The Practice of Teaching

A Sociology of Education

Chris Easthope, Rupert Maclean, Gary Easthope

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138244542
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351997638
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This title, first published in 1990, examines the work of teachers in the classroom and the school from a sociological perspective. It will be important reading for teacher education students who have little or no background in sociology, providing them with information, understanding and techniques which will enable them to operate as competent teachers in the classroom.

1

INTRODUCTION

A map of teaching

A map of teaching

‘THOSE WHO CAN, TEACH’

Everybody knows what a teacher does. Since the introduction of mass education, generation after generation of students (one hundred generations in Australia and New Zealand) have watched carefully the actions of their teachers and reacted to them. Sometimes that reaction has been one of fear, sometimes of pity, but more often than not one of happy acceptance.

After all, there are 175000 teachers in Australia alone, and that’s 3 per cent of the workforce. If you are training to be a teacher it is very likely that some of your friends and family are teachers.

Yet, despite the many years we have all spent observing teachers, and talking to teachers, it is still very difficult to pin down precisely what teachers do. What seems perfectly clear when you are a student or talking to a friend about teaching suddenly seems less clear when you are faced with the reality of entering a classroom and facing 20, 30, or 40 faces all looking to you to teach them.

One response you might make is to act like the people who taught you; and most new teachers, for at least part of the time, take this option.

The problem with this apparent solution is that nine times out of ten it doesn’t work. The children you are teaching are not the children your teachers taught. They are a different generation and they may well come from different backgrounds as compared to you and your friends, with a different set of assumptions about schools and teachers. They may also be of a different age and they may be learning different subjects from those taught by the teachers you remember.

So whom do you copy to be a good teacher? College or university lecturers in Education rarely give model exemplary lessons today, and anyway these lessons are to some extent contrived exercises. Do you resort to the teaching aides? They may seem to keep excellent control but they can only do what the teacher tells them: and you are the teacher. How about the classroom teacher on your practice teaching session? At last someone you can emulate! Unfortunately, you can rarely expect to be in the same school for your first appointment as the one in which you did your practice teaching. So the same problems arise here as when you decided to emulate your own teacher: the students and the school may be very different, and the methods used by the classroom teacher may be inappropriate for the children, or for the subject that you are expected to teach.

There is, unfortunately, no simple answer to this problem. This book is written to help you find your own answer. It will not tell you how to teach: it is not a lifebelt for the teacher who is drowning in disorder, nor is it a teaching methods book. Also, it is not another book on abstract educational theory. It is, rather, an attempt to relate theory and practice: sociological theory on the one hand, and classroom practice on the other.

We know that many students see much, if not all, of the courses on the history, philosophy, sociology and psychology of education that they take during their training as an irrelevant interruption to the real task of learning to teach. Now, this book cannot solve that perennial theory/practice divide, because it is a book. Any solution requires practice—and ‘book-learning’ is not practice. The knowledge derived from experience cannot be derived from books. But we do believe that it is possible to talk about practice, and to write about practice; and that it is possible to do this without either falling into the pit of an atheoretical list of ‘tips for teachers’ or else scaling the Olympian heights of theory, from which the classroom becomes a mere dot in an abstract social pattern.

To do this we have drawn up a guide, a route map, for you to use to develop yourself as a teacher. The map has been drawn for the teacher who is starting the journey into teaching; but we believe that the way of thinking about teaching which is set out in this book provides a firm basis from which, when you become more experienced, you can ‘bush-bash’ and make your own tracks. On this map, then, we set out the pitfalls and perils for which the teacher should keep a sharp look-out. We also show the routes which lead to the high peaks of teaching experience, the ones where every effort-laden step becomes worth it, as when a child you are teaching learns to read or grasps a complex theory and sees the world in a new way. We expect students and methods lecturers to start from our sketch map and fill in the details of their particular terrain.

If used properly, therefore, this book can help you avoid the following type of problem:

[On my second day of teaching] I was going to resign. I didn’t want to go to school and felt that I’d made a terrible mistake about teaching. I spent all last night dreaming about school and woke up at 4 a.m. unable to go back to sleep.
(A First Year teacher quoted in Maclean & Collis, 1986)

And it can also help you achieve the pleasure of climbing this ‘peak of satisfaction’:

When I started working, the world was a mighty big heap and I was anxious to get to the top of it. [However] working as Chief Chemist, as long as the figures were on the desk every night before 4.30 you were a good boy. There was nothing you could do wrong, you could burn the place down, as long as those figures were on the desk at 4.30 and they were correct. Now I sort of look back and I think there is more to it than just getting to the top of the heap. You want to really belong; you want to be feeling useful and productive and I never really had that feeling in industry like I’ve had it since I’ve been teaching.
(An experienced teacher quoted in Maclean, 1983)

Like all maps, this one employs certain conventions and makes certain assumptions. Our major simplifying assumption is that teaching is teaching: that is, although we are well aware that teaching four year olds is not the same task as teaching matriculation students, yet we believe that the term ‘teaching’ can be applied to both and that there are ways of understanding the task of teaching that are useful both to the kindergarten and the Grade 12 teacher.

Another assumption we make is that teaching is a social activity, although learning may not be. You may learn from this book without interacting with another human being, but teaching, as we understand it, involves a complex process of face-to-face interaction between people. The teacher is like the conductor of an orchestra who, dressed in tie and tails, mounts the rostrum and directs the orchestra in a symphony. This involves being able to use body movements, eyes and facial expression to draw out one section of the orchestra (the woodwinds, say) at one time, and another section at another time, all the while keeping the whole orchestra in view and keeping in mind the image of the symphony. The teacher also has to ‘play’ the class so that they act in such a way that each and every one learns. Unlike the conductor, however, the teacher also has to face the possibility that a trumpet player may blow ‘a raspberry’ at an inopportune moment and spoil the whole effect:

As we were walking across the yard to the library I said to the children ‘Come on, stick together, you’re wandering all over the place like Brown’s cows!’ and as we continued there arose, spontaneously, the sound of gentle lowing begun by some humorist in the group and taken up.
(From Maclean & Collis, 1986)

When drawing up a map the cartographer uses colours to delineate one aspect of the terrain from another: forests are green, lakes and rivers are blue, roads red. These are only conventions but without them the area shown on the map would be unintelligible. Our map also has ‘colours’, conventions that distinguish one aspect of the terrain from another. All teaching situations can be seen as containing four elements, four ‘colours’, that ought to be examined before we can begin to understand the events of the classroom:

	KEY
KNOWLEDGE	The content of teaching: what is taught;
CONTROL	All those social processes through which social order is maintained;
INTERACTION	Social interaction: all events where two or more people interact with each other;
EVALUATION	The judgements of people and things that people make upon each other and the world.

1 Knowledge: In any teaching situation there is always someone being taught something they don’t know by someone else who does (or should) know. They might be taught some factual information (the capital of Australia) or some skill (how to read) or some new way of looking at the world (science or history). All these things that are taught we are going to call knowledge. Knowledge, the first of our four ‘colours’, refers then to the content of teaching; what is taught in schools. Every teaching situation also involves somebody who knows the knowledge and someone who doesn’t. Such a situation means that teachers potentially have power over the teaching/learning situation because they can control the content of the knowledge and the speed at which it is presented.

2 Control: In addition, in all school teaching situations the teacher is legally vested with power to control the behaviour of the children. This aspect of teaching we call control and it refers to all those social processes through which social order is maintained.

3 Social Interaction: Teaching also involves social interaction, in which the teacher and the student both have expectations about what is going to be achieved. Any teaching situation involves two or more individuals face-to-face (we are deliberately excluding from consideration teaching machines, including computers. Such devices may be important in learning but this book focuses upon teaching). Social i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• List of Highlighted Points
• Foreword by Professor P. W. Musgrave
• Preface
• 1 INTRODUCTION: A map of teaching
• 2 CONTROLLING CHILDREN: Control and interaction
• 3 IMAGES AND LABELS: Interaction and evaluation
• 4 WHAT DO I TEACH?: Knowledge and control
• 5 STYLES OF TEACHING: Knowledge and interaction
• 6 MEASURING STUDENT PROGRESS: Knowledge and evaluation
• 7 COMMUNITY, SCHOOLS AND COLLEAGUES: Evaluation and control
• 8 A CASE STUDY OF CLASSROOM TEACHING: A lesson on European trees
• 9 TEACHERS AND THEIR CAREERS: The world of the beginning teacher
• 10 WAYS OF THINKING ABOUT TEACHING: A sociological codicil
• Glossary of Key Terms
• Abbreviations
• Bibliography
• Permissions
• Index