John Dewey and Our Educational Prospect: A Critical Engagement with Dewey's Democracy and Education

8. A Teacher Educator Looks at Democracy and Education

8 A Teacher Educator Looks at Democracy and Education SHARON FEIMAN-NEMSER I have always taken quiet pleasure in the fact that I studied at three of the universities where John Dewey taught,1 that I began my teaching career at the University of Chicago Laboratory School that he founded, and that I started my career as a teacher educator in the Department of Education at Chicago that he established. In three decades as a scholar and practitioner of teacher education, no semester has passed without my reading something by Dewey with my students, first at Chicago, then at Michigan State, and now at Brandeis. School and Society, The Child and the Curriculum, How We Think, Experience and Education, and an essay called “The Relation of Theory to Practice in Education” have been staples in my undergraduate and graduate classes. Yet I never read Democracy and Education. It felt too daunting to tackle on my own. I accepted David T. Hansen’s invitation to write this chapter, in part, because I felt that I should read this Dewey classic.2 I read it as a teacher educator interested in how people learn to teach and how professional education contributes to the process. More specifically, I read it as a teacher educator much influenced by Dewey’s ideas. Writing about philosophy of education in Democracy and Education , Dewey refers to education as “the laboratory in which philosophic distinctions become concrete and are tested” (MW.9.339). Over the years, my programmatic experiments and research have been opportunities to 129 130 John Dewey and Our Educational Prospect clarify some of Dewey’s distinctions and test their usefulness in overcoming some of the pervasive dualisms in teacher education such as theory and practice, subject matter and method, and knowing and doing (see, e.g., Feiman, l979; Feiman-Nemser, l980; Feiman-Nemser & Buchmann, l985; Norman & Feiman-Nemser, 2005). Democracy and Education has a lot to say about how people learn in general and how they should be taught in school. While Dewey does not write directly about teacher education, I found myself transposing ideas about learning and teaching to the contexts of teacher learning and teacher education. In particular, I tried to figure out what Dewey means by education as the reconstruction of experience and how this idea relates to the education of teachers. I also looked for expressions of this idea in two proposals for the reform of teacher education, one by Dewey himself (1904) and one by Deborah Ball and David Cohen (1999). In the opening chapters of Democracy and Education, Dewey argues that “the educative process is a continuous process of growth, having as its aim at every stage an added capacity of growth” (MW.9.59). He contrasts his view of education as the reconstruction of experience with other conceptions of education—education as preparation, development , formation, and training. Reading these early chapters, it struck me that these ideas are quite pervasive in the discourse of teacher education. Before turning to Dewey’s conception of education as the reconstruction of experience and what it could mean for teacher education, I want to examine his critique of preparation and development as it bears on the work of teacher educators. (Teacher) Education as Preparation Since Dewey is mainly writing about the education of children, his critique centers on how focusing on a distant future diverts the attention of both teacher and taught from “the needs and possibilities of the immediate present.” Dewey identifies three evils that flow from basing education on future requirements. Children live in the present. The future lacks urgency. So one negative consequence is that teachers have to use reward and punishment to get children to do work whose only justification is its usefulness in the future. A second problem is substituting a vague standard for what young people may be expected in general to become in some more or less remote future for a keen assessment of students’ present strengths and weaknesses. A third is the way such a view encourages procrastination and the postponement of serious work since the present offers many temptations and the future is far away. The 131 A Teacher Educator Looks at Democracy and Education resulting education is less effective than it would be if educators had focused on making present conditions as educative as possible. It isn’t such a stretch to think about teacher education as preparation for teaching...