Transforming Schooling through Technology: Twenty-First-Century Approaches to Participatory Learning

Abstract

Transforming Schooling through Technology: Twenty-First-Century Approaches to Participatory Learning Craig A. Cunningham (bio) The fifty years since the 100th anniversary of John Dewey’s birth have marked the emergence of new technologies that afford a wealth of previously unknown approaches to learning, making it not only possible but practicable for Dewey’s educational vision of participatory learning to be realized on a mass scale. This chapter discusses these possibilities and their implications for learning in the twenty-first century. A Brief History of Deweyan Participatory Learning In The School and Society (1899), John Dewey writes that the best learning occurs when students participate in what he calls an occupation: “a mode of activity on the part of the child which reproduces, or runs parallel to, some form of work carried on in social life.”1 Such participation touches children’s “spontaneous” and “worthy” interests while organizing such interests into “regular and progressive” modes of action such as those carried out in contemporary social life. Occupations “furnish the ideal occasions for both sense-training and discipline in thought,”2 because they grant students “an opportunity for acquiring and testing ideas and information in active pursuits typifying important social situations.”3 Working with his colleagues at the University of Chicago Laboratory School, Dewey developed this idea into a new theory of education that would come to be known as progressive education.4 However, because the phrase “progressive education” has multiple meanings and so much historical baggage,5 this chapter will refer to Dewey’s conception of learning through occupations as “participatory learning,” a phrase used recently by Speaker, Reingold, and others.6 In framing his participatory approach to learning, Dewey looked primarily backwards to a time when people allegedly lived in more direct interrelationship [End Page 46] with nature and with the basic tools necessary to harness and shape its potentialities. Dewey and his colleagues placed students in situations similar to those of laborers, farmers, and do-it-yourselfers from an earlier time so that the students could experience first-hand the building of a house, the spinning of thread, and the making of candles. This approach acknowledged that life at the turn of the twentieth century was increasingly disconnected from nature and that direct participation in contemporary industrial practices was increasingly out of reach for children. Not only wasn’t it safe for children to be roaming around a factory floor, but the science or knowledge underlying modern industrial processes was often beyond the children’s understanding. Making candles or spinning thread, Dewey wrote, “engages the full spontaneous interest and attention of the children. It keeps them alert and active, instead of passive and receptive; it makes them more useful, more capable, and hence more inclined to be helpful at home; it prepares them to some extent for the practical duties of later life”7—without exposing them to the hazards or conceptual confusions they might experience if they were asked to generate electricity or work with the tools of large-scale textile production. Dewey did not consider these activities to be preparation for a job; rather, the purpose was to build the habits and skills of life-long learning. “The problem of the educator is to engage pupils in these activities in such ways that while manual skill and technical efficiency are gained and immediate satisfaction found in the work, together with preparation for later usefulness, these things shall be subordinated to education—that is, to intellectual results and the forming of socialized dispositions.”8 Such activities, Dewey believed, presented “plenty of opportunities and occasions for the necessary use of reading, writing (and spelling), and number work,”9 plus had the corollary benefit of providing “training in habits of order and of industry, and in the idea of responsibility, of obligation to do something, to produce something, in the world [and] . . . of observation, of ingenuity, constructive imagination, of logical thought, and of the sense of reality acquired through first-hand contact with actualities.”10 In theory, this participation in what might be called “historically situated” occupations could also be used as the basis for teaching related subject-matter in history, geography, and science, fostering mental quickness, “sense...