The Theory and Practice of Teaching

Peter Jarvis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134216406
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

An introduction to the techniques, contemporary theories and methods of teaching from facilitating problem-based learning to the role of the lecture, this book explores the issues that underpin interpersonal methods of teaching, and offers genuine insights. It will help teachers at all levels to understand the techniques that they can use in different situations, and willenable them to develop more effective teaching practice.

This fully updated second edition contains new material on e-moderating (teaching online) and its implications for teaching theory, issues surrounding discipline and teaching and the ethical dimensions of teaching. Additional topics include:

• the nature of teaching
• the ethics of the teaching and learning relationship
• the relationship between learning theory and the theory of teaching
• teaching methods, including didactic, Socratic and experiential and monitoring
• the issues of assessment of learning.

The Theory and Practice of Teaching will be of interest to anyone wanting to develop a deep understanding of the key themes and latest developments in teaching and is an ideal companion volume to The Theory and Practice of Learning.

Part I

Chapter 1
Teaching in a changing
world

Peter Jarvis

This book is about teaching in a learning society, in a completely different world to that in which the art and science of teaching emerged. Teaching itself has traditionally had a number of different meanings, as the Concise Oxford English Dictionary shows:

• To give systematic information to a person, (about a subject or skill).
• To practise this professionally.
• To enable a person to do something by instruction and training (to swim; to dance).
• To be an advocate for a moral principle (my parents taught me forgiveness).
• To communicate, instruct in a moral principle.
• To induce a person by example or punishment to do or not to do a thing (that will teach you to sit still; that will teach you not to laugh).
• To make a person disinclined to do a thing (I will teach you to interfere).

It may also be seen from these definitions that teaching has also had negative as well as positive connotations – indicating that sometimes people do not want to learn and have to be taught or that they will be punished if they do not learn. This is something that will occur again in the next chapter when we look at teaching style. Yet, it also contains moral overtones and indications that it is generally regarded as a good thing. However, this diversity of function has been increased dramatically over the past few years because the globalising forces in society and the rapid changes in knowledge, resulting in both the knowledge society and the learning society. It is interesting that the concepts of teaching mentioned about do not explicitly specify learning but, perhaps, the most significant aspect of teaching is in helping others learn.

This book seeks to analyse the nature of teaching in relation to the learning society. Its thesis is that the type of teaching will vary in relation to the status of the content (knowledge) being taught. We will examine first theories of the learning society from which we shall draw out a few points about the way that knowledge is changing. Finally, we will locate the changing nature of teaching in this context and by way of conclusion ask whether educational institutions are responding to the challenge.

Part 1: the learning society

The learning society is both a confused and a confusing idea. Indeed, one of the phenomena that makes society a society is a sense of permanence and patterns of behaviour. In other words, members of society repeat certain fundamental processes, like language and behaviour patterns and so non-learning is a feature of society (Jarvis, 1987). If learning either produces change or reflects it, then the nature of society is itself changing. This, we know to be the case, since change is endemic. But not everything is changing; there is still a degree of stability and permanence. There is both learning and non-learning.

Coffield (2000, p. 28) actually suggests that all talk of ‘the learning society will have to be abandoned rather than refined’ (italics in original); he says that there are simply too many modern and post-modern readings of the term for any general agreement on one approach or model to be possible. He highlights ten different approaches from the various research projects on which he ( p.) reports:

• skills growth
• personal development
• social learning
• a learning market
• local learning societies
• social control
• self-evaluation
• centrality of learning
• a reformed system of education
• structural change.

A number of things emerge from these ten approaches: first, that they are not different models of a learning society but merely different aspects of the society being studied; second, therefore, that they may be describing something of the fragmentation of contemporary post-modern society; third, they have neither a sophisticated nor an agreed model of learning on which to base the analysis which prevents genuine comparison of the fourteen projects that he reports. Since all the projects were conducted in the United Kingdom, I want to argue that it is still possible to talk about a learning society, provided that we can agree on a definition of learning, with each of these projects concentrating on but one aspect of the whole. Indeed, these models are actually Western cultural models and societies such as Hong Kong, which is very committed to the creation of a learning society and in which a tremendously high proportion of the adult population attend post-secondary education, provide other perspectives on this form of society.

On further examination into Coffield’s ten types of learning society we can see that even within a single society, the forces of change do not produce standardised responses, and nor should we expect this to happen since we have not postulated a deterministic model of society. Nevertheless, we can see that it is possible to classify his types into a smaller number of categories:

• personal development – personal development, self-evaluation, centrality of learning;
• utopian – social learning, structural change;
• planned development – social control, skills growth, reformed system of education, local learning societies;
• market – learning market.

From the above that it is possible to argue that those aspects of the learning society that fall under personal development are the natural outcomes of learning. They are about the individual rather than the social, so that we do not need a learning society concept to understand them, although they will have some social outcomes. Nevertheless, when personal development issues involve planning and the control of that development, then they fall into the category of planned development – or strategy. The other three are about vision, strategy and market, and they are distinctly different from each other.

However, one aspect of a learning society not really touched upon in Coffield’s report is that of learning in the risk society (Beck, 1992) – what Beck calls reflexive modernity. Coffield (2000, p. 22) makes an implicit reference to this when he claims that the phrase ‘We’re all learning all the time’ is anodyne. The fact that we are being forced to learn all the time is actually the very basis of the learning society rather than an educative society which underlie the other three approaches. Only those who have disengaged from society are not really being forced to learn a great deal, and even they are still exposed to some of the forces of change. Much of this is either unplanned or uncontrolled, or both, but it is an aspect which is central to contemporary society – for the learning society is also reflexive modernity (Jarvis, 2000). We see this form of learning as a crucial dimension of the learning society, but one that cannot be controlled and this is important when we consider the complex nature of teaching in a society where all forms of learning are occurring in an uncontrolled and uncontrollable manner.

We suggest, therefore, that there are four dimensions to a learning society, which we will examine: vision, planning, reflexivity and market, starting with the vision.

Vision

Early writers about the learning society, Hutchins (1968, p. 133) for instance, started with an educational vision that everybody would have access to part-time adult education throughout the whole of their lives, but it would also be a society which had ‘succeeded in transforming its values in such a way that learning, fulfilment, becoming human, had become its aims and that all its institutions would be directed to this end’. For him, the learning society would be the fulfilment of Athens, made possible not by slavery but by modern machinery.

It was the realisation of the computer revolution that led Husen (1974) to very similar conclusions. Husen (1974, p. 238) argued that ‘educated ability will be democracy’s replacement for passed-on social prerogatives’. He recognised that the knowledge explosion would be fostered by a combination of computers and reprographics and he (p.) foresaw the possibility of ‘equal opportunities for all to receive as much education as they are thought capable of absorbing’. Despite Sweden’s long history of adult education, Husen still regarded the learning society as being educational and based on an extension of the school system.

There are reflections here of Dewey’s (1916, p. 51) claim that:

It is commonplace to say that education should not cease when one leaves school. The point of this commonplace is that the purpose of school education is to insure the continuance of education by organizing the powers that insure growth. The inclination to learn from life itself and to make the conditions of life such that all will learn in the process of living is the finest product of schooling.

In a more recent book on the learning society, Ranson (1994, p. 106) suggested a similar picture:

There is the need for the creation of the learning society as a constitutive condition of a new moral and political order. It is only when the values and processes of learning are placed at the centre of polity that the conditions can be established for all individuals to develop their capacities, and that institutions can respond openly and imaginatively to a period of change.

The vision of these authors, and others who have written on this topic, is of a ‘good society’ that is both democratic and egalitarian; one in which individuals can fulfil their own potential through education and learning throughout the whole of their lives – something for which they have been prepared for in school.

Planning

There have been many policy documents published by European governments in recent years, all illustrating the strategies that they regard as important in the development of the learning society. It is unnecessary to refer to many of these here, but they also recognise the significance of the knowledge economy.

In the introduction to the OECD report (1996, p. 13), the following occurred:

Success in realising lifelong learning – from early childhood education to active learning retirement – will be an important factor in promoting employment, economic development, democracy and social cohesion in the years ahead.

In the European Union White Paper (1995, p. 18), a similar claim was made:

The crucial problem of employment in a permanently changing economy compels the education and training system to change. The design of appropriate education and training strategies to address work and employment issues is, therefore, a crucial preoccupation.

In the British government report The Learning Age (DfEE, 1998, p. 13) it was clearly stated that the learning society is something to be created and that it will be educative in nature:

In the Learning Age we will need a workforce with imagination and confidence, and the skills required will be diverse: teachers and trainers to help us acquire these skills All of these occupations...demand different types of knowledge and understanding and the skills to apply them. That is what we mean by skills, and it is through learning – with the help of those who teach us – that we acquire them.

Despite the inclusion of some rhetoric about learning enriching our humanity and even our spirituality and the democratic society, the main emphasis of planning in all of these documents is that its end-result will be the learner’s employability.

Reflexivity

The risk society (Beck, 1992) is one in which the complexities of the contemporary world make decisions based on certainty impossible, and uncertainty is introduced into an instrumentally rational world. There are now hardly any points of decision in individual or social life that do not offer alternative viable solutions, but there are rarely any such incidents that have only one certain unequivocal answer. Every decision is a risk, which Beck (1994, p. 6) sees as underlying reflexivity:

Let us call the autonomous, undesired and unseen, transition from industrial to risk society reflexivity (to differentiate it from and contrast it with reflection). Then ‘reflexive modernization’ means selfconfrontation with the effects of risk society that cannot be dealt with and assimilated in the system of industrial society – as measured by the latter’s institutionalised standards. The fact that this very constellation may later, in a second stage, in turn become the object of (public, political and scientific) reflection must not obscure the unreflected, quasi-autonomous mechanism of the transition: it is precisely abstraction which produces and gives reality to risk society.

(italics in the original)

That society has emerged in this way means that its leaders take risks when implementing ‘solutions’ to its problems because there is no necessarily proven answer. Consequently, there is always a need for it to confront itself about the outcomes of the decisions it makes, or fails to make. This is a reflexive society, one of the outcomes of which has been that people are forced to make decisions for themselves, often without having more than the everyday technical knowledge that we discussed in the third chapter to guide them. Individuals are forced to take risks, to learn and reflect upon their decisions, and so forth. They are also forced to adjust to the changes that occur in society as a result of whatever changes occur. As Beck (1994, p. 13) suggests, individuals ‘must produce, stage and cobble together their biographies themselves’. People must decide for themselves, adjust to social changes and keep on learning, either by doing and reflecting upon the outcomes or thinking and planning before the action takes place...