Theorising Teaching in Secondary Classrooms

Understanding our practice from a sociocultural perspective

Beverley Bell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136578762
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Classroom Management

Theorising Teaching in Secondary Classrooms is for all teachers who wish to fully understand and improve upon their own practice. It encourages you to reflect on and conceptualise your teaching, and helps you understand how your practice is connected to the social, cultural, political and institutional contexts in which you teach.Considering the la

1	Theorising teaching as a sociocultural practice

As teachers, we use our professional knowledge of teaching to theorise our practice as teachers. When theorising, we are explaining and giving an overview of a phenomenon, with theory being seen as ‘an architecture of ideas – a coherent structure of interrelated concepts … [that distinguishes] good scholarship from even the best journalism’ (Anyon, 2009: 3, 4). Theorising takes our thinking beyond description to explain and account, linking what we notice to a broader perspective (Anyon, 2009; Bruce, 2010). In theorising, we are using theory to add depth, interpretation, meaning, explanation and significance when making sense of what we do and notice when teaching (and when doing educational research).

Theorising is important as we currently work within the neo-liberal discourses of teachers as technicians for efficiency and effectiveness, rather than professionals (Ball, 1995). As Ball states: ‘there is a kind of theorising that rests upon complexity, uncertainty and doubt and upon a reflexivity about its own production, and its claim to knowledge about the social’ (Ball, 1995: 269), rather than solely seeking claims to truth. ‘Theorising is a vehicle for “thinking otherwise”’ (Ball, 1995: 266) and a foil against reductionist and technocratic thinking. And, as such, theorising is not just something that researchers do, it is also done by teachers reflecting on our practice, with theorising being reconstructed or rejected accordingly.

Sociocultural theorising has been useful to educators (of science, for example) to make sense of the teaching and learning in the classroom (Bell, 2005a). Teaching has been theorised in the research literature as a sociocultural practice, with the main goal being to create an account of human thinking and action that recognises the essential relationships between mind and action, and their social, cultural and institutional settings (Nuthall, 1997; Wertsch, 1991, Wertsch et al., 1995). In other words, to understand the thinking and practices of teachers and students teaching and learning in the classroom, we need to take into account the sociocultural contexts in which the teaching and learning are occurring, and the relationships between mind and action.

In addition, the notion of ‘practice’ communicates something wider than a technique and skill, something incorporating, as well, knowledge, making judgements, intuition, and the purposes for the action (Beckett and Hager, 2002).

The term ‘teaching’ is used here in the sense of the broader term ‘pedagogy’ (Bell, 2003) to indicate that teaching is considered not just as a skill set, but as a professional practice, with reference to values, aims and the philosophy of education (Winch and Gingell, 1999); the linking of power and knowledge (Bernstein, 1971; Gore, 1993), and acknowledgment of the situated nature of teaching (Leach and Moon, 1999b). Hence, teaching as pedagogy is viewed as being more than ‘best practice’, more than the techniques or strategies of arranging the seating in the classroom, choosing the materials and equipment to be used, preparing a lesson plan, or ‘managing’ learning activities for the students during the lesson. Seen as a sociocultural practice, teaching as pedagogy is the encompassing of dispositions, knowledges, minds, ways of knowing, languages and discourses, epistemologies of the learner and the teacher; educational goals, purposes, values, expectations, curriculum; the interactions and relationships between participants; the prior knowledge, motivation, the affect, the diversity of students as well as the more widely known facets of teachers, teaching, learners, learning, assessment (Leach and Moon, 1999a).

The aim of this book is to explore the sociocultural theorising of teaching, and in particular nine aspects of teaching as a sociocultural practice, namely teaching as a relational practice (including teaching as a spiritual practice), social practice (including teaching as a knowledge practice), a cultural practice (including teaching as a gendered practice), an emotion practice, a caring practice, an ethical practice, an embodied practice, a spatial practice, and a political practice. In each of these practices, we are invited to explore the relationships between person and context, and between mind and action.

The format of the book is around three strands. First, for each of these nine practices, a review of relevant but not exhaustive educational research is given. The reviewed research literature is from early years, primary, secondary and tertiary educational research. These nine practices have been identified previously in the research literature, but only one or two of them tend to be discussed in any one research article, with few if any articles making reference to all nine (Bell, 2010).

Second, each of the nine practices is illustrated with quotations from beginning and experienced secondary teachers talking teaching. Details of source of the quotations are given in Appendix A.

The third strand in the book is the sociocultural framework or jigsaw (see Figure 1), which is a distinctive feature of this book. Each jigsaw piece of the sociocultural jigsaw is not new knowledge, with each piece or chapter containing a review of existing literature. What is new is that all aspects are reported together here in one publication, and that the jigsaw is used to analyse and theorise the talk of beginning and experienced secondary teachers talking teaching (Bell, 2010; Bell and Scarff Seatter, 2010). The purpose and usefulness of the jigsaw is to retain as far as possible the complexity of teachers talking teaching, while at the same time providing a structure or patterning to enable us to make sense of the complexity. The jigsaw is further discussed at the end of this chapter and in the final chapter, Chapter 11.

Figure 1 The sociocultural jigsaw

A case study

As an introduction to the nine aspects of teaching as a sociocultural practice, each practice is briefly discussed with respect to the relevant literature and illustrated by quotations from Sally, a beginning secondary teacher of English, talking teaching (Bell, 2010).¹ Sally had come to teaching as a second career.

1. Teaching as a social practice

One aspect of theorising teaching as a sociocultural practice in the research literature is theorising teaching as a social practice (Bell, 2005a, 2005b; Bell and Cowie, 2001). Teaching involves social interaction with others; it is not something a teacher does without students. The dialogue between teacher and student is a social practice and we call this teaching. It requires the teacher to use her or his knowledge, and hence teaching as a knowledge practice is included as part of teaching as a social practice.

One aspect of teaching as a social practice is that of teaching as a knowledge practice. Teachers know and use many different kinds of knowledge to teach (Shulman, 1987; Shulman and Shulman, 2004), including pedagogical content knowledge, which is seen as important as it is unique to a teacher’s professional knowledge (Loughran et al., 2006; Hume and Berry, 2010). Sally indicated that she used different kinds of knowledge in her teaching practices, including her knowledge of content:

… and academically I feel very confident and very strong in especially English, it’s been my passion for years … it’s not say I know everything the kids ask obviously. There’s content questions I don’t know or I haven’t read the book or whatever. … in terms of grammar or structural stuff like that, I don’t have any problems at all. [Sally]

She had a knowledge of her students; for example, what interested them and engaged them:

[The department] suggested to me two extended texts and two films and I just looked at the kids … and I thought ‘it ain’t going to work, there’s just no way this is going to work’. … [I spoke with the] Year 12 coordinator in English and told her of my concerns. … I said ‘I just can’t see these kids interacting with either of these things’ and she said ‘well it’s your call, you know, you do it’. So I went with my gut instinct and it was exactly right. I mean it ended up with things that the kids loved. … I got huge satisfaction out of realising that I was right in terms of my gut instinct … I was spot on with them … just the match between the film and the girls was perfect and they are not good writers but at least they had something that they did engage with and they were happy to talk about. [Sally]

She had knowledge of their home situation, as indicated when she talked about what it means to be a ‘good’ teacher:

… I think a good teacher is more than the classroom. I think a good teacher looks at the pastoral role, but also the greater community … and I ring parents a lot, I involve parents a lot … [Sally]

Sally indicated she had a knowledge of the students’ prior knowledge and skills, educational theory, how to teach the content (pedagogical content knowledge) and planning. She also spoke about teaching as a social practice: that is, explicit teaching of the content or subject matter through talking, discussion and dialogue between teacher and student or student and student, either face-to-face or online.

Sally spoke of how she set up interactive activities in the class so that the students could co-construct shared understandings:

… the way I work in the classroom is that I use that peer appreciation all the time … at age 18 their peers are their model and I notice it in the classroom. I can see it happening in front of my eyes and I use that in the class and a lot of that group work is because they work well together. You know, they do listen to each other. They’re more inclined to listen to each other than they’re ever going to listen to me. So group work works in those situations provided you can keep the classroom management. You know, the structure has got to be there. [Sally]

She indicated the ways in which she engaged the students with the thinking and learning. For example:

I am very controversial and I like to, for instance we did [the book] Whale Rider recently and I said to them … ‘Aren’t whales just cows in the water?’ … and everybody was up in arms, and I love doing stuff like that because then that promotes a discussion and they’re able to prove to me that what I’m saying is incorrect. So playing the devil’s advocate sometimes encourages that sort of thing as well and I don’t mind them challenging me and I don’t mind when I get it wrong. … and I say to them that’s wonderful because that shows me that you’re being responsible for your own learning, you’re not dependent on me, you’re thinking for yourself. [Sally]

Sally spoke of how she mediated her students’ learning, for example via another teacher, by having a specific dialogue with the student on language use:

I have, for instance, a child in my Year 11 extension class, very, very bright young woman, but her first writing … and I picked a consistent grammar problem. So in the first week of her writing … I took that [the student’s writing] down to the ESOL teacher and she’s been on a programme ever since, one period a week, and her writing just improved incredibly. It was just a grammatical hitch that’s all …she’s obviously going to do something wonderful at university. Incredibly bright, very talented young woman. [Sally]

She spoke of how she had scaffolded the units of learning so that the students could succeed in each step of the task:

… I spent most of last summer, and that was a big advantage, getting myself organised, so I had all the units prepared and I made extra scaffolding steps for them [the low ability class] so that they weren’t ever put in a position to fail because that’s what they’ve done for six years … and that really changed the attitude. … [But] even at the end, I had one girl who would start every unit [with] ‘Miss, I can’t read’ and ‘I can’t write’. Every unit, and she did, I think, six of the units and achieved and wrote particularly well. What was astounding [was] the quality of the work that came out of these kids. [Sally]

While Sally did mention assessment for summative purposes in responses to questions on her preparedness to do assessment for the (New Zealand) National Certificate of Educational Achievement, when she discussed her teaching her talk was mainly about assessment for formative purposes, that is, assessment for learning:

[In what ways have your assessment practices developed over the past 18 months?]

I’m not so structured on the test as I was; I use different forms of assessment now in terms of formative assessment than I did before. … I do it with my senior Year 11 extension class. … I gave them a task, they had to do an essay, 200 words … And then, I gave them a structured template to have a look at … they felt they could judge for themselves where they might have gone right or wrong. If they were happy with that, they didn’t have to rework it. … and they got another person of their own choosing to go through and check grammar and spelling and punctuation and things like that, and then they got it back again, then they had to rework it. And then I gave them an assessment sheet, the one I used for the marking criteria, and they had to mark it themselves. … I went over to see what they had done and in fact they marked themselves incredibly harshly, but they also had moved. There were individual differences in the way they were writing, and they had moved away from that [initial] format … I wanted to see some thinking and some different levels of thinking … so that was very successful. [Sally]

2. Teaching as a relational practice

Teaching may be viewed as a relational practice, with relationships being seen as very important by teachers (Bauml, 2009). It is within a relationship that the work of a teacher is done. After six months of teaching, Sally identified her relationships with the students as a key priority for her:

[When you graduated last year, what did you think teaching would be like?]

… it is exactly what I thought it would be and I really, really enjoy it … it’s a comfortable sort of, very satisfying feeling that I get from it and I love the challenges and I love the kids and I never realised the relationship you would form so easily with them and I’ve never laughed so much, I love every class, they’re just gorgeous …’

[… What have been the most rewarding experiences as a beginning teacher?]

The relationship with the kids without a doubt, I just, I real...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgement
• Preface
• 1. Theorising teaching as a sociocultural practice
• 2. Teaching as a relational practice
• 3. Teaching as social practice
• 4. Teaching as a cultural practice
• 5. Teaching as an emotion practice
• 6. Teaching as a caring practice
• 7. Teaching as an ethical practice
• 8. Teaching as an embodied practice
• 9. Teaching as a spatial practice
• 10. Teaching as a political practice
• 11. Rebuilding the bigger picture
• Appendix
• References
• Index