Women Educators in the Progressive Era: The Women behind Dewey's Laboratory School

by A. Durst

Overview

This book explores the experiences and writings of four teachers at the University of Chicago Laboratory School, both to investigate their lives as female professionals during the Progressive era, and to add to our understanding of this innovative institution and how these philosophies and innovations have carried out to this day.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781137575944
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan US
Publication date:	08/18/2010
Edition description:	1st ed. 2010
Pages:	241
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.02(d)

About the Author

Anne Durst is Assistant Professor of Education at the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater, USA.

Table of Contents

Introduction:The Laboratory School and Pragmatism Female Professionalism and the Laboratory School Teachers Decision-making at the Laboratory School Teachers as Content Area Experts Laboratory School Teachers and Social Change Democratic Community Implications for Today's Teachers and Schools

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Durst has captured, in all its glory and messiness, the truly communal spirit of John Dewey's Lab School. Scouring the nation's archives for personal papers of four teachers, she has reconstructed the 'organic circuit' of learning and teaching at the Lab School, in which these teachers strove to achieve creativity and balance on issues of students' freedom, interests, and communal responsibilities. This beautifully written study reminds us that the Lab School and its teachers are still capable of inspiring us, 110 years after its meteor crossed our skies." - Carl F. Kaestle, University Professor and Professor of Education, History, and Public Policy, Emeritus, Brown University, USA

"Durst takes us inside the Dewey School classrooms and the teachers' meetings and explores the challenges, rewards, and occasional frustrations of putting Dewey's pedagogical theories into practice. This book is particularly impressive in bringing to light some of the implications of Laboratory School teaching for contemporary educators. I have met many teachers who have read Dewey and believe he has something important to offer them, but wish they had some more concrete idea of what 'Deweyan teaching' and a 'Dewey school' would look like. Durst provides just this sort of thing. The interest in this project lies then as much in the lessons it will afford today's teachers as in the rewards it will offer to students of a crucial episode in our educational past. Durst's bookseems to me to belong on a short list of texts one would want to hand someone who asks why John Dewey still matters." - Robert Westbrook, Professor of Education History, University of Rochester and author of John Dewey and American Democracy

"Through the correspondence of four Dewey School teachers - Anna Camp, Katherine Camp, Althea Harmer, and Mary Hill - Durst offers readers a close look at how the curriculum, pedagogy, administration, and intellectual community of the experimental school was constructed collectively through a reflective approach of trial and error. . . This is a beautifully crafted study." - History of Education Quarterly

Editorial Reviews

"Durst has captured, in all its glory and messiness, the truly communal spirit of John Dewey's Lab School. Scouring the nation's archives for personal papers of four teachers, she has reconstructed the 'organic circuit' of learning and teaching at the Lab School, in which these teachers strove to achieve creativity and balance on issues of students' freedom, interests, and communal responsibilities. This beautifully written study reminds us that the Lab School and its teachers are still capable of inspiring us, 110 years after its meteor crossed our skies." - Carl F. Kaestle, University Professor and Professor of Education, History, and Public Policy, Emeritus, Brown University, USA

"Durst takes us inside the Dewey School classrooms and the teachers' meetings and explores the challenges, rewards, and occasional frustrations of putting Dewey's pedagogical theories into practice. This book is particularly impressive in bringing to light some of the implications of Laboratory School teaching for contemporary educators. I have met many teachers who have read Dewey and believe he has something important to offer them, but wish they had some more concrete idea of what 'Deweyan teaching' and a 'Dewey school' would look like. Durst provides just this sort of thing. The interest in this project lies then as much in the lessons it will afford today's teachers as in the rewards it will offer to students of a crucial episode in our educational past. Durst's book seems to me to belong on a short list of texts one would want to hand someone who asks why John Dewey still matters." - Robert Westbrook, Professor of Education History, University of Rochester and author of John Dewey and American Democracy

"Through the correspondence of four Dewey School teachers - Anna Camp, Katherine Camp, Althea Harmer, and Mary Hill - Durst offers readers a close look at how the curriculum, pedagogy, administration, and intellectual community of the experimental school was constructed collectively through a reflective approach of trial and error. . . This is a beautifully crafted study." - History of Education Quarterly

From the Publisher