An Indefinite Richness of Significance

An indefinite Richness of Significance

In his 1916 book, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education, John Dewey takes aim at “ready-made”, fixed and rigid educational agendas that focuses on “the mere amassing of information.”  For a book written over 100 years ago, that seems to me to be a powerfully progressive and provocative idea, but one that resonate strongly with 21st century learning.

Dewey warns that content divorced from connections to, and activities related to, the individual’s personal experience risks becoming a “hodge-podge of unrelated fragments”, making the learner’s mind “wooden” rather than “elastic”.

Using history and geography to make his point, Dewey indicates that the intersection between fact-based content and the human experience is essential to fostering the curiosity and exploration necessary to create meaning. According to Dewey, it is the educator’s job to create the environments that inspire learners to seek out connections and meaning. He talks about geography and history as “intellectual starting points for moving out into the unknown”, rather than as ends in themselves.  

As a member of a 6-person teaching team, I have had the experience this past year of designing learning experiences around broad and engaging themes that have served as strong intellectual starting points. Dewey’s talking points in this article resonate strongly for me as I reflect on how differently our 6th grade students engaged with big questions and ideas that drove their curiosity and allowed them to make thematic connections across all six of their courses throughout the year. As the year moved forward, our students began to view content as a tool that was important to being able to explore and make meaning of the themes with increasing sophistication as they connected with experts, authentic texts, and each other in meaningful discussions. It was clear to me that these students were simply learning more stuff, they were developing deep understanding of what they were learning and were able to connect it to many other things in the world around them, leading to new paths of learning.  

6th grade students explain sound wave by walking guests through a guitar build experience.

As I read through Dewey’s chapter called “The Significance of Geography and History”, several “what if…” questions arose for me. What if there was no specific content for a course? What if there were only big themes, engaging questions, and open space and time to explore and connect from an engaging intellectual starting point? How would students learning differently?

What if students in the same class could learn different content (the content they needed to explore a topic of choice and personal relevance) while all working toward the same skills goals? What if although all learners begin together at a common intellectual starting point, they could branch off in direct directions that feed their personal imagination and curiosity and then join together at various junctions within the unit to share ideas, questions, and wonders?  What if the teacher’s role was to facilitate each student’s individual learning path toward specific skills, customizing what content each student learns according to his path? What would that look like? Could it work?  How would that impact the traditional sequencing of content in disciplines?

What if disciplinary content was not so proprietary? What if it simply became big ideas for fostering literacy, discussion, exploration, connections, curiosity and the intellectualism?

Dewey summarizes this chapter by stating: “It is the nature of an experience to have implications which go far beyond what is at first consciously noted in it. Bringing these connections or implications to consciousness enhances the meaning of the experience.” This seems to answer my what if questions quite thoroughly. It is my job as an educator not to merely be an content expert in my specific field of discipline, but rather to provide students with an engaging intellectual starting point and a learning environment that foster imagination, curiosity, exploration, and connections.

As Dewey states, “any experience, however trivial in its first appearance, is capable of assuming an indefinite richness of significance by extending its range of perceived connections.” As I think about my students closing out a unit with an indefinite richness of significance rather than simply a test grade, I wonder what I need to do tomorrow to make that happen more richly for my next unit.