Teaching What They Learn, Learning What They Live

How Teachers' Personal Histories Shape Their Professional Development

Brad Olsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317250760
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

"Cogent, interesting, and provocative."-from the foreword by Ann Lieberman Teaching What They Learn, Learning What They Live explores the multiple social, political, and epistemological domains that comprise learning-to-teach. Based on a study of eight beginning English teachers at four different university teacher preparation programs, this book examines the ways in which beginning teachers' personal dispositions and conceptions combines with their teacher preparation programs' professional knowledge and contexts to form their understandings of and approaches toward teaching. Brad Olsen recasts learning-to-teach as a continuous, situated identity process in which prior experiences produce deeply embedded ways of viewing the world that go on to organize current/future experience into meaning. Since experience shapes learning and everyone acquires different sets of experience, no individual teacher's knowledge is exactly like another's. Yet Olsen shows also that the process by which a teacher constructs professional knowledge is common: the what of teacher knowledge varies, but the how remains the same.

1

Theories of Knowing, Learning, and Teacher Knowledge

We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.

—Anaïs Nin

This new millennium finds teacher learning researchers and teacher educators inside several related theoretical revolutions. Within cognition and epistemology, vestiges of the earlier knowledge transfer model are being replaced by constructivist and poststructuralist views, suggesting that learning is a process of creating knowledge rather than acquiring it and is a social process as much as an individual one. Within teacher education and professional development, political debates about who “owns” teacher knowledge have combined with empirical debates about how teachers think and learn, resulting in the ascendance of the teacher as a significant knowledge producer and knowledge-in-use (or “local” knowledge) as a leading unit of analysis. In many teacher education and school restructuring policy arenas, teachers are now considered less as passive, interchangeable automatons in education and more as active, unique persons with great influence over how student learning unfolds. And, finally, the emerging visibility of embedded, reciprocal relationships among all aspects of life has eroded boundaries between the personal and professional, between private and public, self and other, and has therefore called for a research paradigm holistic enough to consider the teacher as whole person, over time, in context. I view this present convergence of research traditions as creating a landscape fertile for ecological investigations of how teachers develop and use their professional knowledge. As well, this convergence requires that we consider knowledge, and teacher knowledge, differently than has typically been the case.

In this first chapter, I trace the theoretical traditions of inquiry, which, taken together, lead to a conclusion that teacher knowledge is holistic, situated, and continuous. It is my belief that epistemology, cognition, and social theory have currently arrived at a place where one might conceive of knowledge as deriving from multiple aspects of a teacher’s identity, embedded in practice, and iteratively structured. Yet, those three related evolutions have not been direct, nor have they reached their termination. The discussion is organized to illustrate currently held notions of teacher epistemology and cognition in the United States as having a Western history structured by dual tensions between empiricism and rationalism—in other words, between situatedness and abstraction—yet simultaneously influenced by Eastern notions of holism and harmony, as well. I then continue by presenting my own empirically derived formulations of teacher knowledge, teacher learning, and the role of prior knowledge in teacher development. In presenting these formulations I hope to offer some philosophical and historical grounding that will enrich understandings of how teachers think and learn in situ. My goal is both to present the theoretical foundation upon which the subsequent chapters sit and to convince educators to adopt a view of teacher knowledge that is broader, deeper, more holistic, and more spiraling than the often linear, abstract, discrete views of knowledge typically enacted (consciously or not) in teacher education and the research on learning-to-teach.

Related Traditions of Inquiry Inform Research on Teacher Knowledge

In the 1970s, as backlash against what they believed an overly behavioristic approach to the study of teaching, several education theorists initiated research and discussion on teacher thinking, therefore introducing cognition to the modern research movement on teaching, as well as foregrounding knowledge as a legitimate object of analysis (Clark and Yinger 1979; Good, Biddle, and Brophy 1978; Shavelson and Stern 1981). These researchers began asking the questions “How does teacher thinking relate to student achievement?” and “What does an effective teacher know?” Teacher knowledge researchers picked this up in the 1980s and started asking, “What is teacher knowledge?” “Where does it come from?” and “What does a teacher need to know?” (Clandinin 1985; Feiman-Nemser and Buchmann 1985; Grossman 1990; Shulman 1986a, 1987; Wilson, Shulman, and Richert 1987). Simultaneously, since Kurt Lewin (1948), action research—or teacher research (Cochran-Smith and Lytle 1993; Stenhouse 1975) has been challenging existing views about where and how, and by whom, teaching knowledge is created, often arguing that teacher knowledge derives from teachers practicing in classrooms as much as (or more than) from professors writing in universities.¹

Underneath these modern lines of inquiry sit a century of research on cognition and about 2,500 years of epistemology, which together explore the fundamental question “What is knowledge?” Thinkers from Plato and Aristotle, through Kant and Locke, to Dewey and Lave and Wenger have examined whether knowledge is empirical or rational, created or acquired, forged in the mind or blended together in social settings—or whether such a thing as knowledge even exists. Ways of conceiving teacher knowledge have been refined to a point where entire debates turn on whether, in obtaining knowledge, one “constructs” it, “produces” it, “acquires” it, or “internalizes” it. During 1998–2000, for example, Educational Researcher published five articles weighing in on whether, to describe learning, the accurate adjective is “situated” or “cognitive” (Anderson et al. 2000; Cobb and Bowers 1999; Kirshner and Whitson 1998; Korthagan and Kessels 1999; Putnam and Borko 2000). I do not mean to imply that games of semantics have replaced substantive debates on knowledge; in fact, I intend the opposite: Our understanding of the topic has evolved to a sophisticated level where we can now distinguish among subtle, yet fundamental, characteristics of the knowledge process.

And, finally, contributions from critical theory have introduced consideration of how language, power, and cultural positioning reciprocally influence ways in which humans reflect on and enact knowledge, thinking, and learning (Bourdieu 1991; Fairclough 1989; Foucault 1970, 1977; Lyotard 1984/1979; Popkewitz and Brennan 1998). This loosely connected cluster of theories highlights active roles that status; social relations; economics; language; history; and the resulting fragile, asymmetrical balances of power play in any aspect of social existence—even going so far as to reject the very notion of an individual (Foucault arguing that nothing exists outside of the always social discourse [1970], or Bakhtin’s belief that all we say has been previously authored [in Holquist 1990]). Applied to teacher knowledge, this critical theory perspective not only informs critical pedagogues and action research advocates who use power relations to help explain whose teacher knowledge becomes valued, but also beckons education researchers to more thoroughly and ecologically examine how an individual both influences and is influenced by others and by past and present sociocultural contexts (Apple 1999; Cochran-Smith and Lytle 1993, 1999).

Epistemological Theories of Knowledge

Epistemology came into being in 350 BC with Plato’s Meno (Gardner 1985). Plato viewed knowledge—or “wisdom,” from the Greek sophia—as knowledge of the whole, whereas Aristotle viewed wisdom instead as knowledge of causes. Plato believed we cannot have true knowledge of anything that is in a constant state of change—for example, the world of our senses—and so he conceived of knowledge as an understanding of the ideas out of which things are created: the deeper “stuff” of which all things are a part. This understanding later came to be called “reason.” As Jostein Gaardner (1996) wrote: “[For Plato], first came the idea of ‘horse,’ then came all the sensory world’s horses trotting along like shadows on a cave wall.” Plato therefore viewed knowledge as reason-based.

Aristotle, however, believed Plato had it backward. Aristotle agreed with the distinction between a tangible thing (the horse, if we pick up Gaardner’s example) and its essence (the idea of “horse”), but believed that the idea, or essence, of the thing followed from having first perceived several tangible examples of the thing. That is, the idea “horse” is simply an aggregated concept arising out of our actually having seen a number of horses. For Aristotle, then, knowledge was the grasping of the idea of the thing out of enough examples of the thing itself. In his view, sensory experience precedes any grasp of the concept. Aristotle viewed knowledge as experience-based. Aristotle was an early empiricist, whereas Plato was an early rationalist.

This fundamental distinction between knowledge as deriving from an internal logic, or reason (Plato’s rationalism), and knowledge as deriving from external sensory perceptions, or experience (Aristotle’s empiricism), has structured epistemological debates ever since. It is a binary worth keeping in mind, as it proves useful when exploring the research on teacher development, because it assists us in distinguishing between competing theories of education. For example, many conceptions of the learning-to-teach process that rely primarily on learning from classroom or personal experience can be seen as deriving from empiricist notions of knowledge. John Dewey’s (1933) instrumentalism is one such model. Paulo Freire’s (1970) authority of experience is another. Both can be described as Aristotelian in their epistemology, whereas, on the other side, “banking” (Freire 1970) and “mind-as-storehouse” (Cuban 1993) conceptions of teaching, or George Counts’s social meliorist movement (Kliebard 1995), are more Platonic.

Descartes’s Mind/Body Dualism

Arguably, much of the last 350 years of philosophy and the whole history of social psychology have been an attempt to undo Descartes (Popkewitz 2001). René Descartes’s (1637) famous binary separating mind and body established at least the perception of a split between knowledge and experience, between internal thought and external world. Accepting this split means accepting that mind (and therefore thinking, meaning, and knowledge) exists separately from the body (a corporeal realm that includes sensation, experience, and the external world). Descartes argued that body is an extended entity existing in reference to space and time, whereas mind is an ethereal, unextended “thinking thing” that requires neither space nor time to exist (Descartes 1637). Epistemology has forever since been trying to rejoin the two phenomena and convince us that no binary exists—that existing in the world and making meaning are united.

Immanuel Kant (2003/1781) disputed Descartes by arguing that knowledge must be understood as a product of both understanding (or logic) and experience (or sensation). He posited the parallel existence of two realities: a noumenal one, existing independent of human sensation, and the phenomenal one we perceive through our senses. Yet, the only one we can know is that latter one—one we ourselves construct from the relationship between thought and sense, from the empirical phenomena we perceive and the rationalist meaning we attach to them. Kant synthesized Plato’s rationalism and Aristotle’s empiricism. Put another way, and what Kant himself termed the Kantian Revolution (after Copernicus’s famous paradigm shift), human understanding does not derive from the material world; the material world is created out of human understanding. “Kant placed knowledge in the mind of the active thinker,” wrote Howard Gardner (1985, 59). In making this point, Kant collapsed the binary between thought and experience and introduced the notion that thought creates experience as much as experience creates thought. The two occurrences, he believed, are inseparable.

Martin Heidegger (1997/1927) also rejected the Cartesian mind/body dualism, believing that humans do not live apart from existence—observing and interacting with it—but rather humans are their existence, creating the worlds they inhabit out of their interpretations of events. Heidegger held that as we go through life, we are continually evaluating and reevaluating, assembling and reassembling our selves in an attempt to carve out an authentic existence in relation to things-that-are (i.e., the real situations we encounter). Epistemology becomes ontology. Interpretation constitutes reality. The present always links to the past, because each of us remains in part bound by our previous assemblages of a self while we reconstruct our selves within any present experience. The present, Heidegger argued, involves a dynamic interplay of past, present, and future. It is related to a past-made-present and a future-already-possessed in the prediction of events and consequences encountered.

A similarly constructivist explanation of knowledge and being comes from psychologist George Kelly (1955, 1963). Kelly begins with the elegant (but gendered) premise that “each man contemplates in his own personal way the stream of events upon which he finds himself so swiftly borne.” He proceeds to argue that an individual approaches any experience already in possession of a transparent organizing pattern or template (he uses “construct”) of the world that is used to perceive, interpret, and make meaning of experience. Because humans are inherently scientists (unconsciously possessing desires to “predict and control,” he wrote), an owner continually—and automatically—tests his or her construct for its accuracy to predict events and interpretations and seeks to revise the construct if needed. However, because we cannot help but evaluate our constructs using our own constructs, they become self-reinforcing—always concluding that what we perceive the way we perceive it is, in fact, what exists.² Such, he argued, is how we move through the world. He argued that each of us creates our particular way of interpreting events of the world unconsciously from early lived experiences. These interpretive patterns he called “life themes.” He argued that, because one’s life themes produce specific ways of interpreting experience, biography and knowing are inextricably linked.

Descartes was wrong, but his dualism was a crucial step in the evolution of epistemology. It allowed others to come along and—by refining, refuting, or replacing his ideas—move the philosophy of knowing forward. In fact, most learning theory in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has been an effort to collapse Descartes’s split: Dewey’s pragmatism attempted such a unification (Dewey 1933, 1938, 1956; Mead 1964/1932; Popkewitz 2001), as did Lev Vygotsky’s notions of language and society (Vygostky 1978), Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive equilibration (Piaget 1954), and most versions of constructivism (Cobb 1994; Fosnot 1996).

Knowledge is best viewed as a process not a product, and individuals make meaning through a negotiated interpretation of experience inside personalized constructs (coming from previous life experiences), contextual positionings (coming from the embedded sociopolitical relationships that mark any context), and their social interactions with others (and the language that facilitates these interactions). Meaning-making exists as a dialectic among self, other(s), situation, and purpose(s)—and means that knowledge is always a holistic, continuous, and recursively constructed assemblage of past and present, personal and professional, stance and understanding.

Eastern Notions of Knowledge

Eastern philosophy conceives of knowledge very differently and in ways that recommend a more ecological formulation.³ Rather than viewing knowledge through the linear, binary lens that Greek (and later, European Continental) philosophy used, Eastern thinkers have traditionally embraced a more holistic, less linear conception of knowledge that views meaning as wider and rounder than the narrow frame of “reason” or “intellect.” Harmony, not understanding, is the intent. In approximately the sixth century BC, Lao-tzu taught that the “way of life” (tao) is beyond reason—that wisdom (or enlightenment as it might more accurately be termed) consists of a deep appreciation for the interconnectedness of all things, for the value of the present, and for the insignificant role of the individual inside the more important, all-inclusive web of the “Nameless Reality” (Kornfield 1993).

This Eastern strand of influence is significant here not only for providing a counterweight to offset the linear logocentrism of Western philosophy concerning knowledge, but also because several educational thinkers have incorporated pieces of this more holistic conception of knowledge into their theories of teacher knowledge. Emphases on the present, on resisting boundaries and categories, and on acute awareness are all Taoist tenets found in some current conceptions of teacher knowledge. Robert Tremmel (1993) has used Zen Buddhism to reconceptualize teacher reflection by foregrounding the present, the simultaneous, and the holistic in how teachers might think about their practice. James Moffett’s Buddhist beliefs sometimes emerged in his professional work as he reconceptualized relationships between people and ideas within learning (Moffett 1992, 1994). Donald Schön’s (1987) theory of reflection-in-action offers an implicit (and probably inadvertent) nod to Buddhism, when it eliminates distinctions between knowing and acting to instead posit a simultaneous, seamless process of considering phenomena, formulating theory, and acting. These holistic framings support a focus on identity as the unit of analysis within human development and professional learning; this book’s conclusion offers more on this.

The notion that knowledge consists of more than simply what can be intellectually grasped or linearly represented has played an important, if minority, role in Western research on what a teacher should “know,” and from where this knowledge emerges. In fact, Fred Korthagen and Jos Kessels’s (1999) use of “gestalt” in teacher learning (discussed later in this chapter) reflects this very conception. These ideas help form the understanding that knowledge...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Teachers, Teaching, and Teacher Education
• Chapter 1 Theories of Knowing, Learning, and Teacher Knowledge
• Chapter 2 Liz: One Beginner Assembles a Teacher Self
• Chapter 3 Life Themes: Personal Experience as Influence on Knowledge Construction—Azar, Kimberly, William, and Liz
• Chapter 4 Conclusions and Implications for Practice and Research in Teacher Education
• Appendix Studying Teacher Development—Research Methods and Methodology
• References
• Index
• About the Author