1. Dewey 2
What does child-centred mean?
Supporting a reading of Experience
and Education chapters 1-3

2. Child centredness: how simple?
• It certainly means ‘putting the child at the
centre of the learning event’
• Does it mean something else besides this?

3. Dewey’s educational philosophy
Pedagogical
The School and Society
Social/ political

4. Democratic Context
4 Dr F.Long, Education

5. • Herbart’s Method: 5 steps • Dewey’s method: 5 Steps
– Preparation (ask for previous • Confusion. The teacher
experiences, thoughts) introduces the confusion usually
– Presentation of new content by skillful questioning
– presented with utmost • -learners attempt to formulate
care and logic the problem or problems
(representation by learners)
– Association – informal • Hypothesis. A type of mental
construct arises, a form of theory
conversation to link new
that arises from practice – a
knowledge to old, multiply hypothesis
links
– Generalisation ; what • Testing the hypothesis: an
general principle might arise experiment is designed to test it
from this new learning? (Inquiry, p. 112)
Extend the learning • Operational Idea – the well
– Application to different tested hypothesis leads to
contexts of what is learned operational ideas

6. Johann Friedrich Herbart 1776-1841
• Influences on Method:
• Child’s experience is the key starting
point
• Child’s interest must be aroused
• Child’s experience then needs
instruction
• The presentation by Teachers is key to
the re-presentation of learners
• The child’s representations
Dr F.Long, Education 6

7. Lev Vygotsky (1896 – 1934)
• Zone of Proximal Development
(Zaretskii,2009)
Dr F.Long, Education 7

8. • We show the child how the problem should be solved and
look to see whether or not, imitating what he’s been shown,
he completes the problem.
• Or we begin to solve the problem and allow the child to
complete it.
• Or we give him problems that are beyond the bounds of his
mental age to solve in collaboration with another, more
developed child,
• or, finally, we explain to the child the principles for solving the
problem, pose a leading question, break the problem down
into pieces for him, and so forth.
• In short, we ask the child to solve problems that are beyond
the bounds of his mental age using one form of collaboration
or another (Vygotsky as cited in Zaretskii, 2009, p. 76)
• Zaretskii, V. K. (2009), The Zone of Proximal Development: What Vygotsky Did Not
Have Time to Write, Journal of Russian & East European Psychology 47(6), 70-93.
Dr F.Long, Education 8

9. Chapter 1
• Some contrasts:
– The education is development from within or formation
from without (p. 17)
– Formation from without:
• Transmit past knowledge to present generation for future use
(habits of knowledge, conduct, school organisation)
• Textbooks a central feature, teaching quality significant
– Development from within:
• Cultivation of individuality (p. 19), internal discipline, learning
from experience, vital appeal, dynamic aims and materials
• To locate subject-matter within experience (p.20)
– Dewey’s new educational foundation: the child’s
experience

10. Chapter 1: Query
• Main Fault of Progressivism: to constitute
itself negatively as a reaction against
traditional schemes and methods rather than
positively
• To define itself by means of what it stands
against rather than what it stands for
• What does it stand for?

11. Chapter 2
• What is educative experience?
– Miseducative experiences
• Cause a rut so the same behaviour is repeated without variation
• Cause enjoyment but in a careless way
• Disconnected experiences – ‘dispersive, disintegrated, centrifugal
habits’ (p. 26)
• Linking learning to boredom
• A philosophy of education?
– Constituted by a plan for deciding upon
• Subject-matter (p. 28)
• Methods of instruction and discipline
• Social organisation of the school

12. Chapter 3
• The nature of experience
– Emotional as well as intellectual attitudes (p.35)
– Growth leading to flourishing (p.35) –lego? A spoiled
child? (p.37) – ‘dynamic system’
– Experience - a moving force for the good (p.38)
– The guidance of the mature person (p.38)
– Experience linked to objective conditions (p.39),
environing conditions (p.40)
– Example of feeding a baby (p.41) meeting of internal and
external conditions (p.42)
– The two principles of continuity and interaction (p.44)
– What education can prepare for the future? (p.49)

13. Contrasts
• Traditional • Progressive
– “the beginning of instruction
– “Dogmatic” knowledge shall be made with the
compartmentalised and experience learners already
disconnected from have” (EE, p.74)
– “expansion and organization
child’s experience of subject-matter through
– A “diet of predigested growth of experience”
materials” (Experience (EE,p.74)
– Social situations
and Education, p. 46)
• Progress marked by a
continuous spiral (EE,p.79)
– a laboratory research
Education, Dr F.Long 13

14. Summary Words: Interest
• Interest
– Avoid drudgery
– Avoid routine
– Avoid the teacher’s ideas alone or ideas for
their own sake
– Promote spontaneous activity like playing
– Promote doing and enjoying
“Education is development within, by, and for
experience” (EE, p.28)
Education, Dr F.Long 14

15. Second Summary Word: Experience
• Experience “Every experience is a moving force” EE,
p.38)
– Avoid callousness
– Avoid entertainment
– Avoid disconnections
– Promote Interaction of subject areas
– Promote Interaction of pupils
– Promote Continuity of learning, (reinforcement)
from earlier understanding to later understanding
Education, Dr F.Long 15

16. Third Summary Word: Discipline
• Think of teaching and learning together as an activity
• Think of this activity as a game. How are the rules of
this game infringed?
• Participants submit to the rules for the sake of the
activity
• There is no arbitrary authority
“the control of individual actions is effected by the whole
situation in which individuals are involved…” (EE, p.53)
Education, Dr F.Long 16

17. Main points
• Like Herbart, Dewey wants to set learning on a
proper psychological footing: All learning is
purposive, directional, connected to the learner’s life
• Links education to society and the democratic
process. Do you understand how this link is made in
Dewey’s system?
• Desire has been replaced by discipline in most
traditional schools. How does Dewey propose
reversing this? How could the new structure be
disciplined?
• Learning situations. How different are these from
traditional ways of approaching the curriculum?
Education, Dr F.Long 17

18. ‘democratic’ knowledge
I believe that the only true education comes
through the stimulation of the child’s powers by
the demands of the social situations in which he
finds himself. Through these demands he is
stimulated to act as a member of a unity...
In order to know what a power really is we
must know what its end, use, or function is; and
this we cannot know save as we conceive of the
individual as active in social relationships.
John Dewey, My Pedagogic Creed
18 Dr F.Long, Education

19. Definition
• Inquiry is the controlled or directed
transformation of an indeterminate
situation into one that is so determinate
in its constituent distinctions and
relations as to convert the elements of
the original situation into a unified
whole
• John Dewey, The Logic of Inquiry (1938), p. 104