Both Dewey and Gee posit that students bring with them prior experiences influencing teaching and learning, however, Dewey’s is a more abstract (typical Dewey) argument than Gee’s. Gee focused on a particular type of Dewey’s “continuity”, that concerning language development.
Bransford and Schwartz also take Dewey’s abstract notion of continuity and make it more concrete in their article on “transfer”. Whereas Dewey argued that continuity exists and that it should be used to judge the quality of learning designs, Bransford and Schwartz provide the reader with more concrete strategies (e.g. presenting students with an idea in multiple contexts so that they can identify general characteristics/ principles of the idea existing across contexts) concerning how to help students prepare for future learning (the portion of continuity occurring after a learning experience).
Finally, Pea’s “distributed intelligence” is an idea that could be used during the planning process to help students offload cognitive demand so that the learner can focus more attention upon principles/ characteristics that would prepare them for future learning. In other words, certain lessons might (intentionally or otherwise) lead students to leave the learning experience having focused too much cognitive effort on context-specific knowledge, inhibiting transfer/ continuity. If designers recognized the intelligence of resources outside the learner, it might enable the learner to walk away with a better understanding of ideas that can be applied in contexts beyond that in which the ideas were initially present.
In summary, Gee’s paper was a more specific application of Dewey’s abstract continuity; Bransford and Schwartz’, and, Pea offered implicit/ explicit strategies regarding the development of continuity/ transfer.
After reading your post, I can see these readings as being a sort of scaffolding for applying Dewey's (definitely abstract!) continuity. When I first read the Dewey article, it was hard for me to grasp, but through Gee, Bransford and Schwartz, and Pea, I now have a clearer understanding of it. Adam made a comment on my post about how these authors were from over a large period of time. Maybe as time goes on and ways of implementation for classroom teachers becomes clearer as it did with these authors, we will actually be able to see Dewey's continuity playing a big role in the average classroom.
ReplyDeleteI think this is a good way to summarize the connections between these scholars. Clearly, they all share a way of thinking about learning, a way approaches situative theory and breaks from traditional norms of school and curriculum design. I find your comparision equation especially useful as it answers a common question: "Well, this theory makes sense but it's not really practical." Bransford and Schwartz especially make clear how what Dewey is suggesting is thoroughly doable, in classrooms and in assessments.
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