Inventions of Teaching

A Genealogy

Brent Davis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135610760
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Inventions of Teaching: A Genealogy is a powerful examination of current metaphors for and synonyms of teaching. It offers an account of the varied and conflicting influences and conceptual commitments that have contributed to contemporary vocabularies--and that are in some ways maintained by those vocabularies, in spite of inconsistencies and incompatibilities among popular terms. The concern that frames the book is how speakers of English invented (in the original sense of the word, "came upon") our current vocabularies for teaching. Conceptually, this book is unique in the educational literature. As a whole, it presents an overview of the major underlying philosophical and ideological concepts and traditions related to knowledge, learning, and teaching in the Western world, concisely introducing readers to the central historical and contemporary discourses that shape current discussions and beliefs in the field. Because the organization of historical, philosophical, theoretical, and etymological information is around key conceptual divergences in Western thought rather than any sort of chronology, this text is not a linear history, but several histories--or, more precisely, it is a genealogy. Specifically, it is developed around breaks in opinion that gave or are giving rise to diverse interpretations of knowledge, learning, and teaching--highlighting historical moments in which vibrant new figurative understandings of teaching emerged and moments at which they froze into literalness. The book is composed of two sorts of chapters, "branching" and "teaching." Branching chapters include an opening treatment of the break in opinion, separate discussions of each branch, and a summary of the common assumptions and shared histories of the two branches. Teaching chapters offer brief etymological histories and some of the practical implications of the terms for teaching that were coined, co-opted, or redefined within the various traditions. Inventions of Teaching: A Genealogy is an essential text for senior undergraduate and graduate courses in curriculum studies and foundations of teaching and is highly relevant as well for students, faculty, and researchers across the field of education.

1
Inventions of Teaching:

STRUCTURES OF THINKING

The conviction persists, though history shows it to be a hallucination, that all the questions that the human mind has asked are questions that can be answered in terms of the alternatives that the questions themselves present. But, in fact, intellectual progress usually occurs through sheer abandonment of questions together with both of the alternatives they assume, an abandonment that results from their decreasing vitalism and a change of urgent interest. We do not solve them, we get over them.

— John Dewey¹

Ten years ago, in a preservice education course, I decided to test out a colleague’s suggestion that a surefire way to prompt students to engage with questions of the nature of pedagogy is to have them choose and discuss personally compelling synonyms for the word teaching. Using a thesaurus, I prepared a list that included caring, conditioning, disciplining, educating, emancipating, empowering, enlightening, facilitating, guiding, indoctrinating, inducting, instructing, lecturing, managing, mentoring, modeling, nurturing, pointing, structuring, telling, and training, among others.

True to my colleague’s assurance, class members did participate enthusiastically. But the activity didn’t go where I had naively expected it would. There were no critical interrogations of gaps and contradictions. Rather, everyone seemed to converge on the same, commonsensical conclusion: Teaching is multifaceted. The teacher wears many hats.

I had hoped that the discussion would gravitate more toward the suggestion that teaching can’t possibly be about all these things—that what teaching is only makes sense when the issue is considered alongside prevailing assumptions about identity, learning, schooling, and so on. Unfortunately, as the activity demonstrated, the task of uncovering these sorts of conceptual commitments involves more than examining synonyms and metaphors. In particular, and in terms of the three main strands of discussion in this book, the task entails interrogations of commonsense beliefs about the nature of the universe, the sources of our knowledge, and the means by which we come to know.

Such beliefs have been subject to continuous refinements and occasional reformulations through the emergence of modern civilization. Although the assumptions that frame teaching have changed radically, vocabularies have tended to linger. As a result, as I seek to demonstrate, contemporary discussions of teaching rest on sedimented layers of vocabulary that have never been completely dissociated from the sensibilities that gave rise to them. It is not unusual, for example, to encounter references to teaching as instructing and facilitating in the same sentence despite that these terms actually point to conflicting, even contradictory, assumptions about learning. The concern that frames this book is thus how we speakers of English invented—that is, in the original sense of the word, “came upon”²— our current vocabularies for teaching.

In other words, this book represents an attempt to make sense of the knots of belief and commonsense that have underpinned efforts at teaching over the past few millennia. In it I trace out some of the conceptual commitments that are implicit (and sometimes explicit) in the terms we use to talk about teaching. In particular, I try to highlight historical moments in which vibrant new figurative understandings of teaching emerged and moments at which they froze into literalness. I do so by combining examinations of important trends in Western thought with etymological traces that foreground the sorts of assumptions and assertions that were in play when various terms for teaching were coined, co-opted, or redefined.³

LINEAR HISTORIES versus NONLINEAR GENEALOGIES

At first I thought this book would be a history of conceptions of teaching. However, when I began to sort through the historical, philosophical, theoretical, and etymological information that I had gathered, I realized that the material might be better organized around key conceptual divergences rather than any sort of chronology. In other words, this text is not a history, but several histories. More appropriately, it is a genealogy.

Most commonly, a history is understood to be an account of how something has come to pass. For instance, the history of a war or species is a systematic narrative, usually chronological, of the happenings that are taken as prequels to the given event or form. Genealogy has a similar sense, in that a genealogy is also a record of emergence. However, unlike a standard history, a genealogy is usually used to trace out several strands of simultaneous happenings. Whereas histories most often obey the image of a timeline, the image that is most commonly associated with a genealogy is a tree. Consequently, this book is not structured linearly as a narrative, but nonlinearly, around important breaks in belief or philosophy.

When the notion of genealogy is applied to the emergence of a concept—as opposed to, say, the lineage of a family—certain accommodations are required. For example, unlike families, concepts do not emerge through successive generations. Critical moments in the evolution of an idea can occur at any time as branches flourish, atrophy, or fuse. Hence, the emergence of a cluster of ideas, such as contemporary conceptions of teaching, cannot usefully be interpreted or represented in terms of any sort of chronology. As I hope is demonstrated in the discussions that follow, it makes much more sense to organize such a genealogy around key philosophical and theoretical developments, those moments at which thinking changed dramatically— not according to dates or people, but according to shifts in the ways that people talked and acted.

It is for this reason that this genealogy begins in the middle of the 19th century with Darwin, not in the first millennium BCE with the beginnings of formal Western philosophy. As detailed in chapter 2, Darwin offered a new way of thinking about the universe. He proposed a dramatic break from the model of the cosmos that had prevailed at least since the time of Plato. The influence of Darwin’s ideas on contemporary thinking about learning and teaching has been nothing short of revolutionary.

In subsequent chapters, I address other key theoretical developments. In chapters 3 through 9, discussions are focused on the models of teaching and learning that have emerged from within mystical, religious, analytic philosophical, and analytic scientific traditions. Chapters 10 through 16 deal with the theories of teaching and learning that have emerged since Darwin’s time, as oriented by structuralist, poststructuralist, complexity scientific, and ecological discourses.

Because the book is organized around branches that keep branching into branches, rather than an orderly linear argument, I have included an overview of the structure—a map—in Appendix A. In the hope that it might help you keep track of where the discussion is and where it’s going, I’ve also attached a partial image of that map on each odd-numbered page. (It turns out that this mnemonic also works as a flip-book. You can watch the tree grow by riffling the pages.) I have also included a brief introduction to the area of study that prompted me to organize the book in the manner presented—namely, fractal geometry—in Appendix B.

I feel it important to emphasize here that the notion of a genealogical tree is offered as a useful tool for organizing a great deal of information, not as a model for the way things really are. As a model, it fails on several counts, not the least of which is the fact that divergent strands of thought don’t always remain separate. They are often wound together to generate new interpretive hybrids. (In the realm of real trees, as well as in medical surgery, this process is known as anastomosis, “the joining of strands”.) A better model to illustrate the crossings and recrossings of sensibilities would be something more weblike. Closely related is the fact that this manner of representation has required that I ignore the finer branches of thought, focusing more on broad movements than specific interpretations. Oddly enough, this particular issue was brought home to me not while writing, but while preparing the tree image. It comes from a photograph of a real tree, but I had to trim (i.e., erase) most of the limbs and shoots out of the original picture to get to the final image.⁴ I did a similar sort of conceptual pruning to create this text. However, the intention here is neither to represent the full diversity of ideas nor to sketch out all of the entanglements of knowledge. It is, rather, to unravel some of the conceptual commitments that are spun into a few strands of thought while underscoring that even the most disparate ideas are usually connected to one another.

The chapters in this book are deliberately brief. I did not want in any way to give the impression that this writing is an attempt at a comprehensive overview of conceptions of teaching. It isn’t. The book is offered as an introduction to the diversities of opinion and assumption that are asserted when teaching is referred to as, for example, nurturing, enlightening, modeling, or empowering. (To keep the discussions brief, I’ve deferred many of the details to endnotes and Appendix C, a glossary.)

My intention in this project of making sense of the varied meanings of a set of words is not to generate a classification scheme of conceptions of teaching. Rather, consistent with a shift in thinking prompted by Darwin, the aim is as much about understanding the interconnections as the divergences among notions. In the following sections, I discuss this attitude and its implications for the structure of this text. Those elaborations are not essential to the discussions that follow, so you may choose to move directly to chapter 2.

DICHOTOMIES versus BIFURCATIONS

Living beings discern. Even those creatures that consist of a single cell must have the capacity to make distinctions so that they, for example, might reorient themselves in directions that offer a greater promise of nourishment.

We humans tend to identify ourselves as the most adept distinction-makers on the planet. This self-bestowed title is implicit in the frequent suggestion that, among all species, ours is the most intelligent—a term derived from the Latin inter-+legere, “to choose among, to discern”.

The capacity to cut up the world is biologically rooted and culturally elaborated. Biologically speaking, recent neurological research into the brain’s “binary operator” has demonstrated the presence of a distributed capacity that prompts humans to frame the world in terms of polar opposites.⁵ Closely related, our perceptual systems are predisposed not only to make distinctions, but to amplify them— and, on occasion, to impose some that just aren’t there in any objective or measurable sense. Two brief exercises in visual perception can help to demonstrate this point.⁶ In the following figure, for example, where the gray blocks meet one another, it appears that the lighter one gets lighter and the darker one gets darker.

In fact, in terms of ink density, each block is uniformly shaded. What’s more is that the difference in tone between adjacent cells is not actually as great at it might appear. If you lay a pencil across one of the borders, you’ll see the neighboring blocks are close to the same shade.

A second example that I find even more compelling is the next image. Most people see a completed circle here, and one that might seem brighter than (and perhaps even floating above) the background.

The point? To reiterate, our perceptual systems sometimes impose borders that aren’t there and often overemphasize edges that are. In survival terms, these tendencies actually make sense. Boundaries are the most useful information in the environment. We might expect sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, and our other senses to be oriented toward fishing out details about edges and exaggerating them.

Humans have extended this perceptual tendency into conceptual habit. We are constantly making conceptual distinctions—and often amplifying them. The habit is vital for our processes of self-definition and collective identification—to our having a reality. One tool that has greatly enabled our abilities to discern—our intelligence—is language. We use this flexible and powerful technology to weave possible worlds through naming, contrasting, likening, and other acts of association and dissociation.

There are different ways to think about the distinctions we use to organize our worlds. For example, through the past few millennia in the Western world, the prevailing belief has been that the distinctions drawn are accurate descriptions of the universe. In scientific terms, this belief has supported what might be called an attitude of dichotomization. Derived from the Greek, dikha+tomie, “two parts”, to dichotomize is to generate two mutually exclusive categories by imposing a sharp distinction. As discussed in more detail in chapter 7, almost all of modern mathematics and much of modern science has been framed by the assumption that the forms and phenomena that we encounter in this universe can be organized into unambiguous categories through processes of dichotomization.

Carving the world into nonoverlapping categories is not the only means of making discernments. Another method that has risen to prominence over the past few centuries is bifurcation. Derived from the Latin bi-+furca, “two-pronged or forked”, a bifurcation is a branching into two parts, rather than a breaking into two pieces. The purpose behind the branching image is to underscore and preserve the rationale for any distinction that is made—in effect, to foreground the fact that someone is making a distinction for some reason.

An example would probably be useful here. Consider that most fundamental of distinctions between BLACK and WHITE. As a dichotomy, BLACK/WHITE (note the slash to indicate a severing) might be interpreted in terms of the following Venn diagram:

There is no overlap. Objects and issues that are seen as appropriate to this particular sort of classification are understood to fall into one circle or the other, never both. By contrast, in terms of a bifurcation, BLACK and WHITE might be illustrated as a branching:

This sort of image prompts me to wonder about the concerns that underpin the distinction. For example, one reason to separate BLACK from WHITE is to classify phenomena that lack color.

A consequence of this manner of representation is that it always generates a new term—which, in turn, might be further examined as half of another bifurcation. ...