Dewey's Concept Research Articles

Reinventing teaching in mathematics classrooms

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the way of how teaching in general and teaching of mathematics in particular can be reinvented by drawing on the perspective of pragmatism. Drawing on long‐standing traditions of John Dewey’s “laboratory model” of learning to teach and Charles Peirce’s semiotic view of scientific inquiry, the design of the lesson study can be reframed or extended through the methodological orientation to reinvention.Design/methodology/approachThe theoretical framework of reinvention for lesson study, following a pragmatic approach, might offer a methodological orientation for mathematics teachers to foster increased self‐awareness in improving their own practices. The conceptualisation of such an orientation, which leads to the reinventing of teaching in mathematics classrooms, begins with an examination of two pragmatic theories: Dewey's concept ofexperienceand Peirce's concept ofpractical belief and judgement. The methodological orientation for reinvention grounded on these concepts will then be outlined and elaborated.FindingsReinvention is a productive “triad of change” through which new possibilities of facilitating the student's learning can be created. Teachers will experience such change by experimenting with their students. In the context of teaching mathematics, reinventing teaching involves the action of an agent carrying out the conversions of mechanisms which bring forth achangeof language, thetransformationof gaze, and the moulding (themetamorphosis) of the individual who does the act of teaching.Originality/valueThe paper offers a theoretical framework of reinvention for lesson study through which teachers’ self‐awareness can be enhanced by improving their own practices. Through the undertaking of pedagogical experiments, teachers are becoming more aware of the need to learn from the learners in order to teach more effectively through the reinvention and unlearning of their own teaching.

Deliberating Intergenerational Environmental Equity: A Pragmatic, Future Studies Approach

Across the applied ethics literatures are a growing number of ethical tools: decision-support methodologies that encourage multi-stakeholder deliberative engagement with the social and moral issues arising from technology assessment and environmental management processes. This article presents a novel ethical tool for deliberation on the issue of environmental justice between current and future generations over long time frames. This ethical tool combines two approaches, linking John Dewey's concept of dramatic rehearsal – an em-pathetic and imaginative ethical deliberation process; with the methodologies of backcasting – a type of scenario planning technique drawn from the future studies literature. The proposed hybrid ‘Deweyan Backcasting’ approach combines a creative process of devising multi-stakeholder visions of potentially desirable futures, with practical evaluation of the technical, social and political networks necessary to make such futures happen. It is suggested that such a model can provide a fruitful means for evaluating intergenerational environmental equity issues in long-range policy and planning.

Beyond Independence: Introducing Deweyan Philosophy to the Dialogue on Occupation and Independence

The concept of independence is often explicitly stated or subtly implied to be a human ideal in occupational science literature. While that assumption has been critiqued as culturally-specific, scholars of occupation have yet to firmly critique independence as an ideal within Western culture. There is a taken-for-granted assumption that independence is good because it is traditionally valued in Western societies. Drawing on the philosophy of John Dewey, this paper introduces a critique of the valuation of independence within Western culture as it relates to occupational science and argues that (a) idealizing independence undercuts the connected nature of life, (b) independence is not an end that can be achieved and maintained, and (c) independence and interdependence in fact co-exist in occupation. This argument extends recent trends in occupational science towards a transactional perspective. Dewey's concepts of freedom and growth—when framed as occurring through occupation—can provide guidance for moving beyond independence.

The Internet and the Democratic Imagination: Deweyan Communication in the 21st Century

A culture which permits science to destroy traditional values but which distrusts its power to create new ones is a culture which is destroying itself.- John Dewey (1991, 172)Since its emergence as a serious subset of political theory in the 1980s, criticisms of deliberative democracy have generated an entire field of literature on their own. I argue that while deliberative theorists have anticipated and argued adequately against most agonistic and liberal critiques of deliberative democracy, they have failed to give a thorough account of an essential component of their theories: communication.While Dewey is not typically classified as a deliberative theorist, I argue that a more robust account of communication can be found in his work, which places aesthetic experience at the heart of communication, and which replaces consensus with confluence as the goal of communication/deliberation. Dewey's account of communication thus allows for a legitimate space for emotions in the deliberative process, which is crucial to unlocking previously excluded and marginalized claims. However, it would seem that Dewey's conception of communication is not only overly demanding, but archaic in the face of 'new' communicative technologies. I will argue that we need to understand communicative tools such as the Internet as a 'problematic situation', where Dewey's insights on communication, technology, and education converge to help us better understand how the Internet can be utilized as a tool for political deliberation and communication.Deliberative theorists diverge on how to achieve consensus, but they still see it as a key component of deliberation, and thus place great emphasis on how citizens can come to agreements through communication despite ethical and socio-economic differences. All deliberative theorists however, recognize that consensus is unrealistic in many political situations, and thus many like Cohen, suggest voting as a means of decision-making if consensus is unachievable. However, deliberative theorists argue that voting after deliberation ensures the vote is a result of reflective processes rather than arbitrary coincidence. Underpinning the ideal of consensus for all deliberative theorists are liberal values of equality, respect for plurality and the claim that authority should be legitimated through agreement rather than coercion. Deliberative theorists accept broadly liberal norms and ideals, but a large part of the dispute between deliberative theorists and other liberals lies in the question of legitimacy as framed theoretically by deliberative theorists.Criticisms of deliberative democracy can be categorized into three main groups: 1) theoretical weaknesses, 2) faulty epistemic assumptions and 3) practical impossibilities. The second and third groups have been dealt with substantively in the work of deliberative theorists such as John Dryzek, James Bohman, and Amy Gutmann. I will focus on the theoretical criticisms of deliberative theory. The main theoretical criticism of deliberative democracy is that it assumes an overly rationalist conception of the subject. Critics argue that the ideal of rational consensus is impossible to achieve, as individuals' moral and ethical identities are part and parcel of their selves, and to ask them to translate their moral and ethical beliefs into universal reasons acceptable to all individuals is to deny individual differences.1Agonistic theorists like Chantal Mouffe argue that deliberative democracy negates difference by presenting consensus as a regulative ideal. For Mouffe, deliberative democracy is politics without the political, which she defines as the dimension of antagonism that is inherent in all human society (2005, 745). Deliberative democracy, by positing that legitimacy rests on rationally motivated consensus, denies the possibility of acknowledging this antagonism that is inherent to any political situation or system. While Mouffe's insistence upon a metaphysical view of politics can be vague, a similar criticism can be seen in Beck's work. …

Virtual Virtu: The Moral State and the Online Re-Formation of the School and Society

The chapter examines John Dewey's concepts of society and the public in the context of digital technology and its potential to transform society and the moral ethos of the public school. I argue that Dewey's theory of society and the public, though articulated for an industrial age, are, like his moral vision of social democracy and public education, still of perennial importance as a ethical lens to frame and critique the emerging network society and publics. “Don't Be Evil.” Google founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin (2004) In a recent book on schooling in the present era, Tony Wagner describes American society transformed by the global economy, a world students must prepare to enter. The needs of our society have changed dramatically…. The days of well-paid unskilled or semiskilled work are over in this country, due to the forces of global competition. As we know any job that can be routinized is being either automated or off-shored. Increasingly, the only decent jobs that remain in this country will go to those who know how to continuously improve products or services or create entirely new ones—the knowledge workers of the twenty-first century. (Wagner, 2008, p. 256)

A Study of ^|^ldquo;Sport as Experience^|^rdquo;: An Attempt to Re-evaluate Dewey's Concept of ^|^ldquo;Experience^|^rdquo;*

A Study of ^|^ldquo;Sport as Experience^|^rdquo;: An Attempt to Re-evaluate Dewey's Concept of ^|^ldquo;Experience^|^rdquo;*

Assessment with an “End in View”

This article uses Dewey's (1938) concept of “end in view” to frame one California State University's purposeful action in implementing the Performance Assessment for California Teachers (PACT). The authors provide a chronology of events that reveal the ways in which teacher education faculty were engaged in examining PACT outcomes and candidate performance through informal, “mock scoring” events, and the design of formative, embedded signature assessments, and the resulting changes in the program assessment system, curriculum, and instructional practices. The article closes with concerns and suggestions for sustaining the “end in view” during high-stakes and low-budget circumstances.

John Dewey's Quest for Unity: The Journey of a Promethean Mystic

John Dewey's Quest for Unity:The Journey of a Promethean Mystic Loren Goldman (bio) Richard Gale , John Dewey's Quest for Unity: The Journey of a Promethean Mystic. New York: Prometheus Books, 2008. 215 pages. ISBN 159102630-X. $32.98 (hbk.) Richard Gale's slender monograph is a sometimes insightful, sometimes enervating and always personal reckoning with John Dewey's philosophy. Gale's basic thesis is that Dewey is a unificationist malgré lui, that despite being committed to empiricism and pluralism his pragmatism remains profoundly metaphysical in a non-naturalistic sense. This claim is hardly new or surprising. Thinkers as diverse as George Santayana, Richard Rorty and John Patrick Diggins, to name but a few, have also noted traces of supernaturalism and monism throughout Dewey's corpus. Moreover, recent works including Victor Kestenbaum's The Grace and Severity of the Ideal (Chicago 2002), James Good's A Search for Unity and Diversity (Lexington 2005) and Melvin Rogers' The Undiscovered Dewey (Columbia 2008) have addressed the intersection of Dewey's writings with spiritual and religious themes. Gale describes his own contribution as "a mere footnote" (26n9) to Steven Rockefeller's John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism (Columbia 1992), an intellectual biography narrated in the long shadows of Dewey's evangelical upbringing. Where Gale's work stands out, however, is in its claim that Dewey's corpus is incoherent unless significantly modified. As Gale sees it, Dewey's work is shot through with a tension between his scientistic metaphilosophy and the "metaphysical" bases and aspirations for his theory of experience. On the one hand, Gale argues that Dewey denies qualitative experiences any cognitive value; on the other, he offers that Dewey's privileged process of inquiry rests on intersubjective communication about qualitatively "felt" and ultimately ineffable problematic situations in experience. As such, Dewey's endorsement of scientific method is incompatible with his aesthetic conception of inquiry. Therefore, either his methodology or his metaphysics has to go. Gale recommends that Dewey drop his infatuation with science and own up to his identity as a traditional metaphysician. The work's introduction explains Gale's systematic approach to Dewey's philosophy and briefly lays out the general argument. Gale reads Dewey's key concepts [End Page 135] of inquiry, moral democracy, communication and education as forming a pyramid "with growth as the summum bonum at its apex" (11). In Gale's words, growth "involves the realization by an individual of ever richer and more extensive unifications, both within herself and with other persons, as well as with her natural environment" (11). Below this apex comes inquiry, the controlled and directed transformation of an indeterminate situation into a unified, meaningful whole (12). Inquiries are successful if they lead to greater harmony within concrete experience. Gale writes that inquiry "involves the realization of greater esthetic unification" (12). Moral democracy comes next, for it "will empower citizens to freely bring about their own growth, and to do so it must create the circumstances in which they will become effective inquirers" (13). Communication undergirds moral democracy, for "[c]ollective inquiry requires a community of shared interests and purposes" which can only be gleaned through "widespread communication" (14). Finally, education sits at the pyramid's base, teaching citizens "how to engage in collective inquiry" (15). While perhaps somewhat forced (an image of a cone or cylinder rather than a pyramid seems more apt), Gale's pyramidal schematization, whether one accepts it or not, reveals that the systematic aspects of Dewey's work can be easily overlooked if one does not make a conscious effort to illuminate them. This image, moreover, allows Gale to make his dramatic claim that "Dewey's grand pyramid is a glorification of humanity as a Promethean creator of meaning and value through the active control of nature by inquiry. . . . This one-idea fanaticism is both the glory and the misery of Dewey's philosophy" (18). Cataloguing the errors of Deweyan inquiry is the task to which Gale applies himself in subsequent chapters. The rest of the book is structured in two parts composed of four chapters each. The first section, "Growth, Inquiry, and Unity," develops the argument that Dewey is obsessed with unity. Gale...

The Art and Science of Occupation: Nature, Inquiry, and the Aesthetics of Living

This paper sketches a logic for occupation to create a more overt and cohesive basis for the related science. To do so, it recovers John Dewey's conceptualization of occupation from 1899, and it then expands that conceptualization through an analysis of three core dimensions of his later philosophy: empirical naturalism, instrumentalism, and aesthetic theory. The analysis suggests that Dewey's original view of occupation intended to incorporate his view of nature, inquiry, and aesthetics. The synthesis of Dewey's concept of occupation and his broader theoretical vision means (a) occupation is a form of natural and social experience, (b) occupation is a primary means of fostering and structuring processes of inquiry that allows people to practice and hone habits and skills related to later inquiries, and (c) occupation is a good way of having aesthetic experiences and thereby a way of learning to live more meaningfully in the future. Implications of the analysis are discussed, including what the Deweyan logic of occupation means for occupational science and its relationship to occupational therapy.

Can Deweyan Pragmatist Aesthetics Provide a Robust Framework for the Philosophy for Children Programme?

In this paper, I argue that Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetics, and in particular, his concept of consummatory experience, should be engaged anew to rethink the merits of the Philosophy for Children (PFC) programme, which arose in the 1970s in the US as an innovative educational programme that aims to use philosophy to help school children (aged 6–18) improve their ability to become more conscious of and make judgments about the aspects of their experience that have ethical, aesthetic, political, logical, or even metaphysical meaning. Although an international success, the PFC programme has attracted many criticisms from a variety of directions. I claim that Deweyan concept of consummatory aesthetic experience is broad and flexible enough to provide a robust framework to make sense of the pedagogical horizon of PFC and therefore fruitfully engage the various critics of the movement coming from religious and social conservatives, educational psychologists, critical theorists, postmodernists/posthumanists, and professional philosophers themselves. The goal of this paper is to offer in a preliminary fashion the basic elements of Deweyan pragmatist aesthetics, which was principally elucidated in his Art as Experience, to defend PFC as a viable pedagogy.

Experimental Publics: Activist Culture and Political Intelligibility of Climate Change Action in the Hunter Valley, Southeast Australia

ABSTRACTThe ethnographic study of Western environmental activism opens up the prospect of studying subjectivities formed in opposition to dominant Western ideas and values, and yet encapsulated within Western societies and democratic polities. One of the directions in which it points the anthropologist, which is pursued in this article, is towards the study of the political lifeworlds of activists, their self‐identity as citizens and their embeddedness in the wider society. Environmental politics can be an emergent activity in citizens' lives, as expressed in John Dewey's concept of ‘the public’ as citizens who organise themselves to address the adverse consequences of situations that they experience in common (Dewey 1991[1927]). This paper focuses on a middle ground of social action between habitual daily practice, and the domain of institutional politics: groups of people in small voluntary organisations in the heavily coal‐mined Hunter Valley, Southeast Australia, who are moved to collective action to address the threatening aspects of anthropogenic climate change. Action group members variously articulate their reflexive understandings of the structural contradictions of environmentalism in corporate capitalist societies where values of consumerism and processes of individualization corrode collective concerns of citizenship‐based politics. These understandings inform activists' personal motivations, values and ideals for a ‘climate movement’, diverse modes of political action and striving for wider political intelligibility.

El debate entre la educación republicana y la neoliberal en Chile

Este artículo forma parte de un proyecto de investigación sobre la concepción neoliberal de la educación comparándola con la republicana y la de Dewey. El movimiento estudiantil chileno combina masivas manifestaciones contra el actual sistema educativo con una propuesta de un nuevo proyecto, concitando el apoyo mayoritario de la ciudadanía. Los conservadores defienden el sistema actual, basado en la concepción neoliberal de Hayek y Friedman, instaurada durante la dictadura de Pinochet y perfeccionada en el período postautoritario. Los dirigentes estudiantiles y los sectores críticos luchan por una educación pública gratuita y de calidad, y por el fin del lucro en la educación privada. Esta postura articula el republicanismo de la historia nacional con el de las tradiciones europeas libertarias.

Young carers as co-designers of a web-based support system – the views of two publics

AimThe aim of the study was to reveal young carers' views of design of a web-based support system (WBSS) directed to them and the differences between their views and the views of project representatives (PRs), in a participatory design process.MethodsEight young people, 17–24 years, were involved in either a work or a test group. The work group participated in video-recorded design meetings with representatives of the project. Content analysis and Dewey's concept of public were applied on the data. The test group worked from their homes and data were collected via test forms and used as supplemental data.ResultsFour themes were revealed, constituting key parts in the design of the WBSS: Communicating the message, Ideational working principles, User interaction and User interface. Furthermore, decisive differences between the views of participants and PRs were found.ConclusionThe four key parts should be considered in a WBSS directed to young carers. The study also suggests that early user involvement and critical reflection in the design process itself may be crucial to discern differences in perspective between designers and users.

The Characteristics of Reflective Teacher Based on Dewey's Concept of Reflective Thinking

The Characteristics of Reflective Teacher Based on Dewey's Concept of Reflective Thinking

Law as a Democratic Means: Deweyan Jurisprudence and Democratic Experimentalism

I investigate and legal thought in relationship to Dewey's demand that within a truly society the ends as well as the means of a society must be democratic. I outline a conception of that is a means to the greater end of society. This contrasts with a conception of law, and especially constitutional law, as an antimajoritarian framework needed to set the ground rules for procedures. First, a conception of Deweyan democracy is offered in combination with a conception of democratic law found in Dewey's works. It is made more concrete through mapping of it on to the picture of constitutional practice offered by Michael Dorf and Charles Sabel. It is then used to give a description of what a Deweyan judge's decision procedure would be like. This construction of a work-able conception of as a means can offer support for the possibility of a society composed of institutions the way down.1. IntroductionIn this paper I investigate in relationship to Dewey's demand that within a truly society the means as well as the ends of society must be democratic. This demand, of course, goes against a standard conception of the rule of law, especially that of the rule of under a constitutional government, wherein and large parts of the legal system is seen as a framework which is, most essentially, outside of the process, indeed is the non-democratic foundational means that sets the game rules for the ends and procedures that it makes possible. Indeed, this very standard conception of is that of a system that gives, necessarily, final decision making authority to a professional judiciary, a judiciary following rules set down by a duly ratified constitution, a constitution enacted with the express intent that its ruling framework would serve as a limitation upon the otherwise potentially dangerous if uncontrolled excesses of passions. This conception of seems to reinforce the idea that democracy ultimately rests, necessarily, upon the use of nondemocratic means. If correct, such a claim is damning to Dewey's demand for means as well as ends in the structuring of a truly society. In this paper I aim to outline a plausible and workable conception of as a means. If this can be accomplished, not only will the radical nature of Dewey's conception of become manifest, but also the limitations and quite possibly unfounded dogmas of standard conceptions of and its relationship to democracy will be exposed.In order to do this, the following steps will be followed. First, a conception of Deweyan democracy will be offered in combination with a parallel ideal of democratic law found scattered throughout his works. Then an attempt to live up to the aims of a truly legal procedure, one that satisfies Dewey's demanding requirement that ends can be ultimately furthered only through means, will be made concrete through the use of Michael Dorf and Charles Sabel's article A Constitution of Democratic Experimentalism.1 Their article offers a Dewey and pragmatism inspired picture of as a democracy enhancing and experiment encouraging social institution. From this conception of a decision making model for the Deweyan judge will be analyzed. This is necessary because of a critique of Dewey's legal theory offered by Richard Posner. Dewey's legal theory, Posner claims, is too abstract and top-down to be useful for a judge confronted with the need to come to a judicial decision in a real-world case with all of its concrete particulars. If correct, and universalizable to any attempt to construct a Deweyan conception of law, such a critique would be fatal to a Deweyan picture of as a means. It will be argued that the system that Dorf and Sabel offer goes a long way in answering Posner's objection. …

Producing Publics: Dewey, Democratic Experimentalism, and the Idea of Communication

In a volume dedicated to celebrating and interrogating pragmatic - and especially Deweyan - roots of democratic experimentalism, this essay explores some of more elusive aspects of Dewey's ideas of communication. It argues that for Dewey, question of communication was not how speakers should make their interior thoughts and desires transparent and understandable to others but how they could produce shared social contexts - that is, publics - and with them new forms of democratic self-governance. The essay thus suggests that Dewey's understanding of communication diverges from one that is more familiar in popular problem-solving discourses in law. For example, in predominant strands of alternative dispute resolution communication is understood primarily as a neutral technique used to bridge mental properties of individuals whatever their aims, rather than, as Dewey would have described it, a means and end of a good society and thus a deeply normative and political practice. By comparing divergent ideas of communication in law, essay aims to open up for analysis and debate whether and how democratic experimentalists understand communication not like traditional models of popular legal problem solving, but rather like Dewey: as a method of social life that calls publics into being.1. IntroductionIn his article for this volume, William Simon observes foundational overlaps between Deweyan political ideals and contemporary field of legal problem solving often called new governance or democratic experimentalism. Simon argues that many of practical implications of Dewey's ideas have remained elusive. But he also suggests that new institutional innovations in business and policymaking, which he describes under sign of democratic experimentalism, make more concrete the key aims and insights of Dewey's vision.1 In this short essay, I consider one of questions that Simon argues Dewey left unanswered. The question, in Simon's words, is this: How do we organize deliberative engagement to produce productive collaboration among people with diverse interests?2 This is a pressing question for democratic experimentalists who propose to restructure institutions of public governance through communicative acts of bottom-up problem solving and lawmaking.Drawing on analyses of Dewey from within field of communication studies, I explore whether and how democratic experimentalists offer a distinctively Deweyan model of communication. For Dewey, communication was a very particular - and political - social good. It was both a means of producing publics and activity that made those publics meaningful. Or to put point a bit differently, for him, communication was a means of creating social feeling and binding people together that could not be separated from questions of a good society. In this sense, essay argues, Dewey's understanding of communication diverges from an idea of communication that is more familiar in popular problem-solving discourses in law. Rather than a neutral technique used to resolve disputes and join interior thoughts of individuals by generating transparent understandings and agreements, Dewey understood communication as a shared social and political endeavor that creates new possibilities for democratic self-govemance. To illustrate this difference between Deweyan conception and a more familiar legal model, essay briefly compares Dewey's ideas of communication with some of predominant ideas of communication that have developed in alternative dispute resolution (ADR) - an important and perhaps most institutionalized practice of popular problem solving and decision making in law. It does so in order to open up for analysis and debate ways in which democratic experimentalists understand communication not like traditional ADR theory, but rather like Dewey: as a method of social life that calls publics into being.2. Dewey and Democratic ExperimentalismTo begin, let me sketch how scholars of democratic experimentalism build upon Dewey's model of public problem solving through deliberative means. …

The Student as Philosopher-Scientist: Dewey's Conception of Scientific Explanation In Science Education

Dewey’s conception of scientific explanation, which has been neglected by both philosophers of science and philosophers of education, facilitates overcoming the seeming divide between teaching a highly technical and specialized subject matter and encouraging students to successfully engage in the experience of being philosopher-scientists. By analyzing Dewey’s philosophy of science as it pertains to science education, we gain the insight that scientific explanation is a tool that may be used by students and supported by faculty to facilitate scientific investigation that is philosophical. Here I present Dewey’s conception of scientific explanation as it relates to science education by providing an overview of this conception as it relates to the student, followed by Dewey’s ideas with specific regard for science education, as well as an example illustrating how scientific explanation is utilized as a self-em powering, philosophical tool within the context of science education.

Virtue Epistemology and the ‘Epistemic Fitness’ of Democracy

In this article I explore three distinct advantages of linking virtue epistemology to an epistemic defence of democracy. First, because intellectual agents and communities are the primary focus of epistemic evaluation, virtue epistemology offers political theorists the opportunity to develop an epistemic defence of democracy that takes ‘realism’ seriously (e.g. the cognitive limitations and biases of humans). Second, because virtue epistemology conceives of epistemology as a normative discipline, it builds normative criteria into the exercise of assessing the ‘epistemic fitness’ of a political arrangement (e.g. democracy vs. epistocracy). Third, by assessing the epistemic powers of democracy from a virtue-epistemological perspective, a more robust (Deweyan) conception of democracy needs to be employed and assessed than the minimalist conception employed by the Condorcet Jury Theorem.

Deweyan Tools for Inquiry and the Epistemological Context of Critical Pedagogy

This article develops the notion of resistance as articulated in the literature of critical pedagogy as being both culturally sponsored and cognitively manifested. To do so, the authors draw upon John Dewey's conception of tools for inquiry. Dewey provides a way to conceptualize student resistance not as a form of willful disputation, but instead as a function of socialization into cultural models of thought that actively truncate inquiry. In other words, resistance can be construed as the cognitive and emotive dimensions of the ongoing failure of institutions to provide ideas that help individuals both recognize social problems and imagine possible solutions. Focusing on Dewey's epistemological framework, specifically tools for inquiry, provides a way to grasp this problem. It also affords some innovative solutions; for instance, it helps conceive of possible links between the regular curriculum and the study of specific social justice issues, a relationship that is often under-examined. The aims of critical pedagogy depend upon students developing dexterity with the conceptual tools they use to make meaning of the evidence they confront; these are background skills that the regular curriculum can be made to serve even outside social justice-focused curricula. Furthermore, the article concludes that because such inquiry involves the exploration and potential revision of students' world-ordering beliefs, developing flexibility in how one thinks may be better achieved within academic subjects and topics that are not so intimately connected to students' current social lives, especially where students may be directly implicated.

Pedagogies of Protest: African American Teachers and the History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1940–1963

Background/ContextAlthough the dominant narrative of the civil rights movement marginalizes the role of black educators, revisionist scholars have shown that a significant number of black teachers encouraged student protest and activism. There has, however, been little analysis of the work of black teachers inside segregated schools in the South.Purpose/ObjectiveThis study examines the courses that Southern African American teachers taught, the pedagogies they practiced, and the extracurricular programs they organized. Using Charleston's Burke Industrial School as a lens to illuminate pedagogies of protest that were practiced by activist educators in the South, this study explores how leading black educators created spaces within segregated schools where they bred dissatisfaction with white supremacy.Research DesignThis historical analysis draws upon archival sources, school board minutes, school newspapers and yearbooks, oral testimony, and autobiographies.Conclusions/RecommendationsIn Charleston, as elsewhere in the South, activist African American teachers made crucial contributions to the civil rights movement. Fusing an activist version of the African American uplift philosophy with John Dewey's democratic conception of progressive education, exemplary teachers created academic and extracurricular programs that encouraged student protest. Beginning in the 1940s and continuing through the 1960s, students acted on lessons taught in classes and extracurricular clubs, organizing and leading strikes, boycotts, and demonstrations. The pedagogies that leading African American educators practiced, the aspirations they nurtured, and the student activism they encouraged helped make the civil rights movement possible.