Insights Into Teachers' Thinking And Practice

Christopher Day, Maureen Pope, Pam Denicolo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135387600
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

A collection of original research conducted by scholars from Europe and North America. The papers consider the evolution of research on teachers' thinking, the nature of professional knowledge, and philosophical and moral dimensions of teachers' thinking.

Part I

Reflections on Teachers’ Thinking and Action

Chapter 1

Knowledge and Discourse: The Evolution of Research on Teacher Thinking

Freema Elbaz

This chapter will examine the evolving discourse of teacher thinking research with a view to discerning the directions in which it has been developing. Three themes will be treated: voice, the opposition of the ordinary and the extraordinary, and story. ‘Voice’ is a term used increasingly by researchers concerned with teacher empowerment; the term expresses an implicit critique of the prevailing tendency in earlier studies of teaching to reduce the complexity of teachers’ work, and to privilege theoretical formulations over the concerns of teachers themselves. The second theme picks up on a tension between the concern to give an account of good teaching, the ‘extraordinary’ work of the master or expert teacher, and to find what is special in the ‘ordinary’, the work of every teacher in all its familiarity. Finally, ‘story’ is another important focus: as researchers try to present teachers’ work and experience in authentic ways, they make use of accounts, portrayals, narratives, biographies, portraits, conversations; the term ‘story’ seems to me to be particularly appropriate to our methodological and epistemological search.

The chapter deals with the language of teacher thinking research, and does so in terms of the perspective elaborated by post-structuralist theoreticians such as Foucault (1970, 1979) and Reiss (1982). On this view one looks at the ongoing praxis of a given community or cultural group through the various forms of discourse which make up the social text of that group; the particular signifying practices of a given group are both constituted by and constitutive of the discursive field within which members of the group live and function. Another way of putting it is that ‘language provides the conceptual categories which organize thought into predetermined patterns and set the boundaries on discourse’ (Bowers, 1987). Further, the ability to determine these conceptual categories constitutes power, and groups who have the possibility of ensuring that significant aspects of their own reality are reflected in prevailing conceptual categories thereby exercise power over other groups whose situation and experience does not have this legitimacy as expressed in names, concepts and definitions of their reality. This perspective was drawn upon by Bowers in an important study of the conceptual underpinnings of liberal educational thought, a philosophical work which has implications for our own concerns since Bowers sees the teacher as potentially exercising ‘a significant form of control over the language process (over how initial conceptual maps are constituted and thus will influence subsequent thought and political behavior)’, and thus considers that teachers ‘have a responsibility for contributing to the conceptual foundations of communicative competence’ (p. 154). Thus the perspective I invoke here has a bearing not only on our understanding of what we have been up to as researchers but also on our educational purposes generally. The chapter will be looking at some of the categories in terms of which research in our field has been organized, and will ask where these categories come from and what part of reality—whose reality—they reflect. The chapter does not, however, constitute a review of the research; rather, the three themes were chosen because they seemed to be both interesting and important, and to make it possible to look at a fair selection of examples from the research (though some areas within the research on teacher thinking have not been attended to).

The analysis of discursive practices calls for different kinds of questions from those we are accustomed to asking. First of all we need to ask quite directly about the mode of discourse in the field: around what concepts and distinctions is the field organized, what terms are used and what assumptions, commitments and values underlie this choice of terms? Second, what places are available in the discourse for possible subjects, and who can assume these various subject functions (Foucault, 1979)? Third, what can we say about the way that this discourse is produced and about how it exists in the world: in what situations do we as researchers work with teachers, in what forms do we publish our work and where does it circulate, what is the impact of the particular institutional practices which attend it, and what consequences are there to its presence, whether in book, article, conference presentation or report form?

Each of the three themes would allow us to raise a variety of questions, but they nevertheless seem to map on, in a rough way, to the three sets of questions. Under the theme of ‘voice’ I will be looking at the way that the language of research on teacher thinking allows us to examine and present the concern of teachers in their own terms. The second theme, ‘ordinary versus extraordinary’, brings into focus the teacher as subject. The third theme, ‘story’, relates to the various forms in which we carry out and present our work.

Voice

Town maps registered the street as Mains Avenue, but the only colored doctor in the city had lived and died on that street, and when he moved there in 1896 his patients took to calling the street, which none of them lived in or near, Doctor Street. Later, when other Negroes moved there… envelopes from Louisiana, Virginia, Alabama, and Georgia began to arrive addressed to people at house numbers on Doctor Street. The post office workers returned these envelopes or passed them on to the Dead Letter Office. Then in 1918, when colored men were being drafted, a few gave their address at the recruitment office as Doctor Street. In that way, the name acquired a quasi-official status. But not for long. Some of the city legislators…had notices posted in the stores, barber shops, and restaurants in that part of the city saying that the avenue running northerly and southerly from Shore Road fronting the lake to the junction of routes 6 and 2 leading to Pennsylvania, and also running parallel to and between Rutherford Avenue and Broadway, had always been and would always be known as Mains Avenue and not Doctor Street.

It was a genuinely clarifying public notice because it gave Southside residents a way to keep their memories alive and please the city legislators as well. They called it Not Doctor Street, and were inclined to call the charity hospital at its northern end No Mercy Hospital since it was 1931…before the first colored expectant mother was allowed to give birth inside its wards and not on its steps. (Morrison, 1977, 3–4)

The notion of ‘voice’ has been central to the development of teacher thinking research. The term itself does not appear all that often; Butt and Raymond (1987), for example, speak of facilitating ‘the expression of the teacher’s perspective and voice’ Others are interested in ‘The teacher’s perspective’ (Janesick, 1982; Tabachnick and Zeichner, 1986), the teacher’s point of view or ‘frame of reference’ (Clark and Peterson, 1986); Feiman-Nemser and Floden (1986) identify this area of research in terms of a concern with getting ‘inside teachers’ heads’. The concern with voice is also implicit in the work of all those who are committed to the empowerment of teachers (Smyth, 1987). As in other areas where the notion of ‘voice’ is used (feminist research, Gilligan’s 1982 redrawing of the terms of moral development), the term is always used against the background of a previous silence, and it is a political usage as well as an epistemological one. Teacher thinking researchers have all been concerned to redress an imbalance which had in the past given us knowledge of teaching from the outside only; many have also been committed to return to teachers the right to speak for and about teaching.

In the passage quoted above, Morrison brings into focus several aspects that are central to our concern with the teacher’s voice: the first is the power to name, to define one’s own reality and to determine, at least in part, the way the rest of the world must relate to that reality; the second is the power to care for and sustain oneself and others, to maintain the dignity and integrity of those named. Having ‘voice’ implies that one has a language in which to give expression to one’s authentic concerns, that one is able to recognize those concerns, and further that there is an audience of significant others who will listen. The passage also underlines a sense in which voice is already there, already critical, regardless of whether the outside world allows it expression; this should be borne in mind lest we lose sight of the fact that our role as researchers is primarily to remove the obstacles to the expression of teachers’ concerns.

In the effort to allow for the expression of the teacher’s voice and point of view, researchers have experimented with methodological innovations such as joint writing (Butt et al., 1988), interviews followed by mutual construction of a narrative (Connelly and Clandinin 1986, 1987), collaborative analysis of teachers’ journals (Tripp, 1987) as well as more familiar methods such as those of personal construct theory (Pope and Scott 1984). While these directions are both interesting and fruitful, it is important to realize that ‘who writes’, whether it is biography or autobiography, joint authorship or negotiated accounts, is only one aspect of the issue. The more basic question is, what kind of discourse is being used, and to what extent does it make possible the authentic expression of teachers’ experiences and concerns. The issue of ‘voice’ should not be reduced to the question of who speaks, nor should we be satisfied with a superficial impression that the concerns of teachers are being expressed. If it has been difficult for teachers to voice their own concerns, this is primarily because the discourse of teaching, and of educational research generally, does not allow for the formulation of these concerns. Lampert (1985) provides an example of this when she suggests that teachers do not deal with problems to be solved but rather confront dilemmas, and that any teaching situation simultaneously presents a number of conflicting issues with which the teacher must find a way to live. This formulation underlines the fact that the teaching situation is not in any sense linear, and it is difficult in educational talk, influenced as it is by liberal, western assumptions that problems have solutions and progress is an unquestionable good, to talk about functioning in a complex setting where problems do not have single solutions towards which one moves in a linear fashion.

Thus to a considerable degree the language we have had available to talk about teaching has been both inadequate and systematically biased against the faithful expression of the teacher’s voice. In recognition of this inadequacy, researchers have shifted their concern from accounting for the mere complexity of teaching to a concern for the authenticity of our accounts of teachers’ knowledge, in short with a concern for voice. This has generated efforts to present the teacher’s knowledge in its own terms, as it is embedded in the teachers’ and the school’s culture. Much of the search for terms by means of which to conceptualize teachers’ knowledge is a series of compromises in which the researcher proposes terms that do some justice to teachers’ knowledge while still being acceptable in the academic context with its requirement of explicit context-free rational discourse. In a sense much of the research on teacher thinking has been a series of developments towards an adequate conception of voice and an ongoing attempt to give voice to teachers.

Looking back over the research as it has evolved, what can we now say about the teacher’s voice, and about the way that the language of teacher thinking research gives expression to the teacher’s voice?

One starting point for almost all teacher thinking research has been the concern for the tacit aspect of teachers’ knowledge and for the paradox implied by this quality: while knowledge must be made explicit if the teacher’s voice is to be heard, we thus risk turning teachers’ knowledge into researchers’ knowledge, colonizing it and thus silencing the voice of the teacher. Some of this risk is voiced by researchers. Brown and McIntyre (1986) write, ‘Although we started from the assumption that there is such a thing as teachers’ professional craft knowledge, we knew that for the most part this knowledge is not articulated. Was it sensible, therefore, to plan to undertake an investigation of what pupils and teachers construed as good teaching?’ And Yinger (1987) asks, ‘What would become of efforts to codify this knowledge, to write it down? Would the form of written language distort and destroy its character, stripping it of its meaning and vitality?’ (p. 309). Despite the risks, many researchers have made the effort to uncover the tacit dimension, and have attended to a number of aspects of the tacitness of teachers’ knowledge: it is nonlinear, it has a holistic, integrated quality, it is at least partly patterned or organized, and it is imbued with personal meaning.

Non-linearity

Since tacit knowledge is not always coherent and consistent, the teacher’s voice ought to be able to speak in several registers at once; teachers’ knowledge is not logically sequenced and many concerns are being entertained at any given moment. Psychological models of problem-solving or decision-making seem to make it particularly difficult to account, except in negative terms, for this non-linearity of teacher thinking. For example, it is claimed that ‘the ability of teachers…to process all of the information in their environment is limited…people tend to process information sequentially (i.e. step by step) rather than simultaneously…Teachers appeared to lack information-pro-cessing strategies to make complete, specific diagnoses’ (Shavelson and Stern 1981). Yet when research begins from an examination of the teaching situation itself rather than from a theoretical position, this non-linear quality of teacher thought comes to the fore quickly. For example, Lowyck (1986) suggests that the distinction between preactive, interactive and postactive teaching does not fit the way teachers view their work. As suggested above, the notion of ‘dilemma’ (Lampert, 1985) is a useful term to reflect the dialectical quality of teachers’ knowledge.

Integration

Polanyi tells us that tacit knowing is ‘an act of indwelling’; for example, in using a stick to feel one’s way in the dark, ‘we attend subsidiarily to the feeling of holding the probe in the hand…The sensation of the probe pressing on fingers and palm, and of the muscles guiding the probe, is lost, and instead we feel the point of the probe as it touches an object’ (Polanyi and Prosch, 1975, p. 36). In some such way, it may be that a teacher concerned with, say, the emotional climate of the classroom, becomes unaware of the specific actions taken to enhance the climate yet feels what is happening in the classroom and thus reads the emotional barometer most carefully from moment to moment. This integrated quality of tacit knowing may of course mask errors in the teacher’s reading of situations. Olson (1986) gives the example of a group of teachers who seemed to be systematically unaware that their loose, pupil-directed strategy for teaching computer literacy was not working as well as they thought, but suggests that there is no paradox in this: the teachers’ concern with the ‘expressive’ domain took priority, and their sense of pupil enthusiasm and their own enhanced image were integrated to give a tacit view of a successful program.

Patterning of Complexity

The concern with the complexity of teachers’ knowledge leads to the search for a ‘language of practice’ which will allow us to understand how teachers cope with the complexity of their work (Yinger, 1987). This concern for and appreciation of complexity could be seen as simply a matter of identifying all the variables, but it seems more fruitful to look at it in terms of how the whole performance is organized: some of it is ‘scripted’, i.e. ordered in terms of patterns (Yinger, 1987), routines (Leinhardt et al., 1987), or cycles (Connelly and Clandinin 1985).

Personal Meaning

One of the guiding questions of much research has had to do with the sense-making processes by which teachers invest their work with personal meaning. What is interesting is how teachers come by particular conflicts or dilemmas rather than others, and how they come to elaborate the particular scripts and routines they do use, what meaning these structures have for them. While teachers probably have explicit knowledge of some or even most of their routines, they are less likely to have explicit knowledge of all the meanings attached to the routines or of their sources. Giving expression to the personal quality of teachers’ knowledge has not been a simple matter; as Eisner (1988) points out, ‘the research language that has dominated educational inquiry has been one that has attempted to bifurcate the knower and the known’ (p. 18), such that teachers’ concerns come to be spoken of in a detached and dispassionate way: coping with th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Reflections on Teachers’ Thinking and Action
• Part II: Case Studies of Teachers’ Practice
• Part III: Innovations in Thinking and Practice
• Notes on Contributors
• Subject Index
• Author Index