듀이의 교육적 경험 재검토: 교육적 경험 분석을 위한 예비적 고찰

Abstract

This paper aims to provide a theoretical framework to understand the educative experience which, I assume, leads to qualitative changes in one’s life. To this end, I critically examine John Dewey’s theory on educative experience in his texts as a stepping stone for my study. In Experience and Education, pointing out that educative experience contains the concept of growth, Dewey offers two criteria to grasp educative experience: a principle of continuity and of interaction. However, his definition of growth is too broad as well as the two principles play at best a negative role to discern normal experience and incomplete one, not normal one and educative one. In Art as Experience, Dewey mentions an experience in his terminology, which has completeness, concreteness, and continuity as its traits, is deeply related to emotion. Nevertheless, it is still unclear that an experience can be identified with educative experience because he does not explain how an experience is related to educational key concepts such as growth, teacher-student relationships, schools, so on. In this regard, I suggest four ways to develop a theoretical approach of educative experience by making up for weak points of Dewey’s theory. First, educative experience can be understood as twofold aspects, that is, forming experience that gives a basis of growth and leaping experience that causes growth immediately. Second, in order to capture specific features of educative experience, it needs to start from an educational state of affairs that already happened. Third, as the authentic growth of a student is likely to be different from what a teacher believes for the student, clues for the growth should be discovered from personal statements of the student who has been matured from the experience. Lastly, even though our ultimate purpose is to improve education in an institutional sense, our primary concern needs to be extended to a whole field of life in order to appreciate the overall qualities of educative experience.