The Reverend John Dewey

This week was a bit hectic. I went to visit the Fam for the Canada Day/Anniversary/Independence Day long weekend and when I got back home I had to really work my arse off to get everything finished. I almost did it too, but because of computer trouble I missed two of the marking assignments for one class. I was finished the one and tried to submit it, but time ran out. It won't hurt my grade a lot though. This week I'm going to their place for KD camp! That's Kelly and Dave, not Kraft Dinner. I'll be there just over a month and by the time I'm finished a lot of things will be different. I'll either find a new job and get a work visa, or extend my D-10 looking for work visa and stay in Gongju, or there could be other options. We'll see what happens... Anyway, here is the writing assignment from this week that I liked best:

The Reverend John Dewey

John Dewey was a religious man. He taught Bible classes and lectured on living a proper, Christian life (Murray, 2017). When I was reading his chapters about experience in education, I didn’t hear him teaching, I heard him preaching and I felt like standing up in my chair as if from a church pew and shouting, “Amen,” or “Preach it Grandpa Dewey!” Just as Reverend Martin Luther King Junior got fired up repeating many of his hopes for America starting with that familiar phrase, “I have a dream,” to the building applause of the marchers for freedom on that day in Washington in the summer of 1963, I could almost see Dewey imagining a similar crowd and growing waves of applause and accord as he listed off some examples of miseducative experiences common to traditional schools each beginning with the phrase, “How many (students)?” (Dewey, 1938).

It was hard not to feel his passion even in his somewhat stilted, formal style of an era in which academic writing that Pinar referred to as “journalistic” (Pinar, 1978) was not taken very seriously. It is an emotional experience to see students’ impetus to learn being lost; their senses being dulled by rote learning; their association of school to boredom developing; their love of reading wasted; and their collective realization of the irrelevance of their school experiences (Dewey, 1938). It is especially difficult for a teacher who cares. These were some of the “miseducative” experiences Dewey believed distorted or arrested the growth of further experience and he sought, through progressive methodology, to replace them with experiences that were informed by the past, enlightened the present and encouraged similarly educative experiences in the future (Dewey, 1938). He felt that teachers should not only employ experiential learning that was shaped by past learning in order to shape future learning in their students, Dewey believed on moral grounds that teachers had no right to withhold this essential, informative experience from their students (Dewey, 1938).

Cheryl Craig’s mention of Li, Conle, and Elbbaz-Lewisch’s “pedagogy of narrative shifting” struck a nerve for me as well in that I believe academic environments of today might be more polarized than ever and making the standoffish atmosphere more malleable through narrative inquiry can be an invaluable classroom resource (Craig, 2011). As an ESL educator in Korea, I see a developing dissonance between modern ideas and traditionally held concepts, not just in education, but in politics, religion, economics, and social arenas, so in my opinion, contextualizing current student experiences with similar examples from history as well as my personal experiences serves to make class more relevant and engaging.

This may conflict with the prevailing traditionalism in Korean education, which has had a longstanding symbiosis with industry and social customs here, but Korean educators are warming up to progressive techniques such as experiential education as they see positive learning outcomes. I have personally witnessed the evolution of the Korean student from the passive vessels into which knowledge is poured then poured out of and onto exam papers (Yi, 2016), to a more inquisitive, active, and creative bunch, and it has been encouraging.

 

References

Craig, C. J. (2011). Narrative inquiry in teaching and teacher education. Advances in research on teaching, 13, 19–36. Retrieved July 1, 2022, from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235282657_Narrative_inquiry_in_teaching_and_teacher_education

Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. Touchstone. https://doi.org/http://ruby.fgcu.edu/Courses/ndemers/Colloquium/ExperiencEducationDewey.pdf

Murray, W. R. (2017). John Dewey, God and the religious education of the American people. Theology Today. Retrieved July 1, 2022, from https://doi.org/https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0040573616688732?journalCode=ttja#:~:text=In%20Michigan%2C%20Dewey%20%E2%80%9Cwas%20active,The%20Place%20of%20Religious%20Emotion.

Pinar, W. F. (1978). The reconceptualisation of curriculum studies. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 10(3), 205–214. Retrieved June 28, 2022, from https://doi.org/http://daneshnamehicsa.ir/userfiles/file/Resources/8-2%29%20Ideologies/ARTICLE_William%20Pinar.pdf

Yi, C. (2016). Investigation of Chinese students' passive learning in EAP classroom. US-China Foreign Language, 14(5), 357–363. Retrieved July 2, 2022, from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311630790_Investigation_of_Chinese_Students'_Passive_Learning_in_EAP_Classroom