| This dissertation examines a classroom teacher's efforts to apply John Dewey's ideas to teaching humanities in a middle school. At the outset, the work was to be largely scientific, taking shape as a series of experiments designed to test principles culled from Dewey's writings. These ideas were meant to serve as guidelines to facilitate a match between external conditions and students' internal readiness to learn, eventually leading to developing the kinds of lesson Dewey calls "an experience."; Instead of using Dewey's ideas to determine what should and should not be done, I found his thinking useful in helping me to reflect. I studied episodes from everyday life at school that had made me stop to think. Dewey's ideas proved particularly useful as part of a process of examining received beliefs. The episodes, apparently simple and straightforward from the outset, turned out to be pregnant with material worth revisiting. Dewey's concept of "generic traits," rudimentary categories of experience, for example, apply to every situation. Moreover, they reveal qualities easily obscured by personal bias, helping to coax out meanings imminent in a situation, mediating between understanding and the concrete details of everyday experience.; I noted a temptation to validate certain concepts by stretching them to fit an experience. However, I learned to recognize circumstances in which Dewey's ideas do not apply. For example in teaching eighth graders Dewey's "method of intelligence," I realized that Dewey himself was confused about what he meant by "reflection." At times, he refers to instrumental thinking, the kind used to solve problems. At other times reflective thinking appears to be aesthetic, aimed at shaping events so that they become what he calls "an experience." Whereas science improves our understanding of the physical world, we have to engage our subjective selves in order to understand human behavior. This suggests that teachers if students engaged in reading Dewey have a responsibility to make explicit differences between instrumental and aesthetic thinking. Thinking about ourselves may involve a different kind of critical judgment, raising questions about how teachers can do this. |
