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last.updated 1.30.11

Dewey's Pedagogical Philosophy
Purpose

John Dewey's theories have been quite influential on twentieth-century United States education. Whether practitioners adopt or reject his theories, many policies and pedagogies seem to respond to his principles. Today we will discuss where we have been and the relevancy of Dewey's work.

Video–The Pedagogy of Super Why!

Children's show's, like PBS's Super Why! are based upon a very formulaic pedagogy that they repeat from show to show. A show like Super Why! which focuses on early literacy education gives us a concrete example for talking about Dewey's and Freire's theories, as well as issues of scaffolding. From a conversation about this show, we will scale the conversation up to talking about the college and high school English Studies classroom.

We will start class at 7:35 to give you an opportunity to watch the assigned episode of Super Why!. To watch the episode, go to PBS Kids Videos and look for the following icon in the right hand menu:

Once you click on this icon, click on the "Browse Videos" button in the top right hand corner. Find and watch the episode titled, "Baby Dino's Big Discovery."

As you watch the episode take notes on how the show's pedagogy does and does not correspond to the theories of learning that Dewey and Friere, respectively advocate and critique.

Discussion – John Dewey & Paulo Freire

In the early twentieth century John Dewey composed a treatise to propose education reform. We will discuss the following:

• What questions do you have about this selection?
• What are his arguments?
• What did you find most interesting about this article?
• Graff has developed a secondary text explaining the history of nineteenth century literacy in the US; Dewey's treatise provides a primary text that defines the education at the beginning of the twentieth century. How do you see Dewey discussion responding to the conditions that Graff describes?
• How does Dewey support his arguments? In other words, what is his epistemology?
• Dewey defines education as "It is that reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to meaning of experience, and which increases ability to direct the course of subsequent experience" (p. 76). What are your opinions about this definition? Does it seem relevant almost one-hundred years later? How might you revise it?
• How is Freire's work with literacy education an extension and/or departure of Dewey's?
• How is Dewey's work relevant to English Studies?

Activity –Composing Blogs

Take a little time to look through your peer's blog entries. As you browse through them, ask yourself, "What textual and multimodal features in the blogs do I think are worth repeating in my own blog? Why?" We will use the end of class to discuss the answers to these questions.