ABSTRACT
Teaching, on John Dewey's view, relies for its success on paying due attention to student meaning-making, the affinogenetic quality of classroom engagement, and both internal and external curriculum coherence. The basic strength of Dewey's approach is that it puts the life world when planning how to instruct. Locating Dewey's law in the life world is in large part what it means to "humanize" Dewey's law. A phenomenological reading of Dewey's law provides a perspective from which to understand the work of teachers with students as a matter of creating teachable moments in which teachers and students form academically significant relationships with one another at the intersection of their life-worlds. Dewey refers to the intellectual process by which objects emerge from situations as association of ideas and insists that association of ideas, to be affected, requires something more and something different than contiguity of ideas.
