Dewey | Discussion Overview – Welcome to ED253 School & Society

Screen Shot 2019-09-11 at 2.56.24 PM

Dewey, J. (2018/1897). My pedagogic creed. In A. R. Sadovnik, P. W. Cookson Jr., S. F. Semel, & R. W. Coughlan (Eds.), Exploring education: An introduction to the foundations of education (5^th ed., pp. 215-218). New York, NY: Routledge.

Dewey, J. (2018/1897). My pedagogic creed. –> This is the Blue Interactive google doc.

There is a need to discuss the suspension of disbelief. How can you conceptualize alternative schools if you have only ever known or experienced school in a particular way?

High stakes testing | Reading through your introductory survey posts, so many of you expressed concerns about schooling as preparation for tests and the culture of high stakes testing. What are your thoughts about this? Can school be school without high stakes tests?

Thinking of test preparation as preparation for something in the future is exactly what you are invited to think. Schooling is about preparation for the future. Practice makes practice. But, if preparation for the future was all you ever did, how would you describe your present?

In other words, what is the lived experience of test prep? Shout out some words, some descriptors.

Is this how we nurture a love of learning? Is this child-centered pedagogy (what’s that)?

Service learning as experiential learning or Democracy & Education |

How to Catch and Peel out of an Eddy

Or, what does it mean to know something or to learn something? Is it enough to read about a women’s shelter, the immigrant experience or a school tutoring program? You could memorize the facts in preparation for a multiple choice test. Or would such readings become truly meaningful in the context of your experiences serving in these contexts?

What does Dewey think about Democracy & Education?

Current connections (HOP essay too) |

Consider segregation where you live in the present in relation to Brown v. Board of education.

The world seems to divide between those who find the study of history to be excruciatingly boring and those who have found their passion and life’s calling in the teaching of history. What gives? Influenced by John Dewey, I believe that the study of history, philosophy or politics becomes of interest and meaningful to students when it is made relevant to present issues and circumstances they can relate to and the world that they live in.

Dewey, J. (2018/1897). My pedagogic creed. –> This is the Blue Interactive of the three articles.

Article I — What Education Is | I believe that education, as getting adjusted to civilization, makes of it a forced and external process, and results in subordinating the freedom of the individual to a preconceived social and political status.

Article II — What the School Is | I believe that education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living

Article III — The Subject Matter | I believe that history is educative when it is made relevant to each student’s current social life. However, when history is thrown into the distant past it becomes dead and inert.