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Encounter A Conversation with Mike Cole on Culture, Experience, andJohn Dewey An Interview by Walter P. Oldendorf Were I to write (or rewrite) Experience and Nature today I would entitle the book Culture and Nature and the treat­ ment of specific subject­matters would be correspondingly modified. I would abandon the term "experience" because of my growing realization that the his­ torical obstacles which prevented under­ standing of my use of "experience" are, for all practical purposes, insurmount­ able. I would substitute the term "cul­ ture" because with its meanings as now firmly established it can fully and freely carry my philosophy of experience. —John Dewey, 1951. (LW1: 361) My introduction to Mike Cole's work commenced upon my arrival at Appala­ chian State University four years ago. It was my turn to follow my wife, who had taken an associate professorship at ASU, and I was offered either the position of goat herder or Coordinator of the Fifth Dimension. My previous experience with being butted from the behind by ill­smelling creatures notwithstanding, I chose 5th D. Much to my delight, 5th D combined preservice teacher mentors, chil­ dren in after school, technology, informal learning, a great deal of fun, and no testing whatsoever. In this era of high stakes test­driven instruction 5th D seems miraculous indeed. 74 • E&C/Education and Culture 21(1) (2005): 74­86 A Conversation with Mike Cole • 75 I soon discovered that the intellectual founder of the Fifth Dimension was Mike Cole. Mike's story of the role of experience in his intellectual development from behavioral psychologist to a major figure in cultural psychology comprises a good deal of the following interview. The interview took place in Mike's office at the University of California—San Diego, where he is University Professor. WO: Mike, I would like to begin our conversation by revisiting the notion of experi­ ence. It seems to me to be the most important concept in Dewey, a rich field as far back as The Child and the Curriculum. We have the child and content matter, and the synthesis of the two is much more than just child and subject matter; it unfolds into the notion of experience for Dewey. I thought maybe we could talk about ex­ periences you have had that shaped your thought. MC: I hardly know where to start. As a scholar I learned about Dewey from the Russians. That's really odd you know. When I went to graduate school, I was a dyed­in­the­wool scientific psy­ chologist, I thought. I got interested in technology, and my first psychology teacher was a woman named Celeste McCullough who is famous for perceptual effect. She taught as a graduate student at Columbia. She was sort of a Skinnerian when she wasn't doing research on perception, so I had a sort of Skinnerian introduction to psychology. I went from Columbia and I ended up at UCLA, where I studied with people who are themselves behaviorist and mathematical psychologists. I went to Indiana University to work with Bill Estes, who was a mathematical psy­ chologist and a student of Skinner's. A long time later I understood that Skinner had actually read Dewey very carefully. There was a very interesting relationship between Dewey and Skinner. WO: Skinner was not to be underestimated. MC: All sorts of people underestimate Skinner, in my opinion. You can disagree with him in all the situations you want, but I think there are certain Deweyan principles you can find in Skinner. But I had never read Dewey at that time and I never had had a class in developmental psychology. Then I went off to Russia to study with Alexander Luria, who was doing classical conditioning of word meaning. I thought it would be interesting to study language with these same scientific methods. I came back from Russia with a degree and almost right away I went to Af­ rica to work on a mathematics project. We studied why African children having difficulty learning mathematics, which resulted in a book that I wrote with John Gay called The New Mathematics and an Old Culture. Children having trouble learning mathematics! I had a...

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