John Dewey
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[00:00:00]
Welcome to Kathy on the couch, your podcast for everyday clinicians who sit with grief, trauma, and the hardest human experiences every day. You weren't meant to carry this alone, and this is a space for therapists who hold space for others and sometimes need a place to be held to. I am Kathy and I am your EMDR consultant, trainer, and theologist specializing in.
Methods of death, dying, and bereavement. I created this [00:01:00] podcast to support those who do the deep work, especially trauma and grief therapists and EMDR clinicians needing a soft place to land who want real conversations, meaningful support in a community where the hard questions are finally welcome. We also are thrilled to share and announce are Kathy on the Couch Membership Community, which is your home for grief and trauma consultation professional growth.
It's by therapist, four therapists. Where you find a monthly consultation group, you'll find a monthly N-B-C-C-C-E training. You'll get access to a course module and resource kits. We're so happy to have you in one place and you don't have to go looking for all those items in all the places. You can just come here so we hold space for those who hold it all.
That's our mission where we talk honestly about all clinical challenges in the business of being a healer through curriculum development. And training and breaking the silence to lead and thrive in the field without losing ourselves in the process. [00:02:00] So if you're looking to join for deeper connection, I invite you to join our membership community to help you learn and grow.
Or if you're an EMDR therapist looking to be certified or a consultant, we have our program EMDR University. Remember to give us a five star reading wherever you get your podcast. Now let's get comfortable and let's head on over to the couch.
Thank you so much for joining us on another episode of Kathy on the Couch, the podcast for Everyday clinicians. We hope today's conversation has inspired you, sparked new ideas, and offered you practical tools you can bring into your own practice. Whether you're just starting out in the mental health field or you are a seasoned clinician.
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Is not intended to substitute for professional consultation, supervision, or individual guidance. If you have questions about how to apply any of the concepts, we encourage you to consult with your clinical supervisor, consultant, or licensing board. As always, follow those research based protocols and best practices in your work.
Welcome to the podcast series. We're so excited to have you on the roots of the Revolution Series, and today we wanna talk about a particular kind of dissonance that a lot of us in clinical work know well, [00:04:00] and you spent years learning how to be genuinely present with another person, attuned, regulated, responsive, and then you walk into a continuing education training.
And within our 20 minutes, our nervous system is doing something completely different. We're sitting in our chair, but we're not really there. And we're wondering if the content is ever gonna connect to something we'll actually do on a Tuesday afternoon with a client in a crisis. And somewhere in the back of your mind, you're asking the question, what, what you might not have language for yet.
Why does this learning feel like this? Why does professional development often feel like something that happens to you rather than something you're actually a part of? So today's episode is about a thinker who spent his entire career trying to answer that question, and his name was John Dewey. He was a philosopher and educator writing in the late 19th and earliest 20th century.
And his central insight that learning is not the passive reception of content, but the active [00:05:00] engagement. Of a living, being with their environment. And this has been confirmed over and over again and by the neuroscience and trauma research that came a century after him.
And this episode is episode two. Of our six part series, the Roots of the Evolution and Why Pedagogical Theory belongs in Clinical Training Spaces. The last episode we looked at Paolo Fre and the banking Model, the idea that dominant education deposits information into passive learners and calls it learning.
Today we go deeper into the neuroscience of why that model fail. And through the lens of John Dewey's theory of experiential education, what he got, right, why it matters for trauma-informed clinical training, and what it looks like when we actually design for it. So John Dewey was born in 1859 in Vermont, and he taught at my alum, university of Michigan and the University of Chicago and Columbia.
And [00:06:00] he wrote prolifically across philosophy, psychology, education, and political theory for more than six decades. And he died in 1952. Pretty young. Oh, and actually he was 92 years old, still writing. Can you believe that he's often associated with progressive education and that association has caused him to no end of trouble?
Because progressive education has meant a lot of different things to a lot of different people over the last a hundred years. Most of them imprecise, Dewey himself, felt considerable energy pushing back against misleadings of his work. In his 1938 book, experience in Education written when he was nearly 80, was essentially corrective.
He was trying to clarify what he actually said. Against the backdrop of educators who had taken child-centered learning to mean the absence of structure, rigor, and the absence of any, meaningful educational architecture. He wasn't interested in the absence of structure. He was interested in a different [00:07:00] kind of structure when organized around the learner's experience rather than the teacher's delivery, which is the whole theme of our podcast.
And that distinction is the heart of everything that follows. For Dewey experience was not the warmup before the learning began. Experience was a medium of learning itself. As I say, EMDR is an experiential therapy. That we need this lived experience. And so now we're gonna look at this idea of experience as a ground of learning.
So do we. Center argument is that experience and education is on the surface almost disarmingly. Simple learning does not connect to the learners lived experience and does not last and may not even truly occur. And so think about what that means in a professional training context. Information delivered on abstraction.
Disconnected from the sensory, emotional, relational context of the earners learner's actual clinical life. What does that do? It fails to [00:08:00] engage the neural systems that make memory and coding and integration possible. A clinician can sit in a training, absorb a significant amount of accurate information, pass a post test, earn their CE credits, or return to their practice on Monday morning with nothing change.
That's not a motivation problem. It's an experience design problem. And I'm actually trying to understand how to apply this in my own trainings and made a distinction I find really incredibly useful in the training design. The distinction between what he called the educative and the miseducated experiences.
And an educative experience is one that expands the learner's capacity for future experience. Okay? It opens rather than closes. It connects rather than fragments, and it builds agency rather than dependency. And a miseducated experience, does the opposite. It may involve the transmission of accurate information, and the content may be entirely correct, but it leaves the learner less [00:09:00] able, not more able to engage with the complexity going forward.
And the Dewey, the question de Dewey advise us to ask is not was the content correct? It is, was the experience educated? Did it expand? The participant's capacity, did it leave them more curious, competent, confident, or more overwhelmed, more passive, and more dependent on the trainer's authority? And I've been in both rooms.
I've been in both of those environments, and the former is definitely more encoded in my system. Accurate content delivered in a miseducated condition produces compliance. Not learning. And in trauma informed fields, compliance is a clinical warning sign, not a training goal. And so what we're gonna talk about what neuroscience adds, this embodied cognition and state dependent learning.
And here's where it gets interesting for us, trained in [00:10:00] trauma and nervous system work. Remembering he was writing without that FMRI data without polyvagal neuroscience memory consolidation. Theories. He was working from a philosophical argument and careful social and personal observation, and he was right.
And we now have the biology to explain why his insistence that learning is grounded in the body's engagement with its environment. Anticipates what researchers now call embodied cognition. The finding that thought, memory, and learning are not purely abstract processes occurring in the isolated brain.
But are fundamentally shaped by the sensory motor experience in the context. So thinking is not something that happens above the neck. It's something that happens through a body that's situated in a specific environment, in a relationship with other bodies. Neuro has confirmed that memory encoding is state dependent, [00:11:00] so information is most effectively consolidated when learners are in regulated.
Engage physiological state and when new information is connected to existing neural networks built from the prior experience and abstract information delivered to a disengaged or disregulated nervous system, what does that produce? Shallow encoding and the learner may not be able to repeat.
The training, but what happens to the integration and clinical practice? It's unlikely. And this gap that continuing education research has documented for decades. The gap between knowing and doing between training, attendance and behavior change is really what we're looking for. And D'S framework names exactly why that exists.
It's not because clinicians are unmotivated resistant, it's because learning experiences we're offering them are not designed in ways a nervous system can use. So if we want learning that transfers to clinical practice, we design experiences that connect to clinical practice, understanding [00:12:00] that abstract delivery produces abstract knowing.
So one of the things I find most compelling about Dewey is his educational philosophy is inseparable from his political philosophy. We heard that in Freir. We're hearing that here. So food for thought on connection. Purdue education and democracy were not parallel concerns. They were the same concern expressed at different registers.
A democratic learning environment is one which every member's experience is treated as evidence. Every voice has access to the conversation and collective intelligence of the group is understood to exceed the knowledge of any single expert. This is not idealized. It's a description of how knowledge actually develops in a healthy, scientific and clinical community.
So Dewey was suspicious of what he called the spectator theory of knowledge. The idea that learning is a passive observation. Uh, of transmitted truth, and he argued that knowing is always an active, participatory relational process. The learner constructs meaning [00:13:00] they don't receive it. And this has direct structural implications for how we design training rooms, training designs that partition participants primarily as spectators.
Watching the PowerPoint, nodding your head. They're not merely less engaging. They're working against fundamental neurobiological conditions where integration occurs. When participants cannot contribute their clinical experience, the experience goes underground, doesn't disappear.
It becomes private unintegrated counter narrative to whatever the trainer is saying, and it's a significant waste. So we're gonna look at continuity reflection in the arc of learning. Two concepts from Dewey that are particularly useful for some of us designing continuing education, continuity and reflection.
I wanna take them one at a time. Continuity. First. Dewey argued that educated experiences must be continuous. They must connect to what came before and to reach forward to what comes next. A training that treats itself. As a standalone event, disconnected from their prior learning and [00:14:00] unconnected to future practice violates the principle of continuity and is unlikely to produce lasting change.
And so this is why series based educational design, post followup structures and the integration of reflective practice into ongoing professional work are not merely nice to have enhancements. I've built my Kathy on the couch grief and trauma community in this way. Where we're having a communal experience, we're having templates, we're having workbooks, we're having connected content.
And there are mechanisms through which continuity is honored and through which neural consolidation of new learning is supported. And one day training, a one day training that exists in isolation is structurally limited on what it can produce, not because it's not valuable content, because the experience design works against this idea of integration.
So now reflection, do we also argue the experience alone is not sufficient for learning? Reflection on experience is what transforms this raw encounter into understanding, and that's from [00:15:00] his 1933 work Without structured reflection, participants have powerful experiences during a training moments of being able to, articulate, integrate or transfer what they've learned. So in practice, this means building explicit reflection structures into training design, not as add-ons at the end of the day, not as bonus activities or time permits, but as an integral to the learning arc throughout small group discussion, written reflection, case application, peer consultation.
These are not departures from content delivery. They're the conditions under which content becomes learning. Reflection is not a break from learning. It's a mechanism through which experience becomes knowledge. So, this is what we're gonna be talking about through the line from Dewey to trauma Informed practice
the polyvagal works emphasis on physiological state as a foundation for engagement. The somatic therapy fields insistence that the body must be included in the healing process. The relational neuroscience and literature [00:16:00] documentation of co-regulation as a medium of change, and all of these, what do they do?
They converge into Dewey's core insight. That learning is an embodied relational experiential process. And when we design training spaces that ignore participants', physiological states that treat their prior clinical experiences as relevant, that offer no structure for reflection or continuity, we're designing miseducated experiences.
In Dewey's terms, we should not be surprised when the gap between training, attendance and clinical behavior change remains stubbornly wide. There's something I wanna directly name here because I think it gets missed in a lot of continuing education discourse. Dewey's invitation is not primarily an invitation to be more engaging or dynamic or entertaining.
It's an invitation to take seriously the claim that we already make. That how we are with people matters as much as what we know in professional education. That principle applies to trainers, training designers with the same force. It applies to therapists and clinical [00:17:00] supervisors. And the argument here is that any training space that does not attend to its participants, physiological states, is not a trauma-informed space regardless.
Of what content it delivers. A training space that does not build on their existing knowledge is not an experiential space. And Dewey sense, it's a miseducated one. These are design problems and they're solvable. So I wanna get concrete because I think Dewey can sometimes stay at the level of principle where we need application.
So let's offer a translation. Dewey's principle of continuity means in practice that your training design should begin before the training starts with pre-work. That connects participants existing clinical experiences to what's coming, and it should extend after the training ends with the structured follow-up community or consultation that supports integration over time.
The training itself is not the learning, it's the catalyst. And so his emphasis on experience as a medium of learning means [00:18:00] designing activities that are clinically embedded, not clinically adjacent, and the case consultation role play with debrief. Structured reflection on real ethical dilemmas, not hypotheticals, or if hypotheticals once close enough to their actual work, that the nervous system recognizes them as relevant.
This concept of reflection means building an explicit processing time through the training arc, not saving questions for the end, structuring of reflection as core learning mechanism from the first hour to the last. And his democratic learning community means genuinely treating participants clinical knowledge as data, not as audience participation.
Clinical knowledge as data empowerment, not as audience participation, not as warmup, actual information that shapes what we do next. The participants in the room have collectively more clinical hours than the presenter, if your training design doesn't account for that, we're leaving the most valuable resource [00:19:00] untouched.
So account for that, factor it in, make it intentional. So I wanna close today's episode with a set of design questions. And here are the questions that come back. When I'm building any training or educational experience, and I offer them a diagnostic lens, not a checklist.
How does a training connect to the specific clinical experience participants bring into the room, not the abstract. Concretely, what do they already know and where does this learning connect to that? What structures for reflection are built in the training, not appended at the end, but woven throughout.
And we're participants given space to process what they're encountering in real time. How does this training connect forward to participants' future practice? What continuity structures follow up community consultation, support integration after the training ends. In what days does a training design position participants as active co constructors of meaning versus passive spectators of content where they're building knowledge versus [00:20:00] receiving it?
Fifth are participants, physiological states being attended to pacing movement regulation breaks. Explicit permission to self-regulate is training designed for a body in a chair or a nervous system that needs to be engaged. These aren't comfortable questions for most of us because they require to look honestly at the gap between what we intend and what we design, but they're the right ones and they get easier to hold the more you practice asking them.
So John Dewey was not writing about trauma-informed clinical training. He was writing about democracy and education in the early 20th century. Trying to articulate what it means for learning to be genuinely human rather than mechanically efficient. But a central argument that learning is an embodied relational experience process.
And that educational designs which ignore this idea of producing miseducation. Rather than integration reads a century later, like a precise description of what neuroscience learning has since confirmed empirically he got there through philosophy. We got there through [00:21:00] brain imaging.
We ended up at the same place that convergence matters, not because it validates Dewey retroactively, he doesn't need our validation, but because it means that what we design professional training spaces that honor. Participants should be an embodied experience that build on their existing knowledge, create genuine continuity, structured reflection.
We're not departing from rigor, we're moving towards it. So coming up in episode three, Lev Vygotsky in the zone of Proximal Development, which turns out to be one of the most useful frameworks I know for thinking about co-regulation and clinical supervision and training. That's a conversation I'm looking forward to.
If today's episode was useful, share it. Like us, follow us. Give us a five star rating in the store. And as a clinical supervisor, a colleague who designs learning spaces, share it with them. You can find the full written post with a PA citations at Rewire 360, the Rooted Practice Blog. I'm Kathy Couch, and this is your Kathy on the Couch [00:22:00] Podcast.
Make sure and check out our Kathy on the Couch Membership community for continuity. Thanks for being here.
We're here to walk along beside you as you deepen your clinical understanding, and until next time, keep connecting, keep learning, and keep rewiring for success. Take care. This is Kathy on the couch and on behalf of our entire team, thank you for being with us and we'll see you in the next episode.
Welcome to Kathy on the couch, your podcast for everyday clinicians who sit with grief, trauma, and the hardest human [00:23:00] experiences every day. You weren't meant to carry this alone, and this is a space for therapists who hold space for others and sometimes need a place to be held to. I am Kathy and I am your EMDR consultant, trainer, and theologist specializing in.
Methods of death, dying, and bereavement. I created this podcast to support those who do the deep work, especially trauma and grief therapists and EMDR clinicians needing a soft place to land who want real conversations, meaningful support in a community where the hard questions are finally welcome. We also are thrilled to share and announce are Kathy on the Couch Membership Community, which is your home for grief and trauma consultation professional growth.
It's by therapist, four therapists. Where you find a monthly consultation group, you'll find a monthly N-B-C-C-C-E training. You'll get access to a course module and resource kits. We're so happy to have you in one place and you don't have [00:24:00] to go looking for all those items in all the places. You can just come here so we hold space for those who hold it all.
That's our mission where we talk honestly about all clinical challenges in the business of being a healer through curriculum development. And training and breaking the silence to lead and thrive in the field without losing ourselves in the process. So if you're looking to join for deeper connection, I invite you to join our membership community to help you learn and grow.
Or if you're an EMDR therapist looking to be certified or a consultant, we have our program EMDR University. Remember to give us a five star reading wherever you get your podcast. Now let's get comfortable and let's head on over to the couch.
