The Child, the Curriculum, and Patai – 11-3-14

The Child, the Curriculum, and Patai – 11-3-14

One of the first readings I assign for my Emergent Curriculum course is John Dewey’s “The Child and the Curriculum,” which is a daunting way to enter into a conversation about teaching and learning.  To put insult upon injury, I have them read a chapter from Dewey’s book, Art as Experience, soon after to begin our focus on the role of the arts in curriculum and in children’s development.   This year some of my students’ response to Dewey’s writing style ranged from questioning the meaning of the language he used to frustration with the way he seems to return again and again to the same idea.  One student wished that there were cliff notes for Dewey, so that his ideas could be better communicated to others.  However, despite these initial comments, all found something in Dewey that speaks to our current understandings and conundrums in education today, and all were surprised to find out when these texts were written.

Every time I read Dewey I see something new, and this year I have been interested in his argument for his particular definition of progressive education, which is very much connected to providing the conditions for children to have experiences that move them forward in their development and learning.  He repeatedly warns us of the extremes of education.  On one side, children left simply to their own devices can languish.  On the other, rigid top down curriculum that determines the teacher’s planning and the child’s path stops the natural development of the child in its tracks.  In three of the texts I use in my courses, these ideas are repeated in different ways:

“It is easier to see the conditions in their separateness, to insist upon one at the expense of the other, to make antagonists of them, then to discover a reality to which each belongs.  The easy thing is to seize upon something in the nature of the child, or something in the developed consciousness of the adult, and insist upon that as the key to the whole problem.” (Dewey, 1902)

“Thus the non-esthetic lies within two limits.  At one pole is the loose succession that does not begin at any particular place that ends-in the sense of ceasing-at no particular place. At the other pole is arrest, constriction, proceeding from parts only having a mechanical connection with one another.  There exists so much of one and another of these two kinds of experiences that unconsciously they come to be taken as norms of all experience.” (Dewey, 1934)

“The history of educational theory is marked by opposition between the idea that education is development from within and that it is formation from without; that it is based upon natural endowments and that education is a process of overcoming natural inclination and substituting in its place habits acquired under external pressure.” (Dewey, 1938)

What I appreciate about Dewey, although others may find this aspect of him frustrating, is that he does not give a solid answer about how one might achieve a balance between these extremes.  My humble interpretation of Dewey’s ‘balance’ is that at times the child must lead the way, at times the subject matter, while both aspects need to be present in one form or another for learning to occur. It is, of course, much more complicated than that, if one looks closely at Dewey’s ideas.  The danger of summarizing Dewey for others is that his work is easily used to support the work of educators of widely differing beliefs.  It is best if readers could interact and engage with his primary texts in order to wrestle with his big ideas, and come to their own conclusions.  But this leads to the problem of my students’ first impressions of Dewey.  How might one present Dewey’s words in order to help readers understand his message?

I find a possible answer to this question in the work of Daphne Patai.  While taking a fantastic qualitative research course at New York University, my Professor Margot Ely suggested using the Patai form when transcribing interviews.  When one translates spoken words into prose, one often loses the intention of the speaker.  Patai, when conducting a study in Brazil, found that this was especially true with the poorer, less educated women she interviewed .  Patai found that by making the interview transcription into a kind of poem, with spaces, commas, and line breaks, “transcribing ..as literally as possible, without the streamlining which suit our expectations as a prose text,” she could better capture the depth of her participants. (Patai, 1988, p 157)  Patai found that this form forced the reader to make the same effort to understand the intention of the speaker as they might do for a more ‘respected’ text:

“We are prepared to work hard to decipher high-cultural texts-often we admire them more the more they make us work – yet we will cry out in impatience when an ‘ordinary speaker,’ a person like Marialice, requires the same of us.” (Patai, 1988, p158)

I myself found this form very helpful when transcribing interviews for my doctoral work.  The rhythm and cadence of the people I interviewed could be attended to, and I think ideas came forward that I might have missed.  My experience in transcribing mirrored Patai’s: “After this was done, the taped interview ceased to have the simplicity of a transparency and began instead to take on a certain density and appear as what it in fact is, a structured narration.” (Patai, 1988)

One person I have interviewed in the past, Storyteller Peggy Pettitt, spoke of education in a way that reminds me of Dewey’s core ideas.  I pulled this piece out of a larger Patai transcription, non-edited, attempting to capture her voice and the meaning within and surrounding her words:

but there has to be

people who are in a position

to

articulate what’s necessary

otherwise,

we have the

wrong people defining

who have no experience

defining

what it is

that’s necessary

for

what do we mean

what do we mean by the word education

and a

in a whole

in a whole sense of the word

what do you mean by that

and what do we value

is it about test scores or is it about the human being

I think it’s also about test scores

but I don’t think it’s only about that…

(Ruen, 2003, Interview transcript of Peggy Pettitt)

Just as Pettitt articulates, Dewey’s work strives to envision education as more wholistic than dualistic.  The unpacking of this idea is not easy, and communicating what might be unpacked to others is even more difficult.  Yet Peggy Pettitt’s voice is speaking toward an urgency to do both, in order to halt the ‘wrong people’ from defining, and hence, controlling, education.

This brings me back to my original question, which I answer with another: What if Patai was not only a form for respecting and communicating the words of the poor and disenfranchised, the artist and the teacher, but also a way of making texts that can be viewed as opaque and elitist easier to access?  What if the poetic form, as a translator of prose, could make ideas and texts come alive, and better reveal the intention of the speaker?

Below is my Patai interpretation of what I find to be at the heart of Dewey’s view of the Child and the Curriculum.  I have used this form with some success to help my own students find meaning within the text:

“Abandon the notion of subject-matter as something

fixed and ready-made in itself,

outside of the child’s experience;

cease thinking of the child’s experience as also something hard and fast;

see it as something fluent,

embryonic,

vital;

and we realize that the child and the curriculum are simply two limits

which define a single process.

Just as two points define a straight line,

so the present standpoint of the child and the facts and truths of studies define instruction.

It is continuous reconstruction,

moving from the child’s present experience

out into that represented by the organized bodies of truth

that we call studies.”  (Dewey,1902)

Our work as educators is not only to operate in the space of ‘continuous reconstruction’ with the child and the curriculum, but also to make this work clear to families, colleagues, principals, policy makers, and government officials.  It is worth the effort to work through Dewey’s ideas, to realize these ideas through our practice, and to heed his warnings.

“I am not, I hope and believe, in favor of any ends or any methods simply because the name progressive may be applied to them. The basic question concerns the nature of education with no qualifying adjectives prefixed. What we want and need is education pure and simple, and we shall make surer and faster progress when we devote ourselves to finding out just what education is and what conditions have to be satisfied in order that education may be a reality and not a name or a slogan.” (Dewey, 1938)

Dewey, J. (1934). Art as Experience.  New York: Capricorn Books.

Dewey, J. (1902). The Child and the Curriculum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Dewey, J. (1938). Experience & Education. New York, NY: Kappa Delta Pi.

Patai, D. (1988). ‘Constructing a Self: A Brazilian Life Story.’ Feminist Studies. 14:1

Ruen,K. (2003). Interview Transcript of Peggy Pettitt.

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