Dewey’s Ecological Psychology: Selectively Permeability, Multiculturalism and Affordances in Education

Selective permeability is inspired by pragmatists like Dewey (e.g.., 1896, 1920, 1934) and their intellectual progeny, especially Gibson (1966, 1979), who is famous for developing affordance theory, which holds that we see settings in terms of what we can do in them. Selective permeability picks up on this thread and attends to how agents are differentially invited into a space because their distinct capacities mean they face objectively varying obstacles. Though selective permeability has mainly been applied to urban geography (e.g. Crippen 2021, 2022, 2023), this paper proposes it as an approach for understanding diversity in education. This has multiple advantages. First, it avoids dismissing lower achievements as primarily coming from “within” students, instead locating challenges in the environment. Second, just as people with missing arms have learned to drive with their feet, the proposed approach rejects narrow norms about proper education since affordances can be negotiated in numerous ways. Third, it illuminates how cultural factors ranging from gait styles to language and hence group coordination modulate the affordances available. Fourth, an affordance-based framework explains how fit with environment allows for participation, but also how non-fit can constitute growth situations via adaptive learning—notions that Dewey (1925, 1926, 1934) advances in both his aesthetic and educational writings, and which align with his contemporary, Maria Montessori (e.g., 1912). This paper adopts an additional insight from Dewey. This is his dissolution of disputes between constructivists and realists. On Dewey's (1925) embodied view, it is not that agents bestow upon things traits that do not belong to them; it is instead that activity confers characteristics that did not belong to things, and when bestowed, these properties are really there in the world. Throughout, this paper argues social constructs are literally built or enacted barriers or openings that have reality in environments the way that affordances do. A Deweyan orientation accordingly departs from Gibson by focusing on social gestalts, scaffolding atmospheres, emotional situations and other things beyond energy and chemical arrays. Yet Dewey and Gibson share a non-subjective thrust, and this account retains it by insisting that experiential variation largely follows from how people’s bodies are environmentally enmeshed.