The basic characteristic of habit is that every experience enacted and undergone modifies the one who acts and undergoes, while this modification affects, whether we wish it or not, the quality of subsequent experiences. For it is a somewhat different person who enters into them. The principle of habit so understood obviously goes deeper than the ordinary conception of a habit as a more or less fixed way of doing things, although it includes the latter as one of its special cases. It covers the formation of attitudes, attitudes that are emotional and intellectual; it covers our basic sensitivities and ways of meeting and responding to all the conditions which we meet in living. From this point of view, the principle of continuity of experience means that every experience both takes up something from those which have gone before and modifies in some way the quality of those which come after.
Dewey, p.35
I wanted to dip into a book from one of the most prominent thinkers and writers on education in the 20th century: John Dewey. I chose his last book on the subject, published in 1938 and responding in part to some of the criticisms his theories had received over the previous forty years. It was also, happily, on the “education” shelf at my mom’s house in Oregon, so close at hand.
As I understand, Dewey’s earlier books sparked a progressive school movement, based on the idea that education is part of life, and that education and learning are social and interactive processes where students are the focus and should be encouraged with experiences and some amount of freedom. As schools began to adopt this philosophy, there was some backlash. This book, Experience & Education, his final on education, sought to expand and clarify certain key points in response to the experiences and observations of some of the new schools, as well as responding to specific criticisms of the progressive school movement. As radically unorthodox as these theories were in comparison to traditional schooling in the early part of the last century, many of these principles remain so to this day, though surely some have been incorporated more widely.
The main part of this book is espousing Dewey’s theory of experience, which he illustrates neatly throughout. I’ll do my best to summarize with many quotes.
Essentially, every experience a person has lives on in subsequent experiences. “Every experience enacted and undergone modifies the one who acts and undergoes while this modification affects, whether we wish it or not, the quality of subsequent experiences” (p. 35). However, not all experiences are “educative,” in fact, some are “mis-educative.” In order for experiences to be educative, or to have educational value, the physical and social environment surrounding the experience needs to be taken into account.
The idea of situations is then introduced as experiences plus internal and external (objective) conditions. “Continuity and interaction are not separate from each other… Different situations succeed one another. But because of the principle of continuity something is carried over from the earlier to the later one” (p.44). “Continuity and interaction provide the measure of the educative significance and value of an experience…The immediate and direct concern of the educator is then with the situations in which interaction takes place” (p.45).
This is emphasizing that learning in isolation means that what is learned in a silo will remain that way, un-integrated with the rest of life. As a result, learning that happens this way doesn’t become an “educative experience” that can be subsequently built upon. “The principle that development of experience comes about through interaction means that education is essentially a social process” (p.58).
Dewey is providing, through all of these illustrations logically and patiently built, sound and reasonable—yes, pragmatic—arguments for this very big-picture way of thinking about education. I appreciate it for a few reasons.
Application to my project
First is the linking of the social intrinsically with education, the idea that learning does not happen in a vacuum. This correlates largely with the part of my project of justifying social elements of learning as being essential to not only consider but to build into curriculum and funding structures.
Second, the idea of experiences and situations being the core of learning is also placing emphasis on thinking about the environment, interactions, backgrounds, etc of students in order to be flexible enough to provide an educational experience that can allow students to build sequences of experiences into a transformation. This is an area I think Applied Imagination as a course is lacking: by not providing students with a coherent overview and linking activities to each other, the course as it is now is failing to create the environment for educative experiences.
Third, the rigidity of the course as it is doesn’t seem to allow much response to individual cohorts’ needs. “The principle of interaction makes it clear that failure of adaptation of material to needs and capacities of individual may cause an experience to be non-educative quite as much as failure of an individual to adapt himself to the material” (p.47).
It also relates back to the Lightning Talk Poojitha Lal and I made at the Academic Support conference. One of the things we were urging the Academic Support community to consider was an expansion of the language around only discussing students’ “individual learning journey,” into a larger sense of the communality of all our experiences.