Conference Program

For John Dewey democracy is not just a form of government but “a mode of associated living” (Dewey 1916, 93). So education for democratic citizenship should not be limited to the knowledge of certain political institutions and procedures, but it concerns children’s experience of living in a democratic community. Moreover, according to John Dewey “experience is primarily an active-passive affair” (Dewey 1916, 147) and not cognitive. Thus, the question that arises is what kind of activities should children undergo in order to have a democratic experience in their school community.

In this paper, I argue that in his early writings John Dewey gives emphasis to productive work and he supports that the schools fail to be transformed in democratic communities because of the lack of it (Dewey 1897). This is one of the reasons why Laboratory School’s curriculum was organized based on certain occupations of constructive work, such as cooking, carpeting and weaving. This early perspective seems to overlook the significance of communication to democratic experience. As Honneth & Farrell (1998) note, the disregard of communication is due to the wider disregard of the necessity of an autonomous political sphere. In his work after 1916, John Dewey makes a communicative turn (Biesta 2006) and he develops a richer analysis about human communication as the peculiar way of human interaction and its importance in democratic communities. However, his distance from actual pedagogical experimentation didn’t allow him to elaborate how this new notion of communication can be integrated in pedagogical practices. Although scholars such as Stitzlein (2020) have already indicated how we can integrate Dewey’s notion of communication in the teaching process, I argue that Dewey’s analysis can also help us to recognize the importance of communication beyond teaching as it concerns the whole arrangement of school’s everyday life. Moreover, I argue that following Dewey’s thought on the interrelation between children’s activities and democratic experience in school communities, we should be critical to his exclusive emphasis on constructive work and employ our pedagogical imagination in order to integrate care-work in the pedagogical procedures.