Who-Ey Is Dewey?

John Lean argues that touching base with the philosophy of the patron saint of progressive education can enrich our practical work in developing experiential learning.

As an undergraduate philosophy student at a traditional university, I never got to do experiential learning. There were multiple reasons for this, I’m sure. But beyond the inertia of tradition, I think there was also a sense that tutors wouldn’t know how to do experiential learning in a subject like philosophy even if they wanted to.

Because what is the ‘experience’ of doing philosophy? Sitting under a tree, having a think? I was doing plenty of that anyway.

As an undergraduate philosophy student at a traditional university, I also never got to go anywhere near John Dewey. Like many educators, I only encountered him when I started working in education. Dewey was invoked in my teacher training in justification of increasingly mainstream experiential approaches like problem- and project-based learning. These became my bread-and-butter for the next ten years as I experimented with project-based learning in my teaching roles, before moving in to working for charities and organisations that pushed for progressive reform to the English school system.

But even this was a superficial engagement. Dewey was more of a symbol of the sort of things that educational innovation might achieve, often seen pinned up on staff room walls but never read. It was only be re-encountering Dewey when I came back to academia - in a PhD focused on playful learning, and leading our boundary-pushing Rise programme at Manchester Met - that I began to understand quite how relevant his thinking was to the challenges of contemporary higher education.

I want to share some of that inspiration. In this post, I’ll try to condense some of my key lessons from Dewey. I hope this will help colleagues busy actually doing experiential learning to unravel and extend their practice.

So, Let’s Sit Under That Tree For a Bit…

In short then; John Dewey was active at the turn of the 20th century (yes, experiential learning is over 100 years old). He was an American philosopher and social scientist: but he was also an active educator and reformer. One of the brilliant things about Dewey is he didn’t just think things. He did them. He set up schools (the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools) and influenced teacher training programmes in ways that are felt worldwide today.

For Dewey education was the heart of social reform; if you want to change a society it’s best to start with its children, and therefore its schools. He advocated for a social model of learning, which emphasises interaction with experience - through projects, knowledge co-production and experimentation. They’re ideas which seem surprisingly modern, given his socio-historical context. But they also feel radical and progressive against many of our current dominant ideologies, particularly in the UK. This is why so many dissatisfied progressives can still turn to him in 2023.

Indeed it was dissatisfaction that drove Dewey. He was uncomfortable not just with how philosophy approached the world, but way its questions felt divorced from the world as we experience it. He drove forward a more practical approach, which we call pragmatism, which often allowed him to position philosophy in a more practical way. As a consequence, for Dewey, ‘knowing how’ to do something was far more philosophically important than ‘knowing that’ certain facts are true - and this followed through into his approach to education in ways that are often backgrounded by the practicalities of delivering experiential learning.

The Dewey’s pragmatist theory of knowledge is most clearly articulated in Chapter 5 of Experience and Nature (1929). Here, he positions knowledge as part of a continuous process of enquiry. Each and every day, we have to interact with new situations in order to understand how they work. In turn, the world effects our understandings - so enquiry becomes ‘negotiation’ between ourselves, the world and other people as we try to make meaning out of experience. As these become more certain and predictable, we may develop conceptual tools and shortcuts , and we can share these tools with others, but even these are tested every time we encounter a new situation.

Mobilising Dewey

In this sense, and to extend Mark’s ideas elsewhere in this site: not only is all learning experiential, but all experience is learning.

But what isn't Experiential Learning?

This leaves us in a difficult position as experiential educators. What do we do with the concept that experiential learning is going to happen whatever we do, or as Mark puts it, that ‘experiential learning is already in there’? My suggestion is that we become, in effect, experience curators, helping students to understand the quality of their experiences. David Winter offered similar arguments using the metaphor of dieticians selecting ingredients.

We are all educational dieticians

As a pragmatist, of course, Dewey’s philosophical justifications can be mobilised to help us understand what our criteria for ‘good’ learning experiences might be:

Communication. For Dewey, enquiry is collective, and depends on the negotiation of meaning with others. This has huge implications. It is at the heart of Dewey’s commitment to participatory democracy: that communicating more openly with others is inherently good for our understanding of the world. Experiential learning needs to be the same; students need opportunities to work together to solve problems, explore new ideas and build communities.

Playfulness. This might seem an odd one, given the roots of the word ‘pragmatism’, but as Richard Rorty points out there’s an undercurrent of ‘playful experimentation’ in Dewey’s approach. To fully engage in enquiry, we need to negotiate the rules of play with ourselves and others. We’ll encounter wiggle room and false leads, get sidetracked and distracted, or get things completely wrong, and what’s more we’ll enjoy doing so. In the context of experiential learning, this intellectual curiosity is at odds with knowing too much about where an activity is going. A project with a defined outcome might seem more efficient, but more open-ended playful exploration might lend itself to better experience.

Different modes of experience. We experience things in different ways, and for Dewey diversity of experience is key to successful enquiry. Universities privilege intellectual enquiry, but students might engage with ideas from an ethical perspective, or from a practical one (or emotionally). Different disciplines have different ways of ‘doing’ knowledge, and interdisciplinary experiential learning should provide a way in for students from any perspective.

Openness about what knowledge is and how we get it. Finally, for Dewey, none of this is metaphorical. His theory of knowledge really is how we encounter knowledge, and really does lead to a particular educational model. Going back to the idea of ‘knowing how’ rather than ‘knowing that’, he challenges us to think about the task of education differently. For a start, how much of our curriculum is based on factual knowledge, and how much is based on practical knowledge? Using experiential learning to deliver facts may not be the best approach. And whatever it is we’re delivering, do students know that they’re participating in enquiry? Any experiential learning we’re doing needs to foreground the learning just as much as it foregrounds the experience, and encourage students to reflect on what they’re learning, how they’re learning it and how this is different from what and how they have learnt before.

All these ways of thinking often lurk in the background of experiential learning, but perhaps there is value in making them more explicit - and returning to Dewey can be a hugely rewarding way to do that. He did things with philosophy, leading social movements and setting up experimental schools. This hands-on, world-changing approach appeals to those who want to do similar things in education, but we can fall into doing this without fully understanding the philosophical grounding that this had. Even if we’re using it to justify doing the right thing, we might be limiting our understanding of why it’s right. By designing experiential learning in line with Dewey’s philosophy, we get closer to a model that isn’t just engaging and fun for students, but that has the potential to transform the world for the better.