Our Wildwood, Volume 50

FEATURE A Reflection on Progressive Education

Having decided after graduating from college that I wanted to teach, I went back to school. Taking a series of undergraduate level courses, I patched together the coursework equivalent of a second undergraduate degree. Talking with one of my professors about the work I planned to do, he was dismissive of the idea of pursuing a master’s in education instead of a master’s in literature. He believed, as many have and some still do, that content was king. I will admit that I can still clearly remember the exhilarating feeling I had listening to him talk about Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head ; but I don’t remember him asking any of us what we thought. His classes were about him. As has so often been the case in formal education, the content of that professor’s courses was delivered through the lens of his understanding and experience as a straight, white male. It was interesting and I enjoyed him as a professor, but even then I realized that he was teaching me how and what he thought; he wasn’t interested in how or what my classmates or I had to contribute. By then I’d already decided on the master’s of education at the University of Pennsylvania, and my experience in those classes only affirmed my decision to focus on pedagogy. I wanted to understand how to teach kids to engage with material on their own terms, bringing their own set of experiences and perspectives to bear, and learning how to think about their own thinking. To be meta. During my time at Penn, I distinctly remember the feeling of being surrounded by ideas. We weren’t using the student-as-worker-teacher-as-coach language to which I’d be introduced at Wildwood 15 years later, but that orientation was clearly one of the tenets of my program. As an aspiring English teacher, we read of “whole language” learning, how—in classic Deweyan fashion—to guide children to learn by doing, integrating writing, speaking, reading, and listening. It was all so

“I wanted to understand how to teach kids to engage with material on their own terms, bringing their own set of experiences and perspectives to bear, and learning how to think about their own thinking. To be meta.”

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