After reading My
Pedagogic Creed by John Dewey (a couple of times through) and John Dewey A Significant Contributor to the
Field of Educational Technology by Peter Rich and Thomas C. Reeves I was
amazed at how many of Dewey’s fundamental principals are still things that I
would like to shape my classroom around. I was also surprised and discouraged
that Dewey and his ideas were written and created over 50 years ago and there
are still many classroom in America that have the students sitting “absorbing”
knowledge.
How we learn and how we relay what we know to other is
something that happens everyday all over the world, Dewey’s emphasis on
teaching students in ways that resembles what happens at home and making
students feel comfortable in the school environment by relating it to their
social and home life is something that I would like to incorporate into my math
classroom. It is intimidating for me to take this task on because if it was
easy and natural then all math teacher would be doing it. I believe that an
important aspect of being able to make your students feel comfortable in your
classroom and being able to relate to your students is getting involved in the
community that your students are a part of. In many schools where student struggle
the teachers do not live in the same community as their students so they in
particular need to get involved and learn about the community that their
students are apart of.
Dewey’s educational philosophies have been applied to so
many current educational trends I wonder what Dewey would think of the current
state of education in our country and how he would evaluate the work we are
doing in the MAC program? I think that he would be surprised at the
standardization and how much emphasis there is to teach the standards and how
little change his work has made. Although his work is still inspiring future
teachers like me, I wonder what has hindered the actual application of Dewey’s
ideas. I am sure I will find out shortly when we start working in classrooms.
I do wonder how he'd feel about our current program. Considering what Jeff was discussing today about Dewey's reticence to join a foundations built on "his ideas", how would he see this program citing so heavily from them.
ReplyDeleteI think one of the reasons, at least historically, why we've adopted so few of his measures is our country's fear of the communist threat. If you search for "John Dewey Progressive Education Association", the first hit is from marxist.org. Consider when he was writing. I actually think he was picking a fight.