Radical Pedagogy (2014)

Volume 11 Number 2
ISSN: 1524-6345

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The Road Not Taken: John Dewey and Sentences as Limit Situations

Sarah Stanley
University Writing Director, English Department
University of Alaska Fairbanks, USA
Email: sstanley2@alaska.edu

Abstract
In J. Dewey’s book How We Think (1933), the metaphor for critical
thinking presented is a “forked road.” The subject critically acts by
observing, analyzing, and then selecting a route, or making a decision. In
Deweyian theory, reasons are tied to judgment, which is essential to
experience. The goal of this essay is to establish writing as critical thinking,
as a result of the process of writing toward and then negotiating these thickly
forked-roads, or what Freire (2000) understands as limit, situations.
Keywords: John Dewey, experience, critical thinking, critical writing

J. Dewey’s (1933) metaphor for critical thinking is the forked road.

He put it this way in How We Think:

A man traveling in an unfamiliar region comes to a branching of the

roads. Having no sure knowledge to fall back upon, he is brought to a
standstill of hesitation and suspense. Which road is right? And how
shall perplexity be resolved? There are but two alternatives: he must
either blindly and arbitrarily take his course, trusting to luck for the
outcome, or he must discover grounds for the conclusion that a given
road is right.
 With this image-schema of a forked road in mind, I re-introduce John,
who is described in Roz Ivanič’s book Writing and identity (1998) as
“highly involved with Aids campaigning.” The passage is a minor detail in a
much larger study; however, it is instructive here as it captures praxis, which
is often hidden from our experiences as critical teachers. In the research,
Ivanič asks John about the word “Aids,” asking him specifically about his
decision to represent Aids as a word rather than an acronym (AIDS) in a
biomedical paper. Ivanič offers to John a forked road, as she highlights
discursive differences—the more sterile representation of AIDS as an
acronym, in contrast to the word of the social justice movement. After
learning of the difference, which is to John a complete surprise—he had only
come in contact with Aids as an activist himself—John tells IvaniČ he will
“continue to do so,” which I take to mean he will continue to write the word
in the paper rather than the arguably more functionally appropriate (given
the disciplinary context) AIDS. Despite the language not changing, his
understanding of what this choice means in its given context does change,
and in this way, John’s writing of “Aids” is praxis. My pedagogical thinking
that follows emerges from my reading of John’s use of the word Aids and
MZ Lu’s (1994) multicultural pedagogy, in which she does a similar close
reading of a student’s use of “can able to.” So in the case of this essay, after
Lu and Ivanič, how will awareness to a sentence’s micro concerns, which
are so often overlooked or by-passed unless there is an error, become re-
experienced as a forked road?

I reflect also on a sentence from John Dewey (1900), from his essay
“The School and the Life of the Child”: “There is all the difference in the
world between having something to say and having to say something.”
Dewey’s sentence interests me for its stylistic, emphatic use of the cleft. The
passage prompts the reader to imagine what “all the difference in the world”
could signify—all the meaning that depends on how we put it, one way
versus another. The energy behind Dewey’s sentiment is in communicating,
or acting on, the “world of difference” between such language situations—
what Freire (2000) understood as limit situations. Friere observed that a limit
situation exists whenever we are faced with a choice for how to understand
an idea, based on an act of interpretation and grounded in how we write this
idea, using language. The sentence is a call: an invitation to reason.

This meaning is profound, I will argue, because of Dewey’s invitation

to interpret just what this world of difference is, between the ways we put
something, and what difference that difference makes. One way of inviting

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such reasoning between form and content is to draw on the resources of a
particular sentence’s syntax, as the differences between subtle syntactical
arrangements are fundamental to how students position themselves, in
relation to their communicative acts with others. Do they have something to
say? Are they saying something because they must? What resources do they
already have for what to say? What resources are we teaching them and,
alternatively, expecting them to already have, in order to say something
purposefully? Are such resources fully conscious to our students, or to
ourselves? How conscious are we of what Dewey declared as the world of
difference between such questions? When faced with an alternative option
for wording what they have to say, what difference does this make to
students? What motivates students to put something one way versus
another?

In Dewey’s essay, the sentence above appears not as an introduction

to his ideas about education and language, but as a conclusion to them, after
a long paragraph in which he explicates two language positions and how
they are approached in high-school classrooms. The argument begins with
the premise that “a chief difficulty of school work has come to be instruction
of the mother-tongue.” Here, Dewey framed his world of difference as
within the context of schooling. Based on the premise that school work is
difficult because of the alienating relationship between instruction and
language itself, he writes:

Since the language is unnatural, not growing out of the real desire to
communicate vital impressions and convictions, the freedom of
children in its use gradually disappears, until finally the high-school
teacher has to invent all kinds of odd devices to assist in getting any
spontaneous and full use of speech. Moreover, when the language
instinct is appealed to in a social way, there is a continual contact with
reality.

In the situation Dewey describes, the school’s treatment of language

has handled it so “unnaturally” that it becomes that way for students. This
process of language’s removal from the lived realities of everyday life is so
pervasive, according to Dewey, teachers respond by going to great lengths of
creativity in order to bring about spontaneous speech. Such a situation is a
problem. Richards (1936) articulated this as a problem of understanding
language as a system, rather than as an “instrument of all our distinctively
human development, of everything in which we go beyond the other

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animals.” This situation is not necessarily fully conscious, and in fact,
language in school can often be presented under what Richards refers to as
“gross misconception,” as teachers emphasize the transmission of words into
images, rather than emphasizing that “it is the word which brings in the
meaning which the image and its original perception lack.”

Dewey presents us with a social communicative situation from two

different perspectives. Specifically, his structure invites the reader to
consider the difference on either side of the turn in the sentence: having
something to say versus having to say something. While Dewey begins each
perspective “having” (his modifying phrase for “students”), he then
manipulates the modification to yield his world of difference, all of which
depends on how and where and when language is put. That is, “having” can
pair directly with “something,” as an adjectival phrase, or rather as an
adverbial phrase with “to say.” What students have, therefore, functions in
two quite different ways. In the first arrangement, “something” immediately
follows “having”: having something. When I read this phrase, I pause after
“having something,” before I put the idea together: having something
[break] to say. The experience is a two-part sequence—having something (1)
to say (2). This arrangement is not about rhythm and turns of phrase only. In
fact, the difference here only becomes fully accessible when Lakoff and
Johnson’s theory of conceptual metaphor (2002) is applied and we become
more aware of how “metaphor gives meaning to form.” The conceptual
metaphor in English writing closeness is strength of effect can demonstrate
how Dewey’s turn of phrase and work with syntax enacts his pedagogical
philosophy of experience.

In Dewey’s early philosophical writing (revised 1964), he observes

these tensions, which he refers to collectively as the problem of interest and
effort in education. He begins the essay “Interest in Relation to Training of
the Will” by noting the contradiction, writing,

On the one hand, we have the school which insists that interest is the
keynotes both of instruction and of moral training, that the essential
problem of the teacher is to make the material presented so interesting
that it shall command and retain attention. On the other hand we have
the assertion that the putting forth of effort from within is alone truly
educative; that to rely upon the principle of interest is it distract the
child intellectually and to weaken him morally.

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Yet Dewey does not see these forces as opposed, as he theorizes their
relationship, weaving them together. He writes that “effort is the result of
interest, and indicates the persistent outgo of activities in attaining an end
felt as valuable; while interest is the consciousness of the value of this end,
and of the means necessary to realize it.”

In chapter 20 of Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson present

several linguistic examples of the conceptual metaphor closeness is strength
of effect. They begin with the premise that our writing system in English
conceptualizes a sentence as “a spatial object with words in a linear order.”
Our spatial reasoning, thus, seems natural to us as we draw on these spatial
metaphors in regard to written expressions (“whether two words are close to
each other or far apart”). That is, for many English speakers, in everyday
English talk, one might ask a friend about another friend—if they are still so
close—enacting an entailment of the conceptual metaphor. Drawing on this
metaphorical understanding of closeness, when applied to the syntax of
sentences, there emerge semantic differences. A Lakoff and Johnson
example:
I taught Greek to Harry.

I taught Harry Greek.

Lakoff and Johnson point out that in “the second sentence, where
taught and Harry are closer, there is more of a suggestion that Harry actually
learned what was taught him—that is, that the teaching had an effect on
him.” Syntax indicates directness of experience, and the elements of this
syntax, and especially their closeness, will indicate “the strength of that
effect.” Syntaxes that lengthen, as well as syntaxes that squish, concepts and
relationships between concepts are also frequently discussed in J. Gee’s
(1999) critical discourse analysis. Grammatical concepts such as passively
constructed sentences, foregrounding and backgrounding contextual
information within sentences, and the presence of grammatical metaphors
embedded in sentences are all syntactical resources used for certain
ideological effects (e.g., hiding who is doing what to whom). In sum,
sentences may be written with varying degrees of causal relationships, and
the ways we understand cause and effect are rendered through the spatial
object of a sentence.

Returning to Dewey’s turn of phrase, the syntax of the first example

“having something” is so close that the grammatical words are in fact

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adjacent. Further, when compared to the second phrase “having” + “to say”
+ “something,” the spatial difference—the degree of closeness—is made
more apparent, all of which is further reinforced by how we read the turns of
phrase, using varying emphasis, rising and falling intonation, etc. Implicit in
Dewey’s arrangement, then, is a fact about grammatical order: grasping
something occurs prior to the decision/obligation to communicate it (having
something to say before having to say something). This discovery contrasts
with the second arrangement, of course, in which the “something” occurs
after a longer verbal phrase of “having to say…”

I’m arguing here that the difference in distance between these two
notions corresponds to the substance of what Dewey advocates in
education—the primacy of experience, which must not be separated from
our understanding of the student’s relationship to language. That is, one
reading of the syntax of this Dewey sentence is that it brings to the fore the
directness of experience (having something) in the communicative situation.
When the communicative situation interrupts the relationship between
students and their experiences (i.e., having + to say + something), then we
distance these students from experience, and in that space, where they are
separated from their somethings, we require language use. To generalize: no
wonder so many students feel alienated, frustrated, and fearful of writing in
school—these students are made to feel they have to say something, rather
than having something to say! Our social expectations for students, in this
case, seem to be more about the institutional obligation for students to
demonstrate rather than communicate.

Personally, because this phrase—“having something to say”—has

always resonated so strongly for me, it has become a kind of mantra in my
own teaching and writing. I have interpreted it intuitively, as a way of
understanding the need for a writer to feel purpose in what she writes and as
a way of putting in effective language the reasons for writing. In a similar
way, Stephen Fishman (1998) adopts Dewey’s words and wordings, as he
weaves them into his experiences as both a teacher and writer of philosophy.
Fishman incorporates Dewey’s concepts often, by directly quoting key
phrases. The effect of this style is that the full force of Dewey’s utterance
about the “world of difference” is left behind, and Dewey’s concept
becomes pedagogical. Consider John Dewey and the Challenge of
Classroom Practice, in which Fishman writes, in the section called
“Teaching for Critical Thinking”,

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 As years of teaching added up, a number of my problems grew
stronger. First, I was getting bored. Having taught the same way for
almost 15 years, I was not discovering much. …this Socratic skill I
was demonstrating teetered on smugness, on what Dewey saw as
learning for ostentatious display. Analyzing for analyzing’s sake, at
least without a lot more constructive work than I was promoting in
class, could easily encourage students to become academic “sharps”
(Democracy 9). So I was chalking up zeroes again, until I got
assistance from an unexpected source, one which led me to see the
value—as Dewey put it—of helping pupils find they have “something
to say” (How 246).

“Yes,” I have written, on the margins of that page. But now I wonder, after
this reading and thinking about Dewey’s sentence, about all the difference
that form makes in Dewey’s sentence’s meaning, about an eagerness to take
that form apart, and about a personal connection to Dewey’s writing on art
and experience, if a deep belief about writing and the teaching of writing
likewise warrants pragmatic doubt. So I also argue that the presence of
“having something to say” and “having to say something” are co-dependent
concepts. From the sentence, the teacher and student are faced with a forked
road situation—should I follow the lead of the student? Should I follow the
lead of the curriculum? How directly—how closely—are we drawing from
the student’s experience with language in our classrooms? Is there a
sequence in place that may displace the student from experience? How can
we develop a curriculum founded on the premise that our students already
have something to say? What does that look like?

The Dewey sentence sets up for us, as teachers at the university, a

significant distinction amid experiences that often become both complicated
and simplified in our classrooms and program practice—our relationships to
the interpretive politics of student language use. On one hand, there exists
the classroom reality that students must say something in order to be
assessed, and on the other, the belief that all students are rhetorical beings
who have both something to say and multiple ways to say it. We must
consider not only the importance of their “something to say” to our students’
relationships to what they write, but also the multiple ways they have for
writing it. Asking writers to have more than one possibility in mind for how
to say something and to develop reasons behind the way they write
emphasizes deliberate acts of meaning-making with others.

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 My students and I have continued to engage Dewey’s turn of phrase.
As the teacher, however, I am always careful to frame our conversations so
that we may discuss purpose in terms of voices of saying, just as I also
introduce them to a fundamental question that motivates critical reasoning
about language use: What is the difference between this way of saying this
particular thing and that way of saying this particular thing? Further: Does
the difference matter? Why does it matter?

I am calling into question the belief that writing should be about the
something to say rather than how the something to say is put. That is, we
cannot extract the meaning from Dewey’s sentence and assume that “having
something to say” is the “substance” of this sentence, as it so depends on the
other possibility—that students have to say something. When I teach writing
to first-year students, I like to begin with Dewey’s point about purpose and
motivation. In order to get students excited about such distinctions regarding
using language and communication, I turn Dewey’s statement into a
question: What is the difference between having to say something and
having something to say?

The place of sentence-level concerns in critical pedagogy often goes

dismissed and ignored (Micciche 2002), as macro discussions of discourse,
power, and the social often take center stage in our critical teaching. A
whole class discussion about a student writer’s use of a particular word, or
the positioning of a parenthesis, or a grammatical arrangement over another
possible one is no doubt atypical critical pedagogy. Even in “writing
intensive” classes across the curriculum, such focus might seem
counterintuitive in a critical curriculum—a problem-posing curriculum does
not often spend significant class time on the differences between “role” and
“rule.” Yet, perhaps we should—and what might this say about that
distinction?

To me, this kind of imagination is what we are teaching when we are

teaching anything—we are teaching reasoning within a given language use
and form, and we are discussing differences and why they matter with our
students. We are using our expertise about how language works, and we are
encouraging our students to develop a similar kind of attention to language
in the way they use it with others and for certain purposes. Without this kind
of investigation and discussion, I do not see how we can motivate our
students to use language in dynamic ways—ways that hold potential to
change and influence their world. Sentence-level critical thinking should be

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developed as an aspect of a writer’s language use because language is
ideological. Focusing on what is lost and what is gained in terms of language
choices that occur for a writer is also a way of discussing the ideological
implications and effects tied to these language choices. The relationship
between language and ideology explored in a classroom encourages students
to critically consider language and grammatical choices, resulting in a more
conscious and deepened sense of their unique purposes, in relation to the
existence around them.

References

Dewey, J. (1900). The school and society. Chicago, IL: The University of
Chicago Press.
Dewey, J. (1933). How we think (Revised edition). New York, NY: Heath.
Dewey, J. (1964). Interest in relation to training of the will. In R. D.
Archambault. (Ed.), John Dewey on education: Selected writings.
(260-285). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Fishman, S., & McCarthy, L. (1998). John Dewey and the challenge of
classroom practice. New York, NY: Teacher’s College Press.
Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York, NY: Continuum.
Gee, J. P. (1999). An introduction to discourse analysis: Theory & method.
New York, NY: Routledge.
Ivanič, R. (1998). Writing and identity: The discoursal construction of
identity in academic writing (Studies in Written Language and
Literacy, Vol. 5). Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing.
Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (2002). Metaphors we live by, second edition.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Lu, M. Z. (1994). Professing multiculturalism: The politics of style in the
contact zone. College Composition and Communication, 45(4), 442-
458.
Miccichie, L. (2004). Making a case for rhetorical grammar. College
Composition and Communication, 55(4), 716-737.
Richards, I. A. (1936). The philosophy of rhetoric. New York, NY: Oxford
University Press.

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