862-0118-00L Democracy & Education: John Dewey’s Philosophy of Education between the Classroom and Civil Society
| Semester | Autumn Semester 2023 |
| Lecturers | M. Boenig-Liptsin |
| Periodicity | non-recurring course |
| Language of instruction | English |
| Abstract | In this course, participants form a reading circle to read John Dewey’s Democracy and Education (1916). The book explores the idea of the classroom as a constitutive site of a democratic community, where students engage together to solve problems. Democracy in this context becomes a way of life through which its members are able to engage with and transform one another’s beliefs and goals. |
| Learning objective | John Dewey’s Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (1916) is usually considered his most important contribution to American reform pedagogy. Although his ideas had a rather troubled history of implementation in public schools in the US, they were still widespread, and remain a valuable resource to many practitioners and scholars in pedagogy today. The book explores the idea of the classroom as a constitutive site of a democratic community, where students engage together to solve problems. Democracy in this context becomes a way of life through which its members are able to engage with and transform one another’s beliefs and goals. This course will put into practice Dewey’s model of the democratic classroom. Instead of an educational authority passing down an interpretation of the text to an audience, all participants will share the task and opportunity to build interpretations as equals. Thus, the course takes an experimental form: learning objectives are not predetermined, but to be (re)constructed by the participants in the process of engagement. Participants are encouraged to reflect on their educational experiences and their relation to the democratic nature of the community they grew up in or take part in today. We suggest the following three components as learning and teaching vehicles: - 30-40 pages of reading every week (from the 2nd week on) before each weekly meeting. The goal is not to attain a “right” or “true” interpretation of the text, but an interpretation of the text that resonates with the participant’s life and experiences in democratic communities and education institutions. The focus here shall not be on the production of a text, but on reading and reflection. - Before every weekly meeting (from the 2nd week on), participants write a post about what they found interesting, problematic, helpful, or difficult to understand in the reading. We encourage participants to engage in some form of written experimentation with thoughts during or after the reading, for example in the form of a journal or curation of text excerpts, and from there produce a comment of roughly 100, max. 200 words, which others will be able to read. - Each participant takes the responsibility to moderate one weekly meeting. Together with the comments from the other participants, the moderator may construct a cluster of questions or a key thread that helps us through the reading. This is not meant to be a presentation. The idea behind this is that the organization of the classroom is decentered. |