PLANNED ENVIRONMENTS FOR LEARNING IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES: TWO INNOVATIVE COURSES AT HARVARD.

This article deals with two unusual and innovative social science courses, which attempt to create such an environment for learning at the university level. One is an undergraduate course in the Harvard Department of Social Relations; the other is a course in the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration. Before discussing these courses in detail, it is worth considering some reasons why the social sciences, of all disciplines, can least afford to ignore John Dewey's views on the planning of the educational environment. The social sciences deal with social reality, a social world that is about Americans all the time and yet largely ignored in traditional teaching in the social sciences. The two courses represent educative environments in which students and teachers cooperate to make maximum use of the immediate social context. They are designed to allow realistic confrontation with built-in emotional and cognitive blocks to learning. They demand that the student make a meaningful connection between intellectual concepts, behavior and experience. The interest and excitement generated by these courses, and the subsequent evaluative comments of students, teachers and research personnel, reflect the effectiveness with which they operate.