Making Democracy: The Art and Craft of Constructing Share Understandings in Classrooms

• In Event: Investigating the Teacher and Student Self

Abstract

Interested and dynamic transactions among people and their intersecting cultural inheritances provide the human resources for what Dewey identifies as a deeply gratifying form of personal growth. In Dewey’s vision, this quality of human growth serves both to motivate and to guide the renewal of democracy as a social and cultural practice. Yet today, teachers often lack the encouragement and resources needed to imagine and develop the dynamic learning experience implied. Here, I provide practical guidance for the work of conceptualizing and constructing distinctively democratic knowledge construction processes (Author & colleagues, 2019) within classrooms. By encouraging and enabling teachers to attend to each student’s reasoning on its own terms, such processes can also help to create more equitable classroom cultures.

Author

• Susan Jean Mayer, Critical Exploration Press