Applications to Schools and Classrooms

instrumentally as a tool to accomplish a purpose. Agreeable to using technology in instruction, progressives want it to be an open means to accessing information in a larger community setting. For example, social media can be used to share ideas and information with individuals around the world. When students work together collaboratively, especially on projects, the results are open ended in that they lead to more experiences and are socially charged in that they bring individuals into social interaction.

For progressives, children’s readiness and interests, rather than predetermined subjects, should shape curriculum and instruction. They resist the imposition of standards from outside the school by government agencies and special interest groups as a new form of authoritarian control that can block open-ended, problem-based inquiry. Instructionally flexible, progressive teachers use a repertoire of learning activities such as problem solving, field trips, creative artistic expression, and projects. Constructivism, like progressivism, emphasizes socially interactive and processoriented hands-on learning in which students work collaboratively to expand and revise their knowledge base.56

In professional education, progressives warn against separating preservice from practice, which are phases in the same flow, or continuum, of a teacher’s experience. Preservice experiences, such as clinical observation, should be directly connected to classroom practice and not regarded as preparatory to it. In turn, practice should be considered as a continuing process of in-service professional development, in which teachers construct innovative and effective teaching strategies. The teacher should guide students to new activities, new projects, and new problems, thus enlarging and broadening their social and cultural relationships.

6-9c applications to schools and classrooms

The West Tennessee Holocaust Project, designed by teachers and students at the Whitwell Middle School in Whitwell, Tennessee, offers an excellent illustration of the project method.57 The project’s purpose was to teach respect for different cultures and to understand the consequences of intolerance.58 Linda Hooper, the school’s principal, saw the project as providing an opportunity “to give our children a broader view of the world...that would crack the shell of their white cocoon.”59

In preparing for the project, students read Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl and Elie Wiesel’s Night, studied aspects of Judaism, and viewed the motion picture Schindler’s List. Overwhelmed by the immensity of the Holocaust’s toll of six million Jews killed in Nazi extermination camps, the students experienced difficulty in understanding why and how this genocide had occurred.

The students learned that some courageous Norwegians, expressing solidarity with their Jewish fellow citizens, pinned ordinary paper clips to their lapels as a silent protest against the Nazi occupation. One student reacted, saying, “Let’s collect six million paper clips and turn them into a sculpture to remember the victims.” The students decided to do so as a memorial to the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

56For translating constructivist epistemology into classroom practice, see Peter W. Airasian and Mary E. Walsh, “Constructivist Cautions,” Phi Delta Kappan (February 1997), pp. 444–449. Also, see David J. Martin and Kimberly S. Loomis, Building Teachers: Constructivist Approach to Introducing Education (Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning, 2007). 57Dita Smith, Washington Post (April 7, 2002), p. C01, at www.truthorfiction.com/rumors

/s/studentmemorial.htm.

58www.whitwellmiddleschool.org/?PageName=bc&n=69256. 59Smith, Washington Post.