In 1900, Dewey (1990) wrote that "knowledge is no longer an immobile solid; it has been liquefied. It is actively moving in all the currents of society itself" (p. 25).

"What happens to learning when we move from the stable infrastructure of the twentieth century to the fluid infrastructure of the twenty-first century where technology is constantly creating and responding to change?" (Thomas & Brown, 2011, p. 17).

Thomas and Brown (2011) explain that the new culture of learning requires both access to unlimited resources and a structured environment in which students have the ability to perform the work of learning including play, questioning, experimentation, and research. 

The active activity of learning in a community may seem chaotic (Dewey, 1990). 

Dewey (1990) exerts that incorporating students' interests is important, but the educator must "through criticism, question, and suggestion bring him to consciousness of what he has done, and what he needs to do" for the experience to be educative (p. 40). 

"Absolute freedom for our students whose learning path has been developed in a highly structured, right-or-wrong outcome-based setting is simply too much for them to handle all at once" (Taylor 2021a para. 2). 

"If we are honest in our quest to grow 21st-century skills in our students, we must provide them the opportunity to play, experiment, fail, consider, reconsider, collaborate, invent, share ideas, and most importantly the occasion to determine their own quest of knowledge and understanding" (Fahey, 2015, p. ix)

"The rules that define complex systems maintain a delicate balance between sufficient structure, to limit a pool of virtually limitless possibiliites, and sufficient openness, to allow for flexible and varied responses" (Davis et al., 2008, p. 193).

For Dewey (1990), education is unequivocally connected to the community. The learner is in service to and learning in collaboration with the community. 

Dewey (1990) describes a shift in the way we may look at the act of recitation from demonstration of knowledge to a place where the community comes together to discuss the work done and aid one another in further developing their individual work. The recitation Dewey describes here is very much like a studio art critique, particularly one that is not held exclusively as a culminating event when all the work is expected to have been completed. 

"All waste is due to isolation" (Dewey, 1990, p. 64).

Learning is powerful when people work freely together as part of a collective, using others as resources (Thomas & Brown, 2011).

People are motivated to learn in collaborative environments created in both physical and digital spaces (Trilling & Fadel, 2009). 

In a Choice-based classroom, students work collaboratively in self-selected groups and share what they've learned with others (Douglas & Jaquith, 2009). 

"Rather, the successful collective is not just more intelligent than the smartest of its members, it also presents occasions for all the participants to be be smarter-that is, to be capable of actions, interpretations, and conclusions that they wouldn't typically achieve on their own" (Davis et al., 2008)

"If we are honest in our quest to grow 21st-century skills in our students, we must provide them the opportunity to play, experiment, fail, consider, reconsider, collaborate, invent, share ideas, and most importantly the occasion to determine their own quest of knowledge and understanding" (Fahey, 2015, p. ix)

Dewey (1990) consistently expresses the need for education to serve and be a reflection of society. Through guided experimentation and inquiry, students practice skills that may have applicability beyond school and/or demonstrate to students that these skills are "fused and  welded with social conceptions regarding the life and progress of humanity" (Dewey, 1990, p. 54). 

"Children grow up, and the kinds of habits of mind they bring to both the workplace and the polling place will determine our common fate" (Meier, 2002, p. 6). 

Dewey's (1990) ideal curriculum is authentically tied to both the current needs of the student in society as well as values and experiences of the past. He advocates for schools that are connected to the environment around them, the current industry, the university, and the home, so the content learned in schools is visibly useful to students beyond the building and societal forces are able to influence the content in a way that the students are prepared or life within those different areas of life (Dewey, 1990). 

Trilling and Fadel (2009) advocate using internships and apprenticeships to place education in the actual spaces in which the knowledge gained will be used. 

"By teaching for artistic behavior, educators facilitate authenic choices for students and honor their ideas for artmaking" (Douglas & Jaquith, 2009).

"When it comes to making authentic art, choice and individual voice are synonymous" (Purtee & Sands, 2018, p. 34)

"I learned to write by writing" (Gaiman, 2013, p.36)

Dewey (1990) identifies four interests that students naturally exhibit: social (communication), making (construction), investigation, and art (expressive). These interests are not independent of each other. The art interest, for example, "is connected mainly with the social instinct - the desire to tell, to represent" (Dewey, 1990, p. 47). 

To achieve self-determination needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness must be met (Deci & Ryan, 2000,2008)

Dewey (1990) explains that his methods are not intended for direct replication. The teacher is expected to adapt their own curriculum and situation to his findings. 

"No two schools are the same, and no single method for delivery is right for everyone" (Purtee & Sands, 2021, p. 8)

From Dewey's (1990) perspective, the school "has a chance to affiliate itself with life, to become the child's habitat, where he learns through directed living, instead of being only a place to learn lessons having an abstract and remote reference to some possible living to be done in the future" (p. 18). 

Dewey (1990) recognizes that children learn in their daily lives and thus seeks to foster that same kind of experience within the school. 

This learning as living is one of Dewey's (1990) goals for education, but he continually feels the need to justify it within the current educational structure which he then goes on to say is flawed because of the school's lack of connection to life represented by connections to environment, home, industry, and university.

"The teaching-based approach focus on teaching us about the world, while the new culture of learning focuses on learning through engagement within the world" (Thomas & Brown, 2011, p. 38).

"I learned to write by writing" (Gaiman, 2013, p.36)

"In other words, schooling and education are not so much about shaping perception to existing frames as opening perception to new possibilities" (Davis et al., 2008, p. 21).

"It is this liberation from narrow utilities, this openness to the possibilities of the human spirit, that makes these practical activities in the school allies of art and centers of science and history" (Dewey, 1990, p. 18).

"By setting up proper circumstances, teachers create opportunities of r a variety of artistic behaviors to emerge and flourish" (Douglas & Jaquith, 2009, p. 2).

"An art lesson is a demonstration of possibilities" (Szekely, 2005, p. 48). 

"The rules on what is possible and impossible in the arts were made by people who had not tested the bounds of the possible by going beyond them. And you can" (Gaiman, 2013, p.29).

"Boundaries serve not only as constraints but also, oftentimes, as catalysts for innovation" (Thomas & Brown, 2011, p. 35).

"The rules that define complex systems maintain a delicate balance between sufficient structure, to limit a pool of virtually limitless possibiliites, and sufficient openness, to allow for flexible and varied responses" (Davis et al., 2008, p. 193).

"Through prompts and questions, as enabling constraints, spaces are provided to extend into the unknown, where learners have an opportunity to stretch forms through recursively elaborative processes seek emerging patterns of inquiry' (Castro, 2007, p. 83).

Experimentation is a means for students to come to knowledge through experience and inquiry, so it plays heavily into Dewey's (1990) methods. 

Because play is a how we learn to engage with new things in our world, play must be an integral part of the new culture of learning (Thomas & Brown, 2011). 

Play and experimentation and important for beginners (Douglas & Jaquith, 2009).

"If we are honest in our quest to grow 21st-century skills in our students, we must provide them the opportunity to play, experiment, fail, consider, reconsider, collaborate, invent, share ideas, and most importantly the occasion to determine their own quest of knowledge and understanding" (Fahey, 2015, p. ix)

"Whatever one accomplishes through play, the activity is never about achieving a particular goal" (Thomas & Brown, 2011, p. 99).

Most of us do not seek out knowledge purely to know but to serve a need or answer a question to which we desire an answer, therefore, educators must provide students with the skills for self-directing their own learning (Dewey, 1990).

People's individual motivations lead them to learn what is meaningful to them (Thomas & Brown, 2011).

"If we are honest in our quest to grow 21st-century skills in our students, we must provide them the opportunity to play, experiment, fail, consider, reconsider, collaborate, invent, share ideas, and most importantly the occasion to determine their own quest of knowledge and understanding" (Fahey, 2015, p. ix)

"Offering instruction in materials and techniques and providing resources, time, and space are ways that art educators can support and encourage students as they develop their own creative process" (Douglas & Jaquith, 2009, p.2).

"A good art teacher involves student sin eery aspect of the search for ideas, materials, and techniques" (Szekely, 2005, p. 44).

To achieve self-determination needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness must be met (Deci & Ryan, 2000,2008).

Dewey (1990) equates the child to the sun to illustrate how his methods put the child at the center of their own education, allowing the available resources to serve each student's specific needs.

Students choose their own explorations and  work at a pace that works for them, so CBAE is innately differentiated (Douglas & Jaquith, 2009).

Authentic learning experiences make children more helpful at home and prepare students for future careers (Dewey, 1990).

21st century skills are those being sought out by employers (Trilling & Fadel, 2009). 

Dewey (1990) explains repeatedly that authentic learning experiences, ones that serve a personal interest or need, are far more motivating than learning for it's own sake.

Choice-based classrooms run on intrinsic motivation as students choose their own explorations and  work at a pace that works for them (Douglas & Jaquith, 2009).

Learning authentically and autonomously requires students to develop and use persistence, patience, and ingenuity (Dewey, 1990). 

Students must learn to not just cope with change, but embrace it (Thomas & Brown, 2011).

Knowing where to find needed information and evaluate it's usefulness is more important than recalling information (Thomas & Brown, 2011).

Trilling and Fadel (2009) outline 11 skills needed for learning and working in the 21st century including: critical thinking, collaboration, creativity, media literacy, adaptability, self-direction, and productivity. 

Tomlinson, as cited by Douglas and Jaquith (2009), explains that "the capacity to make choices and work independently must be learned with lots of practice and support from the teacher" (p. 5). 

"If students are to become their own art teachers they have to learn to discover their own assignments" (Szekely, 2005, p. 48).

Students need to know multiple strategies for learning as well as how to ask for help when they need it (Ricci, 2017).