Innovation’s Renewing Potential: Seeing and Acting Mindfully Within the Fecundity of Educative Experiences

Introduction

An Innovative Learning Centre (ILC) within a Faculty of Education provides the forum to study and give lived expression to the rhythmic workings of experience through documenting a Maker Movement Day for practicing educators. Dewey’s commitment to “the idea that there is an intimate and necessary relation between the processes of actual experience and education” is at the heart of our Maker Day (1938, Experience and Education, 20).¹ The contemporary Maker Movement’s emphasis on studio-based learning attends to the experiences of meaning making from within the experiences themselves.² The rootedness of this thinking across time and traditions can be traced to many interested in revealing the experiential terrain encountered through such attention.³ In doing so, it draws attention to the inner learning necessities elicited for all involved through concrete involvement within the Deweyan “processes of actual experience” (Dewey 1938, Experience and Education, 20).⁴

We conceptualize a Maker Day as an immersive professional development experience for educators.⁵ At the heart of the experience is the Maker ethos, which Martinez and Stager (2013, Invent to Learn, 29) state “values learning through direct experience and the intellectual and social benefits that accrue from creating something shareable.” Design thinking aligns nicely with the Maker Movement by helping makers consider what they would like to create, alongside why, and how to proceed.⁶ We suggest the goal of a Maker Day should be to encourage participants to experience making, and ongoing adaptation and reflection, through design thinking and associated activities, fostering a shared agenda requiring active participation that takes shape through process. We both share a common understanding of making’s powers and significances within learning/living that tells us that it is through the mindful “Taking of Making” in our schools that educators and their students might enact curriculum in formative ways.⁷

It is the formative nature of all sense making as fundamental to being human that is primary to Dewey’s notion of experience understood as the “means and goal of education” (1938, Experience and Education, 89). In an earlier essay, Dewey (1988) describes the complementary “rhythm” incited within his characterization of experience to be a “great force,” “release(ing)” meaning making of all kinds through ongoing “construction and criticism.”⁸ Dewey’s characterization of experience’s “soundness” to education as such an inseparable, pervasive force, offers a warning, though (1938, Experience and Education, 91). He states, “failure to take the moving force of an experience into account so as to judge and direct it on the ground of what it is moving into means disloyalty to the principle of experience itself” (38). Many current educational thinkers concur with Dewey’s warning and, yet, this moving terrain is foreign to many teachers and their students within curricular enactment. Therefore, the concrete opportunities for all involved to partake in educative experiences become estranged.

Dewey emphasizes that when the qualities of experience—including interaction and continuity—are ignored over and over again, they become increasingly estranged. The result is that external conditions then tend to control curricular enactment rather than the interplay of internal and external conditions shaping the interactions and opportunities for continuity characterizing its enactment (Dewey 1938, Experience and Education, 42). This misunderstanding permeates Dewey’s concern and continues to persist. William Pinar (2009, 11) characterizes such current estranged teaching practices as “severed” from curriculum, resulting in an impoverished understanding of curricular enactment, with teachers and students having little to no awareness of curriculum as “a subjectively animated intellectual engagement with others over specific texts.”⁹ So, it is clear to us that the intellectual quality and character of the curriculum has been neglected and undermined, and that the long-term costs have been vastly underestimated.

Alongside Dewey, Pinar, and others, we argue that this formative nature, the aesthetics of human understanding, needs to gain familiarity and lived expression through sustained mindful curricular enactment. The associated significances, for all involved, reflect this paper’s conceptual underpinnings of mindfulness as heightened awareness of the choices and lived consequences...