous experiences and make their learning relevant to their lives. Dewey wrote in his creed that in education, "symbols are a necessity in mental development, but they have their place as tools for economizing effort; presented by themselves they are a mass of meaningless and arbitrary ideas imposed from without" (Article Four). It seems that technology can help teachers make these symbols meaningful to the students in ways that words or equations on the whiteboard cannot. Technology can be used to help students create images, which Dewey calls "great instrument of instruction" that the student develops within themselves and can utilize throughout their lives.
  I look forward to developing these musings more with discussion and practical application of Dewey's ideas in classroom contexts...