Experiencing STEM at the Lab School: Situated Histories and Enacted Pedagogies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines how the historical, theoretical, and lived commitments of John Dewey’s progressive education are enacted in contemporary STEM learning at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. Placing STEM within the sociopolitical and environmental transformations of late nineteenth-century Chicago, we link Dewey’s philosophies to the engineering and civic challenges that shaped the city. Drawing on classroom observations, teacher conversations, and composite vignettes, we show how STEM learning in a grade one class foregrounds student-driven inquiry in community and place. Three themes characterize these experiences: experience and exploration through ongoing encounters with Wooded Island; problem solving and place via collaborative design challenges connected to Chicago’s built environment; and ethics and relationships as students consider their responsibilities toward more-than-human community members. The authors argue that these practices exemplify a transdisciplinary STEM that is historically grounded, ecologically situated, and democratically oriented. As Chicago again undertakes place-making with the Obama Presidential Center, Deweyan principles continue to offer a living curriculum that invites young learners to make meaning, act together, and imagine more just and sustainable futures. Keywords: John Dewey, STEM education, place-based learning, progressive pedagogy, transdisciplinarity
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".