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The chapter presents a novel account of a key concept in John Dewey’s reconstructionist theory specifically related to the nucleus underlying his idea of democracy: intersubjective communication, what Dewey called the ‘democratic criterion’. Many theorists relate democracy to a form of rule. Consequently, discussions of democracy tend to be limited to functionalist theories. Dewey’s idea of democracy establishes an important distinction from conventional theories by developing its radical, critical, evolutionary, and intersubjective potential. I argue that Dewey anticipated Jürgen Habermas’s Paradigm of Communication in his reconstructionist social theory with potential to de-reify institutions and to empower human beings democratically.

Behavioral threat assessment and intervention is a violence prevention strategy that has become widely used in US schools. Instead of relying on a zero tolerance disciplinary approach that often leads to school exclusion of students with disabilities, schools can use a multidisciplinary threat assessment team to assess the seriousness and context of a student's behavior and identify appropriate interventions and supports. This process is especially valuable for students with disabilities who are identified as threatening violence. This chapter describes an evidence-based model of threat assessment, the Comprehensive School Threat Assessment Guidelines (CSTAG), ¹ reviews some common misunderstandings of threat assessment, and presents a case example illustrating the value of threat assessment in preventing school exclusion, and provides services for a student with a disability.

A series of highly publicized school shootings in the USA generated the misperception of an epidemic of school violence. Fears of school violence stimulated an ill‐advised expansion of zero tolerance school discipline policies and the widespread dissemination of profiles or warning signs of potentially dangerous students for use by school administrators. This article presents the rationale for student threat assessment as an administrative alternative to zero tolerance or profiling. It describes the development and field‐testing of guidelines for school administrators to follow in investigating and resolving student threats of violence. Student threat assessment permits administrators to make reasonable judgments about the seriousness of a threat, to resolve most threats quickly and efficiently, and to reserve more labor‐intensive procedures for the most serious threats.

In recent years, violence in schools has become a major preoccupation all over the world. This has led to a considerable increase in the number of public policies and programmes aimed at tackling the problem, as well as to a very large number of empirical studies. In this article, we begin by showing that this research goes part of the way toward making up for the lack of administrative knowledge of the problem, in particular concerning the prevalence of the phenomenon. It examines the possibility of there being a link between the globalisation of worries about school violence and economic globalisation. To do so, it analyses the hypothetical link between school violence and social inequalities. The literature is precise on this question, opting in favour of there being a strong link between the two: the sociology of violence in schools is a sociology of social exclusion. Research also shows, however, that these causes that are external to schools are not the only explanation of the process and, in particular, that effects linked with the institutions themselves or the system give good reason to hope that action can be effective.

Dewey, through his contributions to pragmatism (America’s sole original philosophy), has long been considered relative to symbolic interactionism (SI), which emerged from that philosophy. His impact on SI, while falling short of those of Mead and Cooley, has mainly come from (and has been limited to) concepts and insights developed in Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology (1922/1957) and his earlier, seminal, article, “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,” published in 1896 during his tenure at the University of Chicago (1894–1904). SI, however, has wrongly ignored Dewey’s political theory, especially his concept of domination. In order to rectify this inattention, I summarize the social and historical contexts that motivated Dewey’s turn toward domination; outline the radical nature of his political theory; illustrate similarities of his political theory with Marx’s; expatiate on his concept of domination, including his argument for social practices to reduce surplus domination; and explicate the theoretical and political implications of taking his political theory seriously.

This study compares parallel philosophies of the work of American educator John Dewey in Art as Experience and the arts infused educational approach of the Reggio Emilia Schools of Italy.

This historical and contemporary comparative, cross-cultural analysis explores educational approaches that incorporate the arts in the process of learning and the use of democratic processes in collaborative learning approaches. Data sources include primary source historical documents, field observations, interviews, and primary source educational materials.

Similarities are identified across cultures and time in the examples analyzed for commonalities including arts creation as central to the processes of learning, democratic processes in collaborative project learning experiences, community involvement as an integral part of the learning processes, and imagination and communication as consistent elements in the experiences of the school. This study provides a historical and contemporary context for the cross-cultural analysis of the use of art in the learning processes as described by American educator John Dewey and the educators in the Reggio Emilia schools of Italy.

This chapter describes the democratic philosophy and progressive education writing of John Dewey as sources of wisdom and guidance for the development of schools and classrooms where diverse groups of students live and learn together. The primary emphases are Dewey’s concept of moral equality, his understanding of democracy as a way of life, and his work with the teachers at the University of Chicago Lab School on a curriculum that analyzed tackled the central challenges of community life. Dewey offered useful theoretical work on liberal democratic communities while developing a relevant curricular example of how schools can focus learning activities on the promise and problems of society.

Some studies have claimed that Chinese thinker Hu Shi (or Hu Shih) received and responded to John Dewey's educational ideas only at a theoretical level and did little for education at a practical level. This paper reexamines Hu's reception of Dewey's ideas with a focus on how he used those ideas to solve China's educational and social problems during the late 1910s and 1920s.

This paper draws upon what Schriewer (2012) has called “theories of reception.” Rather than focusing on the international dissemination of ideas and knowledge, this approach emphasizes the reception of foreign ideas from the perspective and needs of the receiver, interpreter and/or reader who apprehends such ideas within a particular socio–cultural context.

This paper finds that Hu not only received — and examined — Dewey's educational ideas in a systematic way, but also used them pragmatically to reform China's systems of education as part of the New Culture Movement after 1919.

This research offers a new understanding of Hu's reception of Dewey's educational ideas. It shows that Hu was not merely a “thinker” in the field of education but also a “doer” who sought to apply Dewey's ideas in practice. This new view allows us to reevaluate Hu's role in the modernization of Chinese education.