EditorialTeaching and Learning Through Lived ExperienceELIZABETH CAMPBELLOntario Institute for Studies in Education,University of TorontoToronto,Ontario,CanadaDewey regards education as the deepening and enriching of the quality of life,by which he means its felt meanings and significance.At the same time,education equips people to direct or guide that very process into ever-widening realms of meaning.(Hansen,2007,p.26)In the spirit of John Dewey’s scholarship on the continuity of experience and its implications for teaching and learning(Dewey,1938),the four papers in this issue of Curriculum Inquiry,in their own ways,provoke thought about the place of experience,more particularly lived experience, in the processes of education.Thefirst two articles,“Local Heroes,Narra-tive Worlds and the Imagination:The Making of a Moral Curriculum Through Experiential Narratives,”by Carola Conle and Michelle Boone, and“Moral Education Between Hope and Hopelessness:The Legacy of Janusz Korczak,”by Sara Efron,both speak directly to the work of Dewey. The third article,“Unreached and Unreasonable:Curriculum Standards and Children’s Understanding of Ethnic Diversity in Canada,”by Carla Lee Peck,Alan Sears,and Shanell Donaldson,as well as the review essay by Klaus-Henning Hansen,entitled,“Rewriting Bildung for Postmodernity: Books on Educational Philosophy,Classroom Practice,and Reflective Teaching,”are more inclined to imply than invoke Dewey’s philosophies. While the four articles are not unified by a common thematic focus,there exist crossovers among various and shifting combinations of the four that have implications for such areas as moral education and the moral pur-poses of education,role modeling,student knowledge,prior experience, and the potential for present or future growth through broadly defined curricular objectives and experiential knowledge.If this issue were comprised solely of thefirst two articles,the title of this editorial could be prefaced with the words,“Of Heroes and Role Models,”for both highlight the moral significance of teaching and learning through ©2008by The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto.Curriculum Inquiry38:1(2008)Published by Blackwell Publishing,350Main Street,Malden,MA02148,USA,and9600Garsington Road, Oxford OX42DQ,UKdoi:10.1111/j.1467-873X.2007.00395.x2ELIZABETH CAMPBELL the exploration of others’narrative experiences.These others are shown to be heroes,moral models who embody the“dispositions”(a term both articles use)of humanity that serve to inspire those around them and who, through their legacy of lived experience,also serve to educate them.Guided by an assumption that“experiential narratives have moral qualities and contain implicit and explicit moral lessons”(p.8),Conle and Boone’s article provides a fascinating empirical account of their nar-rative inquiry into middle school students’experiences with a Language Arts curriculum that was extended to include the described unit on heroes.In having the students identify,through the lens of their own localized scope of experience,heroes who embody the qualities of altru-ism and justice,and then have the students reconstruct the heroes’expe-riential stories through the perspectives of their own“narrative worlds,”the concept of lived experience functions at two levels—that of the four heroes and that of the students.Certainly,the students’knowledge is shown to be rooted in their own past experiences and values developed while growing up in a small and fairly homogeneousfishing village in a Canadian maritime province.However,their knowledge adopts,to echo Hansen’s opening quotation,“ever-widening realms of meaning”as they “imagine”other worlds expressed by the heroes.Yet these worlds exist in the midst of the students’own community,and gradually the unfamiliar becomes familiar as they come to recognize elements of their heroes’stories that seemed previously peripheral to their lives but now resonate with a kind of personal epiphany.The local heroes themselves are described as“speakers who would be able to tell positive stories about altruistic and courageous behavior that could bring about a modeling effect of some kind”(p.8).Indeed,the list of qualities or definitions of a hero,generated by Conle and Boone’s student participants include someone to look up to as a role model, someone who devotes his or her life to others or to a cause or one who helps those in trouble even while facing danger or risking his or her own life.Ultimately,according to the students,heroes are honoured for their goals,achievements,attitudes,and actions—they stand out from the rest of us for doing something special or extraordinary.These descriptors provide a most apt introduction to Sara Efron’s com-pelling review of an extraordinary life in her article about the lived expe-rience and lasting legacy of Janusz Korczak.Described as a“humanist, educator,gifted author,pediatrician”(p.40),and a“pioneer”of moral education,not through the creation of curricular theory,but through his devotion to realizing moral ideals in practice based on experience and inquiry,Korczak is not actually called a“hero.”Yet,for his achievements and his altruism,his dedication to the cause of the good and the wellbeing of children,his courage and his ultimate and tragic death,Korczak is shown to be a“hero.”He is,certainly,positioned in Efron’s article as a role model, a source of inspiration to all those who are presently engaged in educationand who view the process of teaching and learning as a moral and ethical pursuit.Korczak is exemplified as a moral model not solely for his fierce and selfless efforts to protect children,many of whom,along with him,endured the horrors of the Warsaw Ghetto and in the end perished in a Nazi concentration camp,but also for his creation of “an ethical world”within the institutional context of his orphanages,notwithstanding the surround-ing context of an inhumane and immoral society.Ever confident of the value of the educator’s experiential knowledge and the “school’s role in inspiring the young to imagine a better,more just world”(p.40),Korczak developed communities of justice and trust based on an alternative model of schooling that emphasized caring relationships,democratic structures,and individual autonomy.His conviction that learning occurs best when it is “based on real-life experience”(p.42)and practical knowledge under-lines his optimistic hope for the future that in enabling positive moral experiences,even in the face of utter hopelessness and despair,he and those working alongside him could evoke in the young a “longing for goodness,justice and truth that would vibrate throughout their lives”(p.43).If,as Efron’s article claims,the moral purpose of schooling is to make the world a better,more egalitarian place of justice,humanity,and mutual understanding,then efforts such as Korczak’s to create an expe-riential oasis in the midst of an intolerant society stand in stark contrast to the third article’s empirical account of students who are ill prepared to live in a culturally diverse nation.In this article on the intersection of diversity policy and curriculum standards,authors Peck,Sears,and Donaldson report their research results comparing grade seven students’comprehension of and attitudes towards issues of ethnic “difference based on religion,language and/or the identification with a particular cultural group”(p.69)with the formalized curricular expectations for the study of these issues.The students in this research come from roughly a similar geographic region as those in the heroes project described so vividly by Conle and Boone,in that both locations,despite some clear differences,are in Mari-time Canada,and the participants represent a mostly homogeneous group.As Peck et ment about the majority of the students they interviewed,“they had very little knowledge about or experience with ethnic diversity”(p.81).Also,like the Conle and Boone article,this article,powerfully entitled,“Unreached and Unreasonable,”is concerned with student knowl-edge.However,in this case,lack of knowledge may be a more fitting descriptor,as the students were overwhelmingly seen to “exhibit an astounding ignorance about diversity”(p.64),despite curriculum objec-tives presumably intended to enhance their knowledge.However,it is too simplistic to caricature or misrepresent students’inadequate knowledge or appreciation of the issue as a kind of offensive 3TEACHING AND LEARNING THROUGH LIVED EXPERIENCE4ELIZABETH CAMPBELL and personal moral failing on their part.So,the authors critically examine the curriculum standards themselves and conclude that they are inherently faulty and unreasonable for neglecting students’prior knowledge as a central determinant of their capacity to learn new knowledge.As they note, in order to expect students“to grapple with issues related to diversity ...standards must take into account the knowledge students bring with them to social studies in general,and the study of diversity in particular”(p.86).Clearly,if knowledge is enhanced by a continuity of positive and educative experiences,then the students in this study are thwarted by the limitations of their own lived experience.They are unlike their contempo-raries who participated in the heroes project or the children whose daily experience included not solely the misery of the times in which they lived but also the aspirations of hope and betterment inspired by Janusz Korczak. The children in the Peck et al.study have neither the prior knowledge based on formal curricular experiences nor the prior knowledge rooted in the kind of lived experience that would complement the curriculum objec-tives.They have no heroes or role models to enhance their understanding of diversity,only negative images based on stereotype,limited experience, and fragmented perception.Are we left then to conclude that students can only engage in learning that resonates with their own lived experience?Such a belief has the potential to lead us dangerously close to perspectives on curricular“rel-evance”and worth measured in terms of what is seen to be narrowly recognizable to students and,consequently,of immediate utility to them. Extreme interpretations of child-centeredness,often rooted in the corrup-tion of Dewey’s philosophy,could lead to curricular innovations that stop short at the level of subjective experience and abdicate responsibility for enabling new,hitherto not experienced experiences for learners that serve to expand their cognitive and affective horizons.Slattery and Rapp(2003)define the European concept of Bildung as “an educational experience that incorporates lived experiences...[and that]encourages interpretation within our subjective contexts”(p.85). However,Bildung,seen by Klaus-Henning Hansen in his essay review in this issue of Curriculum Inquiry as a“guiding principle for teaching and learn-ing”(p.96),goes beyond the limitations of the subjectivity of curricular experience implied above to involve,according to Hansen,concepts that connect to the Anglo-American tradition of“liberal education.”In this complex and sophisticated review of three books on educational philosophy,classroom practice,and reflective teaching,Hansen uses as his theoretical framework the concept of Bildung,in combination with the German Didaktik tradition,to present a transformed alternative for educa-tional practice imperiled by the trends of postmodern realities.Atfirst glance,this essay may seem remote from the other articles.However, Bildung,as both an Enlightenment idea and a neo-humanist perspective, shares with the articles a singular focus on the processes of education,andBildung -centered Didaktik is grounded in “engaged reflection”about learn-ing and lived experience.At a simpler level,Hansen’s essay reminded me of my own experiences as a student in an undergraduate English literature course in which I was introduced to the 18th -century Bildungsroman ,defined by The Oxford Com-panion to English Literature as “novels of ‘education’(in the widest sense)of which many of the best examples are German”(Drabble,1985,p.100).The genre is often seen to overlap with the “picaresque”novel,which,interest-ingly given the earlier part of this editorial commentary,has as its central character the picaresque “hero.”The always-male model in the Bildungsroman is described as “the innocent,inexperienced,well-meaning,but often foolish and erring,young man who sets out in life with either no aim in mind or the wrong one.By a series of false starts and mistakes and with help from well-disposed friends he makes in the course of his experiences,he finally reaches maturity and finds his proper profes-sion”(Drabble,1985,p.100).This definition conjures up notions of life narratives,lived experiences,and learners as both immature and yet autonomous and self-determining that are echoed one way or another in the following articles.Perhaps the heroes and role models we see in the first two articles could be interpreted as “well-disposed friends”;and,the experiences are not merely the same narrow ones but those that,while building on prior knowledge,extend well beyond the scope of prior knowledge to manifest themselves in actual learning,not like what Sears et al.’s curriculum stan-dards failed to do,but like what Conle and Boone’s heroes and Janusz Korczak’s “Children’s Republic”do.Ultimately,teaching and learning through lived experience may be viewed,in the spirit of Bildung as utopian or,as the articles suggest,as an example of worthwhile educational praxis.REFERENCESDewey,J.(1938).Experience and education .New York:Macmillan.Drabble,M.(1985).The Oxford companion to English literature (5th ed.).Oxford,UK:Oxford University Press.Hansen,D.T.(2007).Ethical visions of education:Philosophies in practice .New York:Teachers College Press.Slattery,P.,&D.Rapp.(2003).Ethics and the foundations of education:Teaching convictions in a postmodern world .Boston:Pearson Education.5TEACHING AND LEARNING THROUGH LIVED EXPERIENCE。
