Deweyan Education and Democratic Ecologies

Dados Bibliográficos

ID8923901
AutoresRamsey Affifi (0000-0002-3333-9807, University of Toronto, autor correspondente), Ramsey R Affifi
Ano2014
Volume50
Fascículo6
Páginas573-597
Data de publicação2014-11-02
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoEducational Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0013-1946 • E-ISSN: 1532-6993
EditoraTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/00131946.2014.965939
OpenAlexW1965879468
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas3
Referências citadas35

From a Deweyan perspective, the capacity to learn is enabled or restricted by the clutch of one's habits, which are established and maintained by the mutual eliciting of action and reaction between an organism and its environment. Relationships that constrict the capacity for organisms to interact and learn from each other are undemocratic so far as they curb the direction and suppleness by which mutual growth can occur. Dewey saw that education and democracy were therefore inseparable pursuits. However, he developed a conceptual orientation that prevented entry for other species. This article seeks to open a Deweyan approach to considering ecological communities politically and pedagogically. Ecosystems, like human societies, form and develop through complex learning interactions. This has been recognized for centuries by local and indigenous groups, and more recently by modern science in differently operating biological processes, from the Baldwin effect, to niche constructionism, and epigenetic inheritance. As Dewey continuously noted, the immediate encounter is a necessary but not a sufficient condition to ensure growthful, democratic environments, because patterns of behavior, thinking, and affect are channeled by the structural contexts within which encounters occur. It is therefore necessary that educators focus on the experimental reconstruction of infrastructure, buildings, institutions, technologies, and other material structures that habituate us to normalize miseducative and undemocratic relationships with our own and with other species

Biology · Democracy · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Indigenous · Niche construction · Perspective (graphical · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Computer Science · Ecology · Embodied and Extended Cognition · Environmental Philosophy and Ethics · Law · Pragmatism in Philosophy and Education