John Dewey and Education as a “reconstruction of experience”: a possible dialogue with contemporary education

Abstract

This text is resulted from a research project whose main objective was to know the concept of experience in John Dewey’s work, in the expression “education as construction and reconstruction of the experience”. Considering bibliographical researches in some works about education by John Dewey, some elements concerned to experience were delineated. Also, the investigation was in charge of understanding and reflecting, in view of the current literature, what characterizes the school culture today and which are the conceptions that supply the valorization of the student’s experiential culture in the school environment. With the purpose of including the current education speeches of valorization of the experience uttered inside the school atmosphere itself, six teachers’ speeches who work with children in a public school were also brought for reflection, by semi-structured interviews. Such interviews, analyzed through the technique of content analysis and of textual analysis, received an appraisal devoted to the understanding of those issues that sustain the concept of experience. By comparing the Deweyian education conception and what today comes at the school as characterizing elements of the experience, our research concludes that we are still seated on an education basically traditional that, although it says it is promoting experiences in the school space, it reduces this understanding when “going there and doing something”. And, when it is affirmed as an expert of the student’s experiences, it is not conceived as a mean of new constructions, in the sense of the process of construction of the knowledge. This impossibility of putting together the Deweyian concept of experience with that one which is uttered in the current education discourses is due to the lack of basement of what is supported at this time, especially.