Connecting Dewey, Gee, Pea, and Bransford & Schwartz - the Role of Experience and Active Learning

One overarching theme over these four readings is the progressive nature of learning.  Here I mean progressive in the sense of learning builds on previous learning.  Dewey refers to this idea as the continuity of experience.  People apply their past experiences to the present, and the experiences from the present will impact future experiences.  Gee’s focus on language states that people best learn specialist languages and how to think about them when they can connect it to prior experiences.  Pea discusses the need for experience in order to realize the affordances provided by artifacts and the environment.  Bransford & Schwartz focus on the idea of “knowing with” – being able to use previous experiences to influence and interpret subsequent events.  I believe the authors would all agree that experience matters in learning.  What one has seen, heard, and read about influences how one learns.  One of the major arguments behind Gee’s second chapter, I think, follows appropriately.  Minorities and children living in poverty often perform worse in America’s education system because they haven’t been afforded the experiences that children in wealthier, Caucasian families have been afforded.  Not only have they not been exposed to the academic language favored by our education system, but they often aren’t in the place financially to have made visits to museums to learn about history, science, and other fields; they haven’t had the luxury of traveling to new cities and exploring new cultures; they haven’t had access to fancy gadgets, or even simpler gadgets for that matter, like the toddlers who play with iPads nowadays.  Because of their circumstances, the experiences of our disadvantaged populations have been severely limited, relative to middle class society, which, in turn, hinders their performance in America’s public schools.

A second overarching theme is the focus on learning as an active process.  Pea emphasizes distributed intelligence as “manifest in activity.”  Intelligence is when one actively taps into the resources of people (including themselves), the environment, and the situation.  Bransford & Schwartz’s preparation for future learning (PFL) requires individuals to actively question one’s own beliefs and ideas and choose what is worth keeping and letting go, as well as actively adapting environments to one’s needs.  Similarly, Gee argues that to be successful in today’s world, people must be able to actively transform and adapt themselves for fast-changing circumstances.  Dewey best sums this up in his discussion of traditional and progressive education.  In traditional education, students are treated as passive learners.  They are like empty jars being filled with ideas.  Progressive education, however, focuses on the learner as an active participant in the learning process.  It allows learners to bring their own experiences and perspectives into the learning environment.  In order to prepare our students for the future, we must engage them in active learning.  This means changing the way we teach and the way we assess, something that we, as a society, are beginning to challenge more and more.