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Dewey’s Theory of Experience, Traumatic Memory, and Music Education

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Abstract

Trauma’s ubiquity in society leads to an acknowledgement that damaging experiences likely affect more students than they leave untouched. Dewey acknowledged the importance of the past throughout his theorizing of experience and simultaneously recognized that students need to draw upon past experiences in new learning encounters. In this paper, we argue that Dewey may have opened the door to account for the possibility of traumatic experience affecting learning. We acknowledge the potential of music to prompt a trauma response and seek to explore ways that music education may also provide a mechanism for working through difficult and traumatic pasts.

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Notes

  1. http://www.canadianwomen.org/facts-about-violence.

  2. https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/how-poverty-affects-the-brain-and-behavior.

  3. Cognitive psychology represents one of many “branches” of psychology, each of which serves a different purpose. These branches include: clinical, cognitive, developmental, evolutionary, forensic, health, neuropsychology, occupational, social, and other forms of psychology. (https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/154874.php).

  4. Civilization and Its Discontents.

  5. “The influence of [evolutionary] biological science in general upon psychology has been very great… To biology is due the conception of organism… In psychology this conception has led to the recognition of mental life as an organic unitary process developing according to the laws of all life…”(Dewey: The Early Works, 5 vols (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969–1972) cited in Hildebrand 2011, 12).

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Correspondence to Juliet Hess.

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Hess, J., Bradley, D. Dewey’s Theory of Experience, Traumatic Memory, and Music Education. Stud Philos Educ 39, 429–446 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-020-09706-z

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