Harry Potter’s Battle for Real-World Learning

You know Harry Potter.  But did you know the young wizard was a champion of constructivist pedagogy?  Based on this scene from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Potter might well have been reading the work of John Dewey along with his other tomes from Diagon Alley.  In this exchange with the loathsome Ms. Dolores Umbridge, Harry argues that reading about spells in books will not help them in real life.  Ms. Dolores assures him that it’s better to learn from a book, at a desk, in a classroom–or as she puts it, “a secure risk-free way.”