Dewey; Educative Experience Leonardo Medel

What is Deweys concept of experience as it relates to education?

The concept of experience is central in Deweys work. However, crucial as it is, it is not easy to get to a straight definition for it. At some extent, experience has to do with a lived situation, which incorporates to our mind, not necessarily in a conscious way. Hence the ways that this term is used (it was a really nice experience, from my experience, I can tell you that it is not a good idea.) To understand Deweys stand on experience, it is important to have in mind that traditionally, education was understood as an external fixed process, in which the immature child was supposed to be taught how to leave behind his natural tendencies, and replaced them with the culturally agreed as mature, correct ones. This idea presents the child similarly to an empty vessel, or tabula rasa if preferred, a blank canvas to be painted with the expertise of previous generations. Dewey opposed to the previous ideas stating that, even at the first contact with school, children already have a set of experiences, intimately tied with affections from his natural environment. To ignore this notion and to ignore those experiences as a foundation for their learning process is to start in a wrong direction from the beginning. But there is much more to it. To complete Deweys concept of experience, two key concepts must be presented: continuity and interaction.

Our mind does not keep experiences in discrete, isolated compartments. Every experience is somehow related to a previous one, influenced by it. Thus, the new construct composed by them will affect the way in which future experiences are assimilated. This is the basic idea of Deweys principle of continuity for experiences. It was impossible for me as I was reading this principle not to relate it with Ausubels concept of meaningful learning. With some perspective, we can also observe a continuity principle in how this cells of old knowledge enlarge in the presence of new knowledge related with the previous one. This new structure is prone to be receptive of more new information. If the information received is stimulating enough, the enlarged structure will attach strongly to the cognitive structure, improving the ability to relate it with other objects 1 in the cognitive structure and, therefore, feasible to be recalled in long-term memory. These ideas both strongly consider the individuals previous

knowledge/experience and establish a continuous-based construction model. The principle of continuity has relevant consequences to establish the pedagogical value of experience. I will come back to this idea soon. Dewey also arguments that every experience is a process in which external and internal variables interact with each other, and together form a situation. By assigning equal value to external and internal variables, Dewey differentiates himself from both curriculum-centered and child-centered perspectives.

By object I mean any element of the cognitive structure. Thus, a very relevant, meaningful knowledge could fall into this category.
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What features of experience make it educative? What features make it less so (or worse)?

To discuss this point, it is fundamental to consider Deweys principle of continuity for experience. Let us remember that, in simple words, every experience affects future experiences (a more detailed definition can be found in the previous section). Hence it emerges the possibility of leading experiences of an individual in several directions. At every point, the experience presented to a person can lead into several possible branches. At this point, it could be interesting to ask: how can we differentiate among the possible outcomes and determine which one is the best (or a good one)? Dewey tells that one of the observations he received was the possibility of someone growing as a successful burglar. He responds that even how the principle of continuity acts is determined by the quality of the experience. It is possible that a series of bad experiences leaves a person stuck in a low development level, affecting his future capability of growing. Thus, an experience (or a series of experiences) can, in fact, be non-educative or anti-educative, depending on the direction in which that experience (or those experiences) led. There is still an issue to determine what we meant by growing. It was just argued that experiences could lead into different directions. To determine whether the taken direction can be considered as growing or not, the following question should be answered: does the taken direction allow future growing or does it difficult ulterior growing in new directions? Only when looking the taken direction under the perspective

of general growing we can determine the educative non -educative or antieducative nature of experiences. A logical consequence of the previous ideas is that teachers carry on their shoulders the ethical obligation of exposing their students to experiences that allow them to grow, and to avoid those experiences that could lead in the opposite direction. Not an easy task.

Do you think Deweys view of education (learning and teaching) changed from C2 to E2? If so, how?

At this point, I have not been able to take off my head the fact that between The Child and The Curriculum (from now on, C&C) and Experience and Education (from now on, E&E) Dewey experienced the work of laboratory schools. If we tend to believe in Dewey and I do we should agree on the idea that this very important experience should affect his own learning process and, somehow, be reflected in his writings. As a start, the idea of experience is latent in both pieces, and it seems to be absolutely consistent. However, Dewey dedicates a generous amount of space in E&E to write some extended ideas on theory of experience. He also discuss about social control, freedom, purpose, etc. All of them are deep and interesting reflections that lead the reader to think that they emerged from the experience of observing classrooms.

Following the mentioned topics, there is a section about the progressive organization of the subject matter, where he flows his previous ideas into a theory on how to organize them to be applied in schools and the challenges of doing so. In sum, I must confess that I found both pieces to be very consistent. Nevertheless, I still consider that after reading C&C I kept the impression of a vigorous Dewey, arguing his ideas and exposing why they should work. After reading E&E, in the other hand, I imagined a more reflective Dewey, giving more space to a broad explanation of his theories, and giving some lights about his own experience.

For classroom teachers (the role that you should temporarily take on for this question), how is Deweys conceptualization of experience useful in organizing teaching and learning? What important issues of classroom teaching and learning does it leave unaddressed?

In words of Giddens2 (1999), school is a shell institution. It appears to change on the outside, but it is really difficult for it to be changed inside. Teaching in traditional ways it is still very typical (at least in Chile). Reading this pieces made me reflect about an important issue. An individual learns in a very specific context, with a set of specific conditions. The exact same conditions from the learning experience hardly are going to occur again in the future. This limits the reach of traditional teaching. There are people that went through several lessons of a diversity of things that they can never remember

Giddens, A. Runaway World, 1999.

again. Those things lost all their significance. They depend from similar circumstances to occur again in order to emerge back. Teaching apart from experience will often lead to meaningless learning. Teaching considering the experience and psychologizing the subject could produce a different result. In this sense, the experience acts as a vehicle. It goes with each individual from one instance to another. It is true that experience is dynamic, prone to change and evolution. However, in the larger construct are still embedded the characteristics of previous experience. Even if the same conditions of the learning instance do not occur, the subjects experience will go with him wherever he goes. By fixing previously all educational features in an external way, a great number of complex, subjective learning processes are excluded. There is an unavoidable restriction of cultural meaning underlying these situations. Experience is interactive; students collaborate with internal variables to conform the situation. They indeed play an extremely important role. Anything less than that is scorning them. Although Deweys ideas are very commendable, it is not less true that they are very difficult to implement. Only by reading Dewey, a teacher could not implement those theories (at least no easily). And it is precisely because much of Deweys work is theory that, more than a century after some of his work was written, we still found that teachers successfully implementing Deweyan ideas such as psychologizing the subject are no more than a handful of particular cases. A pessimistic feeling may be left to the reader after the last idea. However, that is not the intention. There is a tremendous value after every one of Deweys ideas. It is true that they are very challenging, but systematic efforts at a government level must be made

(and keep making them) to implement some of these ideas. Of course, given the nature of them it is more plausible for local communities to engage into this task, but this will happen only with proper support and resources (and by this I do not mean only funding, but also time and willingness) being given to all the actors of the educational system. It is our ethical duty aiming to give our students anything less than the best.