Dewey shifts gears slightly, and begins talking about the larger issue of social control within a group of individuals both educating and being educated.
"When education is based upon experience and educative experience is seen to be a social process, the situation changes radically. The teacher loses the position of external boss or dictator but takes on that of leader of group activities" (59).
When speaking of educators creating experiences for their students, it is inevitable that one should have to deal with the idea of control. Who is in control of these interactions between teacher and student? Surely, the teacher guides the experience based off of their knowledge of the ones they are teaching, while the student molds this experience with previous ones to create within themselves a new way of looking at the world. Here, we have a balancing act of control.
Dewey states that "the primary source of social control resides in the very nature of the work done as a social enterprise in which all individuals have an opportunity to contribute and to which all feel a responsibility" (56). This act of balance occurs when teachers take responsibility for the knowledge of the subject matter being presented and the knowledge of their students, while the students take responsibility for contributing to these experiences being presented to them. In the words of Dewey, the teacher "must survey the capacities and needs of the particular set of individuals with whom he is dealing and must at the same time arrange the conditions which provide the subject-matter or content for experiences that satisfy these needs and develop these capacities. The planning must be flexible enough to permit free play for individuality of experience and yet firm enough to give direction towards continuous development of power" (58).
As museum educators, we know that this is a slippery slope: to be flexible in the presentation of the knowledge we possess and the experiences that we offer, but also to be grounded in a certain direction of learning. How can we achieve this within our walls? From the experience that I have working in various education departments of museums in the West and Midwest, I have found that setting a foundational layer of authority (be that through prompts, directional signage, or gallery facilitators) serves us well in articulating a flexible control over our visitors. More often than not, our visitors just need a nudge in the right direction, but it is up to us to make clear what that direction is. However, at the end of the day, the direction of learning as dictated by our visitors trumps our own level of influence. I personally consider it to be a success for our visitors to find and execute their own way of learning in our galleries.
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Intriguing application of this idea to wayfinding! So much of what Dewey is talking about here is the facilitation of learning/experiencing rather than a heavy-handed teacher-centered approach. So in a way, wayfinding can be both controlled and facilitated depending on what is needed? Perhaps it is a question of interpretation of the different ways in which visitors intersect (and transact) with the museum's non-personal communications.
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