The Dewey Experience
John Dewey’s ideas of experience as foundational to education. Throughout his
career John Dewey strived to develop a philosophy of experience that would inform
education and provide a way to avoid the divisive dualisms that can be so pervasive
in curriculum and education theories. For Dewey a purely epistemological notion of
experience was inadequate to explain the interconnections between a knowing
subject and the objects they encountered in the world (Jay, 2005, p. 288). Further to
this Dewey insisted that experience “recognizes in its primary integrity no division
between act and material, subject and object, but contains them both in an
unanalyzed totality” (1958 [1925], p.18). This position makes interpreting
experience from the measurement of sense data insufficient and in fact renders the
accepted empirical philosophy of the time inadequate to explain human experience
and its importance to education (Jay, 2005, p. 287). It also presents a challenge to
analyze the totality of experience, the actions of real people in real situations, and to
create a framework from which actions (and interactions) are the source of meaning
and knowledge.
The basis of Dewey’s philosophy of experience is a framework that positions activity
and production (as he termed it, ‘learning by doing’) as primary in the imaginative
act of creating meaning. Experience provides an immediate or primary quality that
is felt or had, and its relationship to developing thought or knowledge is part of a
broader philosophy of experience that requires reflection and the development of
future experience possibilities. The analysis and reflection of creative experience is
in this sense a natural and important by-product of human activity (Doll, 2012, p.
61). This position, that our natural tendency for reflection, inquiry, and organization
evolves out of our primary experiences has profound implications to the
contemplation of educational experiences. The emphasis is more on the
development of patterns of inquiry, reflection, and organization that can be applied
to any activity, rather than on teaching specific content or even creating specific
prescribed experiences. The experiences themselves are unique and unrepeatable,
therefore as Doll (2012, p. 98) points out we cannot “give an experience” to our
students. Instead, what we do as teachers is promote activities and foster
environments that cultivate the possibilities for productive or transformative
experience (Transformative learning emphasizes the transformation of a learner’s
frame of reference [thoughts, feelings, and actions] based on critical reflections of
experiences [O’Sullivan, 1999]. See also The Transformative Learning Centre at:
http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/tlc/ ).
We can also develop and organize ways of reviewing, interpreting, and reflecting on
active experience. Dewey considers the contrast between the primary active
experience and the secondary reflective experience as providing a way to
understand the relationship between an experience and the construction of
understanding (1958 [1929], pp. 15-16). Active experience comes with minimal
reflection on the process; in fact many experiences are diminished by reflective
thought (i.e. consider the cinematic experience when you are brought out of your
suspension of disbelief to reflect on your spilt popcorn). The secondary reflective
experience requires continued and regulated inquiry to explain and understand the
primary experience. This consideration situates the primary experience as
providing data for the systematic analytic thinking that develops both knowledge
and encourages progressive experiences.
Dewey associates this view of experience with the empirical method of
experimenting followed by systematic analysis of the experience. This association
with empirical method has resulted in a disinclination of Dewey’s philosophy from
many of our colleagues whose critical theories have instilled a deep mistrust in the
scientific method. However misguided this rejection of Dewey is, it warrants
mention because it points out a distinction that should be understood. Dewey is
offering empirical method as a system that uses experience (experiments,
observations, sense-data, immediate contact with the world) to develop
understanding and promote further experience. This is a way of understanding
action and thought - not a suggestion that we apply a scientific method to the
acquisition of knowledge.