I found John Dewey's "My Pedagogic Creed" fascinating, especially for having been written in 1897. I think his beliefs are quite progressive to this day, and many of the things he criticized are still in wide use in the American education system. This calls into question how much (or little) progress has been made over the past 100+ years. For the most part, I found myself nodding my head in agreement as I read his beliefs one by one.
Something that really stood out to me was Dewey's emphasis that the student should not be a passive learner. This is an issue that I have considered a lot since deciding to become a teacher. My brother and I have had more than one conversation about what makes a person go from taking everything they're taught as fact to being an active consumer of knowledge who raises questions and thinks critically. When I reflect on my own high school experience, I don't recall engaging in such behavior very often. Whatever my teachers said at the front of the class was inherently true. It wasn't until I went to college that I really began to apply my own thoughts, experiences, and beliefs to what I was being taught in the classroom. My college professors were a big influence on this change, as they encouraged this type of learning (unlike the teachers I had up until that point).
Something that I had never really considered, but that made a lot of sense as I was reading it, was Dewey's belief that children are born with an innate power to construct knowledge and that the best way for them to learn is to relate to their social life. If we are to prepare children to be responsible, contributing members of a community of learners, they need to construct new knowledge around what they already know. Traditional teaching styles often stifle this power, as they don't allow children to draw from their own past, present, and future experiences. When children enter a classroom and are expected to believe or hold as fact whatever their teachers present to them, they are moving backward in their own development as active, critical thinkers. Moreover, they are lacking the opportunity to find and build connections to their own world.
One of Dewey's beliefs that I couldn't fully get on board with was his insistence that subject matter is only valuable as it contributes to the nature and growth of social life. Although I agree that this is part of the value in education, I can't get passed the idea that, as Dewey put it, "the study of science is educational in so far as it brings out the materials and processes which make social life what it is." As a future math teacher, I can't imagine how a sufficient education in basic, foundational math curriculum could possibly be focused solely in its contribution to social life. As I read this section of the creed, I was imagining a limit being put on the amount and complexity of math material that would be taught in the classroom, and I found this to be as damaging as everything else that Dewey was arguing against. Perhaps I need to dig deeper into what the quote above really means and how it would impact my job as a math teacher.
All in all, I found Dewey's beliefs exciting to ponder as a brand new future teacher. Here's hoping that I will have the tools to enact some of his beliefs in the classroom one day!
Great post! This is really well-structured and easy to follow. Have you done blogging before? I am still figuring out what a blog post should be like, and I may borrow your format of "intro, three ideas from the reading and my different reactions/reflections" for a later post in my blog. I guess this is one of the reasone we're reading each others' blogs.
ReplyDeleteI'd be interested to hear more of your thoughts about appropriate subject matter and its relation to social life. I got the feeling that a lot of what Dewey had to say should be applied strictly in the elementary years, and more broadly secondary years. For example, he writes about learning through experience, but I think a level of lecturing, especially in math and the sciences, is appropriate in high school. Similarly, while it may not make sense to teach math concepts to seven year olds that they're not going to use in every day life, in high school, you can go beyond simple algebra because you're not just teaching math. You're teaching mathematical thinking. My calc teacher (a wonderful man and amazing teacher) used to tell us often that "Calculus is about learning to SEE!" While I don't use integrals and limits per se every day, I continue to be influenced by what he taught us about the elegance and logic of mathematics and its myriad applications to our lives.
I can't wait to hear more of your thoughts in class!
I'm glad you appreciated the structure of my blog post! I find that my writing typically comes out like this, which is probably because my mind tends to function in a very structured manner, for better or worse!
DeleteI really like your perspective on how the use of subject matter to relate to social life can evolve from the elementary years to the secondary years. I hadn't considered how Dewey's beliefs could be a bit more loosely followed in high school when students have a greater capacity for abstract thinking. This makes a lot of sense and makes this particular belief of his easier for me to swallow as a future math teacher.
Thanks for sharing!
Erin, I like the way your drew attention to Dewey's beliefs in the innate capabilities of children. I've noticed that some of the authors we've read (and some of the speakers we've heard) do believe very much that children have innate (or possibly "essential"?) capacities, and that some children are in fact more capable than others by their very nature. The emphasis of the "Blueprint for Reform" on non-collegiate post-secondary aspirations is at once both open-minded, and yet also redolent of "tracking"; Nel Noddings also seems to come down in favor of tracking, and the idea that some children just aren't cut out for college. I wonder what unspoken assumptions underlie these confident assertions.
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