EDUCATING COMMUNAL AGENTS: BUILDING ON THE PERSPECTIVISM OF G.H. MEAD

A bstract In their search for more communal forms of agency that might guide education, contemporary educational psychologists have mostly neglected the theorizing of George Herbert Mead. In this essay, Jack Martin aims to remedy such oversight by interpreting Mead’s social‐psychological and educational theorizing of selfhood and agency through the lenses of the perspectival realism Mead developed in the last decade of his life. This interpretation understands education as concerned with the cultivation and coordination of cultural, societal, interpersonal, and personal perspectives. Within this framework, communal agency is understood as a self‐interpreting, self‐determining capability of persons. This agentive capability derives from immersion and participation with others within sociocultural practices and perspectives, but also includes reactivity to those same practices and perspectives. The education of communal agents as envisioned here emphasizes the social nature of education, students’ experience and development, and the critical role of the teacher as a mediator between student development and social process. Such an education is grounded in the immediate experiences and perspectives of learners, but increasingly assists learners to move beyond their own experiences through engaged interaction with others and with resources for acquiring broader, more organized perspectives on themselves, others, and the world.