Dewey and Vygotsky

I have advocated a type of education that can provide the students with hands-on experience when they are learning about something. That is because I thought, through having experience regarding what students learn about, they will know how to apply their knowledge to their lives, the reality. However, I haven’t really thought about what kind of experience I need to pursue in learning. Dewey says “an experience maybe immediately enjoyable and yet promote the formation of a slack and careless attitude.” I think this type of experience which Dewey just mentioned was the experience I wanted to provide to the kids if I were a teacher; the experiences do not necessarily reflect the previous or future experience. But Dewey emphasizes that the experiences are linked cumulatively to one another. Students need to develop the ability to find the connection between the experiences, and the teacher’s job is to construct the experiences in a way that students can find the connections. And that is what the current school system lacks.
Also, Dewey suggests what kind of growth we should pursue by bringing the idea of discrimination. We easily say the word “growth,” but how? In what way? are the student going to grow up? Here, he emphasizes to “discriminate between experiences which are educative and those which are mis-educative. The connection between Vygotsky and Dewey is that both of them underline the methods, the way we interact with objects, and the methods are as important as the results of the methods. That is because each different method has the students create different experiences and results.
What I was stroked by from the Vygotsky and Dewey was that they believed “revisioning of individuality. Their ideas embodied a “commitment to reconstruct society by reconstructing the individual. Psychology would transform enlightenment beliefs into practical technologies that would construct people’s understanding of experience, and form the norms of conduct.” The constructive experiences can empower the students to construct “self” again, the self who is capable to govern themselves even in the power structure, and influence the structure.