Teaching as a Professional Discipline

A Multi-dimensional Model

Dr Geoffrey Squires, Geoffrey Squires

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9781138983687
• eBook ISBN: 9781135701550
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

First Published in 2004. This book addresses one of the most basic but problematic questions in education- what do teachers do? After reviewing various paradigms of teaching- as common sense, art, craft, competence and so on- Squires goes onto to develop a theory of professional disciplines based on three common characteristics: instrumentality, contingency and procedural. He then uses this to construct a detailed a model for the analysis of teaching, both at the level of the course and the single class, and offers what they do? Ad how do they do it? The model is related both to the age-old theory practice and to contemporary research on professional expertise. The book ends by critically assessing its implications for current approaches to pedagogical research, teacher training, and the evaluation o teaching, both in the schools sector and beyond. Drawling on a wide of literature and grounded in work with practitioners going back over a decade, 'Teaching as a Professional Discipline' offers a highly original approach to our understanding of teaching which challenges current orthodoxies and sites teaching firmly in the context of other professions. By providing a clear and coherent framework, it enables teachers and lectures to reflect more systematically on what they do and helps create a common language for talking about everyday teaching issues, problems and decisions. Academically rigorous but accessibly written, it will interest not only researchers and policy-makers but practitioners in all sectors of education and indeed in other professions such as medicine, nursing and management.

Chapter 1
The Paradigm Problem

There can be few subjects, if any, that experience as great a degree of internal dissension as education. All disciplines, of course, have their tensions, to do with their scope, theoretical persuasion, methodology, application or other aspects of their practice. Academic life is a disputatious affair, and the historical longevity of the university as an institution may be due partly to the fact that it has found ways of managing conflicts that would leave a church in schism, fragment a political party, or drive a commercial company to the wall.

The tensions within education, however, reflect the very existence of the discipline and nature of the activity. They lead some people to doubt whether education is a proper discipline at all, as distinct from a collection of elements borrowed from other disciplines. And these tensions have practical as well as academic consequences. They place a question mark against the idea of teaching as a profession and undermine its credibility as a policy voice. They make the field peculiarly vulnerable to external pressures. And they lead to the sudden lurches and longer-term pendulum swings that typify educational practice, making it a prey to passing fads and fashions.

Many of these tensions concern what is taught and what ought to be taught—the curriculum. This is hardly surprising. The curriculum involves assumptions about the purpose of education, the nature of knowledge, the social context and the development of the learner, all contentious areas. It is also subject to more immediate political pressures to ‘do something about’ current problems of a moral, social or economic kind. There is a very substantial body of curriculum theory that helps us to analyse these various perspectives, claims and tensions, but the curriculum in practice seems destined always to remain an arena of conflict, reflecting as it does the unresolved issues of the society in which it exists.

However, there are also major disagreements about the process of teaching, the how rather than the what of education, and it is with these that this book is concerned. Such tensions often take the form of arguments about methods: whether the class should be taught as a whole or in small groups, whether lectures are preferable to seminars, or what the proper role of practical work is. In recent years, the development of educational and communications technology has added an extra dimension to such debates.

I shall argue in this book that such arguments are not only unproductive, but a poor way of thinking about teaching. After all, no other profession conceives of its work in terms of methods in the way that education does. Methods are involved inthe practice of medicine, engineering and the law, but doctors, engineers and solicitors would not dream of reducing their work simply to this. Methods are means: they are ways of doing something, but they are not that something. One needs to look beyond methods and media to understand teaching.

This book will set out a multi-dimensional view of teaching in which methods and procedures constitute one, but only one dimension of the activity. The basis for this approach will be spelled out in Chapter 2, on The Nature of Professional Disciplines. I shall argue that all professional activities have certain basic characteristics, which suggest three basic questions: what do professionals do? what affects what they do? and how do they do it? The implications of this approach for teaching will be worked out first at the level of the course as a whole, in Chapter 3, and then at the more detailed level of the single class or teaching session, in Chapter 4. The two remaining chapters will explore the consequences of this approach for our ideas about professional expertise in general, and the training of teachers and evaluation of teaching in particular.

These ideas do not, of course, simply take vacant possession of an empty dwelling. The literature on teaching is rich in theories and models of teaching, and in addition practitioners bring with them their own personal and often implicit ‘theories’, which shape their practice (Marland, 1995). It is important to examine these first, not only to situate this approach in terms of current writing in the field, but to engage with what people already think and do.

One final point before we embark. I have referred only to ‘teaching’ rather than the ‘teaching and learning’ that seems to be de rigueur these days. Clearly, ideas about teaching must relate to ideas about learning, because the purpose of the former is in some way to enhance the latter, and there will be references to research on learning in various parts of the book. However, it is important to remember that learning goes on all the time, whether people are being taught or not. There is now widespread evidence from studies of adult learning (Brockett and Hiemstra, 1991; Candy, 1991; Gear, McIntosh and Squires, 1994; Tough, 1971) that the learning that goes on within the confines of formal education and training is only the visible tip of a much larger iceberg of ubiquitous, informal, self-directed learning. Learning happens anyway; it is teaching that is the special case, and it is for that reason that I shall focus on it, although as we shall see, the wheel will eventually come full circle.

Paradigms of Teaching

Despite the fact that Masterman (1972) identified 21 different senses in which Kuhn (1962) used the word ‘paradigm’, it has entered academic currency as a useful term for describing not only the way in which something is conceptualized or viewed, but the whole package of beliefs, values, attitudes and practices that goes along with that view (Burns, 1995). It will be used in that general sense here, to explore a number of different views of teaching, and the practical consequences of those views. Indeed the term is particularly apt in an educational context, because itaccommodates some of the complexities of the relationship between abstract formulation, practical activity and cultural context that characterize the field.

For Kuhn, the task was to describe how one scientific paradigm came to displace another one, a process for which the Copernican revolution provided an exemplary case study. However, the problem in teaching is closer to what Masterman describes as ‘multiple-paradigm science’ (1972, p. 74). Here, as in some other social science fields, the problem is to explain not how one paradigm displaces another, but how a number of conflicting or competing paradigms somehow coexist. As Masterman notes, ‘far from there being no paradigm, there are on the contrary too many’ (ibid.). Thus I shall explore seven different paradigms of teaching that, while they may rise or fall in terms of relative influence, lay permanent claim to being good ways of thinking about teaching. They are: teaching as a common-sense activity, teaching as an art, teaching as a craft, teaching as an applied science, teaching as a system, teaching as reflective practice, and teaching as competence.

Each of these is an important paradigm, with a substantial literature attached, and it will be possible here only to sketch out the main features, strengths and limitations of each one. Each of them draws on sources of thinking that go well beyond education, an interesting fact in itself, but one that again will point up the limits of the analysis here. And the fact that each is treated discretely should not be taken to mean that there are no links and overlaps between them, or that one cannot draw on them eclectically, and find ways of accommodating elements of several of them. That would be to assume that teaching is an entirely homogeneous activity— that all teaching is somehow the same—and it may well be that different paradigms resonate with different teachers in relation to different aspects of their work.

Teaching as a Common-sense Activity

The idea that teaching is a common-sense activity is not one that is frequently heard in education faculties, for obvious reasons, but it is sometimes voiced by colleagues in other university departments. How else can one explain the fact that lecturers who have had no teacher training nevertheless produce their annual crop of graduates, and sometimes gain high teaching quality assessment ratings in the process? Not only that: the common-sense paradigm has a perfectly respectable theoretical pedigree, and reflects the wider attachment to common sense that is a marked feature of English culture.

The common-sense paradigm of teaching rests on two different kinds of argument. The first goes back to the experience of schooling. Few things in society are actually mandatory, as distinct from forbidden. We do not have to vote; we do not have to get married; we do not have to join the army; we do not have to work (at least not yet). But we do have to go to school (or make alternative arrangements). This massive act of social compulsion, which is without parallel in terms of scope, length and intensity, means that we all have extensive experience of being taught, and (so the argument goes) when it comes to our turn to teach others, have some ideas about how to go about this, what to do and what not to do. The parts ofteaching that we have to learn are those that are usually hidden from us as pupils or students, such as the administrative arrangements and the assessment process (which is typically wrapped in mystery).

The second basis of the common-sense argument is that the things we do when we teach are, by and large, not all that different from what we do in everyday life. We organize resources, plan events, explain things to people, ask and answer questions, guide, encourage and criticize. So all we need to learn when we begin to teach are those things that we do not normally do to others, such as lecture them or assess them, and we can pick these up through a process of trial and error or by apprenticing ourselves to a more experienced teacher. The other thing we do not normally do (with the exception of giving children’s parties) is to cope with a room full of young people, and so classroom management is another skill that has to be acquired. But (so the argument goes) this can be picked up as well. Thus run the common-sense arguments for a common-sense approach to teaching, and they are sometimes applied to other ‘non-technical’ activities, such as management or social work, as well. And if teaching really is a matter of common sense, then it follows that most people can or could do it, since most people, though not all, have common sense (it is after all common rather than universal).

However, there is a more intellectualized version of this argument, which stems from the concept of common-sense knowledge. The central endeavour of phenomenology has been to explore not only how the world appears to us and how we experience it, but what cognitive or perceptual structures we bring to these appearances and experiences. In the work of Schutz (1970) and Berger and Luckmann (1971) in particular this has led to a preoccupation with the structures and characteristics of common-sense knowledge in the everyday ‘lifeworld’ (Lebenswelt). Such knowledge is described as pre-theoretical, in that it tends to take the world for granted rather than systematically analysing, questioning or theorizing about it—although ‘a-theoretical’ might be a better term, since commonsense knowledge is not merely the precursor of organized knowledge, but exists in its own right. Common sense involves a certain stance vis-à-vis the world, which tends to accept and work with what is there. It is basically pragmatic or operational in its emphasis on actions and their consequences and places limits on the usefulness of analysis or reflection (‘we don’t want to get into all that’). It appeals to the shared wisdom of the tribe, although it allows for some individuality and innovation within those limits. And it is primarily concerned with know-how rather than knowledge; things are typically experienced in terms of their use (cf. Heidegger’s notions of ‘equipment’ and ‘tools’) rather than as static objects of perception (Heidegger, 1962, pp. 95–9).

Another characteristic of common-sense knowledge is that despite the way it is sometimes phrased (‘everyone knows that…’) it does not aspire to strict generalization or universality; it tends to focus on the situation at hand. It is localized, specific, episodic and concrete. It addresses particular events, situations, problems. However, it is also associated with the notion of cumulative experience, and hence the idea that people can acquire it over time; young people typically lack it, and old people tend to lose it. One can thus see why it holds attractions for writers such as Hargreaves who conceptualizes teaching in terms of ‘professional common-sense knowledge’ (Hargreaves, 1993, pp. 86–92). Teaching, he argues, is localized, specific, episodic and concrete, so the knowledge we need to do it is largely of that kind.

One objection to Hargreaves’ notion lies in the apparent contradiction between the concepts of profession and common sense. Professions are specialized, expert, closed, sometimes almost hieratic bodies, whereas common sense is by definition common property. Professional work seems to involve a range of kinds of expertise, including formal, organized knowledge and identifiable procedures and skills. We may use our common sense or judgment to synthesize and regulate these, but there has to be something to synthesize and regulate in the first place. Professional work may involve common sense, but it is hardly reducible to it.

A different kind of objection relates to the ways in which common-sense knowledge is stored and passed on, which is often through examples, cases and stories. The term ‘anecdotal’ used to be a term of mere abuse in the social sciences, but more recently the importance of anecdotes as ways of sharing and storing communal knowledge and know-how has become more widely recognized. An interesting question here is how far the current emphasis on narrative research methods in teaching (see the various articles in Gudmundsdottir, 1997) should in fact be located within a common-sense paradigm. Anecdotes may play a particular role in specialized ‘communities-of-practice’, that is groups of people who are involved in the same kind of work, such as teaching (Brown and Duguid, 1996).

However, the problem with anecdotes is that one cannot disagree with them, as one might disagree with an argument. One cannot deny the story: one can only counter it with a different story. Thus anecdotal knowledge tends to carry a heavy normative charge, an implicit expectation about concurrence and assent. This makes it difficult for the practitioner to stand back from the practices of the group, and bring his or her analytical powers to bear. It can seem churlish to demur.

It was noted earlier that not only can the common-sense paradigm be defended in theoretical terms, but as something that reflects the wider society. The notion of common sense plays an important role in English-speaking and in particular English culture; England is, after all, the country of common land, common law, common prayer, a House of Commons. It would be interesting to explore the parallels with other countries: the French do not use sens commun much, and their bon sens appeals more to ‘reason’; the German Bauernverstand has connotations of peasant wisdom or cunning; the Finns talk about ‘countryman’s sense’. In England, common sense seems to represent a permanent celebration of the demotic, a safeguard against ideological and other forms of intellectual extremism, a social bond that unites everyone from the prime minister down, perhaps a continuing inheritance from the old Anglo-Saxon culture with its moots and jury system where—at least in the historical mythology—the ordinary had its value and ordinary people had their say. And of course it serves to keep ‘so-called experts’ in their place.

However, it also sets limits to thought and analysis. To say that something is a matter of common sense is effectively to stop the debate, to rule out further discussion. Common sense tends to be conservative and reproductive in its instincts. It legitimizes a suspicion and ignorance of theory, abstraction, ideas, the intellect and the intellectual. It uses but debases the native English tradition of empiricism, of the appeal to experience. In what other country do people use the phrase ‘purely academic’ so dismissively, to mean of no real importance? In these respects, the common-sense paradigm may in the end impede our thinking about teaching and learning, as it does about much else.

Teaching as an Art

The idea that teaching is an art is both old-fashioned and quite recent. On the one hand, it is associated with some older books on the subject, such as Highet’s The Art of Teaching, which first appeared in 1951 and went through many reprints (Highet, 1963). In such accounts, teaching appears as a rather subtle and ultimately mysterious activity. It is strongly associated with personal qualities and characteristics; significantly Highet begins with a long section on ‘The Teacher’ and has a later section on ‘Great Teachers and their Pupils’. While teaching involves methods, it also involves qualities—such as liking the subject and liking the pupils— and ‘abilities’ such as memory, will-power and kindness. Although Highet does not argue that teachers are born, not made, and indeed talks about ‘teaching’ in everyday life, there is a strong sense that selection or self-selection may be as important as training. Indeed, whereas the common-sense paradigm dismisses training as unnecessary, the art paradigm in its extreme form dismisses it as impossible. Teaching is a gift.

A somewhat different perspective on the art paradigm is offered by Axelrod (1973) in his book The University Teacher as Artist. Here, teaching is seen as the elaboration of style; style not as decorative adjunct or superficial appearance, but as the necessary and authentic expression of a way of doing or being. If the weakness of the art paradigm lies in its vagueness and openness to mere posturing—teaching as ‘performance’—some of its truth surely lies in the notion of style as a coherent expression of identity. The teacher-as-artist does what he or she is.

As Delamont (1995) makes clear in her useful overview of subsequent thinking, the art paradigm has been marginal in most of the mainstream psychological and sociological literature on teaching. However, there are exceptions. Although Jackson does stress the importance of common sense (Jackson, 1986, pp. 10–23), his emphasis on the uncertainties of teaching and on its potential transformative role perhaps places him closer to the art paradigm than any other, although such pigeon-holing hardly does justice to his thinking. Delamont also mentions the work of Gage, which will be referred to later, but probably the most explicit formulation of the art paradigm is that of Eisner. He argues that teaching can be seen as an art in four senses: (1) that it is sometimes performed with such skill and grace that it can be described as an aesthetic experience, (2) that it involves qualitative judgements based on an unfolding course of action, (3) that it is contingent and unpredictable rather than routine, and (4) that its outcomes are often created in theprocess (Eisner, 1985, pp. 175–6). Tom, however, draws a distinction between the fine arts and practical arts, arguing that the latter provide a better metaphor for teaching, a point that will be picked up in the next section on craft (Tom, 1984, pp. 129–35).

However, beyond the work of these particular writers, there are reasons for thinking that the art paradigm has made something of a comeback in recent years. This is evident in subtle shifts in the discourse of research on teaching, and the increasing use of words such as ‘artfulness’, ‘artistry’, ‘repertoire’ and ‘improvisation’ in describing the process of teaching. The current interest in ‘narrative’, which was discussed earlier in relation to the common-sense paradigm, may also be linked to the art paradigm, although narrative is itself a problematic notion in a good deal of modern writing, and its use in educational research seems curiously old-fashioned. In one sense, these words constitute negative or residual elements: signs that rational, technical or sc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• Chapter 1: The Paradigm Problem
• Chapter 2: The Nature of Professional Disciplines
• Chapter 3: Analysing the Course
• Chapter 4: Analysing the Class
• Chapter 5: Theory, Expertise and Practice
• Chapter 6: Research, Training and Evaluation
• References