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emaining the same throughout. Students and teachers need to adopt flexible
approaches so that in the light of information gathered, knowledge being constructed,
and skills and processes being enhanced, additional or different questions and/or
hypotheses can be adopted. (Naylor, 2000, p. 8)
Commonly considered a proponent of progressive approaches to curriculum, Dewey focused
on developing teaching practices that prepare students for a future society, rather than one
that seeks to only recreate the past. Of this, which can be seen as a clear rejection of
traditional approaches, Dewey writes:
In static societies, societies which make the maintenance of established custom their
measure of value, this conception applies in the main. But not in progressive
communities. They endeavour to shape the experiences of the young so that instead
of reproducing current habits, better habits shall be formed, and this the future adult
society be an improvement on their own. (1916/2004, p. 79)
A criticism, however, of the progressive approach is that even though it reacts against rote
learning,
...this approach was not in itself able to determine which questions were worth
asking. When it did, the questions were often those derived from the disciplines’
intellectual or technical concerns, rather than from their value in everyday life or
from important social and environmental issues. (Gilbert, 2004, p. 11)
Making reference to the epistemological emphasis of progressivist curriculum, being an
inquiry process of learning and discuss it as New History, Hoepper and Quanchi write:
…these new approaches encourage young people to see that histories are
interpretations of the past, and that they are constructed using the available sources
of evidence. Thus, histories are partial in two senses – they are incomplete (because
no-one can have all the evidence, and tell the whole story) and they reflect the
backgrounds and beliefs of the people who produce them (because it’s impossible to
tell the objective story of the past). Students are therefore encouraged to read
histories more critically – to discern perspectives, standpoints and biases. (2000, p. 5)
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