Focus Paper Response

11 June 2006

I read Mason's focus paper on John Dewey and his philosophy of education. I'm interested in the work Dewey and L. L. Nunn have done on progressive ideas of education so I was happy to see that one of last year's focus papers covered some of this material; in fact, before I saw that Mason had written on Dewey, I was going to write on Dewey myself.

Dewey saw a strong link between education, democratic citizenship and individual experience. Dewey wanted a system of education that took seriously the its implications in the everyday life and experience of its students. Therefore, Dewey saw the experience of the classroom itself as just as important as the material covered within it. The approach toward education, in my mind, shifts the structure of the classroom from a strictly vertical organization to a more horizontal one. Mason identifies the two main consequences of this emphasis in a Deweyian education as a fostering a democratic awareness and the habit of self-education. In addition, one aspect of Dewey's philosophy that Mason highlights that I hadn't really thought of was Dewey's willingness to praise the organization of traditional education while looking to improve that structure through more experiential methods.

Organization, as Dewey points out, seems so key here. Right now, I think that is by far the weakest part in my teaching. I've clashed, personally, with some of the rhetoric in class of the teacher as the boss of the classroom, functioning almost as dictator. I agree wholeheartedly with Dewey that the classroom needs to mimic the social and political structures we want to foster in our students. Therefore, I want the students running my classroom as much or more than I am. As a teacher, then, my role becomes mostly a model. What might a democratic leader look like? As a teacher I need to model the behavior of a effective and engaged equal. At the same time, I need to organize the path by which we can move through the material as a democratic unit. I want a tangental and free-flowing classroom, but I also need to establish the consequences for disrespect. Whether its giving more warnings, lines and detentions, I need to establish an organized and consistent set of expectations both for the material lesson as well as for classroom behavior. Those expectations are always up for discussion, but I need to spark that discussion.

One idea that i've been toying with is to set up positions in the classroom that shift every day or every week. They would be something like a sheriff and a deputy. I want the students to begin to feel responsible not only for their own actions but for the actions of the whole class as well. I'm interested to see if setting up a system of expectations with consequences for the students, themselves, to enforce might help raise the level of student ownership of the classroom.