Guiding Experiences (Pragmatism)

The importance of experience in pragmatism reminded me of the basic concept of Singaporean Math. I’m not an expert on it, because I only learned about it last June, but I have been teaching it to my students. Time and time again I would remind myself of the Concrete-Pictorial-Abstract style of Singaporean Math where the students have to first experience or manipulate something before dealing with numbers themselves. For the younger students, manipulatives like blocks, beads, chips or popsicle sticks may be needed for them to understand concepts like counting and grouping numbers in Math. This makes the concepts introduced and discussed to them less abstract. Pragmatism believes that the theory should be related to practice. This also reminds me of structured learning experiences where theories are explained through activities which were prepared for the students to experience what theories are all about. Through that style, the  concepts are then explained through the sharing of students about their experiences. Just like pragmatism, it allows students to answer their questions about their experiences and in turn come up with more questions which will allow them to look for definitions and gain new knowledge. These make me think that a pragmatic view on education may help students ask more, which in turn may lead them to learn more. This approach seems relevant to education today where we are slowly moving from the traditionalist to the more progressive approaches. However, the problem of pragmatism is that it can lead to many different truths and values. If people have different experiences, they they too will have different values. What will happen to our world if each person’s value system will depend solely on his experiences? Will students learn if they only believe what they experience?

The pragmatic approach to learning and teaching encourages educators to simply become facilitators and guides to the students’ true learning. Through this, maybe we should also think about our teaching styles. How much of our students’ experiences do we relate our lessons to? Maybe pragmatism is telling us that students are like seeds which need air, water and sunlight to experience their own kind of growth in their own time. As teachers, we may then be called to be like gardeners who simply try to maintain a good environment for our plants to grow, but at the same time let nature take its own course.