[00:00:15] Jon M : I’m Jon Moscow.
[00:00:16] Amy H-L: And I’m Amy Halpern-Laff. Welcome to Ethical Schools. Today, we speak with Susan Jane Mayer. Dr. Mayer is a developmental learning and democratic curriculum specialist. Her most recent book is “Practicing Pragmatism Through Progressive Pedagogies: A Philosophical Lens for Grounding Classroom Teaching and Research.” Welcome, Susan.
[00:00:39] Susan M: Thank you.
[00:00:40] Amy H-L: Susan, how do you define pragmatism in today’s world?
[00:00:44] Susan M: Well, pragmatism is a very large body of perspectives in the sense that because things are left indeterminate, I mean, the fundamental commitment is that we don’t ever have the full final story, right? We’re always looking at sensing, interpreting, the world through our specific lens. As a human being, as an individual human being, as a human being of a certain culture, all of these organizing frames are limiting our ability to get to some final truth, and therefore it’s really, carries a humility, a profound humility in terms of our position in the universe that is not by no means universal even today.
Many people thought, and Jon Dewey, the philosopher I speak about most in this book, is one of the first to understand that the Darwinian lens really positions us as creatures who have evolved among other creatures, and that it creates this kind of, well, just as I say, positions us in the world in a specific place among specific people, with specific needs and desires. So, I don’t mean to talk on and on about this, but that’s really the heart of it all, is accepting that. But once you’ve accepted that, you can go a lot of different directions from there, right? You can still think that perhaps the intimations that we receive as human beings, you know, suggest greater dimensions of order then we can cognitively grasp at this time. I mean, people have a lot of different belief systems, but I guess the other piece of it is belief systems are to be grounded in our experience in broadly recognizable ways.
[00:02:55] Amy H-L: I was just going to ask in this context, what, how would you define final truth?
[00:03:02] Susan M: You know, the classic example is God’s truth, this understanding that there’s theological certainty that’s been recorded in sacred texts and we know what they mean, or our religious leaders know what they mean. Scientists have had their own versions. Western scientists, mathematicians. Some still believe that math could potentially lead to a final descriptive structure, conceptual structure. So final just means that you, you’ve got the whole picture, you can’t be wrong, and there’s nothing outside of what you are articulating of relevance.
[00:03:50] Jon M : And pragmatism is basically saying that we don’t have a final truth or we don’t have access to a final truth, and therefore we have to recognize that and figure things out with a healthy dose of humility. Is that a crude summary?
[00:04:12] Susan M: Yes, that sounds right. At the same time, I don’t want to place too much emphasis on the uncertainty and limitations of our perspectives as people and as particular people, and not enough on the valuable and reliable understandings that we can nonetheless establish together based on shared experience and other forms of compelling evidence. It’s the two in relation. We can solve practical challenges reliably, and construct a shared set of values based on our shared experiential realities, and come to understand these realities in coherent terms. So it doesn’t have to be exactly the same to be coherent. Retaining this sense that we can construct broadly shared purposes and meanings together, valuable, important meanings that can orient our democratic society and our moral, ethical personal lives without relying on any type of supernatural authority is one important emphasis that Dewey is one really organizing aim of this entire project.
[00:05:34] Jon M : How would you define an ethical classroom?
[00:05:39] Susan M: So we were talking about ethics and morality, and the idea of ethics to me is that it’s supported by shared moral commitments and results in a set of practices and guidelines for our actions, alone and with each other, that people agreed to because they understand that morally they have to be in relationship in those ways. So I think you can have a problematic ethical structure. You know, we think are always working toward the ethical understandings that we want to carry into particular contexts. It’s an ongoing project, right? So an ethical classroom is one that engages in that project, and within democracies, it engages it from the groundwork of democratic commitments to the worth of every human being. Yeah.
[00:06:53] Amy H-L: Okay. And would you make a distinction between an ethical classroom and and a democratic classroom, or are they the same thing?
[00:07:03] Susan M: Yeah, I think a democratic classroom, as I was just saying, uses democratic commitments and values as the basis from which to establish its ethical practices and understandings.
[00:07:18] Amy H-L: So they’re basically the same.
[00:07:21] Susan M: Well, you know, you can have ethical contexts, ethical classrooms that aren’t necessarily democratic.
[00:07:28] Amy H-L: What would that look like?
[00:07:30] Susan M: Within other cultural contexts that aren’t democratic, you can still have moral principles. I mean, you still do have moral principles that drive people’s understandings about community and relationship. And so, to the extent that people recognize those shared moral understandings and are working to not only establish, but sustain, enact ethical practices, it’s an ethical classroom. You know, this isn’t my area of expertise because I am really focused on democratic classrooms. That particular subset, which is a very large subset of course in our world, ethical classrooms or democratic classrooms, and you know, they have certain requirements that have really not been attended to sufficiently. Therefore, it’s something that we do, as I say in my book, we need to do a lot more thinking and talking about as a country and as a world.
[00:08:33] Jon M : So would you say that an ethical or democratic classroom from a point of view of pragmatism would be one where everyone in the classroom feels respected and feels that they matter. I mean, would that be a fundamental definition?
[00:08:53] Susan M: Absolutely. I mean, that group goes to the heart of the democratic impetus, right?
[00:08:58] Jon M : Because I’m thinking that, you know, if one’s looking at a school, for example, that there might be some decisions that are not made democratically, that a principal, for example, might say, this is what we’re going to do without it being sort of collaboratively determined by everybody, but that if that’s understood in a context where there is universal respect in the sense that everybody matters, the fact that a particular decision might not be made democratically would not be a critical factor. Does that make sense?
[00:09:37] Susan M: Yeah. I’m glad you brought that distinction up because it is something that leads to a lot of confusion. People think of democratic in the sense of are people voting on something. As we know, people can be voting on things and things can be quite unfair. I mean, free and fair elections are certainly a cornerstone of a democratic society, but when we talk about Deweyan democracy and we talk about democratic classrooms, what I’m talking about is our quality of relations with each other and whether people are being prepared intellectually and emotionally, socially, kind of psychosocially, to be democratic citizens, to believe in themselves and their capacity to make sense of the world independently based on cogent reasoning and the information available to them to be able to sift through incoming information and recognize more and less trustworthy sources, have a sense of why or why not one might wanna trust a particular source of information. But also, and very importantly, trust even the evidence of your own senses and your capacity to pay attention to the world and make sense of it yourself. And that’s something that people really need to be brought up a certain way to feel themselves in the world in that way. And it’s a responsibility of democratic schools to give every kid a chance to experience themselves as a thinker and a collaborator, a doer, and a maker.
[00:11:29] Amy H-L: Something Jon and I were discussing earlier is this idea of experience as education, right, or experience as knowledge and it seems to me that your experience is just you and has a lot more to do with what’s going on inside your brain than what’s happening externally. That may be a catalyst for what’s going on internally for you. But to call that knowledge seems to me to be lacking in context or, and also it’s just this little slice of knowledge that is mostly your own experience.
[00:12:16] Susan M: Yeah. Just moving through the world isn’t necessarily even what Dewey would call experience. You know, it’s not just being there, it’s being activated by a problem situation or, you know, the situation. So situation is a construct that Dewey uses in terms of this, how does experience become knowledge? We have experience of situations that need to be handled. And we learn to handle them or we don’t, or we are not paying attention, in which case no knowledge is accrued. So there’s this developing capacity to work the world and work it in different ways that is knowledge, and it comes from being in the world and having to work the world in various ways. So, I mean, there’s all kinds of knowledge about social etiquette or the different etiquettes of different social contexts or all the way to woodworking or, or being able to join a fire department and feel like you can be in relationship with your colleagues. So there’s these contexts that we need to learn to manage and problems we need to learn to solve. And that’s where the knowledge comes from. But it’s grounded. It’s important that it be grounded in what we know of the world.
And in particular, you know, Dewey was very focused on education, which is why educators always talk about that particular pragmatist. Because of all the pragmatists we know, and there are a lot of them, and they think about different things, they bring different concerns to their philosophizing, Dewey’s big concern was the future of this country, its capacity to sustain its democracy, and he felt quite clear. I agree, many of us have agreed over the years, that that schools had to be central to that effort that we had to teach people, everybody, all young people, not only to think for themselves and be intellectually activated participants in their lives, but to be in collaboration with others and attuned to others. And understanding who they are and who they’re becoming is linked to the cultural knowledge and cultured world they live within. So that sense of cultural belonging and knowing cultural ways and means and being able to be facile with them is this essential dimension of what Dewey’s talking about is experience as knowledge.
[00:15:03] Amy H-L: What is a critical exploration in the classroom?
[00:15:08] Susan M: So critical exploration is what a scholar named Eleanor Duckworth is currently calling her work. She was the chair of my committee. I went back actually to do doctoral work in order to think more deeply about how to talk about the power of her work in ways that can be broadly appreciated because it is very powerful work, and I’ve come up with a lot of different angles on this in the ensuing years. But you know, perhaps the most basic thing that can be said about it is that it creates a problem space, just the kind of experiential problem spaces I was just talking about with Dewey, where there there is a material context of some kind, some sort of proving ground, and there’s some sort of challenge about interpreting a poem or figuring out how to put a mirror on a wall so two people can see each other. But some sort of challenge where students do not need to look to a book or to the teacher, but can figure it out themselves. They’re actually guided by the kinds of questions a teacher asks to think ever more deeply about the material proving ground in ways that push their own theorizing and their observing forward and also learn to listen to each other in that process.
Because it’s a group project, right? The idea is that they’re working it out together. So it’s basically a curricular approach, and it’s not the only one. It’s just a very nuanced and developed one that creates like these sort of classroom-size versions of the kinds of cultural contexts that Dewey is talking about us needing to learn to manage, and giving students the authority to create knowledge on their own terms and on the basis of their own experimentations to have to use the world around to support their claims. And to have to think together about what kind of experiment they might want to run to see whether somebody’s right about something. So this is democratic knowledge construction. I mean, Dewey talked a lot about science, but what he was really just talking about was this, was reasoning together based on realities that everyone can recognize.
[00:17:55] Jon M : In a chapter called Developing Pragmatic Capacity, you include a detailed discussion of a middle school teacher who employs certain types of discourse moves to position her students as quotes, “fully authorized interpretive agents” and quotes “to encourage their close and collaborative consideration of the text in front of them.” Could you describe what Ellen, the teacher, is doing and why this is important?
[00:18:22] Susan M: So, yeah, that just kind of to dig in deeper to what we were just talking about because this is, this is a critical exploration, right? This is a teacher who studied this particular practice and really took to it, which is something that I think it’s useful to mention, that some people just kind of intuitively understand how to do this quite rapidly.
And then because it is kind of an interpersonal kind of knowledge that’s required to balance all the things that have to be balanced. But basically the key pieces are asking students to further elaborate what they’re saying. Ask them to demonstrate where they see evidence for what they’re saying. So there’s a stage where it’s just about noticing all the same things. Does everyone see that? Do people see what Fred just said? Do we see another example of that? So there’s a lot of pulling out of paying attention, and then there’s a whole set of kinds of questions teachers ask to get a kid to say more and develop their thinking more, and then also to put different students’ thinking into relationship with each other. “Well, that’s interesting. Does that relate to what Suzanne just said, or is that different?” So as I say, they’re interpersonally sensitive moves that a teacher has to make to make sure everybody has a voice. Everyone’s speaking up and listening to each other that. The kid that can talk a mile a minute isn’t drowning everybody else out. That every kid’s, not just the popular kids’, but taking every kid’s thoughts seriously. So there’s, there’s actually a great deal of work. A teacher is doing that kind of lesson. It can be summed up quickly in an interview, but that gives you the idea, I hope, of the kind of role the teacher is playing in contrast to suggesting that somebody might be on the right track or suggesting that the class might be getting there or something that somebody said was super exciting or they agree with that interpretation. All of that valuation is removed. I mean, which is the classic teacher response, right? Is like, oh, interesting. So Jon said, you know, and it’s picking up the pieces because you’re trying to get the kids, the students, to work together to create a narrative that you already have in your mind that you want them to replicate. But this is not that. This is trying to figure out what they’re trying to say from the bottom up, right?
[00:21:05] Jon M : Yeah. I found the transcript of the class fascinating, and it was really clear that the teacher, as you were just saying, was facilitating the students’ development of their ideas rather than telling them what they should be learning or coming to a predetermined result. A question I have is what is the role of the teacher if students are, are going in fact in totally wrong, if there’s such a thing as objectively wrong, I mean in this case it was a text from Herodotus. And so how and when would a teacher intervene if it seems as though the direction is not just what she or he might not want it to be, but just isn’t making sense?
[00:21:55] Susan M: So that’s, that’s where the returns of the materials comes in. Well, where do we see that in the text? Is everybody interpreting it this way? Also, in the case of other fields of exploration, like for instance, science, there’s very often additional experimental materials can be introduced on another day for people to… I mean, the short answer is you don’t leave it there. You find a way to challenge misdirection that isn’t being challenged already within the classroom. If you can’t stir that up among the students who are sitting there like, “Does everyone agree with Anne?” Then you need to, I mean, sometimes another move people can use is like, well, “you know, a couple years ago a student said this.” So you disrupt. There has to be a constant disruption of answers that are too simple or not aligned with what is actually happening in the world, in the materials, because the students are missing something. That, that always has to be brought to and, and that’s actually one of the challenging things for some people about this work is that it’s, you know, not always obvious how to do that. But many times it is, it can be easier than it seems perhaps because once you’ve taught the same kind of lesson to the same age student for a while, it’s just, you end up running into similar stumbling blocks and, and you develop techniques for destabilizing pat agreements among students.
[00:23:49] Amy H-L: You say Maxine Greene, when she talks about inviting different perspectives and belief systems into the classroom, doesn’t come naturally to most students. Would you talk about why this is so important and how teachers can become more comfortable?
[00:24:10] Susan M: Yeah, that is a really hard question for us right now, right? We just have such a unhealthy cultural climate when it comes to disagreeing with each other, and the very worst kind of leadership really at the top of our political hierarchy with respect to this very question about how we learn to listen to people who see the world in different ways. And so we can certainly say it makes it all the more important that we learn to do it in schools, and that we learn to do it with less politically charged materials. And that’s really the beauty of doing this kind of exploratory work with students is that we do actually need to be exposed to these kinds of interactional spaces where we learn from people we don’t expect to learn from. And if you’re in a class and you’re all working together to try and get somewhere, that’s a context for learning that somebody can see the world in a way that you didn’t think of, that’s maybe just fun and interesting, but maybe just really useful to you in terms of your own thinking.
There are many problems to not only… I started with the sort of the macro-political context, but there’s also the issue of the cultural landscape of classrooms in the US today. I mean, not just the US but especially I would say the US, and especially in poorly served school areas, school districts, where the emphasis on getting one right answer and getting as many of them committed to memory as possible so that you’re gonna score well on the tests is really just the overarching concern. So I’m talking about the things that are fighting against it and it’s really, it really is a problem. I think, frankly, Amy, we’re at the stage where we just have to make the case for how important it is before we can even start really digging in again in a broad way to this work of opening up, opening up the kinds of complicated conversations, frankly, that are required for people even to be, have a chance to disagree with each other. You’ve gotta create a certain kind of space before kids would even do that. And then once they do it, it’s like, how are we ethical in terms of our interactions, right? How do we impart a set of ethical understandings about how those transactions unfold? It’s a complicated piece of work. So there’s, there’s no easy answer and, and teachers are really up against it right now in trying to do this work in the classrooms. And so, as I say, I think unfortunately we’re just at the stage of having to somehow make the case that we’ve got to take a new direction, that this work has to be done. We have to learn to talk to each other if we want to continue to have a democracy.
[00:27:25] Amy H-L: I guess that applies to adults as well as students.
[00:27:29] Susan M: Absolutely. I think part of the problem is we do not have a set of young adults today who have learned how to talk to each other in schools. That has not been the prevailing ethos. Nobody talks, I mean, in the sixties, seventies, and before, in the twenties, thirties and forties, the first half of the 20th century and into, into the seventies, people were talking quite actively at different policy levels about educating for democracy. After the Second World War, there was tremendous interest in thinking about how to educate in a way that people would not fall victim to the easy, often solutions of fascists. It was very present in people’s minds and, and that infused the discourse of educators and educational policy-makers. But it sounds like an oversimplification, but it, it’s incredibly true that we’ve succumbed to a discourse of test scores, an instrumentalist understanding about what schools are about. They’re about training students to be able to plug into society successfully.
[00:28:56] Jon M : I am thinking about this question of, you know, where you’re saying, and, and I guess Maxine Greene was saying, that opening the classroom to all these different perspectives doesn’t necessarily come naturally to most teachers. Have you had a sense of how teachers can come who don’t normally or who don’t, on their own, naturally feel comfortable with this divergent views that are not only divergent among the students, but that might be divergent from what the teacher thinks? What’s your suggestion as to how somebody who wants to be in that place but doesn’t necessarily find themselves there, can get there? Have you seen how teachers have, have grown to be more comfortable with ideas that they themselves may disagree with, that students are voicing?
[00:29:53] Susan M: Yeah, that’s an important question, Jon, and goes back to what we were saying about adults needing to learn how to do this, too. My feeling, and it’s certainly a common feeling among those of us in the community of this exploratory curricular work and and beyond, that we need to experience learning in this way ourselves. As a student, as a participant, you need to understand that conversations like that are possible and get a feel for them and learn to like them, have a positive learning experience yourself, with being able to think for yourself instead of just being told things. With learning to listen to people who take your perspective in another direction. Having that kind of successful encounter operates on a couple of different levels. But one of them is just, you know, as a proof. “Oh wow, that can happen.” And “that, wasn’t that kind of interesting.” “I feel like my mind’s really buzzing now. I’m so excited about mirrors. I’ve been looking at mirrors my whole life. I never really thought about all the different places we see these reflections,” and you’re, you’re lit up and so that’s kind of like chicken and egg sort of thing. But I mean, teacher ed really does, I very strongly believe, need to give, and especially these young people, our teacher candidates are still overwhelmingly young white women who’ve been successful academically themselves and therefore understand like about studying and learning things in a particular way. So complicating the ways that they can learn in and giving them an experience that is so moving they feel like that’s what they want to do too for their students is step one. I mean, you have to have somebody who’s moved by the idea of it. And then also, of course, if you’ve given people experiences of being in these kinds of learning environments, then they start to develop a sense of what those kinds of learning environments are like. And then you can support with curricula, specific kinds of explorations. “You know, this is what I did, this is what I introduced. I had these materials ready if anyone asked for them. Sometimes kids will do this, and then I do that.” So there are ways of structuring curricular supports as well. But it’s not, it’s not straightforward work.
As one can hear with me talking about it, I liken it to other human growth professionals such as therapists. We don’t judge therapists because of a number that comes out from a test that their clients use, and we don’t expect them to be able to get it down and not have ongoing challenges in terms of making a particular kind of relational transaction work, right. I mean, it’s doing this kind of human transformation leadership is a lifelong learning situation, and as I said, we’re, we’re not even close to providing the kinds of supports and tools or even suggesting the idea of it in most teacher education programs today.
[00:33:20] Jon M : You say that the public school system from its beginning has sought to minimize or eliminate cultural diversity that actually pragmatist philosophers recognize and value. Can you talk a little bit about that and how can pragmatist teachers deal with the contradiction of working in a system that’s been structured to try to eliminate or minimize cultural diversity?
[00:33:50] Susan M: Well, we have a real tension in this country, and we’ve always had between cultural diversity , not to mention the racial schisms, born of brutalized slavery and indigenous genocide displacement and being one country, right? So there’s this, you know too deeply involved in the history of the American school system. In short, it was put together to get everyone able to work in factories and to Americanize and to make a country out of very different people who spoke different languages, coming from different places. The egregious move to the Indian boarding schools was about acculturating young Indian children into the American way. So this was the priority at the end of the 19th century. And it’s only been over time that people have been able to articulate and theorize all that’s been lost. But that doesn’t, you know, as we can see today, with the tensions working there, sort of surfacing in these different disturbing ways now in our country.
This is not a tension that is ever going to go away in this country, and it therefore, it really requires educators to understand what we mean when we say a democratic country. What essential to that? What is it that we require everybody to agree about? It’s not just about everyone getting to be different. We have to come together around certain kinds of understandings, and these are the very understandings and values and practices that we have not been focusing on now for 40, 50 years in our schools. Well, 40, 35, 40, you know, I mean, increasingly in the early eighties, these conversations just disappeared. So pragmatism is very much about diversity, but it’s also very much about shared culture. And Dewey was faulted by some today for being overly, you know, he was a man of his time, as we are all people of our times, and he was arguably overly focused on us all sort of coming together as one happy country or one coherent country. Anyway, very little emphasis, well, no discussion of race and very little emphasis on cultural or individual diversity. He was focused on growth and on self-realization, but, but he also really wanted everybody thinking a lot more profoundly about what it was that everybody could agree on, and this idea of being able to support each other in coming up with a culture that allowed us all to grow in the ways and realize ourselves is what he came up with.
So. I’m sorry, I might have lost track of the question. Is it did that? Was that responsive?
[00:37:11] Jon M : Yes. So you talk about how a goal of education should be tied to local communities, and certainly there are lots of situations where schools are not supporting that. How do schools both support ties to local communities and be responsive to local communities, and at the same time encourage in the critical thinking, situations where students may want to be breaking away from the consensus of the local community. So for example, if a local community is very racist, let’s say, and one of the things that hopefully will happen in education is that students will start thinking more broadly. Is there a tension between the ties to the community and a focus on critical thinking and exploration?
[00:38:10] Susan M: Well, certainly there can be those kinds of differences we see in the world all the time. I came to focus in my research on discourse, because really what we are talking about is being able to open up a certain quality of communication, and one that prioritizes the value of hearing from everybody, even if they’re hard to listen to. A democratic discursive ethics is one that not just makes space for everybody to speak, but supports them in doing that in the ways that are necessary.
So I know you interviewed Cindy Ballenger. The group that she was involved with, the Brookline Teacher Research Association, they were focused on students, but they were also, I know because I know Cindy, focused on listening to parents in the same way. So a decentering of institutional authority is required to bring community members into meaningful conversation with school personnel. And that’s, that can be very challenging when you feel like you’re up against each other in ways that matter very much to both of you. So I feel like the work is really the same work, whether it’s a teacher- principal, school-committee, teacher-parent, teacher-student. It’s about finding ways of increasing the mutual understanding and in ways that are practical and constructive in terms of the challenges at hand, right? I mean that’s, that’s the pragmatic way.
And what we have learned, very often, to do discursively in our schools is, and if we’ve gone to college, in our colleges, is argue other people into the ground or to, you know, create a powerful case ourselves, the most powerful possible, the very best interpretation of something possible. And so this is really a redirection discursively. It’s about not getting outside of your own mind. And it’s, yeah, not an easy thing to do and not something, as Amy was saying, that people are drawn to do necessarily. It’s just something we need to do to learn to live and work together.
[00:40:47] Amy H-L: How can teachers help to create a system of education based on pragmatism?
[00:40:55] Susan M: So I think we’ve touched on the big pieces, which have to do with staying open in terms of your ongoing learning, staying interested, structuring learning environments that allow for everybody’s ongoing learning. When a teacher becomes interested in how their students are thinking about something, even the students who seem confusing or maybe off-track even, there’s learning to be done. So it’s certainly one of the primary early shifts that you have to make is opening yourself up to exploring the world together, and then that lack of ongoing certainty is a very big deal, and I think goes a long way to decentering the kind of institutional authority that I was talking about, that educators, often practitioners, rely on. Well, I’m the teacher, I’m the principal.
And you know, it’s not that that institutional authority isn’t there and that it doesn’t mean anything, it’s just that, to the extent that you have to lean into it that way in order to run a learning environment, it suggests that you are not running it in a way where everyone feels like they’re an active agent on their own terms, where they’ve been invited into the meaning making as a fellow participant.
So I have an example in my first book about evolution, and maybe that’s helpful to think in terms of the fact that, you know, as a high school biology teacher, you, it’s not your responsibility to get all your kids believing in evolution. It’s your responsibility to get them all into a place where they can understand why anyone would think about evolution, why evolution has actually become the language of biology in our scientific world. So that comes back to the clarity too, right? You know, you need to be clear about what actually everybody does need to know, in your opinion, because we all have our different opinions about that. But you need to be able to articulate yours and justify yours. And in all the different domains, including the way that you expect students to learn.
So if you’re a teacher committed to exploratory curricula, and I should mention, I don’t believe that this is the only kind of education that should happen. You know, we’ve talked a lot about critical exploration, exploratory curricula. And I would say that in every grade and in every subject area, every domain of practice, students should be given some exploratory opportunities, but that’s not, does not make a, a school curriculum. We’re not expecting students to reinvent the world, a lot of things.
So I have three different kinds of understandings that I think it is really important to distinguish, three different kinds of curricular experiences. So it’s not always about providing opportunities for students to arrive at something on their own, but it is about providing opportunities for them to make sense of the material on their own terms. So again, that comes down to that discursive piece of… it can’t just be about your language, it has to be about everyone has to get a chance to bring their own language, their own experience to bear in making sense of whatever it is that is being learned in whatever way.
I should probably also add here that we’re talking about exploratory learning experiences, which I talk about in my book as just one important, I argue necessary, form of classroom experience within democratic societies. In the book, I talk about three different curricular forms, the other two being translation and problem solving. And I think it is important that we emphasize that there are many different ways of learning all the things that we want students to learn in the course of their K-12 education, I call translation. It’s another way of speaking of traditional direct instruction, one that emphasizes the need for teachers to be aware of and responsive to the ways that their students are thinking and the words that their students are comfortable with and know. So this form, like the others, also requires discourse to be more dialogic, which is another concept that’s large in my work and in the book, is that in general, we need to be more dialogic in pedagogical situations so that we’re hearing what students are making of what we’re saying as teachers. So there needs to be more back and forth, increase the chances that everyone is indeed understanding everyone fully. Then problem solving is a more recent form that gets a lot of play now and different theorists have different approaches to it, but it comes out of the worlds of science and math education, the idea being that teachers create problem spaces as in exploratory learning experiences. But these are more straightforward and everyone’s supposed to solve the problem, arrive at the same answer though not necessarily in the same ways. So with this form, students get a chance to think things through in ways that make sense to them, and they’re more actively involved in constructing the understandings as they go. And then they also get a chance to see that people can arrive at the exact same place that they did in different ways. So it’s another look into the way that different minds work.
[00:47:19] Amy H-L: Well, thank you so much, Susan Jean Mayer, author of ”Practicing Pragmatism Through Progressive Pedagogies: A Philosophical Lens for Grounding Classroom Teaching and Research.”
[00:47:26] Jon M : And thank you, listeners. The book is now out in paperback, which makes it much more accessible for individuals. If you found this podcast worthwhile, please share it with your friends and colleagues. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and give us a rating or review. This helps others to find the show. Check out our website, ethicalschools.org, for more episodes and videos, and subscribe to our email newsletter. We post annotated transcripts of our interviews to make them easy to use in workshops or classes. Contact us at hosts@ethicalschools.org. We’re on Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and LinkedIn. Our editor and social media manager is Amanda Denti.. Until next time.