John Dewey's Vision(S) for Interdisciplinary Social Studies
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Social Studies Research and Practice www.socstrp.org John Dewey’s Vision(s) for Interdisciplinary Social Studies Thomas D. Fallace William Paterson University of New Jersey For over a century, social studies educators have drawn upon the works of philosopher John Dewey to justify an interdisciplinary vision for the field. This manuscript explores the intellectual context that engendered Dewey’s pedagogical vision, outlines how and why Dewey organized his interdisciplinary curriculum at the University of Chicago Laboratory School, and traces how Dewey expanded his pedagogy in the 1920s and 1930s to include the interdisciplinary study of social and political issues in the classroom. The author argues that Dewey’s interdisciplinary pedagogy is best appreciated through a developmental and contingent framework. Key words: curriculum, democratic, John Dewey, child-centered, interdisciplinary, Lab School, social issues Introduction Throughout the 20th century, leading social studies educators such as Harold Rugg (1947), Maurice Hunt and Lawrence Metcalf (1955), Donald Oliver and James Shaver (1966), William Wraga (1993), Walter Parker (1996), and Steven Thornton (2005) have drawn upon the work of John Dewey to justify an interdisciplinary approach to the social studies. Prior to the work of these scholars, the 1916 Committee on Social Studies cited Dewey in support of its suggested interdisciplinary courses, Community Civics and the Problems of Democracy (Fallace 2009; Jorgensen, 2012). Dewey’s work, thus, has been instrumental in the interdisciplinary approach to the social studies since the founding of the field. Interdisciplinary study was important to Dewey throughout his long career but, there was a developmental aspect to his thinking on the topic that has been overlooked by many scholars who cite him (Fallace, 2012). To understand Dewey’s approach to disciplines and interdisciplinary study fully, we must reconcile Dewey’s earlier views on how the disciplines of history and geography were used at the University of Chicago Laboratory School (1896-1904) with his later writings on the importance of addressing social issues in the classroom through interdisciplinary study (1923- 1938). I am constructing a consistency of views that Dewey never fully outlined. Dewey viewed his own thought in contingent terms; his ideas were never intended to be internally consistent, rather each idea was introduced in the context of a particular issue and period. As Dewey admitted to a colleague in 1931, “I’ve worked out my views rather piecemeal and not always with consistency in detail” (Hickman, 1931/2005, rec 08009). The consistency of Dewey’s thoughts on the disciplines can be found in the piecemeal nature of his career, development, and philosophy. Dewey was consistent in that he consistently approached knowledge and problems in a contingent and developmental manner. A historical and contingent approach to Dewey’s work not only provides a more accurate depiction of changes in Dewey’s thinking over time, but it may accurately reflect his views on the disciplines themselves. Dewey considered disciplines as representing a specific form of thinking that emerged at a particular point in the history of the human race. Disciplines emerged during the latest, Volume 11 Number 1 177 Spring 2016 Social Studies Research and Practice www.socstrp.org modern, scientific stage of human development (Fallace, 2011b). He believed, therefore, that disciplinary study ought to be introduced to students only after they had mastered pre- disciplinary forms of thinking. In Some Stages of Logical Thought, Dewey (1900) outlined the universal stages of psychological and sociological growth that reflected the history of the human race, as well as the development of the individual. First, Dewey (1900/1976a) argued communities and individuals established fixed beliefs, customs and laws (stage one). They then incorporated these beliefs through discussions, dialogues and judgments (stage two). They next incorporated these discussions into a positivistic science of induction and deduction (stage three). They finally incorporated positivistic science into differentiated sciences based on contingency and inference (stage four). The last contingency stage produced the modern disciplines and the sub-disciplines within them, and each discipline had its own socially-constructed symbolic forms of knowledge and communication. The modernist period was not only the stage of the emergence of democracy, but also the stage of the modern, disciplinary specialist. So, Dewey identified specific stages of growth for both the child and society and sought to align these developmental schemes with one another. For Dewey, disciplinary thinking represented the highest psychological and sociological stage, not because disciplinary thinking was inherently superior to earlier forms of thinking, but because disciplinary thinking necessarily built upon pre- disciplinary kinds of thinking in the history of the human race and development of the history of the individual. Disciplines, Dewey (1901/1976b) wrote, “did not grow out of professional, but of human, needs” (p. 303). Disciplines were more complex forms of the same kind of inquiry and thinking in which children naturally engaged and that which our cultural ancestors had already undertaken. As a result, disciplines were simply outgrowths of previous, natural modes of human inquiry. He argued, therefore, that students should not be introduced to disciplined inquiry until the previous stages of inquiry had been mastered. Because both pre-disciplinary and disciplinary inquiry emerged out of attempts to solve real world problems, Dewey’s consistently criticized disciplinary experts for not using their knowledge to inform present issues and problems. My account of Dewey’s approach to disciplines and interdisciplinary study includes three sections. The first section provides some historical context for the formative years of Dewey’s philosophy of education to demonstrate that interdisciplinary study was already common in the social sciences and among reform-minded educators in the early 20th century. Second, I demonstrate how the social occupations and cultural and industrial history of the human race provided the underlying conceptual framework for the curriculum at the University of Chicago Laboratory (Lab) School, where Dewey first implemented his pedagogical vision. Dewey’s curriculum at the Lab School was best characterized as pre-disciplinary study, because Dewey sought to introduce children to early versions of the concrete problems with which pre- modern man struggled in order to demonstrate how disciplinary knowledge emerged organically out of these initial struggles and concerns. Third, I outline how Dewey’s expanded his approach to pedagogy in the 1920s and 1930s to argue on behalf of addressing social issues in the classroom. Dewey’s post-1923 work was explicitly interdisciplinary and included proposals to extend the social studies beyond even history and the social sciences. Divorced from the concrete prescriptions he had worked out empirically in Chicago, Dewey’s post-1923 interdisciplinary vision was overly ambitious and vague. Throughout his career, nevertheless, Dewey was consistent in his assertion that Kindergarten-12 instruction ought to draw upon, but not necessarily work through, the individual Volume 11 Number 1 178 Spring 2016 Social Studies Research and Practice www.socstrp.org disciplines because expert specialization was best addressed in college after previous pre- disciplinary forms of thinking had been mastered. Even at the post-secondary level, Dewey consistently expressed contempt for the disciplinary expert who could not employ his or his knowledge towards the solving of present day issues and problems. Dewey in Context Dewey’s vision for interdisciplinary social studies did not emerge in a vacuum. His focus on applying multiple disciplines to a specific area of inquiry was aligned with the leading scholars of the period. Intellectual historian Morton White famously characterized the work of leading progressive era scholars such as Dewey, James Harvey Robinson, Charles Beard, and Thorstein Veblen as a revolt against formalism. White (1947) argued this ideological shift was characterized by two elements: historicism and cultural organicism. White defined historicism as “the attempt to explain facts by reference to earlier facts,” and he defined organicism as “an attempt to find explanations and relevant material in social sciences other than the one which is primarily under investigation” (p. 12). Drawing on the work of Charles Darwin, whose theory of evolution emphasized contingency, adjustment and change, leading scholars of the period argued that the nation’s character and social structure had shifted as a result of industrialization, immigration, and urbanization. Some of the most influential and exciting interpretations of the early 20th century drew upon historicism and multiple disciplines to support their theses in support of social reform. In the Theory of the Leisure Class economist Thorstein Veblen (1899) drew upon history and anthropology to argue the socioeconomic inequalities in the present were historical and cultural outcomes of events occurring centuries earlier. In The Frontier in American History, historian Frederick Jackson Turner (1921) drew upon sociology, psychology, and geography to support his theory that the development of the western frontier had profoundly shaped American ideals and character.