Technology and Learning Through Experience

I'm not going to lie. One month ago, if someone had mentioned John Dewey to me, I would probably have assumed that he was the creator of the Dewey Decimal System. From my cursory research, it would appear that the two aren't even related. John Dewey was, instead, a highly influential philosopher, who had a great deal of influence on the philosophy of education. One of his big ideas was that children should learn through experience, not simply by passively listening to lectures, reading texts, or watching demonstrations. We see some of that influence in today's classrooms: while most of us probably had chemistry lectures in high school, we also got to do our own labs. In their 2006 article “John Dewey: A Significant Contributor to the Field of Educational Technology,” Peter Rich and Thomas C. Reeves posit that schools should incorporate technology in the classroom in order to provide that experience to students. The assumption underlying this idea seems to be that, through simulations or other interactive activities, students get an optimally hands-on educational experience. I'm not so sure I agree.

A number of years ago, I worked at a science museum that stresses hands-on activities. While there are a great deal of high-tech machines at the museum itself, my job consisted of going to different schools and leading science fun nights or activity days, where children could visit different stations and experiment with various hands-on activities. While one of the best activities was very high tech (a super strong microscope hooked up to a laptop so kids could look at their t-shirts, skin, hair, under their nails, etc), few of these activities had anything more high-tech than empty film canisters and alka seltzer, or simple microscopes that used natural light. In fact, a perennial favorite was simply corn starch and water, which in the right proportions form a non-Newtonian fluid, amazing to play with and experiment with for all ages, and incredibly easy to clean up when it dries out. It's also one of my favorites, and if there's a way to fit it into a World Language or ESL curriculum, I will do my best to find it.

After a couple of years at the museum, I left the States to teach English in Turkey. My students ranged from six to thirteen years old, from completely bilingual to having absolutely no exposure to English. I spent nine hours a day with these kids, five days a week, for the whole summer, and I did the best I could to teach them all English with hands-on activities. This job exposed me to SmartBoards (see my first post), which were used decreasingly often as the summer progressed. As things gradually broke down in the school (I had no skills or training in fixing these things myself, and I didn't speak enough Turkish to effectively talk with a repair(wo)man), any lesson plan involving computers inevitably necessitated a change in classroom. After a couple of days of traipsing between the three rooms, searching in vain for a room with SmartBoard, internet, and windows that open, I gave up on anything “interactive” with computers. In fact the computers, when they worked, were largely for English-language background music during free-time or drawing-time. My all-time favorite lesson? Teaching the words/phrases “seed,” “how far?” “very far” and “spit” every time we got watermelon at lunch. Required technology? A mouth.

However, technology can certainly be used to enhance experience. Watching an English-language film, pausing every few minutes to name objects and characters with the lower-level English-speakers, and asking relevant questions to the middle- and upper-level ones, is one example. Another is using Skype so my mother could watch their weekly performance, and so the children could talk to her in English as though she were really there. This was obviously much more viable than flying another English-speaker in to the school. But it didn't hold up to having an actual teacher in the classroom.

So I guess I tentatively agree with Rich and Reeves's assumption that technology can provide more hands-on experience to students, but only if used well. Otherwise, it will just end up being what Dewey called “object lessons,” which is to say, regular passive lessons with props. In the end, I'm not reluctant to bring technology into the classroom, as long as it's actually providing something that allows my students to engage actively with what they're learning, and as long as it does so in a way that is either not possible or not practical in a cheaper, low-tech manner. Because in a world where, across the globe, teachers' workloads are being increased as their salaries decrease, class sizes explode while class periods get incrementally smaller, blowing thousands of dollars, euros or lira on SmartBoards while cutting art and music classes just brings education further out of the realm of hands-on experience.