Deweyan Education and Democratic Ecologies

Abstract

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.

Notes

¹ For his most explicit treatment of nonhuman semiosis, see Dewey (1929).

² For example, consider Bateson's suggestion that the “genetic contribution [of an organism] … might take the form, not of fixing the given behavior, but rather of making this behavior easier to learn” (1972, 426) given, of course, certain environmental stabilities. This approach has found experimental evidence in developmental systems theory's rejection of the genotype/phenotype dichotomy (see Oyama, Griffiths, and Gray 2001).

³ An objection to the notion that phenotypic (or developmental) plasticity and learning are synonymous might lie in the observation that many organismal adjustments occur without the organism itself being involved. I have nothing to do with the fact that my skin tans in the sun, and presumably a bird did not actively adjust its coloration in response to its perception of its context. A great deal of human readjustments to the environment are undertaken without passing through the interactive medium of a phenomenal world. It is assumed that in the case of other species, and certainly those without brains, learning cannot be said to meaningfully occur. A closer look, however, reveals that, although in these cases learning may not be going on in the larger organism-with-central-nervous-system/environment circuit, it may be occurring in smaller circuits (such as cell/extracellular environment circuits, etc.; for a discussion of this in relation in plant learning, see Affifi 2013).

⁴ Note that this argument for reciprocity is echoed in Noddings' notion of care 1984.

⁵ But not by flinging agency over everything that exists, flattening ontology so much that chairs and cars are given the same voice in democratic assemblies as life, ignoring the needs, growth, and interactive potential manifest in biological organization. This approach inadvertently reifies human supremacy (such as we find in Bennett 2010, though for a more subtle treatment, see Bryant 2011).

⁶ I suspect, however, that he articulated this position for pedagogical reasons, realizing that broadcasting pessimistic and fatalistic positions was self-defeating. Indeed, this would be in keeping with his insistence on the effectiveness of a “democratic faith.”