The first challenge I faced was how to get as much of a comprehensive overview as possible of the education landscape – and that led me to a Coursera called “What Future for Education” by the University of London (materials are free, unless you want the certificate). It was useful in that it provided a map – I was looking for something like an introduction to international relations course I took in college, which started with realism, liberalism and constructivism – and this course helped provide the first scaffolding.
The course started off with describing the major distinctions between traditional and progressive education. Progressive education became more prominent at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, in line with the reform that was directed towards the reconstruction of American democracy. Progressives wanted to rid the government of corruption and reform public education, among other areas of life. John Dewey was one of the leaders of the progressive movement in education.
For Dewey, traditional education consisted of bodies of information and skills that were worked out in the past that needed to be transmitted to the students. Students were seen as vessels that needed to be filled in order to prepare for their future responsibilities. Information was imposed from above and outside – and part of the simplicity of this positioning was the assumption that the future would be much like the past.
Progressive education, on the other hand, valued experience – Dewey writes about how every experience is a moving force, and that what differentiates an educative experience from a mis-educative one is that it creates conditions for further growth, instead of shutting off a student from new directions. An experience should be “arousing curiosity, strengthening initiative and setting up desires and purposes that are sufficiently intense to carry a person over dead places in the future”. In traditional education, the subject matter may be sealed off in a container, while progressive education argues that “learning in the way of forming attitudes, likes and dislikes…are fundamentally what count in the future” and that “the most important attitude that can be formed is that of a desire to go on learning”.
Even though progressive education was introduced over a hundred years ago, we still have traditional education models in the classroom simply because it is the easiest thing to do. Dewey’s comments on how much more challenging it is for a progressive educator ring true today – they need to judge “what attitudes are actually conducive to continued growth and which are detrimental” – and effectively know what’s going on in each person’s mind. Educators need to also recognise what surroundings are “conducive to having experiences that lead to growth”, which takes more time than just lecturing and filling blackboards with information. They need to be aware of the needs, capacities and past experiences of the students, and look ahead beyond the next exam or next class. In schools that are already bursting with 40 students in a class, that require hours of grading – how can stressed-out educators tailor-make unique experiences for each child, even if they know it makes for a better educational experience?
This is hard to see, but if you click on the interactive link, you can see the beige boxes that show the different disciplines that inform learning theory, building upon organizational theory, design, linguistics, psychology, philosophy and anthropology. Progressivism might be the large umbrella that some of these could fall under, but more specifically, here are some of the main ideas that have been presented in the course:
- Emancipatory Theory
- How education can be seen in terms of increasing people’s freedom and equality
- Constructivism
- People construct their own knowledge of the world through experiencing things and reflecting on them (connection to: maker-centered learning)
- Behaviorist
- Learning is manifested as a change of behavior; very competency based
- In practice: repetition is important and reinforcement is needed
- Cognitive
- Learning results from inferences, expectations and making connections
- Instead of habits, learners acquire plans and strategies
- Humanistic
- Learning is seen as a form of self-actualizing
- Need to engage the whole person: learning is logical and intuitive, intellectual and feelings
- Social/situational orientation to learning
- Focus on what kind of social engagements provide the context for learning to take place
- Learning involves participation in a community of practice.
- Experiential learning
- Learning through reflection on doing
Are you aware of other major learning theories that have played a significant role in shaping how we learn? Let me know!
STEP BY STEPH 