Megan J. Laverty

Evaluating classroom dialogue Reconciling internal and external accountability

In this article we present an instrument to be used by students and professors to evaluate classroom dialogue. We begin with an explanation of the classroom community of inquiry and why we value it as a pedagogical approach. We then describe our different reasons for evaluating classroom dialogue — including institutional, professional and pedagogical accountability — and describe the inherent conflicts among these reasons. We explain how our evaluation instrument was designed to ameliorate these conflicts. We recount a number of theoretical and practical problems we encountered in designing and implementing the instrument and explain how we attempted to overcome these problems. We conclude the article by describing the advantages and disadvantages of our instrument in light of our analysis of data gathered from its first implementation.

Thinking my way back to you: John Dewey on the communication and formation of concepts

Abstract Contemporary educational theorists focus on the significance of Dewey’s conception of experience, learning-by-doing and collateral learning. In this essay, I reexamine the chapters of Dewey’s Democracy and Education, that pertain to thinking and highlight their relationship to Dewey’s How We Think: A Restatement of the Relation of Reflective Thinking in the Educative Process—another book written explicitly for teachers. In How We Think Dewey explains that nothing is more important in education than the formation of concepts. Concepts introduce permanency into an otherwise impermanent world. He defines concepts as established meanings, or intellectual deposits used to found a better understanding of new experiences; they are what makes any experience educationally worthwhile. Dewey accuses traditional and progressive education of failing to appropriately form concepts in students. His position is that concepts are formed and transformed by experience, reflection and activity. He argues that the individual makes a personalized use of concepts for which he or she requires: continuity of experience, exposure to new or surprising possibilities, and sustained communication with others—all of which are discussed at length in Democracy & Education. I conclude with the practical recommendation that K-12 schools introduce philosophy into the curriculum. Philosophy not only invites students to engage their concepts in a reflective manner, but it also provides a valuable resource for that engagement. Most if not all of philosophy’s canonical texts are dedicated to analyzing such concepts as beauty, friendship, love and justice. The introduction of philosophy in K-12 education would, I suggest, offer a correction to both traditional and progressive education.

Introduction: Redistributing the Artistic and Pedagogical Sensible

In this introduction we argue that there is an urgent need to think together the shared crisis found in arts education and in teaching more broadly conceptualized. In both cases, there is a consistent attack against the aesthetic dimensions of experience. We then outline how individual chapters in this collection can help us to appreciate the political, economic, social, and philosophical overlaps between the teachings of the arts and the art of teaching.

Conceiving education: The creative task before us:

Philosophers of education regularly undertake the challenging task of defining their field and what it is they do. John White and Harvey Siegel are no exception: Siegel categorizes philosophy of education as a branch of philosophy, and White responds that philosophers of education would do better to adopt a Deweyan perspective. White claims that philosophy of education is not a sui generis area of philosophy. It does not engage timeless philosophical questions, but draws heavily from ethics and epistemology (and other fields) to address contemporary developments in education. Contrary to White, I view philosophy of education and aesthetics as analogous and, building upon the analogy, suggest that philosophers of education resist totalizing approaches to their field. To this end, I argue that a Wittgensteinian-inspired approach to philosophy of education is particularly valuable for teachers today.

The World of Instruction: Undertaking the Impossible.

Throughout history, philosophers have reflected on educational questions. Some of their ideas emerged in defense of, or opposition to, skepticism about the possibility of formal teaching and learning. These philosophers include Plato, Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas, Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Together, they comprise a tradition that establishes the impossibility of instruction and the imperative to undertake it. The value of this tradition for contemporary education is that it redirects attention away from performance assessments and learning outcomes to the ethical, aesthetic, and metaphysical dimensions of schooling. I argue that philosophers of education are uniquely responsible for teaching this tradition so that instruction might be undertaken in the right spirit. To this end, my essay is divided into three parts. In the first part, I explain why instructional skepticism has not been prominent in philosophy of education. I follow up, in the second part, by clarifying my choice of the term ‘instruction.’ In the third part, I sketch the instructional philosophies that ‘book-end’ this tradition: those of Plato and Wittgenstein.

Music as an Apprenticeship for Life: John Dewey on the Art of Living

Megan J. Laverty’s paper focuses on rhythm or the patterned and recurrent alternation of sound and silence that we find in music and its relation to education. She considers the broader existential significance of this phenomenon using Dewey’s aesthetic philosophy. Laverty argues that if Dewey is right that (a) music exemplifies artfulness and (b) to live well is to live artfully, then an education in music—formal and informal—constitutes an education in how to live well. Artfulness, according to Dewey, involves, the intelligent harmonizing of the precarious, novel and irregular with the settled, assured and uniform. Laverty explains what Dewey means by intelligent harmonization and contrasts it with those occasions when individuals act from enforced necessity, routine or blind impulse. Laverty offers an intrinsic justification for arts education that focuses on a quality not previously highlighted by Maxine Greene and others. Clearly humanist, Laverty thereby aligns Greene with other post-humanist contributions by focusing on an iterative process constitutive of our material condition. The aim, as with so much of post-humanism, is not to control or direct this process in the interest of a telos, but to vibrate possibility.