Autobiography and Teacher Development in China
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Autobiography and Teacher Development in China

Subjectivity and Culture in Curriculum Reform

W. Pinar, Kenneth A. Loparo, W. Pinar, Zhang Hua

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eBook - ePub

Autobiography and Teacher Development in China

Subjectivity and Culture in Curriculum Reform

W. Pinar, Kenneth A. Loparo, W. Pinar, Zhang Hua

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About This Book

This is the first investigation of the roles of autobiography in teacher education to be informed by concepts and examples from China, Europe, and North and South America. Unique and timely, this volume addresses multiple movements of teacher education reform worldwide.

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Information

Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan
Year
2016
ISBN
9781137382405
Topic
Didattica
Subtopic
Formazione dei docenti
C h a p t e r 1
On Teacher Development
Zhang Hua
Introduction
“For every student’s personal development” and “for every teacher’s professional growth” are two sides of one question. Curriculum reform in basic education and the reform of teacher education are interdependent and reciprocal. China’s New Curriculum Reform of basic education has been underway for 14 years. It has now entered a key stage of “re-start.” How to reconstruct teacher education from a panoramic view of theory, practice, and policy is a crucial task of educational reform in China.
If we say that the basic nature of New Curriculum Reform in China is educational democracy, and if its fundamental aim is to emancipate every student, teacher, and school from the rigidity of a top-down centralized system, then educational democracy should also be the value pursued by China’s teacher education.
China’s teacher education is still lost in the mold of Kairov’s pedagogy, and deeply branded by “old education.” It suffers the following three severe problems.
First, the nature or vocation of a teacher is still regarded as a “knowledge transmitter,” and teacher education is deeply involved in the conception of knowledge transmission. Kairov’s pedagogy is essentially the pedagogy to process and shape human beings’ minds by the top-down, outside-in procedure of ready-made knowledge transmission (Zhang, H., 2010). From the perspective of such pedagogy, knowledge is transmitted by persons in educational situations. Teachers never participate in the process of knowledge creation. From this point of view, education and teaching processes are teachers’ only “working process,” not a “knowing process.” Just as the famous Chinese educational scholar Professor Wang Cesan said, “In short, as for teachers, teaching is not their knowing process, but their working process. When we discuss the knowing issue in teaching, we need not discuss teachers’ knowing” (Wang, C., 1985, p. 136). “Emphasizing knowledge-transmission is the essence or vocation of teaching in basic education” (Wang, C., 2008, p. 9). Whereas “knowledge transmission” is the essence of schooling and teaching, there will never exist true inquiry, problem-solving, and knowledge creation in schooling. So, the fundamental problem and the moving mechanism of China’s traditional education are (a) to make school teachers knowledge transmitters by depriving teachers’ professional autonomy and creative rights, then (b) to degrade education and teaching as only a knowledge-transmission process, and (c) to realize the aim of controlling every student’s mind.
Second, teachers’ professional literacy is formed by the skills of knowledge transmission, and teacher education is immersed in skill training. Traditional teacher education is instrumentalist and focuses on skill training; it assumes that teacher literacy is formed by those skills or competences enabling teachers to impart knowledge. These skills can be instilled, trained, and internalized from outside in.
Third, teachers’ knowledge-transmission process observes its rules; it can be scientifically controlled, and so teacher education becomes a technicism. From the traditional view of teacher education in China, not only do teachers transmit textbook knowledge intact to students, just as postmen deliver mail, but also teachers’ transmitting process itself should be strictly and efficiently controlled. Why so? This educational view believes in only one correct or effective model or method of knowledge transmission. If we adopt behavioristic psychology, engineering, or other principles of behavioral science, the knowledge-transmission process can then be effectively controlled. According to this educational view, teacher education is the one way to effectively control teachers’ behaviors. Information technology is widely applied to the control and training of teachers’ behaviors. This strengthens the technicist tendency in teacher education.
These tendencies of knowledge transmission, skill training, and technicism in teacher education not only deprive teachers of their creative rights, but also repress teachers’ liberal personalities. They strongly hinder educational democratization in China.
Understanding the essence and value orientations of teacher development, allowing teacher education to become the process for developing each teacher’s subjective and critical consciousness, capacities for theoretical reflection and practical creation, teachers’ independent personality and social responsibility, and then realizing the integrity of teachers’ professional development and liberal development constitute the basic reconstruction steps of teacher education in China.
Teacher Development Research in China and the World
As a research field, teacher education is varied and complex. Just as Henrietta Schwartz said, “It is fair to say that no single, unifying theory of teacher education exists today, and, therefore, preparation and research modalities are flexible frameworks rather than tight conceptual models” (Schwartz, 1996, p. 3). Nevertheless, we can explore the historical development of teacher education and teacher development research based on value orientations and the related professional images of different teacher education theories.
Before the 1970s, the dominant teacher education theories were characterized by technical rationality and interest. Their basic hypotheses are as follows. Human behaviors are manipulative and controllable. Teachers are in need of teaching science or technology to effectively control students. Teacher education is the process to train teachers to master teaching science or technology. Teacher education is an empirical-analytic science, aiming at finding objective laws of teacher education and thereby effectively controlling the process of teacher development. Teachers as technicians was the professional image of such teacher education. The related practice is teacher education as “technical education,” which has training teachers’ teaching skills as its core. In the United States, the Tyler Rationale and its proceduralism inevitably led to “teacher-proof” curriculums, and its implicit teacher image is as a technician (Tyler, 1949). In China, Kairov’s pedagogy has been on stage for six decades. Under its influence, China’s pedagogy textbooks are basically teachers’ “workbooks” (Chen, G., 1998, pp. 42–48). These textbooks are not only in pursuit of technical interest as the reflection of mainstream ideology, but also a combination of technical rationality and centralized ideology. So, in China’s traditional pedagogy, the teacher’s image is not only of a technician, but also of a policy propagandist.
In the 1970s, teacher education in the Western world started to undergo a “paradigmatic shift.” Two tendencies emerged: one turned to a practical interest (epitomized by the work of Joseph Schwab); and the other went toward an emancipatory interest, evident in the work of those curriculum theorists who reconceptualized the field. Both were reactions against the technical interest in teacher education.
The fundamental hypothesis of teacher education theories that seek Schwab’s sense of the practical interest is that the nature of human behaviors is understanding and interaction. Through the interacting process between human beings and environments, human beings can understand, harmoniously coexist with, and integrate into environments. If the characteristics of control-based technical interest are the objectifications of environments and the subjectification of human beings is a dualism of subjects and objects—then understanding-based practical interest is inclined to treat environments as communicative objects and dialogical partners. Through continuous interaction, human beings and environments can generate immanent relationships and form an organic whole. So the basic character of this practical interest is against subject-object dualism and for intersubjectivism. If technical rationality reduces human action into tiny controllable, manipulative, and managerial parts, due to its reductionist epistemology that assumes that a whole can be divided into tiny parts and that the whole is equal to the sum of its parts, practical rationality treats a human action as a whole, “the cut-down hands are no longer human hands” (Hegel’s words; Hegel, 1991, p. 302). So, according to practical rationality, human actions should not be studied by the methods of division, infinite fragment, and sole quantity. On the contrary, human actions should be studied by the whole methodology of qualitative research. We might use field notes, audio or video recordings, and photographs, to name a few methods, to transform human actions into texts, and interpret and understand the meanings of these “action texts” (Grundy, 1987, p. 13).
On the perspective of practical interest, the teacher is a practitioner. Teachers’ professional literacy is gained by teachers’ understanding of their practical situations and reflections on their practical experiences when they are rooted in their situations. The core of teachers’ professional literacy is teachers’ practical and research abilities. The essence of teacher knowledge is his or her personal practical knowledge. Teacher education is a historical-hermeneutic science, which takes teacher education back to its histories, traditions, and practices, and to aim at understanding and interpreting practice. The fundamental objective of teacher education is then to nurture teachers’ abilities to improve their practice through a research or inquiry process: the teacher as a researcher, as a reflective practitioner. Owing to the intrinsic relationship between the teacher and curriculum, the paradigm crisis of the US curriculum field was accompanied by a crisis in the teacher education field. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, US curriculum scholar Joseph Schwab sharply pointed out that the basic way for the curriculum field to step out of the crisis would transcend “theoretical questions,” which were symbolized by Tyler’s Rationale, and make “the practical” as “a language for curriculum” (Schwab, 1969, pp. 1–23). When curriculum is practiced as the art of the practical, it is returned to teachers. Schwab further pointed out that teachers are both the agents of translating the curriculum and the commonplace of curriculum (Schwab, 1973, pp. 501–522). The teacher becomes the curriculum. Following Joseph Schwab, British curriculum scholar Lawrence Stenhouse also advocated the practical turn in curriculum and teacher education fields. Pointing at the control-based “objective model” in Tyler Rationale, Stenhouse raised “a process model” of curriculum development. When curriculum focuses on process, it forefronts teachers. Stenhouse further launched the teacher as a researcher movement, which has remained prominent in teacher education. Concerning the meaning of “the teacher as researcher” Stenhouse wrote:
Curriculum research and development ought to belong to the teacher and that there are prospects of making this good in practice. I concede that it will require a generation of work, and if the majority of teachers—rather than only the enthusiastic few—are to possess this field of research, that the teacher’s professional self-image and conditions of work will have to change . . . The idea is that of an educational science in which each classroom is a laboratory, each teacher a member of the scientific community. (Stenhouse, 1975, p. 142)
Teachers are examiners of all curriculum, teaching, and evaluation programs, and researchers of their own practices. In the 1980s, the famous American social scientist and educator Donald A. Schön judged that “technical rationality is the positivist epistemology of practice” (Schön, 1983, p. 31). Because technical rationality overlooks complexity, uncertainty, instability, uniqueness, and value-conflict of practical situations, it gives rise to the failure of professional education and the crisis of confidence in professional knowledge. Only if we encourage professionals to become reflective practitioners can they know-in-action, reflect-in-action, and reflect-in-practice, abandoning technical rationality, and convert professional education from failure to success. Schön wrote: “When someone reflects-in-action, he becomes a researcher in the practice context. He is not dependent on the categories of established theory and technique, but constructs a new theory of the unique case” (Schön, 1983, p. 68). The reflection-in-action epistemology of practice created by Donald A. Schön laid a firm foundation for the practical turn in teacher education. From Schön on, various thought tides turned toward the understanding of teachers’ personal practical knowledge—among them “narrative inquiry” and “action research” have been prominent in the teacher education field.
The fundamental hypothesis of teacher education theories, which seek emancipation, is freedom from the limits of environments and external restrictons. Freedom is not anything-goes but the integrity of autonomy and responsibility, choice and consequences. Emancipation must be based on awakened consciousness; it has to be realized by self-reflection. It also has to be realized through social cooperation and interaction. Emancipation has social equality, justice, and democracy as its fundamental significance (Grundy, 1987, p. 16). The famous German philosopher, founder of cognitive interest theory, JĂŒrgen Habermas, considers the emancipatory interest a pure and fundamental interest because it is rooted in human reason. Habermas wrote:
Self-reflection is at once intuition and emancipation, comprehension and liberation from dogmatic dependence. The dogmatism that reason undoes . . . is false-consciousness: error and unfree existence in particular. Only the ego that apprehends itself . . . as the self-positing subject obtains autonomy. The dogmatist . . . lives in dispersal as a dependent subject that is not only determined by objects but is itself made into a thing. (Habermas, 1972, p. 208, quoted in Grundy, 1987, p. 16).
So, the emancipatory interest aims at letting people cast aside dogmatism and false-consciousness, avoid reification and objectification, and regain freedom and autonomy. The technical interest oppresses and destroys human freedom because it objectifies human beings and their behaviors. The practical interest allows progress for human beings to practice freedom owing to its aspirations of understanding and interaction. But the practical interest can’t ensure human freedom because it lacks critical consciousness and thorough self-reflection. Consensual understanding might be false, deceivable, and become a new means of control (Grundy, 1987, p. 17). Only the emancipatory—rooted in human reason—is the spiritual foundation of personal freedom and social justice. So it is the highest value for human beings to seek.
On the perspective of the emancipatory interest, teachers are intellectuals with “independent spirit and liberal thought” (Chen Yinque’s words; Yu, Ying-shih, 2005, p. 434). I identify three tendencies of teacher development within the emancipatory interest. First, teachers should integrate individual spiritual freedom with social equality and justice. Through self-reflection and self-study, teachers can heighten self-consciousness and gain individual spiritual freedom. Through social criticism and empowering actions, teachers can develop critical consciousness and pursue social equality and justice. Teachers should locate self-reflection and self-study in social relations and cooperation. Meanwhile, they should start social criticism and empowering actions from self-reflection and self-criticism.
Second, teachers should integrate their lived experiences with academic study. One important characteristic of the teaching profession is that it is rooted in teachers’ personal lives and life histories; teachers use their whole bodies and minds to teach. Only when teachers root their work in their own lived experiences can they find meaning and spiritual freedom in their work. Teachers’ lived experiences develop through continuous reflection. Only when teachers root their lived experiences in intellectual traditions, and learn to conduct theoretical reflections and criticism, can they theorize their lived experiences, and develop critical consciousness and ability. Teachers’ self-formation is realized by the integrity of lived experiences and academic study (Pinar, 2009, p. 11).
Third, teachers should integrate reflection with action. Reflection involves criticism in order to reveal the social system roots, power roots, and cultural-historical roots that result in alienation of personality and social equality. Reflective action is practice based on self-consciousness and critical consciousness. Teachers can be empowered to realize personal freedom and social justice. The integrity of reflection and actions is praxis. Only when teachers transform education into praxis can they complete responsibilities and vocations of intellectuals.
From the perspective of emancipatory interest, then, teachers’ professional literacy represents the integrity of their free personality, critical consciousness, and praxis ability: teachers as intellectuals. The core of teacher development is self-knowledge and critical literacy. Teacher education is a critical science that emphasizes personal freedom, emancipation, and empowerment at its core. The aim of teacher development is to nurture teachers’ self-reflection and study, critical consciousness, and professional praxis.
Emancipatory-interest-oriented teacher education theory has two branches. The first branch is teacher autobiographical theory, which advocates developing teachers’ self-consciousness, independent personality, and spiritual freedom. In 1976, William F. Pinar and Madeleine R. Grumet published their landmark work Toward a Poor Curriculum (Pinar and Grumet, 1976), which initiated autobiographical theory in curriculum and teacher education fields. Pinar said, “Why am I a teacher? Why have I enrolled in this teacher-training course? What can it mean to be a teacher? These are questions whose answers are to be found in one’s past, one’s present, one’s images of the future” (P...

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