Studenting: An Historical and Sociological Study.

[摘要] I seek to comprehend how thinkers have understood studentsʼ work and the practices they thought were associated with different versions of studenting. In my work, studenting is comprised of the activities and tasks that students must engage in to learn; studenting is understood to be the means to learning outcomes. A central question runs through this analysis: how have educators, theorists, researchers and sociologists understood studenting?I analyze three important and historically rooted arguments about the nature of studenting, all of which continue today. The first occurred at the inception of public education in the U.S. during the Common School era, the second at the turn of the 20th century when school enrollment continued to swell and urbanization and industrialization increased, and a third in the mid-1900s when the school system was maturing. This is a study of those ideas and arguments, with attention to the historical context of those ideas. This analysis is framed by the following elements: what students bring to their work; the politics of studenting, which here means how students respond to learning under conditions of compulsion; and, the nature of the work that students were to do.While the three sets of thinkers that I consider wrote at different times and with different theoretical frames, I find a continuing refrain: enabling effective studenting came down to managing a key problem: securing student engagement – which was conceived by all of the thinkers as necessary for learning – when students might not be interested in what teachers believe they should be learning.

[发布机构] University of Michigan

[效力级别] Education History

[关键词] Education;Education History;Educational Sociology;Studenting;Common Schools;John Dewey and William T. Harris;Education;Humanities;Social Sciences;Education Studies