Exploring the Ideal of Teaching as Consummatory Experience

In this article, it is argued that fulfilling teaching and educative experiences go hand in hand. Not only is it possible to be fully alive as a teacher, it is also essential for educative experience to unfold in students. To substantiate the claim made here, an analysis of what I would like to call the ideal of teaching as consummatory experience is engaged based on John Dewey’s concept of experience as this was elucidated in his later works, especially Art as Experience. Given an intimate understanding of Deweyan consummatory experience, its implications for teaching and teacher education programs are considered

Teaching as consummatory experience: the aesthetic dimension of experience in the later works of John Dewey and its relevance to teaching and teacher education

In this dissertation, what I would like to call the ideal of teaching as consummatory experience is discussed in relation to John Dewey\u27s concept of experience as the latter was elucidated in his later works, especially, Art as Experience and Experience and Nature. Dewey, particularly in Art as Experience , focuses on the aesthetic dimension of experience as its most fulfilling and complete mode. The articulation of the ideal of teaching as consummatory experience is grounded within the American Bildung tradition in which John Dewey was schooled and is necessitated as an attempt to reassert an alternative against the unabated dominance of the positivistic ethos that underlies much of the contemporary reform movements in teacher education. The implications and possibilities of a restoration of such an alternative for teacher education reform in the face of positivistic and late-modern skepticism are fleshed out