In the 1970s and into the early 1980s, the major textbook that I used in graduate science education courses for teachers was Carl Rogers’ book, Freedom to Learn.  Rogers’ book provided the experiential and the theoretical background needed to help teachers transform their practice to incorporate humanistic principles.  The focus of these courses was to work with practicing teachers to help them reflect on, experiment and transform their practice.  Transforming science teaching practice was based on humanistic principles, which I’ll explore in more detail below.

1975 I had completed work on my first book which I co-authored entitled Loving and Beyond: Science Teaching for the Humanistic Classroom (L&B).  In the summer of 1975 I attended my first Association for Humanistic Psychology (AHP) conference, which was held in the Rocky Mountains at the YMCA of The Rockies.  I had just completed L & B, and this conference was a major experience in impacting my view of teaching and influenced me for the remainder of my career.  I joined the AHP, and one year later, in the fall of 1976, a group of us sponsored a conference on humanistic education at Georgia State University, entitled Celebration of the Teacher.  We invited George Leonard, Bob Samples and Jack Canfield is our keynote “speakers” and they also participated in person-centered discussion that met for an hour or so each day of the three day conference.  George Leonard had published his book, The Ultimate Athlete, and we asked him to give a keynote speech/workshop entitled The Ultimate Teacher, which he did more more than a thousand teachers. Bob Samples, who I knew from the ESTTP project, and the ESCP, had just published his amazing book, The Metaphoric Mind.  I met Jack Canfield at the AHP conference, and we later worked together for several years as active participants in the Association for Humanistic Education, which originated in the Department of Psychology at West Georgia College.  Canfield had just published his book 100 Ways to Enhance Self-Esteem, and of course he later went on to write and publish the Chicken Soup for Soul series.

The underlying principles that drove my own work in transforming my own instruction were Rogers’ ideas that a teacher needs to open up and theorize from experience, and the notion that humans need to viewed wholistically and that the teacher can not teach (concepts, facts, ideas) directly, but can only facilitate learning.  Rogers even went to lament that he really wasn’t interested in teaching, but that ones focus should be on learning.  

This essentially is a paradigm shift.  The humanistic paradigm represents a shift from a traditional, mechanized, individualistic, dependent, heirarchical, content-driven model to an innovative, flexible, cooperative, interdependent, student-centered driven model. (See Hassard, Figure 4 for details). The humanistic paradigm, as I see it, calls for a new literacy insofar as “knowledge” relates to human needs, the needs of the environment, and the social needs of the earth’s population and other living species.  Curriculum becomes Deweyian and Rogerian in the sense that emphasis is on anticipation and participation, on inquiry, learning how to learn, and to how ask questions.  Anyone of these aspects would be very good starting points for a teacher desiring to transform his or her teaching/learning practice.  

As such, from the 1970s on, my interest in teaching was from the point of view of how to help students learn.  And since nearly half of the students I “taught” at Georgia State University over the years were practicing teachers, my goal always was for the teachers in my courses to reflect on their own practice, and to use my courses as an environment of trust, in which they could explore new ideas with colleagues, try out these ideas in their classes, and use the course as a tool to discuss their ideas.  I asked students to keep a journal of their work, and it was in this early period that I started using the concept of a “portfolio” to help students guide their progress and work in my courses.

Transforming one’s practice is not a new idea.  In 1896, John Dewey founded the University of Chicago Laboratory School, and one of the basic thrusts of the school was for teachers to experiment with pedagogy and curriculum.  The lab school became a model for a “child-centered” approach to learning, and many of the seeds for social constructivism grew from this mid-western center.  Learning was seen as a social process most effectively achieved in small groups, rather than by isolating students.  Hands-on projects, creative problem solving, community-based learning experiences were fundamental pedagogies of Dewey’s approach.  But underlying this was the sense that teachers were continuously experimenting with pedagogy and curriculum, and working with each other to transform their practice.

If you are interested in transforming some aspect of your teaching, whether at the K-12 or college level, here are some helpful resources.

Freedom to Learn by Carl Rogers

The Carl Rogers Reader by Howard Kirschembaum and Valerie Land Henderson

Emerging Perspectives on Learning, Teaching and Technology, Edited by Michael Orey

Teaching Students to Think Globally by Jack Hassard

The Art of Teaching Science by Jack Hassard and Michael Dias

Models of Teaching by Bruce Joyce, Marsha Weil, & Emily Calhoun