Scott C. Taylor, a first-year doctoral student in the Philosophy and Education program at Teachers College, was recently awarded the Southern Illinois University, Dewey Center, Emerging Scholars Award. The award was granted to those graduate students and early career scholars whose papers were accepted for presentation at the upcoming international conference “John Dewey and His Legacy for Education.” His paper will offer a rethinking of John Dewey’s notion of occupations, with special attention to its social, historical, and natural emergence. In effect, Scott poses a Socratic reframing of occupations as a research program: both Dewey and the literature following his on occupations ask the questions of how and whether occupations be taught before asking a more fundamental question, “What are occupations?” While at the conference, Scott has been given the opportunity to participate as a mentee in the Dewey Center Mentoring Program. The conference will be held from October 12-14, 2023, at Southern Illinois University, organized in celebration of the reopening of the Center for Dewey Studies.