One way to look at Dewey [1] is as a radical liberal and a social reformer who identified the importance of a common humanity to personal and social growth [2]. He was an academic and the prototype of the public intellectual, contributing to political debate, active in teacher unions, supporting the settlement movement and setting up his own experimental schools. His commitment to democracy led him to be on the right side of many of the arguments that dominated his life and times and still matter today. He saw mass immigration into the USA as an opportunity for generating a national democratic culture, he was patriotic but not a militarist, he was an early supporter of women’s rights. He was prescient when it came to philosophy – a pragmatist and ‘fallibilist’ [i.e. he understood that we might be wrong] in a way that was unusual in his time – and wanted us to search for consensus based on reason. He was romantic about community and what it offered for social life but was forward looking, urban based and not interested in rural idylls. He was politically radical while remaining, unusual among radicals of the time, anti Marxist and anti Stalinist. He was not afraid to talk ‘truth unto power’ in USA or on a global stage. He chaired the ‘Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials’ that exposed the absurdity of the Stalinist purges in the 1930s but was not impressed by Trotskyism. He was, in spite of everything, wilfully optimistic about life and our ability to make sense of it. It should not matter in the consideration of his ideas, but it seems he was a playful, though distracted parent, and he endured the death of two of his children bravely.

Dewey has drifted in and out of favour over time but he is still a key point of reference for educators. His work has always managed to wind up conservative commentators on education on the largely mistaken grounds that he was a ‘progressive’ educationalist [3]. Having recently had an election here in the UK, when evenly mildly expressed social reform took a bashing, expect to see another attack next year on Dewey to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of his landmark book ‘Democracy and Education’. So what did he believe that upset the conservative Right? In a nutshell he saw that learning was triggered by problem solving and wanted to put inquiry at the heart of learning. He was forward thinking too in the way he thought about language and saw communication as core to learning. For example in ‘Democracy and Education’ [4] he writes:

To be a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed experience. One shares in what another has thought and felt and in so far, meagerly or amply, has his own attitude modified. Nor is the one who communicates left unaffected. Try the experiment of communicating, with fullness and accuracy, some experience to another, especially if it be somewhat complicated, and you will find your own attitude toward your experience changing; otherwise you resort to expletives and ejaculations. The experience has to be formulated in order to be communicated. To formulate requires getting outside of it, seeing it as another would see it, considering what points of contact it has with the life of another so that it may be got into such form that he can appreciate its meaning. (Dewey 1916 [1947]:12)

This sets Dewey up as a very radical thinker about education, but perhaps this was because his opposition to didactic teaching took centre stage, given that didaticism was the dominant mode of teaching in his day. Less time has been given to his critique of so called progressive teaching because this was, and has always been, something of a sideshow. Nonetheless it is worth clarifying that in ‘Democracy and Education’ he was not advocating that children should take over their schools but was asking how can we help children generate habits for later democratic participation in society. Similarly, his idea of ‘learning by doing’ sounds very experimental and unfocused but this was not what he was saying. Rather he felt that while learning was triggered by problems you should not flay around wildly trying to solve a problem, instead you needed to think reflectively and socially on what to do. A problem-solving curriculum was a structured one with important roles for teachers and teaching. It is just that the structure and the preparation for teaching was different to what didactic instructors imagined. His key point was that the teaching of concepts needed to be rooted in experience, not learnt by drill. Here [5] he differentiated between ‘genuine ideas’ and surface assimilation:

Suppose it is a question of having the pupil grasp the idea of the sphericity of the earth. This is different from teaching him its sphericity as a fact. He may be shown (or reminded of) a ball or a globe, and be told that the earth is round like those things; he may then be made to repeat that statement day after day till the shape of the earth and the shape of the ball are welded together in his mind. But he has not thereby acquired any idea of the earth’s sphericity; at most, he has had a certain image of a sphere and has finally managed to image the earth after the analogy of his ball image. To grasp sphericity as an idea, the pupil must first have realized certain perplexities or confusing features in observed facts and have had the idea of spherical shape suggested to him as a possible way of accounting for the phenomena in question. Only by use as a method of interpreting data so as to give them fuller meaning does sphericity become a genuine idea (Dewey, 1910: 109.)

To sum up, Dewey was concerned with education as an end in itself and he offered a child centred approach that was not over romanticised or sentimental. In politics he was a democrat (small d) worried about the ways that our democratic instincts were skewed by special interests and inequalities. In philosophy he saw that we were responsible for interpreting the world but saw this as reason for optimism rather than existential pessimism. So what is there not to like? He was, and will remain, forever criticised from the socialist left for lacking an economic analysis of capitalism – this would, following Marx, place Dewey as a ‘utopian’ though a practical one who, in his own way, believed that the point was not to understand the world but to change it. For sociologists Dewey was too ready to see the world through the lens of what bound us together rather than through structures of class and other social formations that pulled us apart. And more generally social scientists do not get his action-oriented inquiry in the way that educators do. His views on education are never going to appeal to conservative thinkers, even ones who have taken the time to read him. However a more widely expressed criticism is that he was unnecessarily vague as to what he was advocating and in fact he might be a lot more, or for that matter a lot less, radical than we think. He offered little too, in the way of detail, in terms of pedagogic strategies. Another recurring but often unacknowledged difficulty with Dewey was that he was really only writing about children and education. Indeed you want to imagine that his university classes, like his experimental schools, were full of activity, practical experimentation and lively debate, but they were not and for me that is the most disappointing thing about him.

[1] Dewey (1859 – 1952) is widely celebrated as a philosopher, social psychology social but is often assumed to have given his name to the Dewey system of library referencing. However that was Thomas Dewey. More importantly Donald Duck had a nephew Dewey (plus two others Huey and Louie) but the name probably was again taken from Thomas rather than John.
[2] This view of Dewey as a radical liberal is articulated in Ryan, A. (1995). John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism. New York: W. W. Norton and Company.
[3] Professor Robert Pring wrote:
Indeed, when I came to Oxford I was seated at dinner next to Lord Keith Joseph who had been Secretary of State for Education under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. He accused me of being responsible for all the problems in our schools – because I had introduced teachers to John Dewey. And subsequently there was systematic attack on Dewey even from philosophers as well as journalists and politicians. Professor O’Hear, for example proposed that ‘[i]t is highly plausible to see the egalitarianism which stems from the writings of John Dewey as the approximate cause of our educational decline’. In Pring, R. (2007) John Dewey, London: Bloomsbury Press.
[4] Dewey, J. (1916 / 1947). Democracy and Education. New York: The Macmillan Company.
[5] Dewey, J. (1910). How We Think. London: D. C. Heath & Company available online at http://archive.org/details/howwethink000838mbp.

Our research students are putting on an interdisciplinary conference on education [1]. This is something I very much welcome, but I don’t imagine it to be straightforward to get agreement on how or why education research should be an interdisciplinary undertaking.

In my own case I came to education research around mid career through teaching and researching my teaching as this was the usual route at the time. I did not give much thought to education as a field of study and assumed it was inter disciplinary [2] in the sense that you dipped into whatever research gave you some insight into the questions / problems you were facing. For example, I became interested in online discussion and took some inspiration from the idea of communicative language learning (which had been much touted in language teaching [3]) and aligned this with a concept of social constructivism which I thought had something to do with Vygotsky – though to be honest I did not interrogate original sources too closely relying in particular on scholars such as Neil Mercer [4] and others who offered a constructivist approach to classroom talk.

I believed that I was carrying out educational research– a kind of action oriented inquiry into practice [4] – rather than discipline research into the sociology / psychology or philosophy of education. This I think was the widespread view of my colleagues in teacher education at the time and reflected a view that we should not take theories generated in ‘social science’ on trust; whatever anyone proposed about teaching needed to be tested in practice and must contribute to desirable outcomes – and we were going to interrogate what desirable outcomes were, thank you very much. I was, by inclination, suspicious of research into education that had not been carried out by practitioners or with teachers. I was for example familiar with some of the sociology literature, for example Corrigan and Willis both wrote insightful books to show how underachievement and the marginalisation of lads is ‘constructed’ [5]. When it came to learning to teach such books offered very little that I could use and to be honest the sociological insight got in my way. I can look back now more kindly on the sociology of education. I can see that these books should have been used to inform policy makers of the consequences of the institutions they had set up and I could see that the historic aim of social research is to say ‘how things are’ – what we choose to do about it is another matter. Some books on the sociology of education are of limited value in the classroom but may be that is not why they were written.

Of course not all is rosy with this action oriented educational research. One particular weakness is that we can be cavalier about the literature we quote. For example myself and colleagues call in Vygotsky to justify approaches to learning based on participation in a community of practice as well as more instructional ones, and in particular interactive theories of instruction. Surely the same theory cannot cross over into two very different settings? I suspect, too, that because educational research is not rooted in a field we are more susceptible to fashions, for example a head of steam builds up now and then around a single idea such as community of practice, which is adopted by nearly everyone, and then dropped when we move onto the next big thing. There is also a view held by some that what really matters is trial and error in the classroom, and we should ignore ‘theory’, I simply don’t hold to that at all.

So what has educational practice got to learn from discipline research? Well here are some examples. In spite of what I said earlier the sociology of education research has made a difference in that it has shown us that cultures are ‘real’ and they really do ‘operate on’ us as learners. Once we had a story that intelligence was all about what lay in the head of the person, intelligence was an innate capacity to be clever or not, sociology of education has told us that this is not the case and good schools and good teachers work on the culture of learning in the classroom as much as learning at the level of the indiuvdual; we all unselfconsciously talk about the culture of learning in ways we would not have done without the input of sociology. In contrast psychology got us off to a bad start by over focusing on the individual and generated all too often a simplistic behaviourist approach to learning. However it has been social psychology (the work of Vygostky, Lewin and more recently I have found the input of Valsiner useful) that has the best explanations of how learning is both an individual achievement and that of a group and or culture. It also needs to be said that psychology’s focus on ‘what is in the head of the learner’ has been hugely important in the understanding of special needs, for example our understanding of autism. Finally I would also make a plea that as educational researchers we need to be more historically aware. In the field of technology we are for ever talking about paradigm shifts and new learning theories – but the problems of learning and knowing are age old and we all too easily forget that.

My younger self should have taken discipline research more seriously but I think those working in social science disciplines should ‘get their hands dirty’ with action oriented classroom research from time to time if they are writing about education. It will stop them saying things about teaching and learning which are simply silly, it will alert them to what teachers find important, and the experience will pull them back from proposing solutions that practitioners know would not work.

I am very much looking forward to attending the conference and to hearing more from our students.

[1] Go to http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/ces/research/pgconference

[2] Definitions vary, but broadly we can think about:

Crossdisciplinary as involving a team from different disciplines working together but hanging on their own discipline standpoints.

Interdisciplinary as involving a deeper level of exchange between disciplines and perhaps using the fruits of collaboration to shift the boundaries of one’s own disciplines.

Transdisciplinary as involving a more full on willingness to engage with problems rather than disciplines and to create new conceptions of knowledge.

These terms are mostly discussed in the context of research teams but these are of course standpoints that an individual researcher can take.

[3] A key text here was Widdowson, H. (1978) Teaching language as communication, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[4] Mercer, N. (1995) The Guided Construction of Knowledge: talk amongst teachers and learners. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters

[5] See of example Carr, W., & Kemmis, S. (1986) Becoming Critical. Education, knowledge and action research. Lewes: Falmer.

[6] See:

Corrigan, P. (1979) Schooling the Bash Street Kids, London: Macmillan.

Willis, P. (1977) Learning to labour. How working class children get working class jobs, New York: Colombia University.

I have recently been researching the idea of online community and came across the concept of slacktivism; as Choi and Park* explain (they are looking at the use of social media in a protest movement in South Korea) online slacktivism is about soothing participants without contributing to any political or social impact.

An example that has been picked in the media recently has been the #BringBackOurGirls campaign, this in response to the abduction of 276 Nigerian schoolgirls last April (for a summary go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-27293418 though this was posted in May); several commentators have pointed out the absurdity of the campaign set against the unyielding fanaticism of Boko Haram. For one, Scott Gilmore:

‘The #BringBackOurGirls campaign is the latest disgrace from slacktivists, those who support good causes by doing very little, and achieving even less. A slacktivist is someone who believes it is more important to be seen to help than to actually help. He will wear a T-shirt to raise awareness. She will wear a wristband to demonstrate support, sign a petition to add her voice, share a video to spread the message, even pour a bucket of ice over her head. The one thing slacktivists don’t do is help by, for example, giving money or time to those who are truly making the world a better place: the cancer researcher, the aid worker, the hospice manager.” http://www.macleans.ca/society/the-real-problem-with-slacktivism/

The phenomenon of slaktivism is not, of course, new. Tom Lehrer did a skit on the protest song movement in the mid 1960’s, he had a nice ironic line in song introductions,:

“One type of song that has come into increasing prominence in recent months is the folk-song of protest. You have to admire people who sing these songs. It takes a certain amount of courage to get up in a coffee-house or a college auditorium and come out in favor of the things that everybody else in the audience is against like peace and justice and brotherhood and so on. The nicest thing about a protest song is that it makes you feel so good.”

`You can hear the song at various places on YouTube e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yygMhtNQJ9M&list=RDyygMhtNQJ9M#t=33

Slacktivism is difficult to take when it slips into self-righteousness but by temperament I am a slacktivist. Choi and Park treat slacktivism fairly sympathetically too, noting for example it might lead as much to action in the future rather than an excuse not to act. If there is such a thing as hard activism, at the other end of slaktivism, this is not really embodied in the jobs people do, as Gilmore puts it, but in the stances they take  The people I know who do ‘truly good work’ would not raise their choice of occupation above the those of others; many are in some respects at least, by temperament, slaktivists too.

These thoughts on slacktivism were triggered by the news of the disappearance of student teachers from a training college in Ayotzinapa in Mexico – again more on the BBC site, for example http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-30047996

I noticed too what might be dismissed as a slacktivist response by Mexican illustrators and designers at http://ilustradoresconayotzinapa.tumblr.com . This invites artist to draw and paint portraits of the missing young people based on their student photos (I should stress that artists have traditionally had a more activist role in Mexican public life so there might be much more at stake in this initiative than meets the eyes). The online contributions have become widely shared using the hashtag #IlustradoresConAyotzinapa.

Critics of slacktivism are right to tell us how inadequate all this is, but when all is said and done, as with the Nigerian girls, the story of these student teachers breaks your heart; we will be lessened if we don’t offer some kind of response, as the Mexican illustrators have done as the BringBackOurGirls campaign did earlier, even though it will be of scant consolation for the families involved and of little practical help. We do need to be reminded of who we are and what we believe in, slaktivists or otherwise.

*Choi, Sujin and Park, Han Woo (2014) Title: An exploratory approach to a Twitter-based community centered on a political goal in South Korea: Who organized it, what they shared, and how they acted, New Media & Society, 16, 1, 129-148.

For those wanting more on the link between social media and activism try the Westminster Papers at http://www.westminster.ac.uk/camri/publications/wpcc volume 9,2 which I think is freely available.