syllabus
calendar
blackboard
student.email resources

last.updated 5.19.08

History, Education, & Literacy

Purpose

As with any theoretical discussions, it helps to know where we have been to get a better understanding of where we are going–or where we may be able to go. John Dewey's theories have been quite influential on twentieth-century United States education. Whether practitioners adopt or reject his theories, many policies and pedagogies seem to respond to his principles. Today we discuss where we have been and the relevancy of Dewey's work.

Graff provides a history of literacy in the US from the birth of the county until the twentieth century. We will discuss the following:

• What questions do you have about this article?
• What are his arguments?
• What did you find most interesting about this reading?
• What features of nineteenth century literacy are still familiar to us today? In other words, what conditions did Graff describe that are still relevant today?

Discussion II – John Dewey

In the early twentieth century John Dewey composed a treatise to propose education reform. We will discuss the following:

• What questions do you have about this selection?
• What are his arguments?
• What did you find most interesting about this article?
• Graff has developed a secondary text explaining the history of nineteenth century literacy in the US; Dewey's treatise provides a primary text that defines the education at the beginning of the twentieth century. How do you see Dewey discussion responding to the conditions that Graff describes?
• How does Dewey support his arguments? In other words, what is his epistemology?
• Dewey defines education as "It is that reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to meaning of experience, and which increases ability to direct the course of subsequent experience" (p. 76). What are your opinions about this definition? Does it seem relevant almost one-hundred years later? How might you revise it?
• How is Dewey's work relevant to English Studies?

Activity I: Praxis

Praxis, as we have discussed, is theory informing practice and practice informing theory. This means that to develop an implementation of praxis you have to think about how you will use the scholarship to inform your own teaching practices and how you will make your own contribution to the field.

For the first part of this activity the instructor will briefly talk about writing at the graduate level, touching on issues of...

• expectations for graduate level work
• how to read for graduate courses
• participating in the "conversation"

For the second part, you will work in groups to articulate a process for getting from pedagogical theory to practice. Think about how scholars have described the process of writing; it is not a perfect representation of what everybody does, but it gives us a vocabulary and a model for describing the activity. If you need some concrete theoretical principles to work with, you may want to start with Scribner and Coles' implications or Dewey's work.

At the end of twenty-five minutes each group will put their processes up on the board for discussion.