I am sure teachers out there can relate:
You are sitting in a faculty meeting or at a professional development conference, learning about some new initiative, state mandate, or educational theory, and you think, “Isn't this what we used to do, or what we already do, but called by another name?” Your “jargon translator” kicks in, and you add to an ever-growing list of synonyms in your head. “Ah, where the slöjd movement spoke of the benefits of handwork, Dewey’s pragmatists championed “learning by doing”, Piaget promoted “constructivism,” today we are discussing the benefits of “Maker-Centered Learning.” This probably happens in other professions as well, but as a high school teacher I often felt that we had a sort of professional amnesia, doomed to revisit the same epiphanies over and over, like some real-life replaying of the movie Memento.
Over time, and with a little perspective, I got to a place where I was less frustrated and more intrigued during these moments of pedagogical deja vu. If smart folks across time say similar things, I should be paying close attention.
As I mentioned in earlier posts, this week I am kicking off an afterschool program for grade schoolers in wood carving and craft called “Carving Club”, and I have been using this as an opportunity to read up on the 19th century educational slöjd movement. For those unfamiliar with slöjd, it was founded in 1865 by Finnish educator Uno Cygnaeus. “Slöyd” or “slöjd,” derived from the Swedish word “slog” meaning “skillful,” is a system of handcraft education that is still practiced in Scandinavian schools to this day. In English we might translate slöjd as “crafty”, if we focus on denotations like “skillful, clever, and artful” and less on connotations like ”guileful, designing, and tricky.” The primary purpose of slöjd is not to make more woodworkers. Indeed, slöjd class often focuses on materials other than wood, including fiber and paper folding. The primary goal isn’t even to improve manual dexterity, though that is a secondary benefit. Instead, the main goal of educational slöjd is to develop thinking habits and mental dispositions that can only be learned through handwork and tinkering. In the mid-nineteenth century, Cygnaeus recognized that something significant was being lost in child development as the world rapidly industrialized. Kids were no longer making the things they needed and, as a result, they were not developing thinking dispositions that came with making. Self-reliance, persistence, resilience, love for work, and neatness were all taught through making, and Cygnaeus wanted to include these lessons in primary school.
Since then educational movements have regularly circled back on the same ground covered by slöjd 160 years ago, from student-centered learning to the maker movement, from “grit” to “growth mindset”. To help me get my head around the similarities and differences between slöjd and other educational movements, and in an attempt to identify best practices that seem to pop up repeatedly over time, I hope to write on some ways that slöjd fits within a larger educational context, including the work of John Dewey, Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, Howard Gardner, Ron Ritchhart, Dan Pink, Project-Based Learning, and the Maker Movement, name a few. I am sure that list will change as I dive in, but, for now, that is where I am headed.