John Dewey (1859 - 1952)

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John Dewey (1859 - 1952)

• Presented by group 7
• Cinthia Rodriguez
• Nuvia Bautista
• Omar Rodas

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General Information

• John Dewey was born in the United States of
  America on October 20, 1859.
• American philosopher, psychologist and
  educational reformer whose ideas have been
  influential in education, philosophy, and
  psychology.
• known best for his publications about education,
  but he also wrote about other topics such as
  experience, nature, art, logic, inquiry,
  democracy, and ethics.
• Major representative of populist philosophies of
  schooling during the first half of the 20th
  century in the United States of America.

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Time Line

• On October 20, 1859 John Dewey was born in
  Burlington, Vermont, from a modest family. He was
  married twice and had six children.
• In 1879 he graduated from the University of
  Vermont (Phi Beta Kappa). Then, he worked as a
  high-school teacher in Pennsylvania and as a
  elementary school teacher in Vermont. So, after
  studying philosophy independently, he entered the
  graduate program in philosophy at Johns Hopkins
  University to receive his Ph.D.
• From 1884 to 1894 he had a faculty position at
  the University of Michigan.
• In 1894 Dewey joined the University of Chicago
  where emerged his Pragmatic Philosophy.

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• In 1903 Dewey also set up the University of
  Chicago Laboratory Schools to actualize the
  pedagogical beliefs that provided material for
  his first major work on education, The School
  and Social Progress (1899).
• In 1899, Dewey was elected president of the
  American Psychological Association.
• From 1904 until his retirement in 1930, he was
  professor of philosophy at both Columbia
  University and Columbia University's Teachers
  College.
• In 1905 he became president of the American
  Philosophical Association.
• Years later, the United States Postal Service
  honored John Dewey with a Prominent Americans
  series 30 postage stamp.
• Nowadays, Dewey is considered one of the founders
  of The New School.

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Writings

• Major Dewey's educational theories were presented
  in these writings
• My Pedagogic Creed (1897)
• The School and Society (1900)
• The Child and the Curriculum (1902)
• Democracy and Education (1916)
• Experience and Education (1938)

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Deweys Theories and Beliefs on Education

• Experiential education Dewey focused his concept
  of instrumentalism in education on learning by
  doing or hands-on learning, which means to learn
  not only by the theory, but also by the practice.
  Instrumentalism is a theory of knowledge
  created by Dewey in which ideas are seen to exist
  primarily as instruments for the solution of
  problems encountered in the environment.
• The schools role Dewey stressed the importance
  of education in school not only as a place to
  gain content knowledge, but also as a place to
  learn how to live. The purpose of education
  should be the realization of everybodys full
  potential and the ability to use any skills for
  the greater good.

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Deweys Theories and Beliefs on Education

• The educational process role Dewey advocated
  for an educational structure that makes a balance
  between the child and the curriculum, that is to
  say, delivering knowledge while also taking into
  account the interests and experiences of the
  student.
• The teachers role The teachers role should be
  that of facilitator and guide since the teacher
  becomes a partner in the learning process who
  leads students to independently discover meaning
  within the subject area.

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The Dewey School

• In January of 1896, Dewey opened the doors of the
  Experimental University of Chicago with the idea
  of setting up an Experimental School by his
  own.
• The program core of the studies of the Dewey
  School figured what he denominated occupation,
  in other words, a form of activity done by the
  children that reproduce a type of work done in
  social life or that is parallel to it.

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The Dewey Teaching Method
Age Activity
4-5 years old Cook, Carpentry, needlework
6 years old They built a farm of wood, planted wheat and cotton they sold their products in the market.
7 years old They studied pre-history in caves made by themselves
8 years old They studied navigation like Marco Polo, Colon, Magallanes and Robison Crusoe.
9 years old Local history and geography
10 years old They studied the Colonial History
11-12 years old Anatomic experiments, electromagnetism, political economy and photography
13 years old They built a building for their debate club.
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• Dewey wrote the child goes to school to make
  things to cook, to sew, to work the wood, and to
  make tools through acts of simple construction
  and in this context, and like consequence of
  those acts it articulates the studies reading,
  writing, and calculus.

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• The Dewey pedagogical key consisted in providing
  the children with experiences of first hand
  about conflictive situations, most of the time
  based on personal experiences. In his opinion,
  the mind is not completely free until the right
  conditions are created to make the children
  participate actively in the personal analysis of
  his/her own problems, and participate in the
  methods to solve them, at the price of multiple
  tries and mistakes.

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• Even though he didnt expect that the
  Experimental School method were followed in a
  strictly way in other places, he kept the hope
  that his school served as a source of inspiration
  to whom pretended to transformed the public
  education.

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The End of the Dewey School

• The precursor community of Dewey lasted too
  short. Its end was caused by the people who
  worked with Dewey in the Experimental school.
  They all wanted to have the control of the
  school, since the school didnt belong to Dewey,
  in fact, it belong to the Chicagos University.
• The lost of the Experimental school left an
  opened room to others to understand, apply, and
  even deform Deweys pedagogical ideas.

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Quote

• Education is not preparation for life
  education is life itself. Education, therefore,
  is a process of living and not a preparation for
  future living.
• John Dewey

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Conclusions

• Dewey considered schools and civil society as two
  fundamental elements and major topics that need
  attention and reconstruction to encourage
  experimental intelligence and plurality in order
  to improve our life and environment.
• Dewey strongly believed that students must be
  active learning perceivers and critical thinkers
  rather than passive believers and receivers of
  information.
• Deweys theories have been a great influence on
  20th-century thought. His writings on educational
  theory and practice have been widely read and
  accepted because he showed that the disciplines
  of philosophy, pedagogy, and psychology should be
  understood as closely interrelated. For that
  reason, Dewey's ideas have remained at the center
  of much educational philosophy in the United
  States and in many countries around the world.