The Flipped Curriculum: Dewey’s Pragmatic University

Abstract

Recently Graham Badley (Stud High Educ 41(4):631–641, 2016) made the case that the "pragmatic university" represents a viable future for the post-modern institution. In his construction of the pragmatic university, Badley largely draws upon the vision laid out by Richard Rorty (Philosophy and social hope. Penguin Books, London, 1999). While Rorty's neopragmatism offers an important perspective on the pragmatic institution, I believe that John Dewey's classical pragmatism offers a richer and more capable vision of the university. The aim of this paper is to develop a view of the pragmatic university drawn from Dewey's philosophy. His writings on the university offer a unique and viable path forward because he directly engages a reconstruction of the relationship between knowledge and experience in the context of post-secondary education.