Reuniting Parker, Dewey, Makiguchi and Ikeda

What: Reuniting Parker, Dewey, Makiguchi and Ikeda: Education for Community and Citizenship Across Language and Culture Symposium

When: March 26, 2011; 8:30am - 4:00pm

Where: Francis W. Parker School, 330 W. Webster Ave., Chicago, IL 60614 

 

About the Symposium

This symposium engages leading international scholars of Parker, Dewey, Makiguchi and Ikeda in discussions with academics, teachers, parents, students and community members about the contributions and the continuing relevance of these four important educators. In bringing them together, we seek to revitalize their shared perspectives and practices regarding epistemological concepts that have been pushed to the margins of educational theory, practice and research because of external and unwelcome pressures on education.

In a world of economic, cultural-linguistic, social, and environmental injustice, this conference will promote social self-actualization, moral development, joy of learning and human-nature interconnectedness. "Reuniting" Francis Parker, John Dewey, Tsunesaburo Makiguchi and Daisaku Ikeda in the context of globalization, acquisitiveness, dislocation, and standardized accountability, helps us explore an East-West ecology of education and create new directions for cooperation and growth. 

Invited Speakers

Registration

This event is open to the public and free to attend. A $5 box lunch is available upon request with pre-registration. Attendees who do not pre-order a boxed lunch will not be able to purchase one on site. CPDUs will also be offered.

Click here to register

 

Panel Discussions

Panel I: Convergences in Educational Ecology
Jim Garrison: The Parker, Makiguchi, Ikeda, and Dewey "Reunion" as a Response to Spiritual Nihilism
Abstract: How are we to respond to the spiritual crisis of late modernity brought on by Darwinism and the so-called death of God? While many know that Freidrich Nietzsche famously proclaimed the death of God, few ever recall exactly where and how we first pronounced the death sentence. All four of the educators we are lauding and reflecting upon address our spiritual crisis in ways that remain immensely meaningful as we struggle to overcome it. Two of them, Tsunesaburo Makiguchi and Daisaku Ikeda are Buddhist religious humanists who, presumably, are as affected by Nietzsche's assault as those in the West. A third, John Dewey, is also a religious humanist who neo-Darwinism explicitly rejects almost the entirety of western ontotheology. The fourth, Francis Parker, is a theist that puts his belief in God directly into his educational writings. Clearly, he experienced being an educator as a religious calling. I believe we may say the same for Makiguchi, Ikeda, and Dewey, although in different ways.

Larry Hickman: Context and Quantification in Education, East and West
Abstract: Two of the many themes common to the pedagogies of Dewey, Parker, Makiguchi, and Ikeda are a) emphasis on context and b) concern that quantification in and of education be restricted to its proper role. Emphasis on context provides platforms for empirically and experimentally rich educational experiences, enhanced understanding of the role of religious freedom and other democratic values, and the building of institutional support for educational infrastructure. In all this, quantification should play a supporting rather than a leading role.

Takao Ito: Geography for Global Citizens: Dewey, Makiguchi, Parker
Abstract: Just before the beginning of the 20th century, John Dewey and Tsunesaburo Makiguchi each delivered an epoch-making lecture that expressed their own educational philosophy.

Dewey gave a lecture to parents at the Chicago Elementary School attached to the university in April, 1899, and it is recorded in The School and Society (1900). On the other hand, Makiguchi spoke to primary school teachers at the Teachers College in Hokkaido, in May, 1899, and the record is included in A Geography of Human Life (1903).

Of course, Makiguchi did not know Dewey's educational practice at that time, and Dewey never knew of Makiguchi. However, when their two lectures are contrasted, it can be said that they had already acquired one common aspect in 1899. That is, that primary education should be organized based on children’s “Life,” and the subject of “Geography” must be especially valued. This synchronicity in these two educators’ philosophy did not occur by chance. There was one common educational philosopher who was behind them and influenced them. His name is Francis W. Parker. In this speech, I will reconstruct the connection of thoughts among these three influential educators.



Panel II: Urgencies of Citizenship for the 21st Century
William H. Schubert: Cultivating the Transcending Spirit of Education in Dewey, Parker, Makiguchi, Ikeda, and Others
Abstract: Pondering the work of Parker, Dewey, Makiguchi, and Ikeda has made me continuously reconstruct my own recent work on Love, Justice, and Education, on reverence vis-a-vis teaching, and on indigenous world-wide perspectives on curriculum studies. It leads me to augment my critique of education as a mere interest in national competitiveness. This requires an image of citizenship that is world-focused and oriented to the cultivation of humanity. It requires a reverence for an educational quiet that builds on the depths of human interests that are often found in indigenous concerns of individuals and groups. Thus, central themes in Parker, Dewey, Makiguchi, and Ikeda point to education that transcends many extant globalizing forces. A key issue is how to cultivate such transcendence.

Gonzalo Obelleiro: Wisdom, Courage, Compassion, and the Moral Ideal of Democracy
Abstract: Parker, Dewey, Makiguchi, and Ikeda see in democracy the moral ideal of dynamic, creative and harmonious political association rooted in the flourishing of humanity in each individual. The 21st Century puts this enduring ideal of democracy under conditions of great pressure. Ours is a world of increasing interconnectedness and ever faster change, or unprecedented wealth and unprecedented inequality. This is a world in which the end of poverty, universally guaranteed education and health services and materially realizable possibilities, just as much as the possibilities of the depletion of natural resources and the end of life itself. The vertiginous advance of communications technology and media culture into every aspect of daily life threatens to transform the human condition itself in ways that might disable many time-honored moral capacities. These conditions render the ideal of democracy fragile but urgent. Ikeda, our contemporary amongst the four figures, offers a response in the form of what I believe is a powerful and provocative vision of cosmopolitan education. For Ikeda, the moral ideal of democracy, in all its fragility and urgency, must be achieved by means of what he calls education for global citizenship, which he articulates in terms of the Buddhist principle of the three virtues of the bodhisattva: widsom, courage, and compassion.

Panel III: Dialogue as the Education of Humanism
Ming Fang He: East Meets West in Cultural Humanism in Confucius, Makiguichi, Ikeda and Dewey
Abstract: This article explore cultural humanism in education in the East, in the West, and in-between illuminated in the five main themes in the works of Confucius, Tsunesaburo Makiguchi, Daisaku Ikeda, and John Dewey: human-nature interconnections, humanism, embedded in languages, cultures, and identities, flourishes with the ideal of educating for creative, harmonious, associative, joyful, and worthwhile living. Such an ideal calls for cultivating an East-West ecology of education (Goulah, 2009;2010) of shared interests that commits to a high level of human potential and global awareness for creative, harmonious, associated, joyful, and worthwhile living (Schubert, 2009) for all in an increasingly diversified, complicated, and contested world.

Theresa Austin: Communities in Dialog: Teacher Education for Critically Understanding Radical/Alternatives in Education
Abstract: It is well recognized that educational systems reinforce dominant values that shift across time. Yet it is in the times of deeply-entrenched values that competing values are thus perceived as “radical” and “dangerous” because of their potential to redirect our attention to significant matters that have been dismissed, under-appreciated, or overlooked.

Parker’s progressive school movement stood in opposition to a classical education reserved for elites. His stance that learners should not be marginalized from their education resisted the natural assumption that non-elites were unworthy of such education because it was considered a privilege.  Dewey’s vision of learning dared to begin where the students life conditions were and to then inspire them to go beyond those conditions to understand their community’s development. Both required educators to prepare learners for democratic participation in a way not seen before. They both called for teacher education that could ignite learners to struggle for democratic collective when the ideal American character in the modern age touted the discourse of rugged individualism and captains of industry. Dewey’s ideas set up a course of action for teachers that demanded strong skills in language and literacy in order to interpret their students’ background and context of learning to work toward instilling a bond to a collective good.  Almost in sync, yet in contexts that are seemingly opposite, Makiguchi and Ikeda both envisioned education that could build learner’s abilities to approach problems individually in a collective society that demanded monologic obedience. Both duos held that humans were the products of their socialization and held teachers to be central to the socialization process.

This paper addresses the importance of attention to the dialogs of these moments where leaders and their faithful followers transform their stances about the individual’s relationship to society. The cycle of building dialog to destabilize what has been seen as natural is subject to be regarded as moments of “radicalism” and “danger” both in the name of the collective and in the name of developing the individual. What makes Dewey and Parker’s ideas of holistic development of educating future citizens “dangerous” in schools in today’s times of globally emerging democracies? What makes Makiguchi and Ikeda’s ideas of valuation in education “radical” and “dangerous “for teachers working in schools in times of globalizing educational pressures for conformity and uniformity? I will examine these questions and the challenge of learning through dialog for teacher education when envisioning possibilities of creatively facing an unpredictable future.


Speaker Bios

Larry Hickman is director of the Center for Dewey Studies and professor of philosophy at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He is the author of Modern Theories of Higher Level Predicates (1980), John Dewey's Pragmatic Technology (1990), Philosophical Tools for Technological Culture (2001), and Pragmatism as Post-Postmodernism (2007). He is the editor of more than a dozen volumes, including Technology as a Human Affair (1990), Reading Dewey (1998), The Essential Dewey (with Thomas Alexander, 1998), The Correspondence of John Dewey (1999, 2001, 2005, and 2008), and John Dewey: Between Pragmatism and Constructivism (with Stefan Neubert and Kersten Reich, 2008). In addition to his current position, he has held faculty positions at the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University. He has lectured in more than 20 countries and his publications have been translated into ten languages. In 2007 he received the Phi Kappa Phi National Scholar Award, and he holds honorary doctorates from Soka University (Japan) and the University of Cologne (Germany).

Jim Garrison is a professor of Philosophy of Education at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, where he holds an appointment in the Department of Philosophy and the Science, Technology, and Society Program, and the Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought. His work concentrates on philosophical pragmatism and especially on the philosophy of John Dewey. He is a past winner of the Jim Merritt award for his scholarship in the philosophy of education, the John Dewey Society lifetime achievement award, the Scholarly Achievement Award from the Institute of Oriental Philosophy, and the John Dewey Society Outstanding Achievement Award. He is past president of the Philosophy of Education Society and of the John Dewey Society. He is currently serving on the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy executive committee (and is co-chair of the Society's upcoming conference). He is currently engaged in a series of dialogues with Daisaku Ikeda, president of Soka Gakkai International, and Larry Hickman, head of the Center for Dewey Studies, which are currently appearing monthly in Todai magazine. He is the author or editor of nine books, including most recently Reconstructing Democracy, Recontextualizing Dewey (SUNY Press, 2008), and John Dewey at One Hundred-Fifty: Reflections for a New Century (Purdue University Press, 2009). Currently, A.G. Rud and he are under contract with Palgrave for an edited work titled: Reverence in Teaching.

William H. Schubert is Professor of Education, University Scholar, and coordinator of the PhD program in Curriculum at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), where his teaching has been awarded several times. He has published 10 books and 150 articles or chapters on curriculum theory and history in and out of school. Former president of the John Dewey Society, The Society of the Study of Curriculum History, Society of Professors of Education and vice president of American Educational Research Association (AERA), he received the Lifetime Achievement Award in Curriculum Studies from AERA in 2004 and the Raywid Award from SPE in 2007. His most recent book is Love, Justice, and Education: John Dewey and the Utopians (IAP Press, 2009).

Ming Fang He is Professor of Curriculum Studies at Georgia Southern University. She has written about cross-cultural narrative inquiry of language, culture, and identity in multicultural contexts, cross-cultural teacher education, curriculum studies, activist practitioner inquiry, research for social justice, exile curriculum, and narrative of curriculum in the U.S. South. She is an associate editor of the Handbook of Curriculum and Instruction (2008). She was an editor of Curriculum Inquiry, is an associate editor of Multicultural Perspectives and co-editor of Handbook of Asian Education. Currently she is engaged in research on the education of Asian American immigrant students in the context of school, family, and community; life in Southern U.S. schools, families and communities; and the education of minority and disenfranchised groups in international contexts. Her most recent books include A River Forever Flowing: Cross-Cultural Lives and Identities in the Multicultural Landscape (IAP Press, 2003) and Personal~Passionate~Participatory Inquiry into Social Justice in Education (with JoAnn Phillion, IAP Press, 2008).

Theresa Austin is Professor of Language, Literacy & Culture at University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research draws on critical race and sociocultural theories to examine language and literacy policies and planning for multilingual learners from a broader social perspective and discursive microanalytic level. Her transnational scholarship addresses ethnolinguistic and cross-cultural issues in planning language and literacy curriculum, teacher inquiry, technology-assisted learning, assessment and evaluation for learning second and world languages (African American English, ESL/EFL, Spanish, Japanese, etc.). She conducts sociohistorical research, ethnographies of communication, and critical discourse analysis for inquiry to responsibly address the instructional needs of diverse historically underserved communities. Her scholarship appears in Multicultural Education & Technology Journal, Modern Language Journal, Colombian Applied Linguistics Journal, Critical Inquiry in Language Studies Journal, Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Language Report, Journal of Educational Foundations, Foreign Language Annals, Teachers College Record, and others. She is on the editorial advisory boards of several journals: Modern Language Journal, Multicultural Education & Technology Journal, Journal of Language, Identity and Education, and others.

Takao Ito is an associate professor in the Department of Literature and an associate research fellow in the Soka Education Research Institute as Soka University, Tokyo. He is also director of the Japanese Center for Dewey Studies/Soka Education Research Institute at Soka University, Tokyo, and is director of the Japanese Society for Studies on Schopenhauer. Dr. Ito is editor of the journal Soka Education and serves on the editorial board of Schopenhauer Research. He has written widely on Makiguchi and Ikeda studies in education and was recipient of the 2008 Japan Translation Cultural Prize for his translation work in the Japanese edition of the Collected Works Herman Hesse (16 volumes). 

Gonzalo Obelleiro is a graphic artist and a doctoral student of philosophy and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. In his native city of Buenos Aires, Argentina, Obelleiro pursued studies in art, architecture, and design. His discontent with a professional life in the fields of graphic design and advertising led him to an interest in the social, political, and philosophical foundations of media, art, and culture. In pursuit of these intellectual interests, he joined the first graduating class of Soka University of America, where he discovered his passion for philosophy and developed a commitment to education as a means for personal enlightenment and social transformation. He is recipient of the Founders Prize, Soka University of America's highest honor for graduating students. His current work focuses on the educational philosophies of Daisaku Ikeda and John Dewey in relation to the ideas of value creation and cosmopolitan education.

Related Links

East Meets West in Pedagogy: The Colonel Parker/Dr. Ikeda Connection (http://www.fwparker.org/page.aspx?pid=3340)

John Dewey Society Confers Honorary Life Membership to Daisaku Ikeda (http://www.daisakuikeda.org/sub/news/2008/aug/DI_080812john-dewey.html)

John Dewey and Tsunesaburo Makiguchi: Confluences of Thought and Action, Occasional Papers, The Center for Dewey Studies at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale (http://www.siuc.edu/~deweyctr/scholarship_papers.html)

Daisaku Ikeda and John Dewey: A Religious Dialogue (http://www.iop.or.jp/0919/garrison.pdf)