Redefining Teacher Development (Teachers, Teaching and Learning)

Redefining Teacher Development

Jonathan Neufeld

First published 2009 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2009. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © 2009 Jonathan Neufeld All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Neufeld, Jonathan. Redefining teacher development / Jonathan Neufeld. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. 1. Teachers—Training of—History. 2. Elementary school teachers—Training of—History. 3. Educational sociology. I. Title. LB1715.N463 2009 370.71—dc22 2009001498 ISBN 0-203-87446-3 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN13: 978–0–415–45431–5 (hbk) ISBN13: 978–0–203–87446–2 (ebk) ISBN10: 0–415–45431–X (hbk) ISBN10: 0–203–87446–3 (ebk)

For Andy Hargreaves One teacher developer

Contents

List of figures Preface and acknowledgements

x xi

PART I

Defining teacher development

1

1

3

The sociology of the school The rationale for teacher development 3 Basic assumptions: instruction and accommodation 4 Who is this person called schoolteacher? 6 Determinants of the occupational type 9 Forecasting the future of teacher development 13

2

The life of classrooms

16

Introduction 16 The culture of the school 16 The classroom as a learning machine 20 Teachers’ thought processes 22 The institutional life of the classroom 27 The sense that is non-sense 30 3

Schoolteacher: defining the problem Introduction 33 Lortie’s assumptions and methods 33 The objective uncertainty of school teaching 39 Articulating the teacher’s Kraft 42 “Good days” are still uncertain days 45

33

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Presentism, conservatism, individualism 48 Defining teacher development 50 PART II

Teacher development, consciousness, and thought

53

4

55

Development: a conceptual study of a modern idea Theories of human development relevant to teaching 55 Conceptual foundations of developmental theory 59 The natural evolution of teacher research 62 The modern doctrine of development-as-progress 65 Mathematics, scientific progress, and human development 71

5

Purpose, trust, and educational development

74

Pleasure, prosperity, and the subconscious 74 The truism of trust 77 Cognitive processes and the teacher’s personality 81 Lives of Teachers: “It is probably better this way” 87 6

The science of teacher thinking

90

The pre-scientific worldview and the basis for thinking 90 The scientific worldview and reflective practice 95 How teachers (should) think 101 The social psychology of thought 108 Reflective professional reasoning 112 PART III

The economics and narratives of teacher knowledge

117

7

119

Economics of educational reform Introduction 119 The ecology of economic waves: from inflation to depression 120 The common school, urbanization, and early childhood: 1784–1845 121 Manifesting destiny, capitalism, and education science: 1846–1898 123 Fordism, secondary schooling, and the Great Depression: 1899–1949 126 Sputnik, higher education, and the great society: 1950 to the present 129 Economic shock waves of the new world order: the twenty-first century 133

Contents

8

Sociology, classrooms, and economics as war

ix

137

Introduction 137 The Sociology of Teaching in a decade of depression 137 Schoolteacher in a decade of inflation 142 Life in Classrooms during the great society 144 Schoolteachers as soldiers of economy 148 9

Of narratives and knowledge

157

From scientific formation to an emotional vocation 157 Knowledge, teaching, and the foundations of formation 164 Emotion, commitment, and the response to vocation 172 Meta-narratives of teacher development 176 CONCLUSION

Teaching, learning, and the spirit of the future

181

10 Redefining teacher development

183

Introduction 183 Vocation: the spirit of economic prosperity 184 The logic and ethics of vocation 188 A religious experience of classroom life 196 Foretelling meta-practices of teacher development 203 Notes Bibliography Index

207 209 215

Figures

6.1 The pre-scientific and the scientific worldviews compared 7.1 The Kondratieff wave showing peaks and troughs associated with political or cultural events 7.2 The first Kondratieff wave: 1784–1845. Showing dominant “moods” for each economic phase 7.3 The second Kondratieff wave: 1846–1898 7.4 The third Kondratieff wave: 1899–1949 7.5 The fourth Kondratieff wave: 1950–present day 10.1 Formation and vocation: two logical and normative tendencies

99 121 122 124 127 130 190

Preface and acknowledgements

Daniel Lortie introduces Schoolteacher by writing that familiar sectors of society present special “problems” for the sociologist. The contemporary notion of the “schoolteacher” as “a curriculum problem” is endemic to university faculties of Education. Entire faculty departments devote their research and budgets to improving the quality and effectiveness of life in schools. All of us have been influenced by teachers. The schoolteacher thus becomes “our problem,” as Waller claimed in his groundbreaking book. In my book, however, it is not the schoolteacher that presents me with any problems to research. It is the research that I problematize. And in so doing, I challenge the methods that researchers have employed to develop teachers in schools. In many ways, I follow Lortie’s lead in analyzing this unique history. He outlined his method from pages viii to ix of Schoolteacher. To achieve fresh understanding, I penetrate the conventional definitions that have enmeshed teacher development as an object of study. Lortie’s use of “enmesh” portrays exactly the challenge posed by my kind of conceptual analysis. The definitions of teacher development have become entangled. These entanglements have, first, to be caught, grasped, so that they can be held up for examination. I grasp these knots in Part I, “Defining Teacher Development,” with critical readings of Waller’s, Jackson’s, and Lortie’s definitive texts. Redefining teacher development begins with the ways in which teachers were defined as distinctive occupational types of learners. Establishing these definitions is the subject of the first three chapters. Chapter 1 lays out the basis for how schools were first characterized by Willard Waller in 1932. Waller also introduced researchers to the occupational “determinants” that stereotyped teachers. Then, in 1968, Philip Jackson introduced readers to the elusive culture of the school and to how teachers processed their thoughts within that culture. Once these early definitions are isolated, I show how a mature network of concepts created the field of study that we now know to be “teacher development.” The big picture doesn’t come into plain view, however, until the borders of the conceptual framework become outlined. This finally becomes clear in 1975 with the publication of Dan Lortie’s Schoolteacher. In Chapter 3, I spell out how teachers became defined as objects of academic study. In Part II, “Teacher development, consciousness, and thought,” I focus on the “development” half of teacher development. I am assisted in this analysis by two leaders in the field. The first is Malcolm W. Watson, Professor of Developmental

xii

Preface and acknowledgements

Psychology at Brandeis University. Watson’s research provides the basis for historicizing development and its relationship to the history of science. Along with Watson, I base my analysis in Chapters 4 and 5 on the research of Daniel Robinson, Professor of Philosophical Psychology at Oxford University. In these chapters I show where the concept of “educational development” came from and how it pre-organized the ways in which educational researchers construe teacher development. In Chapter 6, I show where the scientific worldview of development came from with the help of James Lawler, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Buffalo. This worldview determines to a large extent how teachers’ thought processes were theorized. But the worldview itself is rarely, if ever, questioned and so redefining teacher development has to begin with critically challenging this entire view of the world. I end Part II by showing how Donald Schön actually began to do this very thing when he attempted to assist professionals in becoming more adaptive. In many ways, Schön’s work was more “post-scientific” than was ever appreciated during his time. In Part III, “The economics and narratives of teacher knowledge,” I critically question teacher research and its problematic allegiance to the economy. I spend two chapters, 7 and 8, showing how educational reform has always been tied up with economic trends, particularly when those trends spiraled downward into deflation and depression. Like Waller’s and Lortie’s, my book was researched and written during one of those downward trends – and a severe one at that. I believe research on education needs to develop an original perspective on the troubled relationship between economic and educational theory. It is especially time to free teachers in classrooms from the burdens of assuming that they are responsible for reviving economic vitality. Teachers in classrooms have always been laying building blocks for a sound economy in any case, if only indirectly. I make this point strongly in the last chapter. I’m acknowledging Hasan S¸ims¸ek, Professor of Educational Administration and Higher Education at The Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey for his analyses of economic and curriculum trends. S¸ims¸ek successfully melds Kondratieff economic wave-theory with educational reform movements. I adapt his synthesis to research teaching, assisted by Timothy Taylor, Professor of Economy at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. In Part III, I argue that teaching in its “development” has not always been theorized with teachers’ best interests in mind; this is also to say, not in the interests of pupils in elementary school classrooms. Specifically, I argue that there is an unfair challenge being leveled at teachers to become “soldiers of the economy.” This burden began during the Great Depression but it was especially pronounced during the economic hardships of the 1980s. I believe that the “Great Inflation” of the 1970s and early 1980s, as Samuelson has called it, was a turning point in the history of teacher education in America. This is why Schoolteacher is the basal classic in the history of this research. Lortie’s book was published just at the onset of this great shift in American economy. His book really created the field of academic study devoted to teachers’ continuing educational development. Current definitions of teaching and of development, however, like current models of economic development are no longer sustainable. The discourse on teacher’s

Preface and acknowledgements

xiii

continuing development is based on assumptions that have ignored essential elements of elementary school teaching. This has led to the creation of models of learning and development that favor knowledge and its formation at the expense of vocation and its generation. It also ignores some of the most basic ways in which teachers have always been developing. These ignored ways of learning have always been present throughout the history of this research. I show how they have consistently been shoved to the sidelines and treated as inconveniences to educational development. In the final chapter, I bring these anomalies to the forefront along with sources that enhance them from classical American Philosophy. This leads me to conclude that teachers are always developing in their education. But researchers have missed out on these developments, sadly for teachers and for pupils alike, mainly because they were blinded by science and by a belief that teachers needed to be reformed. Our assumptions only arose from the tradition that produced the research, not from the teachers themselves. This is why redefining teacher development is not very difficult or controversial. It just requires embarking with entirely different assumptions of what life in classrooms consists of. Therefore, I end the book with recommendations on how different assumptions would radically alter the field of study for teachers and for researchers. Like Lortie before me, it is my desire to “cut through” the hand-me-down definitions, assumptions, depictions, and interpretations which permeate the rhetoric of teacher development. Inspired initially by reading Waller’s Sociology of Teaching 20 years ago, I have tried to stress the importance of “insight.” But whereas Waller laid stress on social insight and its method, I lay greater stress on the insight that follows from skeptical reflection on concepts, ideas, and rhetorical language in research literature. In forging this research path, my research still lies in the tradition of Waller, Jackson, and Lortie. Like those pioneers, I have analyzed their persuasive interpretations to gain genuine insights into the nature of teaching as a distinctive vocation. No such study as this could exist, therefore, without the work of brilliant colleague-researchers who built the structure that helped me to analyze these texts. For this structure, I thank the numerous researchers who have dedicated their lives to the improvement of teachers in schools. They are to be found in the Canadian Society for the Study of Education, the American Educational Research Association, at Bergamo, and in the International Study Association for Teachers and Teaching. It was at an ISATT meeting in 1990 that I first met Michael Kompf on a cobbled street in Guildford, England. I am truly grateful for his mentorship and for his assistance in publishing this book. I thank my own teachers, Andy Hargreaves of Boston College, the late Michael Huberman of the Université de Genève and Harvard, and Peter P. Grimmett and Alan J. Mackinnon of Simon Fraser University. These individuals introduced me to the possibility of developing teachers as living objects of research. Then there were other individuals who led me subsequently to texts as living objects of research. By questioning the conceptual foundations of the language used there, they showed me that it is possible to envision alternative worldviews that might be more adaptive when coping with economic and social changes in the human environment. These were Frederick M. Dolan of the University of California at Berkeley, Hubert L. Dreyfus, also of Berkeley, and Charles Scott and John Stuhr of Vanderbilt

xiv

Preface and acknowledgements

University. John Stuhr was especially helpful in showing me how American Pragmatism is a path towards new understandings of teaching and learning. This is significant, given the role already played by the pragmatic tradition in theorizing teachers’ thought processes. David Goicoechea of Brock University’s Philosophy Department opened the way to an alternative understanding of myself with the methods of conceptual analysis. The influence of this friend and colleague runs throughout this book. Success in attaining any new perspectives in a field of study is always going to be relative, as Lortie cautioned over 30 years ago. I acknowledge this as well. Clearly, a text such as this has subjective connotations because any study of teaching by a teacher is an examination of the self-as-educator. My audience for the book is obviously practicing and would-be teacher-researchers. But since the objects of study for this book are elementary classroom teachers, I could not have written it without remembering the experiences and needs of undergraduate teacher candidates and practitioners who work in the classroom. In the end, therefore, what counts here is a new understanding of the person that the teacher is, can be, might be, and perhaps must be. And this cannot take place without a new understanding of the person that the researcher might be, and perhaps must be as well. Teacher development remains an important “human potential movement.” In this study, I demonstrate how that movement and its motion can take on entirely novel perspectives. That potential and that novelty were in the literature all along, waiting latently to be liberated; in other words, what’s new in this book was never really “new.” Waller, Jackson, and Lortie were foretelling the future of this research all along. These predictions just needed to be disentangled from within their studies. New perspectives can only be clarified when conditions permit their coming into presence for our view. These conditions are now at hand and are calling on us to respond. Current conditions, more than any time since the 1920s, call on researchers to begin researching and writing about teachers in fundamentally new ways. Now, in the twenty-first century, research on teaching and teachers has never been more urgently called for. Teachers are the key – they always were – as Kenneth J. Weber declared in 1982. Research into those “human levers,” as the means of gaining access and entrance into public life, as the mentors of social and economic freedom, and as the guides to liberation through “education” is the subject of this book.

Part 1

Defining teacher development

Chapter 1

The sociology of the school

The rationale for teacher development Research dedicated to the improvement of schoolteachers originates in the economic disaster that took place after the stock market crash of 1929. Three years after that calamity Willard Waller composed a radical sociological account in State College Pennsylvania that determined how teaching would be researched for 80 years. In particular, his account changed the way in which teachers would be conceptualized in American schools up to the present day. But Waller’s account is not really about the sociology of teachers and their development. His book is a humanization of the school institution as if it were a living organism with its own unique consciousness. This living organism lives in an economic world and Waller’s recommendations respond to the environmental challenges that faced school institutions in his economic world. Methodologically, Waller lays the basis for a curriculum by defining essential categories and by outlining an original problem for research. He locates instruction as an essential context for teacher education and isolates the accommodating effects of being continuously and constantly preoccupied with instructing children in classrooms. This continuous engagement is what determines the stereotype that he recognizes as “schoolteacher.” The typical traits that characterize the trade are manifestations of a particular style of leadership. The style is typical, because its origin lies in shock and trauma. These origins are exactly what make teachers’ personalities so solid in their formation and Waller typifies this solidity as a disorder. In prescribing learning for this type of stressful disorder, he personifies the teacher as an oppressed learner who deserves special educational attention. It is this diagnosis and prescription that determines the research agenda that endures to the present day. However, this entire lineage of research all but ignores its economic background. Instead, the research that Waller’s sociology inspires tends to focus on the psychology of teachers as specialneeds learners who are at great risk. This may have to do with the sociological perspective and its methods of examining institutions, roles, and activities, all of which Waller employs masterfully.

4

Defining teacher development

Basic assumptions: instruction and accommodation Social science was a highly innovative way of viewing the external world in Waller’s day. From his sociological perspective, the impersonal institution that we commonly call “school” is actually very organic in its relationships. In fact, schooling is a unity of interacting personalities. By calling it a “unity” Waller theorizes that the universal experience of schooling, teaching, learning, curriculum, and its administration could be broken down into separate interrelating parts. These internal dynamic relationships produce unifying organic functions. The school, for Waller, was like any organic body that functioned in a healthy way when all of its parts were performing in a healthy manner. Teachers, as one organ in this living system, were naturally of concern. This organic body was managed by a community of functions – we could call it a “consciousness” – and its systematized community of relations produced what Waller called a “we-feeling.” This feeling is much like how the organs or parts of our own body produce the “me-feeling” that individual human beings call consciousness. The life of the body was managed at every moment wherever and whenever teachers and pupils met communally in the process of giving and receiving instruction. Instruction is the breath, or life-blood, of the school. The life force and breath of the school circulates as instruction. The English word “instruction” comes from a very old fifteenth century word, which meant something like “to take ahead of time,” with the added sense of “to elevate, or hold up high.” Traditionally, instruction originally involved direction by someone who held something ahead of others for observation. This “before-handling” produced a pedagogical relationship between the one who held up the model and others who copied. In response, apprentices tried to imitate or emulate in the direction suggested by that model. To understand this, picture someone holding up a model and asking apprentices to copy it; or imagine someone pointing in a direction and expecting others to follow along on an indicated route. Learning by means of this “signing” demanded compliance with what was being directed. For this reason, Waller refers to the instruction of the school classroom as a kind of “despotism.” This sounds a bit harsh. But the word “despot” comes from domos, which the Greeks used in reference to what we call “a house.” Even more interestingly, the second half of that word descends from an ancient Sanskrit word poteAs, which meant “Lord of the house” (i.e. a potentate). And so in this sense, despotism really refers to how a figurehead presides over others in “a house of learning.” Obviously, responsibility comes along with this supervision. Oikonomos, in ancient Greek, from which we get the contemporary word “economist,” was the steward, manager, or superintendent of a farm, household, or state finances. The authority and responsibility that comes with teaching in a classroom, therefore, is similarly “economic.” Schoolteachers are laying the ground and preparing the basis for a sound and sustainable economy in their house of learning. And in this sense, Waller’s schoolteachers are indeed despotic. Basically, then, schools are authoritarian places where domination and submission really determine the dynamic relationships that make the school a self-conscious kind

The sociology of the school

5

of place. The giving and taking (compromise), the pushing and pulling (conflict) establish a basis for all pedagogical processes. But compromise and conflict are not the outcomes of primary interest for Waller. Compromise and conflict are only the means towards a more significant end. The most notable outcome of instruction for Waller is accommodation. The life force and consciousness of schooling is realized as an accommodation. And this is a very important point for understanding the way in which Waller analyzed the school sociologically. Accommodation is a social arrangement that is meant to prevent and reduce conflict as the basis for establishing security and order. Accommodation comes from an old Latin word that meant, “to make something fit,” “adapt into,” or “to make room for.” In social situations, accommodation is the foundation of public safety, national security, and even for environmental hygiene. Accommodation coordinates divergent interests and amalgamates divergence into a common unity. In other words, accommodation composes conflict and organizes compromise. In doing so, it has the effect of adapting and adjusting society to changing environmental conditions. It makes room for differences to “fit in” and, in doing this, accommodation promotes a sense of unity by incorporating differences into the whole system. And so in trying to articulate curriculum-consciousness as adaptive accommodation, Waller was ingeniously trying to articulate how schools could adapt and adjust to a worldwide crisis that was affecting everyone economically. In many ways, The Sociology of Teaching was a response to a nation faced with enormous risks. Waller’s book was an attempt to understand, accommodate and then to re-integrate an inclusive feeling of community into a struggling but integral American cultural institution. By analyzing the effects of instruction, he hoped to transform schools into more synthesizing instruments for social and economic sustainability. But to do this, it would be necessary to assimilate and accommodate the teacher in new ways as the figurehead of the school’s consciousness. In terms of such integration, accommodation is related to community. The reintroduction of community sought after by Waller was to take place by a process of “assimilation.” Assimilation is the same thing as incorporation into a body; in this case, the organic body of the school. Assimilating new forms of understanding, sentiments and attitudes, and incorporating new ways of interpreting memories and traditions – all these were supposed to produce just the correct balance of dominance and subordination into the struggling institution of the school. Since the school was an organic body composed of many parts and functions, assimilating new functions might lead to healthier parts that could be more adaptive to changing social and economic conditions. The processes that Waller prescribed determined educational procedures and measures to form and reform teachers in schools 80 years later. As Waller noticed, when political or economic processes are in a state of conflict, many interest groups use the school to pass biased truths on to unbiased younger generations. Schools, wrote Waller, lead children through a tunnel. Within that tunnel, interest groups pass their hands through the walls and try to touch the pupils that pass by to mark them. Many such interests and lobbies originated during the Great Depression. They include

6

Defining teacher development

professional reformers, political parties, sectarians, moralists, and labor unions. In contemporary terms, we could add evolutionists, creationists, corporations, public health and medical organizations, the military, or advocates of intelligent design to the list. Therefore, as Waller proposed, and as we still know today, the school is “shot through with accommodations,” another way of saying that the school is a nexus for social adaptation to environmental and economic challenges. These accommodations, like Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) metaphors that we live by, grow old with time to the point where their original purpose becomes entirely forgotten. But we keep using them and depending on them long after their original purposes are forgotten. The processes that accommodate become so indigenous to the institution that those who become socialized into them assimilate them without resistance. Newcomers just become accommodated into the cultural patterns of instruction. They become, literally, commodities of the institution. In becoming commoditized, all “occupations” within the school are just acts and processes of taking possession of distinct locations within the institution and playing the role of that function unconsciously. Incorporation into the occupation means being integrated into an unconscious unity, functioning as one of the many in the whole, and being an organic component of a body. One’s “type-casting” in the “play of school” and adopting the role of instructor involves becoming incorporated into the framework and daily work of the school. This concept of school culture that Waller introduced in the 1930s would become one of the most fundamental and important research assumptions for the next 70 years.

Who is this person called schoolteacher? A sociological perspective convinced Waller that teaching was not just a job – it was also a station in society that had its own peculiar status within a hierarchy. Teaching, as an occupation, locates a person in a position or rank in relation to all others, and this relative status is part of a social hierarchy that determines prestige in the eyes of others. The social position of classroom teaching thereby attains a relative value among other positions, stations, or jobs. Waller spends a great deal of time analyzing the person that the teacher is as “one other person” in society. In Waller’s cultural and historical context, assimilation had a special significance, for schools carried the mandate of amalgamating all others into one whole American society. Representatives of many diverse cultures were flocking to America’s shores during the time that Waller composed his book. In some ways, therefore, it wasn’t just an economic depression that was creating a crisis for America. In other ways, the nation was trying to cope with the kind of migrations that occur whenever labor or capital shifts continentally or globally. Currently, the American states of Michigan and Ohio are the two most affected by this kind of migration as labor shifts internationally and capital shifts virtually to Asia and Mexico. For Waller, it was essential to analyze the effects of instruction for the special purpose of responding to such economic migrations during the earlier part of the twentieth century (although during his time, these movements were corporeal and national). This urgency remains intact during the early twenty-first century.

The sociology of the school

7

Waller’s response to an environment of crisis and risk was to analyze stereotypical effects of trauma, crisis, and risk in one institution. “Stereotype” is a fascinating industrial word. It’s borrowed originally from ancient Greek when it meant something like “solidity.” For example, the ancient Greeks used the word stereo to refer to the quality of density. In contemporary terms, that ancient root has come to be translated as threedimensionality, as in the “visible form” of an object. Consider any stereotype to be a kind of typical copy. Basically, it’s some kind of a formation that’s identifiable by its unique type and is then “stereo-ed.” During the early stages of industrial mass production it referred to a process for making metal plates out of a mold. This process of stereo-typing involved forming papier-mâché molds, taking these mold casts and applying the molds to the formation of a metal cast, all for the purpose of mass producing more copies from that cast. Therefore, a “stereotype” is the solidifying process of mass producing identical forms. It produces copies that can be used as imprints that trace locations back to original points of origin (i.e. back to the mold or to the original model from which they originated). In analyzing the consciousness of the school, Waller becomes fascinated by the effects and processes that solidify the mass production of what we call “a teacher.” He is interested in how instruction is a mass-formation process that forms identifiable copies of the person that a teacher is. It’s almost as if there is some ideal image of what the teacher is and each individual teacher is one imprint, or one footprint back in the direction of what Waller calls “teacherishness.” Waller focuses on instructional processes as the means by which a teacher is replicated. He identifies this process as necessary leadership training. His goal is to point to the basic traits that determine the leadership of instruction. A military type of engagement typifies the route to mastering this unique type of leadership. That “route of engagement” is exactly what’s going to make it effective and solidify it as a strong tendency. However, that enduring course of learning is also what makes it resistant to change and to learning new ideas after accommodation becomes solidified. That’s because the leadership that the teacher has is encountered and practiced by an engagement that is not unlike the one practiced by the soldier in battle. Instruction singularizes the teacher, just like battle singularizes the soldier, because nobody truly understands the front-line of engagement except other instructors. Therefore, the personality of the teacher is mass produced by means of instructional practices and this production process estranges the teacher in relation to others. How is this seemingly so? Waller claims that members of the community at large disaffect teachers and he suggests that this forced isolation has the effect of dehumanizing teachers as they play out their stereotypical roles. We should expect that school teaching would integrate and incorporate the teacher. But on the contrary, Waller sees instruction as a marginalizing and discriminating process. Instruction leads to being set apart from the general population and results in loneliness. Such alienation can be depressing and create dysfunctional, coping strategies. To justify this controversial claim Waller envisions the community to be like a large sea with the teacher being like an island in the middle of that vast sea. Instruction is an insulating trade that makes teachers feel estranged and disaffected. He identifies one trait in particular that stamps the teacher obnoxiously: it

8

Defining teacher development

is the long-term effect of maintaining control over children in the enclosed classroom. Constantly maintaining self-control and control over others essentially defines the person that the teacher must be. And this enforced personality, for Waller, is somehow “fallen” from grace in the sense of being “less than normal” and depraved socially. This diagnosis prescribes curriculum prescriptions for teachers’ remediation for 70 years. The debilitating effects of negotiating control and mediating instruction is what produces a distinctive style of leadership. For Waller, leadership means, “defining the situation,” another way of saying, “establishing a context.” The definition of instruction and the establishment of discipline, when administered habitually, produce the longterm effects of the teacher-personality. Waller identifies two types of situation-definitions: institutional and personal. Personal leadership arises completely out of the prestige that is attached to being a leader. By contrast, institutional leadership arises out of the prestige that is attached to the role played by the person in that institution. Both expressions of leadership are prestigious, but Waller claims that instruction depends almost entirely on a teacher’s institutional leadership. The authority of instructional leadership demands that some gap, gulf, or distance be established between the leader and the followers much like in military contexts. In a word, it necessitates “despotism.” Recall what it meant when Waller referred to the teacher as a despot? Teachers understand very well what it means to have this kind of social distance from their pupils. In fact, teachers of all sorts require this kind of relative a-proximity vis-à-vis their pupils. Furthermore, all teachers are familiar with what it means to maintain discipline and this maintenance demands aloofness, as Waller observes correctly. What are the stereotypical traits that determine the prestige of the teachers’ institutional leadership? Waller identifies some of these signs, codes, or patterns that reside deeply embedded within the cultural practices of the institution. This takes place during the most controversial discussion in Waller’s book: the determinants of the occupational stereotype. What are the instructional and institutional patterns that determine the person that the teacher is, from Waller’s observations and analyses? He starts by stating that instruction does something to those who instruct and he establishes this debilitating process as “our problem.” By setting this problem in the plural Waller is identifying a problem that all society must allegedly share. It is social and it is economic. And as a shared, common problem its resolution would make schools more adaptive institutions as agents for social and economic reform in general. It would seem from this that Waller’s main interest is in schools and teachers, but he’s really posing much larger sociological questions: what does any occupation do to the person who follows it in a dedicated and prolonged way? What does it mean to occupy a profession and practice it to the point of mastery? Occupying a place in an institution and achieving status within that institution trademarks the body, he claims, and seals an impression in the mind of the tradesperson. This means that any profession eventually stereotypes recognizable patterns for the body, its behaviors, practices, and even its thought processes. In terms of stereotyping, the compulsion to remain at one’s station repeatedly, as if standing on guard, and then the compulsion to occupy that space in a disciplined way for long periods of time informs the person that does that. Much as a soldier of learning, the discipline of

The sociology of the school

9

maintaining and standing to attention and waiting for learning to happen, as Waller jokes, has a commanding effect on the one who does that. In doing so, the teacher conforms to an image over which they have little control because they must integrate their being totally into the intensive practices that shape them. In dominating and maintaining control an instructive consciousness transforms every relationship in the classroom, stereotypically casting everyone in the process. Waller interprets this transformation to be highly traumatic and the nightmare begins at the moment the teacher first decides to enter the classroom of instruction. So who is then called typically to undergo this traumatic journey, according to Waller? While Waller assumes that every occupation has some kind of entrance examination, teachers’ socialization is quite distinctive. He further assumes that all occupations traditionally attract typical personalities who are naturally attracted to them, such as medicine, law, engineering, and, of course, teaching as well. Furthermore, anyone who follows any given occupation is continuously thrown into similar kinds of social situations. And so to some extent, determining all occupational types is what Waller’s book is about. While Waller is sometimes criticized by teachers as being very negative and offering very unfriendly and unflattering interpretations, we have to remember what Waller was doing more generally. He is explicitly not ridiculing teachers. The Sociology of Teaching studies institutional patterns within the school as a totalizing kind of place. These determinants, Waller claims, make schools into places which cannot adjust very well to changing economic conditions. This is certainly very important, given the crisis that was overtaking America and the world in general at that time. In the early 1930s it was essential to theorize how institutions might be more adaptive and prevent what was to take place economically on a global scale. How could all institutions be more predictable to prevent what was, at that very time in history, degenerating slowly into a worldwide crisis? Crises that threaten nations often overtake them by surprise (i.e. Pearl Harbor; 9/11; the financial crisis of Fall, 2008). They strike in the midst of some unsolved mystery. For Waller, demystification begins by reforming the most important organ of the school’s body. Reformation will then begin by examining everything to do with the birth, health, and growth of teachers.

Determinants of the occupational type In terms of organizational theory, The Sociology of Teaching studies the pathologies of institutionalized curriculum leadership with the hope of attaining some kind of new vision for that leadership. Earlier in his book Waller refers to these pathologies as assimilation patterns, and these subjective patterns are what Waller also notes as being the traumatic learning encounters of teachers’ socialization processes. Traumatically learning to teach is a type of entrenchment not unlike the enforced learning of the soldier, according to Waller. Mysteries surround this learning-by-doing and these are problems that Waller believes all of us should recognize. What makes this especially grave is that these introductory processes damage teachers forever as continuing learners.

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Defining teacher development

Waller tries to solve this mystery by selecting economic standing as one important determinant of who selects the teaching occupation. In Waller’s day that economic standing would probably have been relatively low. In contemporary terms, however, this is only somewhat reversed. In any case, people in many economically developed countries choose teaching as a career for reasons other than relatively high salaries. They choose teaching because they want to teach. So consistently people tend to choose teaching for the exact reasons that Waller identifies in 1932. In America, since 2005, it’s been a swift path to get out of student-debt through the Teacher Loan Forgiveness Program. All this suggests strongly that teachers tend to be “security seekers” who quest after social and economic stability, an adequate pension, and benefits that are very family-oriented. They tend to originate from conservative sectors of society. For example, in the nation of Québec there’s a proverbial saying that teachers arise from bonnes filles de bonnes familles; translated literally as “nice girls from good families.” We cannot ignore the continuity between this kind of stereotypical folkloric image of the teacher and Waller’s thesis. In another way, Waller further refers to the way in which society objectifies the teacher stereotypically. Self-selection translates into selfdetention into the protective institution that restricts teachers from continuing educational development. The suggestion that teachers choose confinement predicts patterns that determine a research agenda for 70 years. Self-selection leads into self-detention because career-choice is rarely a rational decision for teachers. They do not choose institutional confinement but their calling to teach necessitates this detention. Like in Québec, people everywhere choose teaching due to family patterns, class traditions, or sometimes just because of what Waller calls wishful thinking. Whenever I ask teachers why they chose teaching as a career they almost invariably reply with the same phrase: “I wanted to make a difference.” Yearning to make that difference demonstrates teachers’ wishful longing to serve humanity, perhaps even to save humanity, by helping those in need. Teachers want to be needed; they long to be called into service by others. And so, later in the book, Waller logically compares teaching to church ministry or missionary evangelism. Perhaps revealing his own wishful thinking, he laments that the social standing of teaching is unfortunately low because persons who chose service as a career should be more respected and better remunerated. However, service and the search for security are undervalued when compared to entrepreneurialism and the self-made success of business enterprise. G. Bernard Shaw’s adage “those who are able do; but those who are incapable of doing, teach” remains current. And this is why, Waller claims, teaching is “a sheltered occupation.” It has to be protected as if vulnerable to some threat, because it’s a refuge for those personalities who are incapable of going it alone and on their own. Teachers depend on the institution and its privileges, its feigned dignities, its pensions, because they are incapable of being self-made. They lack personal leadership and have to rely on the institutional status of the office. And that’s another reason why their social standing is low in terms of its esteem. Teaching is for those who must retreat from personal responsibility and then compromise by being responsible for the care of others. But in retreating from the stress of that engagement, teachers face the stress of instruction and endure

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its traumatizing effects. It is to this traumatic consciousness that Waller eventually turns to portray teaching as a classic social disability. Why does learning to teach result in post-traumatic stress disorder, wonders Waller? To answer this, recall that stereotyping was related to the production of forms according to a predetermined model. In response to the deforming effects of instruction, Waller tries to prescribe alternative measures to the problems that he identifies so that teachers can be re-formed according to a new image. He begins by questioning how respect is garnered. Teachers’ dignity is cheaply bought. It doesn’t take very long to become certified as a classroom teacher in America and so teachers crave supplemental ways of demanding respect. Furthermore, he cites inflexibility, a stiff and formal manner, a lack of spontaneity and chronic inhibition as characteristics of a teacher’s didactic manner. All this comes about, he suggests, because classroom instructors know they’re pretending to be true professionals and so they compensate with an affected dignity. In describing their pursuit of dignity, it is not surprising that Waller identifies the weightiest social relationship and responsibility for the teacher as the teacher-pupil relationship. This power-convergence is the definitive source for all the teachers’ motives. The teacher must enforce real obedience in this relationship. Teachers must be aggressive in their dominion over the pupils and the inflexible requirement of this obedience must flow naturally from all the relations, which produce what he calls “the constant pose.” The teacher must force the group to adapt to his or her personality. For the teacher, all dignity originates from that command. This demand for respect is misinterpreted publicly as arrogant aloofness. To compensate for this, the teacher begs for subjective dignity in the public realm. Waller adds that this craving comes about because teachers, along with everyone else, are fully aware that their credentials were hastily attained. Not so in other professions such as dentistry, medicine, or law, where the duration of training and apprenticeship is long and arduous. To be fair, no one can argue that the experience of apprenticeship that leads to mastery in the classroom is less than arduous. But the right to enter that learning curve comes after only a brief period of certification, verifying the perennial opinion by teachers that certification is a waste of time and that it’s “in the teaching” that one actually learns to teach proficiently; in other words, facing pupils and students is what teaches teaching. But that real training is undergone in isolation in enclosed classrooms, not in front of other adults. The main evaluators of good teaching then are the children not the adults. My own personal experience as a classroom teacher confirms this. I knew full and well that my certification papers did not constitute mastery. After two years of arduous trial and error I was finally able to control a room of 30 grade school pupils. It was only then that my colleagues congratulated me as “a master” and it was not until then that I felt worthy to enter the schoolhouse door as a true teacher. I believe that Waller integrates satire into his analysis exactly because teachers who read his book will know that there is some truth to his characterizations. It’s part of his pedagogy for change. But in spite of this, teachers know well what really counts for them in terms of dignity. Waller’s chapter on the determinants of the occupational type is often cited as a source of humor and satire. I actually believe that it was Waller’s

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intention to produce a chapter that would make the reader laugh a bit. Satire presupposes truth. Perhaps he was hoping that teachers would actually read this chapter, laugh at themselves and, in so doing produce the impetus to reform themselves. My own experience of having been an elementary schoolteacher causes me to laugh with Waller. For example, Waller describes how teachers must learn to get angry, and get angry quickly! Teachers are cranky because crankiness helps them hold their jobs. Teachers know that they are “teachers” when they decide that only teachers are important; that is, that’s when they know they’ve attained the dignity of being a teacher in public. They have to learn to be dignified without the slightest effort, without being conscious of the fact that they are being dignified. When I apply Waller’s observations to invoke reflection among teachers, some in fact laugh with him; others, however, condemn his satirical portraits. I take this difference as indicative of who’s ready to reevaluate their position as a teacher and who’s not. Some find this objective stance discomforting. Perhaps they’ve become detained by the collective consciousness of the school and have forgotten how to be self-critical as a result of their traumatic learning, thus only confirming Waller’s findings. By referring to teachers as pretentious and undignified Waller is attempting to paint a picture of the profession that is, perhaps, in a state of crisis and so a critical look at teaching is required. Since the economy and the entire social fabric of America (and the world) were suddenly deteriorating, Waller prescribed stiff medicine. This reaction to crisis and economic deterioration resurfaces in 1983 when American researchers asked once more: what must teaching be to address “a nation at risk”? I believe that it must resurface once more in 2009. I observe few differences between the contemporary social and economic context and the one that produced Waller’s sociology in 1932. Instead of a stock market crash, North America is currently experiencing a credit crash spurred on by similar economic habits: buying property with marginal or no credit. Wars and rumors of wars abound. Banks are failing. And in the midst of these perceived political and economic crises, teachers still rely on routine and conform to individualistic and conservative attitudes. The crises of traumatic learning have the direct effect of continuing reinforcing habits of protectionism and conservatism. It is no surprise that “trauma” is related to the old English word for “dream.” One could theorize that the trauma of instruction spellbinds adults and absorbs them into the consciousness of the school. Are teachers asleep, asks Waller, or are they dreaming and require some kind of awakening? Alternatively, could we theorize that teachers are living in a kind of bliss, and is that “our problem”? We could ask whether it is fair to expect teachers in schools to alter global, social, or economic crises. Is it fair to assign the trade of instruction with the task of correcting such wide and broad problems? Perhaps Waller should have analyzed the sources of the economic and social conditions that produced the Great Economic Depression and World War II. Perhaps contemporary educational researchers should inspect the conditions that are producing global environmental degradation and militant religious fundamentalism instead of focusing on teachers in schools. To be fair, Waller’s characterization of the teacher was not entirely negative or satirical. As an example, he refers to one model (“Judge Story”) that made instruction

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a constructive experience, and this experience was very important for his pupil’s subsequent personal growth. Perhaps in providing this example of excellent practice Waller was referring to the kind of teaching that he wished took place more widely. But he makes a further observation. When a community stereotypes certain classes and categorizes people, then it becomes almost impossible for the community to free itself from that designation. This is because stereotypes are over 80 per cent visual in two ways. Externally, we judge people by visual cues. Internally, we don’t represent other people directly but assign labels in our minds. We characterize people prejudicially from imaginary models or from stereotypical examples we’ve encountered and we do this mostly based on visual biases. Waller notes this to be a kind of protective mechanism that we employ to keep potential enemies at bay and keep intruders at a safe distance. In some strange way, perhaps we are threatened by teachers, by what they represent, and perhaps we’re privately resentful of the kind of power that they wield over us in the classroom, over other children, and eventually wield over our own children. Perhaps we long for that immense consciousness that comes with the bliss of instruction without ever being aware of the consequences of maintaining that control. And so even though we do tend to stereotype them as self-sacrificing, gentle, kind, or self-effacing, we observe that they are also overworked and underpaid, while always curiously ready to give freely of their time and their money for the purposes of the children.

Forecasting the future of teacher development Waller approaches the end of his book by again reminding us of “our problem”: the teacher is imprisoned within a stereotypical cage and the effect of that confinement is to become complacent with imprisonment. Teachers become imprisoned by their own institutional practices, and this makes Waller compare teaching to a monastic discipline of habit and restriction. For the medieval French monastic, confinement was the means to freedom. It meant total convocation with the Benedictine Rule, a shelter that made them express their life as a living “martyrdom,” a word that comes to us from what used to mean “witness.” Indeed, from Waller’s viewpoint, the sacrificing teacher is always and only a witness to others who are constantly learning. Do teachers feel the penitence of regret for this sacrifice? Waller’s viewpoint might acknowledge that they do. With all of these comparisons, Waller is always trying to convince his readers that teachers are in need of some new kind of recognition. They are actually oppressed in some ways and require emancipation from bondage. Indeed, this would be “our problem” if it were true. Nowhere in the book is this point made more vivid than when he writes: Schoolteachers, like Negroes and women, can never quite enter the white man’s world and they must remain partial men who, except in the society of others, like themselves, are outcast. Schoolteacher prejudice is as difficult a thing to combat as Negro prejudice. (1932: 421)

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Defining teacher development

Like the Old Testament oppressed who were stereotyped as “widows, the fatherless, strangers, and the poor” (Zechariah 7: 10), teachers must remain strangers in a society of similitude. Teachers are not fully “persons,” says Waller, and so it becomes our problem to humanize them and integrate them into society. They are aliens and, as such, remain outcasts except when associating with others like themselves. This is certainly the most powerful and controversial observation in Waller’s entire book. The teacher is a socially disabled learner that requires special types of education because of the martyrdom of instruction and the debilitating effects of their sacrifice. Waller actually makes the claim that teachers are illiterate in some ways by arguing that they lack a technical vocabulary. They seem willing only to engage in “shoptalk.” This narrows their mental horizon, says Waller, a euphemism for describing them as ignorant. They remain conversant only with the values of childhood. Their discourse remains elementary, child-like, and this reduces them as well as real persons. In response to our problem, Waller foretells a future for teacher development research by calling for the cultivation of a craft spirit, a similar type of spirit that would have originated in the medieval “guild.” It is significant to note that by invoking this type of spirit he is actually trying to redirect the origins of school teaching from ascetic monasticism to the medieval craft guild. Monks practiced self-denial and a self-discipline that disabled their commerce outside the monastery. Waller’s teachers exhibited similar practices. In contrast, guilds were the originating engines of the modern spirit of capitalist entrepreneurialism and business enterprise. Guilds were worldly and selfpromoting. “Coteries” of teachers interacting with fellow workers, Waller theorizes, might promote exactly that kind of self-promoting spirit. That spirit might assign teachers’ work with the dignity of “professional” service. Free association of kindred minds would do more for the craft spirit than any other activity, he advises. Social service work, in Waller’s opinion, can be dreary and discouraging. If teachers gathered together from time to time to cultivate their craft spirit then they might stay engaged and be encouraged. The word “coterie” comes from an old English root, which referred to what we would call, in modern English, a “cottage,” as in “cottage-industry.” Craft spirit originated from being a member of small groups of workers who gathered together to develop exclusive trademarks with unifying and common interests. “Coterie” became introduced into the French language to mean “lodgers.” A teachers’ lodge, therefore, would be the same thing as a collaborative community that assembles to do more than just engage in shoptalk. They would actually maintain some ethical standard of reflective practice that would be much higher in terms of its professional adaptability. In conceptualizing this “lodge-spirit,” Waller again foretells the future of teacher development research for decades to come. Waller argues that collaborative activities would convince teachers that their trials and troubles are not there for them alone but that the trauma that they experienced was actually intrinsic to the very nature of their calling. Therefore, collaborative communities would have the effect of inspiring a vocational spirit among teachers. And so, Waller closes the chapter by calling for new knowledge. Teachers must forsake their “namby-pamby intellectualism” that is so common to them. Teachers should avoid

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stereotyping themselves and should avoid being stereotyped by the community. Teachers would do well to insist that any program of educational reform should start with them, first of all. We must then ask, in conclusion, what are the commonsense insights of teachers that would lead to “new knowledge”? Waller advises that teachers should be given insight into the nature of their social reality. But to accomplish this, teachers and theorists alike must learn to understand the theoretical components that underlay the social dynamics of the schoolroom. It becomes necessary, therefore, to investigate what those dynamics are. If they are truly social, it becomes additionally necessary to investigate what makes sense to teachers and what is “common” to them. Waller then calls for a conceptual and practical theory of teachers’ experience. Heeding Waller’s call is the achievement of Philip Jackson 30 years later. In articulating the “life” of the classroom, Jackson draws forth the consciousness of the school. Then, 43 years after Waller, Daniel Lortie succinctly identifies the person that the teacher is as our distinct research and curriculum problem: Schoolteacher.

Chapter 2

The life of classrooms

Introduction Jackson grasps an invisible but essentially generative force that is present in schools. His book is the first attempt to come to grips with the “culture” of the school. A certain “spirit” seems to circulate within institutional life. He is interested in how human beings develop adaptive mechanisms by communicating with this invisible, generative force. He theorizes that these mechanisms have something to do with “knowing.” Jackson tries to distinguish what he calls “the many ways of knowing” because classroom life is very complex. These were newly explored “ways” during his time. Jackson discovers some aspects of institutional knowing that had never been grasped before. His research contributed to new analytical categories about unique forms of life, categories that would form the basis for future analyses of teachers’ thought processes.

The culture of the school For Waller, the energy of instruction generated a type of consciousness in the school. For him, the school is analogous to a human organism, filled with many mundane, trivial events. Jackson is interested in how those events manifest the life of the classroom. Before entering this living system, he assumes that the classroom is a kind of “grey zone” where evanescent events are never easy to distinguish. A sort of middle region exists between teachers and pupils and he’s trying to portray that region for general understanding. As he puts it for the first time, he is trying to appreciate the cultural significance of what is otherwise dismissed as tediously taken-for-granted phenomena that would seem self-evident; that is, to anyone who’s spent extended time in classrooms. These might be candidly labelled as “the humdrum,” a word used to describe an indistinguishable circulation or musical tone of the place. But for Jackson, these naïf but sincere expressions of ordinary life would take on a new brilliance, if only they could be illuminated. Jackson begins by questioning the strange importance that school culture attaches to “necessary attendance.” He notices how everybody’s forced to sit at attention in an elementary school classroom, an exercise that harkens back to Waller’s association of

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the school with a military discipline. Nobody’s really given a choice but to learn how to read, write, and cipher. Indeed, Jackson calls classrooms “enclosures.” These enclosed spaces are hidden from public view and this privacy is why they seem like darkened places that need to be illuminated. Jackson provides a startling calculation to illustrate this. If we were to spend as much time in church as in our sixth grade classroom, then we would have to spend all day in a church service, every Sunday, for more than 24 years straight. We would have to attend, alternatively, a one-hour service every Sunday, but do that for 150 years! That’s the significance of one year of schooling in terms of its relative indoctrination. And yet, the life of schooling and its collective consciousness is grey, mysterious, and taken for granted. What are the secular, cultural “doctrines” of the school classroom? With regard to indoctrination, Jackson observes that the church and the school are both very stable and highly stylized environments. If compared, we see that they are both filled with repetitive exercises, ritualistic actions, and powerful codes of discipline. While most of us understand that a church is a normalizing institution, Jackson insists that we should understand the school classroom as a unique moral territory with special rules and obedience patterns. The classroom is a kind of sanctuary. To test this, he reminds us that there’s a sense to classroom life that stays with you long after you move on. There’s even an olfactory and audible sense to the environment that can stay with a person for the rest of their life. Susceptibility to this intimate level of awareness is an early indication of how profound Jackson’s analysis will be. It has to be, because immersion in these enclosures transforms the odors, sounds, and experiences into blurred outlines that are not sharply identified. There’s no objectivity to life in classrooms. Life in those places is entirely subjective to the ones who sense the culture. And Jackson’s goal is to demystify that subjective cultural sense for the purpose of making schools more humane and adaptive institutions. What goes on in schools should matter to everyone! If schools are not meeting their potential then, with Waller, that has to become “our problem.” Jackson begins by noting how the clock dictates when certain events take place in schools. Schools have much in common with other types of totalizing institutions that are run by ritual and chronology, such as the prison, the manufacturing plant, or even a mental hospital. In Jackson’s time, these comparisons might have been controversial. However, his claim is repeated 20 years later by Michel Foucault in France. Foucault conducted genealogical analyses of common practices (which he called “histories of the present”) in modern institutional life. He began studying the structure of language, the institutionalization of knowledge, and then turned his attention to structured institutions such as asylums, prisons, and the medical profession. Foucault died before he was able to write a book about schooling, which was his plan. He was going to call that book “The children’s crusade” (Fink-Eitel 1992: 67). Jackson’s book actually fulfills Foucault’s plan, making his text predictive of the postmodern turn that was to come in educational research 30 years later. Jackson was not a postmodernist. But in strict methodological terms, he is a psychologist like Foucault was. For Jackson, as for Foucault, schools are basically places where people are being disciplined. They are being judged and evaluated. And this doesn’t just take place through formal testing – it

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Defining teacher development

takes place pervasively, continuously, and relentlessly by teachers, administrators, and pupils together. As they are basically evaluative settings, life in classrooms means having one’s words and one’s deeds watched, examined, judged, and evaluated relentlessly. Furthermore, teachers are more privileged than their pupils in exercising the disciplinary practices of examination and evaluation. Teachers are less “leaders” and more “policy directors.” They measure the social circulation of traffic in the classroom, the practice that Waller called “instruction.” But for Jackson, teachers are never in total control of the circulation that characterizes life in schools. Much of the control that circulates within the school is self-controlled. That’s what makes it mysterious and worthy of psychological investigation. Obviously, the disciplinary effects of self-control and constant evaluation function in partnership with each other. Evaluation comes from more than one source. It can be intensely rewarding or punishing. Either way, it is impossible to avoid evaluation of your personal qualities, and this goes for pupils as well as for teachers and administrators. Therefore, we could say that, when it comes to life in elementary classrooms, the pupil becomes the one who is awaiting evaluation. By comparison, the teacher becomes the one who conducts judgment, supervises, and evaluates constantly. Exercising this practice is what Waller recognized as “despotism.” The teacher evaluates personal qualities, general intellectual abilities, and motivational levels; even cooperation and helpfulness. They are evaluated in this effectiveness by administrators, other teachers, parents, and even by their pupils. As Waller wrote so accurately about life in the school, “It will be well to be wary – to watch, watch, and watch!” Clearly, classrooms are disciplinary environments with the same rigor that would be found in the military barrack or the prison. Here, again, Waller likened the discipline of teaching to the discipline of soldiering. Schools are totalizing environments that work to create a normal type of person who will be judged to be successful after graduation. Jackson identifies these voluntary self-impositions by discussing the basic lessons that have to be learned in schools. For example, the importance of waiting one’s turn is directly related to the importance of learning how to control one’s body. Learning to become patient in a crowded institution, tolerating delay and the patience required for this tolerance must be endured. And in so enduring, Jackson claims that the institution of schooling begins to teach the significance of linear thinking (Jackson 1968:14). Linearity is one of those mysterious aspects of life in schools. Jackson identified how the clock’s linear flow of time organizes how events take place in schools. To understand this, consider for a few moments where and when all step-by-step lines of procedures are normal and commonplace in the world. While straight-line motion may not be obvious in the natural world, it surfaces pervasively in public, cultural life. It is virtually everywhere. Schools are crowded and they are filled with people who need to be fulfilled. The self-discipline that comes with delaying fulfillment, tolerating delay, waiting one’s turn, moving and then thinking in successive linear ways is essential for adaptation in schools. This self-imposition of one’s instincts is one of the most important skills to master in schools. For Waller, this essential skill became the object of satire when he characterized the teacher as a soldier of learning who masters the discipline of maintaining and standing to attention and waiting for learning to happen.

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Along with tolerating delay, waiting patiently, deferring gratification, and following linear processes, everyone in school has to learn a kind of institutionalized individualism. Pupils must learn how to ignore those around them and focus exclusively on their own task. In other words, they must learn to be alone while being in a crowd. In general, events won’t happen right away, as you might like them to. Pupils have to practice becoming accustomed to waiting. They must try to screen out interruptions as they wait, and filter out all distractions in doing so. With practice, this self-controlling temperament produces a conservative institutional personality. Perhaps “conservative” may not be the best descriptor for this development. “Reserved” or “restrained” might be a better way to describe this effect. A “reserve” is also something that is kept aside, or set apart, for future use. Keeping emotions aside, setting your needs apart for future use creates a kind of self-isolation that waits for gratification. In this sense, the effects of this repressed individualism is perhaps best understood as “conservation.” But from Waller’s perspective, this is also a recollection of monastic asceticism. Ascetic conservatism practices an enforced and reserved patience that is the product of postponing the fulfillments of one’s desire. Failure to comply with this reservation and conservation results in agitation or disruption. Therefore, learning in schools requires denying one’s own spontaneous bodily desires in favor of accommodating to the general desires of the whole group. Those who master self-denial most proficiently are the most successful graduates of classroom schooling. As Waller observed 30 years prior to Jackson’s study, the teacher is someone who learns to “wait for something to happen.” Therefore, life in classrooms really avails limited choices when it comes to what constitutes knowledge of value. Everyone is rated according to measurement systems to enhance the likelihood of being praised and reduce the likelihood of being punished. First, pupils learn how the reward-system in classrooms works. Secondly, pupils learn what knowledge counts as valuable in that disciplinary environment. Finally, pupils try to demonstrate actions that lead to positive evaluations and conceal actions that lead to negative ones. Clearly, behavior is circumscribed in schools. And in terms of their professional relationship to pupils, teachers remain “relative strangers” vis-à-vis pupils. However, professional estrangement does not mean remoteness or a-proximity. Especially the elementary schoolteacher is, in many ways, a parent-surrogate with enormous legal and personally motivated responsibilities for children. With responsibility comes power. Jackson explains how power is put to use in very restricting ways by the teacher. When it comes to working in schools, teachers are pro-hibitionists and in-hibitionists. Recall how life in schools thrives on delay, waiting, and patience, avoiding distraction, deferring gratification of desires, and restraining self-expression. Teachers exemplify these difficult but adaptive skills. In doing so, Waller concluded that teachers became the physical embodiments of prohibition and inhibition. They discourage free or spontaneous activity, especially through the operation of inner psychological or external social constraints. Teachers might claim that they’re all in favor of creating “democratic style classrooms.” But Jackson is trying to be honest by showing that we have to acknowledge

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Defining teacher development

undemocratic power-relationships that institute classroom discourse and instruction. These relationships create what Rousseau called a “general will” as a basis for democracy. Here, we begin to understand that this collective will, or “institutional consciousness,” is based on accommodating self-control in the name of civility and communal integrity. The teacher may seem very much in control of all interactions that take place within the classroom. But this control is all for the sake of teaching the civility of community life. Without these subtle but necessary (self) controls, civic, economic, and commercial life would be unmanageable. Life in classrooms is life in (a) society. The power-relationships are all about creating a culture in the school that promotes public life. What are the mechanisms of these relationships?

The classroom as a learning machine Jackson’s goal was to portray the “life” of the classroom. By focusing on the living systems of that dynamic context he was able to portray how adaptive strategies have a way of maintaining themselves in schools. These strategies maintain themselves and live a life of their own. It seems that they exist completely independent of the people who are living their lives. As maintenance-strategies these disciplines maintain order and evolve into mechanisms that run the institution, as if by automatic pilot. Jackson has identified these mechanisms. Necessary attendance demands that attention is given to the institution. A linear chronology measures when events take place and how long they last, thereby assigning them with a relative priority that is external to the body’s natural functions. While attending and awaiting, evaluation is omnipresent and totalizing. Needs must be deferred and bodily functions must be self-controlled, even including when and where one may speak and where and when one must remain silent. The well-run classroom functions like a well-run machine. Even so, Jackson is critical of this metaphor, in particular of its “engineering” perspective. For this reason, a lot of research attention is focused on the pilot of that machine or the “lord” of that house, which Waller called a “despot.” “Lord of the household” was an original meaning for the ancient word “economist,” and so the teacher has to economize all of the movements and strategies of the class. Indeed, it’s worth noting that the word “class,” in the educational sense, comes from the Latin word that was applied to groups of people who were called to military service. School pupils, like those who are drafted into military service, enter totalizing institutions for the sake of serving society after graduation. But we know that this regiment is not intended to oppress. Recall that Jackson is searching for the consciousness of the classroom, and consciousness is always intentional. The intentions of the teacher are all about the production of learning. Successful learning is the product of classroom discipline and its codes of conduct. Watching, examining, judging, and evaluating are not done for the sake of censure, constraint, and the maintenance of order. Rewarding, disciplining, and punishing promote learning as adaptive strategies. They are what make the classroom into a learning, teaching machine. Obviously, becoming a productive and model graduate means becoming absorbed by these mechanisms. But compliance is not the same as submission. Compliance can

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also mean the same thing as conformity, as in “(con)forming into a model” or even “adapting” for the sake of everyone else. Compliance can be empowering, therefore, and Jackson is showing us what the empowering compliance-mechanisms are in the classroom. In doing so, he’s portraying a curriculum that’s hidden from direct view but without which the classroom could not function as a learning environment. He shows us what the “ways” that produce knowing in the classroom are. He illustrates what forms of knowledge matter the most. In illuminating those mechanisms (those ways), he also shows us what forms (what ideas) count as most valuable. These mechanisms and ideas constitute the doctrines of the classroom. During the period of Jackson’s research, “attention” was fading out as an administrative priority in classrooms in favor of more progressive and democratic descriptors. Attention seemed to denote a more totalitarian approach in which pupils acted as passive recipients of knowledge that was delivered by the teacher. Progressive education advocated an appeal to the interests and talents of the children and democratic methods involved pupils in demonstrating the superiority of shared decision-making arrangements. This shift occurred at a time when a more “dynamic” interpretation of human affairs was being influenced by post-Freudian psychology. “Dynamic” is descendent from an old Greek word that meant, simply, “power.” And so, we can see how the movement from static, conscious processes to fluid unconscious processes was intent on creating more empowering approaches to classroom research. As Jackson itemizes, this shift was from the manifest to the latent signs of human disorder and from the persona to the personality. There emerges an interest, therefore, in the unconscious, latent, and depth of an individual’s behavioral and emotional characteristics. As a movement toward developing one’s personality, this marked a shift away from prioritizing the social façade that the individual was playing. And this curriculum shift would influence how the teacher would be analyzed in terms of meaningful development. Surface “fronts,” “façades,” and roles were de-emphasized in favor of what seemed to hide behind the personal role, what lurks latently within the unconscious, including the emotions that influence behavior. As Jackson states, metaphorically, this shift was from surface to depth and generated an interest in motives, inner processes, emotions, drives, desires, and motivations. In terms of pupils’ emotions and behavior, researchers wanted to know “what is Johnny really thinking about as he sits in class” rather than whether or not Johnny just looks alert on the surface. But in terms of teachers, this progressive shift would open the door to psychologizing the teacher as a goal-seeking, career-driven person. Headed by Benjamin Bloom at the University of Chicago, the main goal of this research was to develop techniques for revealing “thought processes” of pupils in classrooms. As we shall read, the implications of this work generated an interest in the systematic thought processes of teachers as well. These unconscious processes would be of great value in developing a science of teacher development because they provided methods to analyze what gifted teachers intuitively knew. This knowledge could then be catalogued and be communicated to researchers, teacher educators, and ultimately to teachers to reform them. It would enable researchers to theorize what Waller’s “craft-spirit” actually was. This research was important during its time,

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because what appear to be superficial attitudes, feelings, and disappointments have not been explicitly revealed to researchers. Some form of reasoning lay behind action, it was assumed, and so it was theorized that these reasoning processes could only become visible through conversations with teachers. This was based on Bloom’s “stimulated recall” method that made sound recordings of class sessions and then played them back within a period of two days. Pupils were then asked to report the thoughts that had occurred to them at the time of the recording. If a pupil’s thoughts were irrelevant to the task-at-hand then it was concluded that they were inattentive, in a psychological sense, no matter how their attention might have been interpreted by the teacher. In other words, proving for attention involved measuring the invisible thoughts of the pupil not by estimating crudely the visual attention of the superficial persona, or mask of the pupil. If these invisible processes could be measured, then they could be codified, entrained, and refined behaviorally. Researchers were attempting to actually measure “invisibility.” When applied to teachers, this data measured not only what the teacher would say, but also the way of saying it, and even what was left unsaid. These were clues to the unconscious, latent, dynamic nature of teachers’ thoughts, and Jackson devotes an entire chapter of his book to collecting and analyzing these very processes. This research comprises the most valuable source of foundations for the curriculum of teacher development for decades to come.

Teachers’ thought processes Jackson captures the hidden and transitory forces that suggest “a culture of the school.” He demonstrates the foundations of teachers’ knowledge through an analysis of teachers’ speech about teaching. Speech, as the medium of teachers’ knowledge, will have enormous implications for the results of this research. It is more than anything else a set of activities. Teaching is coordinated action-in-the-world. But as sets of practices, teaching is also about attitudes, feelings, and reasoning about action. The ways that teachers justify their attitudes and feelings will provide the reasons for their actions. These reasons will express what counts as professional knowledge for them in their own world. Jackson assumed that expressions of this knowledge and indications of this world lived in speech, since speech was the medium in which instruction took place. As the singer is always singing, so the teacher is always teaching to themselves and to others. To teach is to speak – what, then, were “the sayings” of teaching from Jackson’s research? Jackson is quick to identify teaching as a “craft.” This word comes to English from German (i.e. Kraft) and it means “strength” in terms of skills in planning, making, or executing an occupation. It was generally applied to people who practice “trades.” What do teachers trade? To begin answering this question Jackson quotes John Dewey who, in articulating sources for a science of education, advocated analysis of what teachers do intuitively, so that something accruing from their work could be communicated to others. “Intuition” is knowledge, sense, and perception, that is directly apprehended, a word that comes to us from the Latin word for observation, consideration,

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or “watching over.” Jackson notes that behavior does not reveal what a teacher is actually watching over, especially not the moral justifications that lie behind their actions. “Ways of saying” are as important as what is said, because these ways are the pathways to understanding what teachers value in emotional as well as moral terms. Ways of saying are ways of knowing. Therefore, teaching trades activities in exchange for learning that takes place in a microcosmic world that’s completely unique to teachers and pupils. Consequently, talk is necessary to make “sense” of this direct and intuitive craft-knowledge. Speech demonstrates what teachers most diligently watch over when they trade their work of instruction. By searching for intuitive moral justifications for good practice(s) Jackson is searching for some criteria that measures effectiveness. But he laments that these are really illusive when it comes to the trademarks of teaching. So he enters this world with an open mind and poses open-ended questions dealing with the following criteria: 1 2 3

describe what tells you that you’re doing a good job in the classroom describe your relationship to the school institution describe your personal satisfactions about teaching.

These focused on teachers’ self-evaluations, their use for institutional authority, and the joy that they derived from applying their trades successfully. Four recurrent themes emerged from this investigation of subjective knowledge: 1 2 3 4

immediacy informality autonomy individuality.

Let’s examine each of these separately. Immediacy Teachers use very here-and-now measurements to gauge success in the classroom. Successful learning in exchange for their teaching was measured by “the look on the children’s faces,” visible signs of alertness, such as physical enthusiasm, or the way they sounded in response to involvement. As actors can sense engagement with their audience, teachers relish in the feeling of being connected with their pupils in very immediate ways. This emotional zeal came with a general disdain and mistrust for the objective certainties that accompanied testing assessments. Testing was given little emphasis overall. Pupils’ involvement and enthusiasm seemed much more significant along with participation in activities that resulted in joy and pleasure. When contradictions arose between subjective and objective evidence, teachers were more likely to deny the accuracy of test information. Teachers argued that performance on achievement tests reflected native abilities rather than results of their effectiveness. Standardized tests, in

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other words, revealed no meaningful standards with regard to their effectiveness in communicating learning. Evidence of excellence came from the continual flow of information from pupils during the existential reality of the teaching and learning relationship. Jackson concludes that this exhibits a paradox: we have present-oriented practitioners in future-oriented institutions. This paradox, he worries, may be discomforting for teachers under certain circumstances. As we know, this discomfort becomes acute 40 years later when standardized testing becomes widespread in North American schools. As one elementary schoolteacher communicated to me at the time of writing this text: “It’s standardized testing time in my school. It’s a farce; we all know it. But we play along because we have to. We even tell the kids that. Soon, it’ll be over, and we can get back to learning again.” Has much changed since Jackson’s definitive study? Clearly, the “learning” that comes from good teaching is still very much an intuitive sense that something miraculous is happening, and the evident certainty of this perception can only be measured subjectively. Informality Teachers were reticent to call their teaching style “formal.” This could have reflected a preference for dynamic involvement over the more static necessity for attention that preceded involvement. Attention might have been assumed as an indicator of mastery, while an informal atmosphere in the classroom might have been the indicator of freedom, pleasure, and joy that comes from being fully engaged or involved in the teaching and learning process. As an indicator of what constituted good teaching, Jackson clarifies that “informal” really meant less formal rather than not formal. In other words, all absence of form(ations), rules, conventions, would just result in chaos. And without the status of control, no teaching can take place, formal or informal. For the teachers, the desire for informality was never sufficiently strong enough to interfere with their institutional definitions of responsibility, authority, or tradition. Therefore, informality as a measure of excellence really translated into an easy-going and relaxed context in which to engage teaching. It assumed that the teacher was very much in control of the social circulation of traffic and discourse in the classroom. Autonomy In describing their relationship to the institution, teachers referred to autonomy from two different perspectives. First, they were hostile to an overly inflexible curriculum. Secondly, they spoke very suspiciously about superiors bent on evaluating the performance practices in their classrooms. The teachers in Jackson’s study felt violated when they were expected to disclose any detailed plans well into the future. They believed that this would undermine their spontaneity or they felt insulted because this constraint threatened what they interpreted to be their professional pride. Clearly, freedom within the classroom is a very highly protected personal privilege for teachers. Jackson again connects this coveted privacy with teachers’ wish for “informality” in

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the classroom where, in this case, “informal” meant freedom to improvise without external supervision or constraint. They vehemently protected the privacy of their personal learning space with their own, personal class. This relationship, more than any other, was what defined teachers’ identity. Consistently, therefore, the intention of visitors to monitor, supervise, inspect, or possibly criticize their work disturbed the teachers more than the visitors actual physical presence. They also took this observation as an invasion on their personal property – the classroom – and an encroachment on their freedom to express themselves in front of the audience that measured their personal standard of excellence. This “flock” over which they were the shepherds signified for them where their freedom reigned. They wanted to be informal despots over their regnum, within limits, but insisted that these limits be internally defined, governed, and maintained. Individuality Individuality was only related tangentially to how teachers interpreted their personal autonomy. It was not vain or narcissistic but altruistic. Teachers were interested in the well being of individual pupils and their class. This was particularly evident when the teacher was asked to describe what personal satisfaction they derived from their work. Primarily, this was defined in relation to the success that they experienced with individually challenged pupils, in spite of the fact that much of their work involved an entire class of pupils. They felt a salvation joy when particularly vulnerable pupils responded to their teaching style and “turned the corner” in ways that were life changing. Of all four themes, individuality represented the most significant subjective category for teachers. It defined “the person” that the teacher is because the experiences that personalized salvation joy had direct, subjective face-validity for them. Practically, individuality had everything to do with the joy of teaching and the love of one’s pupils. “Joy” is a more accurate descriptor here than “job satisfaction.” As Jackson noted, joy reflected the variety of responsibilities and opportunities that comprised the role of the elementary schoolteacher. Joy was intimately related to what teachers saw happening to their pupils. Jackson organized these “pleasures” and ordered them in terms of their intensity of emotional involvement. This scheme provides us with an early inventory of the person that the teacher is. The salvation joy of altruism was clearly evident, as one teacher likened these pleasures to “missionary work.” Their mission in life was to help young people develop. This provided them with a feeling of usefulness or personal meaning. Along with this self-esteem came a spirit of urgency. Like the missionary, the teachers believed that there was only limited time to complete their mission. There’s a risk associated with teaching that comes with a belief that time may run out and failure may result. Jackson notes that this feeling of urgency is absent from other forms of social service, which raises two points. First, is teaching a social service if it’s characterized by this urgency? Second, if it were not a “social” service, then what service would elementary school teaching resemble? Clearly, the pleasures that it provides come in fulfilling a calling to save others from being unsuccessful.

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When asked directly, teachers responded quite frankly about these rewards. “Seeing them happy,” “seeing them progress,” “seeing a child be successful,” and “seeing a child find their place in life” were all verifications that the mission of the teacher was fulfilled. It’s significant that these subjective fulfillments were all felt in “seeing” results take place in the moment of teaching itself. The salvation of learning and the completion of the mission could be viewed directly and spontaneously in the eyes, faces, and feelings of the children. “Seeing their faces light up with an idea or a sense of accomplishment” displayed the excitement of teaching. Notice once more the injection of “sense” as an indication that success was at hand and that it was measurable subjectively. Teachers also reported that they felt a sense of salvation from life’s difficulties when the children sensed this kind of freedom. They spoke of “forgetting your problems” when children felt the joy of learning, particularly when the teacher felt “magnified” as the magician of this miracle. Jackson compares the most dramatic transformations as “religious conversions” and “classroom miracles.” These are of great psychological significance and the teacher who is fortunate enough to witness them comes close to an epiphany (137). It was difficult to articulate exactly these consummatory experiences. Sometimes these animating and vital occurrences could only be expressed in metaphor and similes that emphasized the dramatic and magical quality of some of these transformations. As teachers said, the children “see the light of day,” “wake up,” become “uncorked”; all metaphorical expressions that represent a freedom from bondage. The emancipationexperience of learning, as enabled by the teacher-as-liberator, seemed to have been the most psychologically motivating experience. This experience alone separates elementary school teaching from other forms of public service because it separates teaching from being “work,” a “job,” or a type of simple salaried employment: “When you see a child bloom, it’s gratifying.” Gratification comes from an old Latin word that meant, “to show kindness.” Acts of kindness symbolized the emotional intensity that came with feeling personally useful, wanted, welcomed, of feeling a sense of accomplishment, or of witnessing dramatic personal changes in children. Teachers compared this salvation-liberation with saving a child’s life, as a doctor would do. This had to be a glorious feeling, particularly when the child was one that no other teacher had reached. Consistent with their religious mission of kindness, service, liberation, and gratification, the teachers used the word “love” to describe a satisfaction that transcends even the thrill of observing a pupil’s metamorphosis. Many teachers spoke of their deep affection for individual children. This caused Jackson to compare the experience of teaching to “mothering” especially as female teachers related it. Consistent with love as a basis for the teaching and learning interaction, teachers used the word “joy” to characterize this human element of “life in schools.” Teachers spoke of “finding the age that they enjoyed”; confessing that they would enjoy remaining with the same class, year after year, and that “one of the joys of the holiday season is hearing from so many youngsters.” “Respect” is sometimes a euphemism for the joy that arises from actually loving the experience of learning with children. However, it’s important to distinguish this love from erotic love. The ancient Greeks had four words for “love” and the one that most resembles the kind of love that Jackson uncovered in his study is agape. This

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was distinctly different from the love or friendship that involved sex (eros), life-long friendship (storge), or the kind of “brotherhood” or “sisterhood” that adults may feel towards each other communally (philia). The self-sacrificing love that’s expressed for children (agape) is clearly what’s found in the life of the classroom, and it’s this expression of love that is consistent with teaching being the fulfillment of a gratifying mission. The “feeling of being needed” is the reward for offering sacrifice. And it is this calling to sacrifice, more than any other, that separates teaching from other forms of mere “public service.” Giving of one’s self for the other’s sake makes teaching a type of religious mission. It is also what makes life in schools, especially in the spiritual enclosure of the classroom, a form of highly personalized religious experience.

The institutional life of the classroom In considering the relevance of these findings to understanding life in classrooms, Jackson unearthed two dominant topics: the conditions of life in the classroom, and the general psychology of adults who choose the life of the elementary school. Since teaching is a remunerated activity, we could say that these two broad topics concern working conditions and the personality of the teacher. But much more than this comes out of Jackson’s findings. A general contradiction emerges from these findings about how teachers, as members of a unique occupational trade, integrate an emotional life calling into the practical confines of an institution. For example, Jackson cites that one of the most notable features of teachers’ occupational discourse is the general absence of any technical vocabulary. Waller made exactly the same observation over 30 years earlier. Unlike professional encounters between doctors, lawyers, astrophysicists, or even garage mechanics, when teachers talk together almost any reasonable intelligent adult can listen in and comprehend what is being said. In other words, classroom discourse is what’s referred to as parochial, provincial, and narrow. “Parochial” descends from the ancient Greek word that was translated as “parish” (paroikia). It was an ecclesiastical unit that was under the care of one pastor. But it was related to the word paroikos, which meant “stranger.” From a more sophisticated perspective, a “provincial” person is usually thought to be lacking in urban polish or refinement. They’re “narrow” in terms of the kind of experience that’s assumed to come from living in more educated or cosmopolitan settings where lots of cultural stimulation is found. In combination, these characterizations provide an image of what teachers’ professional vocabulary consists of. It is unique to the teacher (i.e. it is “strange”) and it is local to the conditions that produce it. It is confined to that “care-unit” that is under the teacher’s jurisdiction, and in that sense it’s a kind of religious language like the pastoral. Certainly unlike doctors, lawyers, astrophysicists, garage mechanics, teachers’ technical language is not cosmopolitan but comes from local, inside regions. This impenetrability of teachers’ language invokes questions for Jackson. Their narrow world doesn’t seem to tolerate penetration from outside influences. Teachers make very little use of jargon from professional fields that would seem to be closely related to their own, such as psychopathology, group dynamics, learning theory, social organization, and developmental psychology, to mention only a few. These are noticeably absent

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according to Jackson. This absence leads Jackson to classify teachers’ discourse as “conceptually simplistic.” Teachers avoid elaborate words. They also shun elaborate ideas. Jackson is curious about this. It would seem that teacher thinking should be as complex as they can make it because it’s their business to help pupils learn. Should this be alarming? Jackson responds by specifying four aspects of teachers’ conceptually simplistic thought processes: 1 2 3 4

events are connected in simple ways simple insights are favored over complex reason preconceived notions are closed to alternatives working definitions are narrow.

In summary, teachers don’t analyze very deeply how events take place in their “parish.” One thing leads to another very basically. Insights are very superficial and explanations are not complicated. Teachers tend to be opinionated and aren’t generally very open to alternative explanations for how and why things are in the classroom. Their working definitions are generally quite elementary. To explain in more detail, teachers often talk as if theirs was a world in which single causes produce single events. Two examples: “Why is Freddy misbehaving? His parents are separating.” “Why are the children restless? It’s getting close to Christmas.” Conceptual simplicity does not really mean that a simple preceding event produces a visible result. It means that teachers choose quick and ready insights behind any events, lock onto them, and make them authoritative as justifying explanations. Teachers may search for quick resolutions to questions, and Jackson suggests that this is forgivable. Were teachers to untangle the web of forces that combine to produce the complex reality of the classroom then they would probably have no time to think about anything else. But this says a lot about what life in classrooms is really like. The classroom is a chaotic context and so assigning shortsighted causes to events assigns a quick semblance of order to chaos. Teachers are willing to accept the surface and willing to take events as they are without too many deep probes. Their conclusions are unlikely to be followed by an analytic scrutiny of what has taken place. This also means that when good things happen, it’s best not to ask too many questions why it took place. Chalk it up to “a miracle.” In contrast, when bad things happen, choose a simple reason that may not be “a reason” but just a simple cause and move on. To explain further, when Jackson asked teachers to justify their professional decisions, they often declared that their behavior was based on impulse (i.e. instinct) and feeling (i.e. a sensuous communion with immediate experience) rather than on reflection (i.e. complex reasoning) and thought (i.e. rationality). In other words, teachers defended their pedagogical decisions based on how they felt rather than by claiming that they knew the correct course of action. Jackson concludes from this that the teacher thinks like a jazz musician who improvises by playing “in the groove.” In their daily practices, they “teach from the heart” as if in spontaneous performance in front of their audience. The pleasures that are invoked by their ad libitum performances are what create miracles of learning. Indeed, the abbreviation “ad lib” comes from the

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Latin phrase, which meant “at one’s pleasure.” Jackson’s teachers often reported that they were playing a melody by ear. The important question that this raises for Jackson is whether teachers are unnecessarily intuitive when their actions should be guided by reason. He asks, “what’s the overall propriety of intuition in the life of the classroom?” By comparison, nobody objects when a chef dashes a bit more salt just because “it feels right at the time.” However, this would be inappropriate for a pharmacist when practicing their craft. Even though teachers couldn’t justify their decisions based on sound reasoning or formula, they remained quite opinionated about why they made certain decisions in the classroom. Despite what Jackson called “the weakness of their intellectual tenacity and the intuitive softness of their talk,” they knew exactly what they liked, like amateur artlovers. But they didn’t always know why they liked it. When pressed for reasons behind their “tastes,” as Jackson calls them on two occasions, they became impatient as if the answer was either self-evident or irrelevant. Rarely did the teachers ever defer to evidence beyond their own personal experiences to justify professional preferences. As Jackson summarizes “in matters of taste, there was no dispute” – it just felt good. Feeling good rather than doing what was right is in line with Jackson’s observation that teachers generally employed very narrow working definitions to common experiential terms. Whereas they did employ some complex words and phrases such as motivation, social relations, and intellectual development, “the referents for these terms, on close inspection, were usually found to contain only pale reflections of the rich concepts from which they are derived.” We can conclude from this that when teachers talk about life in classrooms, the “signs” that they use may be clearly expressed. However, “the world” of the classroom, which those signs indicate, can never be a direct reflection of those signs. The teachers’ worldview is not so sharply or distinctly outlined. Life in classrooms is always an approximation to what can be expressed discretely in abstract language. For example, “motivation” typically refers to pupils’ enthusiasm and not much else. “Social relations” typically refer to their interactions with others in the class and the teacher, or crudely reduced to pupils’ popularity with peers. Teachers’ professional vocabulary exhibits a colloquial style that is local to the conditions that produce it. Complex signs point to simple referents that are at home in the parochial life of classrooms. The teacher focuses on concrete reality, not abstract conceptions. They live inside what Jackson calls “sharp existential boundaries” and those boundaries evince themselves in the way teachers talk. In fact, the word “colloquial” comes from a Latin word meaning “conversation.” And this is interesting, given Jackson’s findings. Teachers converse with the concrete reality of their world. That world is sharply demarcated existentially for teachers and so their sign–referent system of language is sharply bound within that localized world alone. For the elementary schoolteacher, any degree of relevant “knowledge” is only valuable in the boundaries of the real world of their classroom. Like a tooth that is abstracted from the mouth, “abstract” meanings are drawn away or separated away from material objects or practical matters. Concrete experiences are those that are available to the senses. These sensual availabilities in sharp existential boundaries are

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the objects and objectives of teaching and learning. Like the clergy, therapists, the ambulance medic, or nurses, the urgencies of these existential, concrete realities link them intimately to the personal well-being of those for whom they offer care. But in terms of existential realities, note how these comparisons differ. For clerics, the therapy of care comes with the care of one’s soul, often in response to another’s suffering. For therapists, suffering is often also what brings the client into the office in search of remediation. And for the nurse, and sometimes for the medic, the therapy of care is directed to the triage and health of the suffering body. When Jackson compares the teacher to these “care-givers,” he is comparing teaching to the mysterious therapy of remediating the health of those who suffer. Giving of one’s self for the alleviation of another’s suffering is what makes teaching a therapeutic mission. It is also what can make life in classrooms a profoundly healing experience. Teachers’ working definitions are narrow only if their world includes abstract research and experimentation. It would be unfair to call the concrete world of the classroom narrow, however, considering the complexity of life within that existential boundary. Enter any elementary school classroom on any given day and many simultaneous events are taking place continuously. Teachers were reluctant to discuss the merits of incorporating dramatic educational reforms into the “here-and-now” realities of their existential boundary, even though Jackson’s interviews provided them with opportunities to discuss such matters. Pedagogically, they were conservative, in the sense of conserving the status quo, which moved Jackson to refer to teachers’ intellectual vision as “myopic.” The debilitating condition of myopia produces defective vision of distant objects. Figuratively, it results in a lack of foresight or the ability to distinguish and select what is true and appropriate. Clearly, good teaching does not rely on abstract thought. Teachers’ thought processes are rooted in the concrete, existential, and here-and-now of life in classrooms. To verify appropriate truths, they needed only to look at the children in their classrooms. There, they found “face-validities.”

The sense that is non-sense Teachers’ language, from Jackson’s analysis, is anything but flattering. It lacks technical accuracy, skims the intellectual surface, and is “fenced” within the walls of teachers’ concrete experiences. Jackson comments: “these teachers hardly look like the type of people who should be allowed to supervise the intellectual development of young children” (148). And yet, the interviewees were some of the most highly respected in their field. This produces a paradox, which deserves a brief comment. He speculates on the following possibility: seemingly undesirable aspects are in fact not undesirable at all. Weak thought processes in other settings might in fact be strong processes in teachers’ classrooms. In other words, human failings on the part of teachers may be pedagogical virtues. And this is not due to any failing; it is tied to success in a world where events are best discerned as concrete, simplistic, and superficial. As myopic, the intellectual vision of teachers prevents them from envisioning distant objects, remote from their world, such as abstract concepts and theories. But let us consider replacing the telescope of

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abstract theory with the kaleidoscope of concrete immediacy. Jackson does note that the structure underlying these kaleidoscopic events cannot be easily discerned nor are they even under the control of the teacher. The conceptual superficiality of teachers’ language seems to be directly tied to its referent: the ambiguity, unpredictability, and the occasional nonsense of the classroom. Jackson wonders whether teachers would, in fact, perform with greater efficiency if they sought a more rational understanding of their world; if they were more open-minded in their pedagogical choices; or more profound in their view of the human condition. Certainly, they’d receive more applause from cosmopolitan intellectuals who were removed from teachers’ provincial world. Perhaps their parochial language was somehow an adaptive mechanism in the classroom? Broadly, Jackson typifies teachers as tender-minded idealists rather than toughminded empiricists. And this seems to be a contradiction to everything that he had found so far in his study. Despite their immersion in the “here-and-now” of direct and concrete experience, their view of children was both affected and highly modified with “a quasi-mystical faith in human perfectibility” (150). Jackson claims that his findings may be disturbing to educational researchers because the mission-call of rigorous research is to dispel such “old fashioned views.” We need more future-oriented, more realistic findings that favor a worldview that is based on the laws of modern physics. However, teachers’ mystical optimism and romantic idealism, while as disturbing as they are perplexing to Jackson, were surely no accident in his view. The interviews with teachers raise doubts about classifying them as rational problem-solvers and abstract hypothesis testers. This is because life in classrooms is immediately experienced. Events pass in and out of duration quickly. They don’t persist for objective measurement. In the classroom, time is ephemeral, momentary, fugitive, and evanescent. Jackson uses “fleeting” five times in his book to identify this classroom temporality. This calls into question the appropriateness of using conventional models of rationality to depict the movement and duration of time in that place. Jackson still takes for granted, however, that classroom life is rational or that customary physical laws of cause and effect still operate there. Jackson insists that events are as lawful there as they are in any other sphere of human endeavors. However, the identification of alternative courses of action, conscious deliberation of choice, weighing evidence, evaluation of outcomes; in summary, the rational processes of orderly cognition do not stand out conspicuously either in the teachers’ behavior or in verbal reports of their behavior. There has to be something special about interactive teaching. During the teaching–learning euphoria high degrees of uncertainty, unpredictability, and even confusion prevail. Intuition, beliefs bordering on mysticism, and highly charged optimism seem inappropriate within the confines of a highly regularized institution. Jackson wonders whether highly rational and reality-oriented persons (i.e. the tough-minded types) might not be better suited for right and regular organizations such as schools. This would reform much of teachers’ knowledge, which consists of idiosyncratic information about a particular group of pupils. Because of this, Jackson believes that it is the teacher who preserves the personal aspect of what would otherwise be a tough

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and overly rational institution. The teacher is the human face of the school, which, otherwise, would be a cold and depersonalized learning machine indeed. Teachers not only know the children; they care about them. Personally, when I taught elementary school children, I made it my goal to learn every child’s name in the school by the end of September. I had a method for doing this and I found that it assisted me in being an informal leader in the school and highly enhanced my disciplinary effectiveness. But much more than that, it improved my effectiveness as a caregiver throughout the school. Pupils overwhelmingly trusted me, sometimes more than their own home-room teacher, simply because I knew their names when I did yardduty, bus-duty, engaged in intramural sports, or wandered the hallway. I’ve continued this method in my instruction of undergraduate university pupils. By the end of September I can name every student in the lecture hall by first name. This ability has more of an effect on their learning, apparently, than my professional and scholarly competence as their instructor. Good teachers dull the most abrasive elements of institutionalization. And since institutions are omnipresent in human life, the humanity of the teacher lets children know that they do not have to be perfect. However, Jackson asks, does this not introduce a fundamental ambiguity to the teacher’s role in schools? The role cannot be understood as something that is perfectly clear, delineated, and definitively objectified. There’s objective imperfection to who the teacher is and to what the teacher does. On the one hand, the teacher must preserve the institution of schooling; on the other, they must serve the individuals who inhabit it and, in doing so, they demonstrate its imperfections. He quotes the social psychologist, Charles Horton Cooley, to illustrate this ambiguity: An institution is a mature, specialized and comparatively rigid part of the social structure. It is made up of persons, but not of whole persons; each one enters into it with a trained and specialized part of himself . . . in antithesis to the institution, therefore, the person represents the wholeness and humanness of life . . . A man is no man at all if he is only a piece of the institution; he must stand also for human nature, for the instinctive, the plastic and the ideal. (Jackson 1968:154, italics mine) When it comes to life in classrooms, there is something antithetical to the assumed universal laws of science. Life there should be physical and rational but it appears to be what Cooley calls very “plastic” and instinctive. While Jackson suspects that life in classrooms may be as sensible as in any other sphere of human endeavor, there seems to be something about that life that remains nonsensical. In that world, we find ambiguities, paradoxes, and even non-senses. This “sense” that is also nonsense puzzled Jackson the most about life in classrooms.

Chapter 3

Schoolteacher Defining the problem

Introduction Lortie begins by briefly reviewing the history of school teaching in America. He reviews the balance of continuity and change that’s taken place in schooling over the last three centuries. By measuring how the work of teaching changed over time, and how it didn’t change, we can understand the school system and how it influenced school teaching. He then explores the context of teaching during his present day. Lortie discovers three major orientations that are shared by all teachers. However, even these are not new. They were mostly detected by Waller in the 1930s and again by Jackson in the 1960s. These orientations have been universal to the experience of schoolteachers for almost 80 years. Continuity becomes evident in these foundations, therefore, and definitive patterns now begin to become explicit for defining teacher development. A completely redefined school culture must become the medium of reform. This comes down to changing how schoolteachers think about social action, a recommendation that was common to Waller. This must begin by teaching teachers about how they think about these actions. It assumes that teachers must begin thinking about their actions in sociological terms. Passions, emotions, and feelings – all of these can be defined sociologically, and Lortie believes that if these are theorized appropriately we will likely have the means towards positive change. Schoolteachers are anachronistic in their thinking. This could be because they still self-select themselves. In doing so, they bring centuries of tradition with them into schools. But Lortie believes that a few simple alterations can undo these problems. Before prescribing these simple alterations, however, he provides us with an incredibly thorough examination of elementary school culture with especial attention to the main organ of that culture: the schoolteacher.

Lortie’s assumptions and methods Lortie sets out by describing the social system in public school teaching. He begins by pointing out that the earliest American teachers of the late 1700s made no practical distinction between cultural literacy and personal religious salvation. In other words, teachers not only prepared children to read and figure – they also saw themselves as saving children’s souls from an eternal afterlife of punishment. Clear linkages were thus

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forged between the basic activities of school teaching, the core values of the society, and the religious beliefs of the Christian church, which oversaw European and American social, moral, and religious values. This meant that the schoolteacher was an agent of ministerial service. This is also why many teachers in early America were destined for church ministry. In fact, the most educated teachers in early colonial America were so because they were clergymen waiting to be appointed to a church. School teaching was a way of biding time until that appointment came up. A direct occupational relationship existed between school classrooms, therefore, and church congregations. In both cases, pastoral care and “shepherding” were involved and in both contexts “piety” was the goal. Teachers had to be models of moral behavior, not just masters of subject matter. Lortie’s approach presupposes that school teaching is deeply rooted in traditional patterns of thought and practice, patterns dating back 300 years. In order to distinguish these patterns, he begins by inquiring into the ways in which teachers are recruited. He posed three questions: 1 2 3

Who chooses teaching as an occupation and why? Once they begin how are they oriented into the profession? What are the rewards that keep them in the classroom?

The ways in which these processes unfolded reaffirmed much of the past. School teaching, Lortie found, did have its own “occupational ethos.” Teaching is a safe haven in which to work with young people and it’s a good place to find trustworthy marriage partners. This is consistent with Lortie’s earlier argument that schools and churches have everything in common historically. It could also explain why schoolteachers are very often “self-selected”; that is, individuals feel the personal calling to become teachers in school, much like a pastor feels the call to lead a church congregation. Pastoral care and piety still seem to be stereotypical feminine traits and the modern occupation bears all the marks of the earlier religious circumstances that produced it during colonial times (Lortie 1975: 15). It is interesting that he chooses the word “marks” to refer to these traits. It’s as if contemporary teachers have some kinds of “markings” or “signs” that brand them to these early teachers. Marks and signs are tokens that refer to something else. They’re the same thing as symbols. In this way, modern teachers are tokens of earlier circumstances that are still present in the contemporary teacher. As tokens, they may not even be noticeable to the contemporary teacher. Recall how Waller’s processes of accommodation became indigenous to the point where newcomers became commodities without conscious awareness of that adaptation. Lortie’s goal, therefore, is to make these circumstances explicit in the interest to destabilizing this historical and psychological continuity. He predicts that radical changes are underway in how public education will be administered. This new order demands changes be instituted in how schoolteachers are selected and socialized occupationally. In particular, they will have to learn to work together to become more adaptive to future economic and technological changes that will be exerted upon them and over which they have no control. This is Lortie’s rationale for teacher development and it’s identical to that of Waller’s 40 years earlier.

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Categorizing schoolteachers as having an occupational ethos is consistent with a sociological method and point of view. This perspective is also responsible for assuming that teaching is, more than anything else, “paid work.” As Lortie writes, “occupations are what shape people” (53). Contrasting this method, and its assumptions, with the ecclesiastical history of school teaching will have implications for how problems are identified for resolution. He cites the founders of the sociological method (i.e. Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber) to support the thesis that the value-orientations of any profession are socialized into the person in the process of learning to become a professional. This is a very significant assumption. It implies that values and norms are absorbed during the arduous process of adopting the persona of “schoolteacher”; hence, the title of his book. It also suggests that learning what a schoolteacher is requires learning all about how the workplace socially produces that persona and personality. So, if we want to learn about how to improve teaching, it’s assumed we have to learn about the person(a) that the teacher has. That person is a structural product of remunerated work patterns that en-culture it, patterns that have their origins in the piety of church ministry. Those cultural patterns and their resultant value-structure are the sources of “our problem.” Lortie documents some clearly identifiable structural patterns for teachers’ personality development. But these differ sharply from other professions, some of which he identifies as contrast-categories. For example, consider and compare the kinds of distinctive experiences that would form the occupational roles of the medical doctor, the retail salesperson, the airline pilot, or the truck driver. Now consider and compare the kinds of distinctive experiences that form the occupational role of “schoolteacher.” When Lortie conducts this inventory, he concludes that the workplace of the schoolteacher is not organized to promote educational inquiry or to build the “intellectual capital” of its occupants. This is because the work-socialization of teaching is less involved than “arcane” crafts that are familiar only to insiders, like doctors. The subcultural conditions that produce medical practitioners have a rich history, and an intense body of knowledge is built around that history. This richness and intensity closes off medicine as a profession to the average person and it’s impossible to masquerade as a doctor without enough preparation. You have to be initiated into that arcane and esoteric order to be an insider. Not so for school teaching, and this contrastive point illustrates why an occupational history of school teaching opened the book. The rich subcultural and historical conditions that produced elite professions are absent in the subculture of the schoolteacher since the 1700s. School teaching was a temporary post. It led to church ministry if you were a man. If you were a woman, it led to the marriage-altar and the nursery. It did not have its own specialized knowledge of subject, field, or applied science. There are clear reasons for this if we examine how schoolteachers are prepared for service. Becoming a schoolteacher involves undergoing three stages of passage: 1 2 3

some formalized “schooling of a general nature” some rite of professional certification or “mediation” learning while doing, or “apprenticeship.”

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Therefore, two forms of schooling are necessary to become a teacher in a school; one is general (i.e. stage #1) and the other is specialized (i.e. stage #2). A very large part of the specialized schooling involves on-the-job training. The generalized schooling is relatively long in comparison to the specialized part and in comparison to other professions the specialized stage is very short. The specialized preparation is neither intellectually nor organizationally very complex. Medicine and Engineering, for example, have roots in the sciences; Law has roots in centuries of case precedents and constitutional principles; and even Divinity can point to generations of scholarship in theology and ethics, all of which have contributed to their professional development. None of this holds true for school teaching. The organizational simplicity of instruction in education is rooted in conventional classroom practices. And even the study of education itself in that context is standardized around traditional practices of instruction or even private study. These principles, practices, and studies do not routinely feature the varieties of learning settings found in the more established medical, legal, or even ministerial professions. In school teaching, certification typically occurs following some rite of passage in actual teaching practice (stage #3). This is what makes the schoolteacher a real “teacher,” a promotion that Lortie notes is very abrupt after a brief stint of training. And this is one reason why school teaching is so unique: this final, all-important induction system is not as highly developed as similar induction systems in other professions. This forms the basis for what Lortie identifies as the fundamental problem of teachers’ work-socialization. The teacher’s occupational-socialization is a subjective process. It is something that happens to you, alone, as your body moves through a series of structured and unstructured experiences that internalize the subcultural norms of the institution. These mutual interactions take place at a mysterious place that Lortie calls an “inner world” (65). They are not publicly demonstrable or even visible in the same way that they may be in other more established professions. In medicine or law, by contrast, criteria that measure success are objectively established and measured. However, this is not so with school teaching. And this is a problem, because neither the mediated passage of entry (stage #2) nor an “apprenticeship of observation” (stage #3) prepares candidates for an abstract conception of school teaching. If you watched other teachers when you were their pupil, you weren’t objectively assessing their performance but you were behaving subjectively as their pupils. By doing so, you were internalizing what it meant to be taught. This internalization process results in mysteries that are only understood as “inner experiences,” and as long as these basic foundations remain hidden in the inner world they will never become explicitly teachable to novices. The principles of teacher training in the 1970s were increasingly drawn from the behavioral and psychological sciences (e.g., Skinner; Bloom; Piaget) but Lortie notes that little assessment of these principles were being undertaken that were measurable with discrete objectives. Likewise, his contemporary research on teaching was increasingly adopting sociological theories of group dynamics, but an apprenticeship of observation does not lend these analytic orientations to the actual “work” of classroom instruction. Therefore, unless beginning teachers are able to undergo some forms of

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training which offset individualistic, traditional, and inner-worldly subjective experiences, the occupation will continue to be staffed by people who have little use for any shared scientific knowledge. This is the essential problem that accompanies the passages that create the “schoolteacher.” Referring to Tyack (1967: 412) Lortie reminds us that teachers have always been very critical of their preparatory training. They believe in general that their work is complicated but that subject-matter knowledge is only a minor component of learning to succeed in the classroom. From Lortie’s sociological perspective, the secrets of success in that forum seem to remain hidden from view. School teaching is not like other occupations, according to him, whose members talk in a language specific to those professions. The absence of this common ground limits the beginner’s ability to tap into any pre-existing body of knowledge. This means that each newcomer laboriously constructs ways of interpreting what their craft means for themselves. This, says Lortie, remains one of the costs of the mutual isolation that attends the absence of any common technical culture (73). On top of this, schoolteachers have no glossary of specialized terms and applied meanings. “Glossary” comes from a Middle High German word (glossen), which is related to “glisten.” A professional glossary would be a collection of bright and shining terms that light the newcomer’s way through the first stages of their career. But without this introductory craft-glossary, teachers remain in the darkness and are forced to feel out their path on their own like the blind. The ordeal of institutional incorporation is private, not common, and the memory of this foundation dictates that professional knowledge in general remains a private possession for the rest of the professional career. According to Lortie’s research, the best source for new ideas during the early stages was informal conversations and exchanges with colleagues. These sources promoted the formation of the individualistic convictions that emerged during these informal exchanges. Overwhelmingly, these back-region conversations and exchanges were more significant than official systems of supervision. This brings Lortie to “a difficult question” which reiterates Waller’s “problem” concerning teachers. Schoolteachers work largely by themselves and in isolation. They don’t participate in meaningful community, be it technical or otherwise. And without the general principles shared in common, the profession is defined by personal styles (77). When the teachers in Lortie’s study made reference to “principles,” they apparently pointed to specific activities and trade-tricks that were essential to surviving in the classroom. Principles were not generalized laws, theoretically based procedures, nor especially conceptual assumptions – they were actual techniques or specific methods of coping with difficult situations in actual practice. They were managerial rather than theoretical, narrowly practical rather than broadly conceptual. When contemplating mastery, therefore, the schoolteacher traditionally assesses what works personally with reference to curriculum-delivery in the lived reality of the actual school classroom. They think in terms of the status quo rather than “states-of-the-art.” Therefore, when considering schoolteachers as adult learners Lortie concludes that we have to consider them as aggregates of individuals, each assembling practices consistent with individual experiences and particular personalities. Choosing to be a

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schoolteacher takes place largely as a self-selection; socialization into the work is largely a self-socialization. This fact places the occupation strangely in between those that are marked by casual entry, such as day laborers, and those in which protracted demands are made, such as the Marine. Upon entering the classroom, this solitary journey results in outcomes that produce a copy of the occupation that we call “schoolteacher.” But note, says Lortie, that this stereotype is only reproduced by means of the instructional exigencies that are necessary and essential to manage a room of restless and reluctant pupils. Lortie emphasizes that this, again, is “our problem” since these circumstances lead to maladaptive patterns and psychological disabilities. The absence of common, objective, technical knowledge results in self-doubts and lowered self-esteem. Teachers become insecure in asserting their authority on educational matters. This, in turn, makes them less able to respond to demands that are external to the school. This further reinforces their isolation and dependence on individualistic interpretations of practice. And this essentially de-professionalizes schoolteachers. As evidence of this argument, Lortie reminds us that “occupations” are recognized as “professional” when the general public believes that its members jointly possess “arcane knowledge” on matters of vital, general public interest. National politicians, by comparison, do not certify themselves formally for their job. But by means of, and in the process of, successfully governing they accumulate a common obscure and secret store of knowledge that is only indigenous to the halls of government. They are assigned confidence for this competence and the general public trusts them to govern effectively and ethically. However, politicians align themselves with political parties that are organized for the purpose of directing common policies. In contrast, schoolteachers always retreat into individualistic responses to events that confront them. They also run to individual reward-patterns and favor individualistic conceptions of performance-excellence. In essence, they choose to isolate themselves, not to ally or associate themselves professionally. They search for idiosyncratic rewards for success and develop personally private benchmarks for that mastery. In general, the individualistic socialization of the schoolteacher supports a subculture of conservatism in the teacher corps. Their inability or reluctance to ally themselves with others and the lack of any common conceptual knowledge for what they practice produces resistance to changing conditions in their workplace. Once they become locked into place individually and once they solidify what works in the classroom, they can’t seem to correct or reverse these earlier impressions and orientations. It’s as if these impressions become burned into place, glossed permanently into individual memory, and this practical glossary of fundamental and traumatic experiences orients all future patterns that follow thereafter. This is not the case with the established professions. For example, even if the most conservative scientists were recruited into laboratories to conduct experiments, the reward-patterns would never impede them from doing highly innovative and experimental projects. It doesn’t matter, in other words, whether scientists are conservative or radically liberal in their ideologies. They are rewarded for being bold in their efforts. In contrast, schoolteachers don’t seem to be concerned with being bold in their innovative efforts, at least not beyond

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the initial stages when their occupation personalities become cemented. The socialization patterns that ossify those personalities produce conservative people fundamentally but also conservative practitioners secondarily. Even if they enter the occupation as radical or liberal educators, those ideologies become stifled and they eventually adopt a conservative orientation. When combined with protective individualism, this conservative trait becomes solidly locked into place.

The objective uncertainity of school teaching What are the rewards, then, that this conservative occupation prizes? It’s not money, apparently, and Lortie notes that their salary-income tends to be “front-loaded”; that is, remuneration does not increase dramatically with seniority. This, once more, differentiates school teaching from other careers where upward mobility becomes associated with higher earnings. Schoolteachers tend to value high degrees of involvement in their work, and the devotion of personal resources to their classroom is one indicator of this moral principle. Schoolteachers want to be paid in “psychic rewards” (101). To understand this, recall that school teaching is a subjective developmental process that forms from the interaction of persons in a classroom rather than out of the understanding of carefully researched pedagogical principles. These relationships are constructed in an “inner world.” To explain the strange motivators in this world, Lortie compares two solitary contexts that are mutually exclusive. On the one hand, the career rewards of school teaching makes teachers look to be rewarded in the immediate present. However, on the other hand, this presentism develops in an institution that is supposed to be very futuristic in its orientation. We observe, therefore, two competing temporal orientations in the work of the schoolteacher; one, which is entirely focused on the “now” of the present and immediate rewards; and the other, which is entirely focused on long-term future outcomes and compensations. Jackson made the same observation. To understand how schoolteachers balance this temporal conflict and its competing reward structure, Lortie asked them to identify where effort made a difference for them. Answers to these kinds of questions revealed what kinds of events were most satisfying for teachers. Again, it was not remuneration for future gain that moved them to apply themselves and develop themselves. It was also clearly not future benefits for society in general, although they acknowledged that was important. The matters of importance that drew them to develop were in the here-and-now of face-to-face subjective interactions with pupils. They were called and propelled by the inner, psychic rewards that emanated from the interactive human faces of their classroom responsibilities. To illustrate, Lortie classified three types of rewards that could be detected in the occupational context of the classroom: 1 2 3

extrinsic rewards ancillary rewards intrinsic psychic rewards.

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Extrinsic reward patterns include the promise and motivation of increased pay for increased performance review. They could also be higher stages on a promotionladder that results in added responsibilities, privileges, or increased financial bonuses. Ancillary rewards can be a combination of extrinsic and intrinsic rewards that go hand-in-hand or they are rewards that are interpreted to be rewarding by some but taken as granted by others. For example, teaching is not generally environmentally hazardous. It is not physically dangerous, in general, and so some might identify these benefits or incentives to be “rewarding”; others might see them as obvious to the work. In contrast, schoolteachers overwhelmingly pursue intrinsic rewards as measures of their success. Consistent with the history of their occupation, the rewards of more money, prestige, power over others and its privileges are generally reacted to with suspicion. In the same way, activities engaged in for personal gain, greed or avarice – certainly selfishness – are all condemned with hostility. Giving is better than receiving, and what does the schoolteacher want to receive in exchange for giving instruction to pupils? Lortie answers this question with a tactile metaphor. Schoolteachers attach enormous importance to “outreach.” They want to feel what it’s like to “reach their pupils.” The value attached to this priority even has historically documented support (see Tyack 1967: 314). It also lends support to the tradition of schools being “self-perpetuating institutions.” Working in classrooms promotes the continuous search for this kind of human connection between schoolteachers and pupils. Hyphens connect words together and combine them into one idea. The inner-life of school teaching locates the reward-structure on that plane: along the dash or hyphen between teachers and their pupils. The word hyphen comes to us from ancient Greek (hyph’hen), when it meant “subservient” or, “submissive to one or another.” These servant relationships between teachers and their pupils give rise to teachers’ moral outlooks. However, Lortie claims that it is these connections that actually hinder teachers from adjusting and adapting to system-wide changes. Psychic rewards appear to be as cherished as financial rewards and any threats to their psychic rewards are resisted. Lortie proposes that this subservience prevents schoolteachers from looking beyond their institutions and learning to adapt to social changes. In essence, they remain the slaves of their pupils. This analysis shows that schoolteachers, more than anything else, are agents of moral education. While they do instruct and transmit subject-matter knowledge to children and youth, their “agency,” a word that descends from the Latin word for “drive,” or “lead,” arises directly out of their drive to serve others as leaders of moral virtue. That is essentially the kind of difference that teachers are trying to make with children and youth. And Lortie is quick to point out that this sentimental attitude is consistent with the moral roots of American schooling. The schoolteachers that he interviewed reminded him clearly of the basic tenets of the colonial founders and the linkage that they established between basic literacy and religious goodness. This striking coincidence was evident in the interviews, literally, and Lortie cited exact transcripts to provide evidence for this claim. For example, one schoolteacher reported that their main service was the preparation of children and youth for citizenship. In the exact words of the schoolteacher, “I suppose what I’m really doing is trying to get

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that child ready to live in society; to take care of him and become the kind of proper member of society” (111). Acculturating “good citizenship” is the closest articulation of the politics of teaching. Note how “citizenship” connects with “city-state.” Its roots actually come to us from Middle English, by means of the French citeien (contemporary citoyen): one who inhabits the cité. A citizen is a person who is naturalized into a nation state at birth and who owes allegiance to that state as a naturalized person in exchange for the protection of its sovereign. The main point of emphasis here is protection, rights, and privileges in exchange for allegiance. Allegiance denotes obligation, fidelity, devotion, duty, and loyalty. These are tremendously important ethics with fundamental values that are necessary for personal and public success. They are the bases of public morality and they sustain the interpersonal relationships of public trust. As another schoolteacher insisted, “You have to prepare them for life . . . first they have to be respectful, honest, good citizens and so forth” (111). What, then, is the mission of the schoolteacher? It’s hosting a micro-community of citizens-in-preparation as the sovereign of a microstate called “the classroom.” This is exactly what Waller called “despotism.” Conclusively, the psychic rewards that are paid in exchange for that benevolent sovereignty are what satisfy and fulfill the schoolteacher. Many schoolteachers in Lortie’s study made much of cultivating an independence of mind in their pupils. However, actually practicing what they preached tended to betray behaviors of compliance and obedience. This may seem contradictory until we recall that “good” citizenship was historically demonstrated by obligation, devotion, and duties in exchange for the privileges of freedom within limits. It is easy to understand, therefore, why a social contract between pupils and schoolteachers often offers the most effective means of maintaining order in the classroom. In other words, when pupils cooperate with schoolteachers they are demonstrating how successful they will be as contributing members of society. In particular, they are in training for the dependable interactions that will be fundamental to commerce, trade, industry, and traffic. By implication, they are actually demonstrating independent abilities of mind as well as of finance. In a word, they are learning to “prosper.” At this juncture, Lortie concurs with Willard Waller’s reference (1932: 248) that the essence of successful school teaching is visible only in how they maintain their classroom discipline. The classroom is the incubator of social, political, and economic order. And the “easy teacher” or the one who can’t maintain discipline in that incubator “lets the whole side down” as Waller wrote. That means that losing control in the classroom lets down society as a whole. It prepares a context of public disorder, financial ruin, political dissent, and even criminal activity. We should all be concerned with creating and maintaining a social, political, and economic context in which we can feel safe, free, and prosperous. Clearly, given these priorities, the problems of the person who maintains order in the classroom should be everyone’s problem. That person is creating and maintaining a safe, free, and prosperous environment for children and youth. Their difficulties will result in difficulties in the wider social world. And this is exactly why Lortie is focusing on the significance of “psychic rewards.” From Lortie’s perspective, schoolteachers are unable to focus on

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more future-oriented rewards that promote adaptive change for the institution if they rely on psychic rewards. Why were the teachers so reliant on this criterion for their success? Well over 64 per cent of elementary schoolteachers that Lortie interviewed located craft-pride around striking success with one, individual, and single pupil. With this discovery, Lortie confronts an irony. While classroom order in general is the essential demonstration of leadership, saving “that single individual” who would otherwise fail is the purpose for maintaining order. Order protects the most vulnerable. This is basically what “making a difference” means. Pride, in short, is generated by what Lortie calls “elitist” outcomes (132) and the child-at-risk is the elite pupil. Teachers may claim their stated ideals are universal and in the interest of all pupils but the elite goal of their work arises in crafting single “master-works.” “Craft” came onto the English language from Old High German, where it continues in High German to mean “strength” (Kraft). Fewer than 29 per cent of schoolteachers interviewed mentioned generalized outcomes with entire classes to be a measure of their strength as educators (127). While schoolteachers might claim that they care about the effectiveness of the institution of schooling, they really specialize in personal and selective effectiveness as a basis for their craft-pride (132). They can never be certain, therefore, that their work is really making a general difference at all. They must teach to “the whole” but they look out for “the one” that is always due to fall. Lortie claims from this that schoolteachers have a basic psychological defect: uncertainty. Schoolteachers can never be certain of making a long-lasting difference in the lives of their children for the long-term future. They want to produce “good people” but they can never be sure of accomplishing this goal. Everyone expects so much from schools. However, “education,” when examined from the perspective of the individual schoolteacher, seems to be an uncertain and insubstantial affair. If we want to understand the psychic world of the classroom teacher, therefore, we have to understand the significance of subjective certainty because that is how we will discover the meaningful, existential measurements for life in classrooms.

Articulating the teacher’s Kraft We begin to see the conceptual shift that’s taking place during the founding stages of teacher research. Traditionally the schoolhouse blurred distinctions between citizenpreparation and pietistic-salvation. This was probably because the ethics of citizenship and commerce were originally biblical values. Lortie tries to destabilize this historical continuity with sociological methods and assumptions. Primarily, this requires conceptualizing school teaching as paid occupational work, not a response to a religious calling. The goal is to redirect the ethos of teaching from religious vocation to professional formation. The shift begins by investigating how value-orientations are socialized as a route to distinguishing which habits and values refer to the religious heritage of teaching. These need to be corrected and redirected towards social and psychological scientific foundations; the justification being, what we now see in schools as “schoolteacher” is increasingly maladaptive to a scientific and technological world.

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There are clear malfunctions that surface when we inspect schoolteachers with these assumptions. First, they are not selected objectively according to professional criteria, but choose themselves vocationally. This promotes an individualistic orientation to the job. It also prevents the accumulation of a professional vocabulary. Teachers look inwardly for guidance and feed on the psychic rewards that return from reaching out to their pupils for self-esteem. They become subservient to children and co-dependent on their pupils’ success at the expense of their own. This leads to disempowerment that comes with chronically feeling guilty because they can never be all that they wish to be for these pupils. The needs that children display at that tender age are infinite. The disability is consistent with the religious orientation that inspired them to enter teaching. As a subjective calling, one can never be sure of one’s personal adequacy; that is to say, “am I truly pious enough?” or “am I falling short of personal salvation?” Schoolteachers are obsessed with others’ success. They can never be sure of their own. The solution to this problem would be to inject more objective certainty into the work, the kind that comes from scientific methods and assumptions. Scientific methods have little tolerance for the blurred inaccuracies of faith and piety. One way to redirect this tradition is to coordinate teachers’ work with the established crafts. “Handicrafts” (from the German Handwerk, literally, “hand-work”) are objectively measured and always result in clear outcomes and products. But teachers’ “products” cannot be visually inspected and monitored like handicrafts. Furthermore, many institutional barriers separate teachers from controlling outcomes and products. Teachers don’t work with objects; they work with human bodies that have real, living energies. And so whereas a craftsperson would be highly debilitated by the insecurities that teachers chronically feel, teachers live them on a day-to-day basis. We would be suspicious of renovators or auto mechanics that felt psychologically estranged or alienated from their product while they worked on our home or fixed our car. But Lortie claims that we tolerate teachers who feel this way when they work with our children. Jackson felt suspicious when he noticed these chronic traits in teachers, and it is this suspicion that motivates researchers to diagnose teachers as psychologically defective. We want schoolteachers to be more certain, more confident; in a word, more “professional”; but at the very least, we want them to have the minimum confidence of a certified tradesperson. Lortie recommends that teachers need to be stronger and this will come if they can mimic other strong professions like doctors. Surgeons shouldn’t be burdened by self-doubt when they work on our bodies. They know what’s correct because they rely on scientific principles to back up their decisions. There is a need, therefore, to articulate what teachers’ “craft” consists of from an objective and scientific perspective. My choice for referring to school teaching as a trade rather than as a profession was actually inspired by Lortie, who finds it useful to conceive of the teaching occupation as “a craft.” My choice is also inspired by Waller, who indicated that instruction is what’s actually exchanged (i.e. “traded”) between the teacher and the pupil and constitutes their basic relationship. This word also descends from medieval occupations that traded finely crafted objects, such as furniture, jewelry, and the like, either for money or for bartered goods of relative equal value. The finery of one’s “craft” was

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traditionally measured by the excellence of the goods that they produced with their hands (i.e. handiwork). Visual indications demonstrated the power and strength of their “know-how.” Lortie points out how crafts-people have always adjusted and readjusted their actions in line with hoped-for-outcomes. They monitor steps and make corrections as they proceed. Often, these steps are visually inspected for correction. However, monitoring teaching effectiveness is fraught with complications when compared to other crafts. This is because the processes and products sought by teachers are difficult to measure. Unlike the handicrafts, they lack specifications, blueprints, plans, and working models. The measurements that teachers try to manipulate are very uncertain and often refer to success with single individuals alone. Alternatively, some trades can offer services by achieving expected purposes. As Lortie mentions, an airline pilot knows immediately when his landing meets expected standards. Feedback is immediate and definite and the timing is unambiguous. Ordinarily, these purposes are measured in terms of performance objectives. When gauging human outputs such as this, measures might include acceptable response time, the total number of transactions completed within a given time, and the effects and durations of downtime. But such unitary dimensions cannot be applied realistically for school teaching. As we have read, the standards that are valued in that context are normally multiple in their definition and singular in their focus. And these multiple definitions and singular criteria are applied simultaneously. The purposes of school teaching are capable of being understood in two or more possible senses or ways especially when the elusive goals of good citizenship are concerned. In terms of response time, years lapse before dependable evidence reveal the results of teachers’ services. The context of their work is a developing human life and the life of the classroom is only one tangent of that comprehensive life. Lortie states this problem clearly: The teacher’s craft, then, is marked by the absence of concrete models for emulation, unclear lines of influence, multiple and controversial criteria, ambiguity about assessment timing, and instability in the product. (Lortie 1975: 136) Absence, vagary, multiplicity, ambiguity, instability – these are the hallmarks of the teacher’s craft. There are also structural aspects that complicate our ability to measure schoolteachers’ work objectively. For a start, schoolteachers do not select their clients. They are delivered as their parents produce them and all children enter the system for training and education, as Jackson observed. This is another reason why schoolteachers depend so heavily with psychic earnings as indications of their self-worth. Lortie again adds that reliance on psychic earnings brings an endemic and prevalent anxiety. Teachers blame themselves for not measuring up to self-interpreted standards. Lortie theorizes that guilt, shame, self-blame, even resentment, may be the associated costs for the individualistic culture of the school. As long as reassurance for successful performance comes with the immediate gratification of “seeing their eyes,” or “feeling their enthusiasm” in relative solitude, then teachers will feel anxious and forsaken whenever these immediate earnings are not forthcoming.

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For all of these reasons, Lortie characterizes teachers’ thought processes as “moralistic” rather than “analytic” (159). Moralistic ways of thinking are going to make schoolteachers self-accusing rather than self-accepting. Self-accusation is a much more passionate experience than self-examination. For example, social work and clinical psychology are more analytic and scientifically based professions. Social workers and clinical psychologists are more self-examining in their stance vis-à-vis their clients. But Lortie finds that teachers do not allow themselves this privilege. Consequently, Lortie sensed that teachers seemed lonely. They doubted themselves and their abilities constantly, and this bleakness is not something shared by other professions. They fight battles alone with their own conscience and it seems, from Lortie’s research, that they frequently lose those battles.

“Good days” are still uncertain days It is certainly true that other helping occupations encounter objective uncertainty. This is not unique to schoolteachers. For example, psychologists, psychiatrists, and clinical sociologists all engage in what could be called “soul-work.” However, Lortie believes that the situation in teaching is unique. This is because of what he calls “the structural exacerbation of uncertainty” (159). The structure that he refers to is both personal and institutional. He reminds us of how schoolteachers are self-selected into the profession but that their training and certification for the occupation itself is not highly respected, even by teachers themselves. Before actually being hired into the classroom, they don’t undergo any formal “ordeal” that initiates newcomers to the field and differentiates members of the field from non-members. In other professions, older members feel reassured that newcomers “care” about their responsibility. In moments of self-doubt, those who have “passed the test” and bear the marks of that fitness for service reassure themselves that they also made that passage and were found worthy of a place in the profession. Institutionally, the career system of teachers does little to offset the objective uncertainties and subjective disparities caused by “intangibility and relational complexity” (161). Eased entry and careers without demarcated promotion levels exacerbate objective uncertainty and promotes the subjective certainties that follow from immediate psychic rewards. They encourage individualistic orientations to personal and professional development. Lortie sums up our problem in this way: Uncertainty, under these conditions, can be transformed into diffuse anxiety and painful self-doubt, which only exacerbates the need for psychic rewards. It seems likely that teachers treasure the joys of accomplishment the more for their scarcity. It is also likely that they care deeply about working conditions, which they believe increase the flow of work rewards. (Lortie 1975: 161) It’s not loneliness that schoolteachers really feel, perhaps, but some kind of fugitive refuge. It’s akin to being a “maroon.” Maroons were fugitive slaves of the Caribbean

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islands. They were cast adrift and forsaken in solitude to survive on their own like Robinson Crusoe. It is schoolteachers’ insularity from public view that results in this kind of alienation, an estrangement certainly noticed by Waller, to the extent that he even equated their alienation to actual slavery. Lortie is discovering the structural features that exacerbate this slave-morality. This discovery is a prerequisite to analyzing the sentiments, beliefs, and preoccupations that result from this tragedy. This is an obvious result of Lortie’s study, because his main interest was to discover the schoolteacher’s sentiments. Lortie defines sentiments as attitudes, thoughts, or judgments prompted by feelings. If feelings prompt thoughts, then schoolteachers’ sentiments are easily betrayed when asked the question, “how do you feel about an issue, or event, or person?” Those ideas become collected into sets that become “ideologies.” Coherent sets of ideas form strong beliefs, attitudes, and these sentiments determine what kinds of decisions a schoolteacher makes about their life, their work, and about many other things. Belief-structures imply directionality and they orient decisions. A schoolteacher’s sentimental “orientation,” therefore, reveals the general directions of their inclinations or interests. For example, what kind of “mood” would you describe yourself as having most of the time: happy, melancholic, or even depressed? By determining the schoolteacher’s mood, Lortie was interested in the “ethos” of the school, a very important but difficult item to research. Ethos is an ancient Greek word that meant “custom,” or “character” and this is the closest characterization of what we might call the “culture” of the institution. So researching the ethos of the teachers’ occupation is making a careful and detailed search into the distinguishing sentiments, orientations, and guiding beliefs of the person who chooses teaching as an occupation. It also delves into the mood of the institution in which schoolteachers perform their occupation. And because ethos is related to “ethics” Lortie’s investigation was particularly concerned with how teachers judged what was right, just, and good in contrast to what is wrong, unjust, or bad. In judging teachers’ decision-making processes, Lortie begins by identifying the structural disabilities that impede freedom of thought. For example, unlike other performance-practitioners, such as stage-directors, schoolteachers have very little artistic control over their scripts. They work with curriculum and supplies that are furnished by others. They manage classrooms, but schoolteachers are rarely referred to as “managers” and very rarely receive the kind of credit afforded to such professions. Schoolteachers work under administrators and they work alongside people who are younger than they are. In performing that work, schoolteachers perform a therapeutic service similar to the physiotherapist and the psychotherapist. For example, they do conduct assessments, diagnose difficulties, and prescribe treatments to remedy learning difficulties. These practices call on intuition and require some explicit reasoning. However, Lortie repeats that therapists enjoy a much higher degree of professional status than classroom teachers, owing largely to the rigor of their certification process. Their accreditation also involves stages of development during service that steadily increases their competence. But schoolteachers have fewer resources at their disposal than stagedirectors, psychotherapists, or psychiatrists do. This gives them less control over the kinds of promotional stages that would increase their competence and confidence.

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Lortie makes all of these assumptions, therefore, before posing what he referred to as “the most useful question in his study.” The answer to this question revealed the schoolteacher’s basic belief-structure. When asked to describe “a good day” the schoolteachers in Lortie’s study tended to identify two sets of influencing factors. They began by describing what would compromise good days. Undesirable occurrences tended to be associated with adults who trespass the boundaries of their sacred classrooms for whatever reason. Trespass usually involved some kind of invasive supervision. In addition, school-wide tasks that stole their time from the classroom tended to bring down a “good day” and compromise it. Good days didn’t mean days without conflict. Schoolteachers acknowledged that good and bad days almost always contained “ups and down” of erratic flows of activities. A report of what makes a day “good” reaffirms all earlier analyses. Good days involved how well pupils positively respond to the schoolteacher’s style and effectiveness in the class. Good days come about when the immediate and casual interactions between the teacher and the pupils in the school come off congenially and cooperatively. The teacher then felt worthy of being a teacher. Consistently, schoolteachers were totally concerned with matters of the classroom and they imparted secondary importance to all other organizational matters. Preoccupations and beliefs are in harmony, therefore, when schoolteachers are able to teach. They yearn for uninterrupted and productive engagements with pupils. When schoolteachers have “bad days” they usually revolve around unproductive engagements with pupils, sometimes complicated by harassing engagements with adults who invaded their ability to control the classroom. Problems with administration typically involved principals’ inability or unwillingness to protect their sacred spaces of learning. These findings are consistent with the fundamental importance that schoolteachers place on the psychic rewards of their work. Lortie then explored what schoolteachers longed for to maximize such “good days.” The schoolteachers rarely if ever suggested system-wide changes. They tended to recommend short and small-scale measures. Consistently with the rest of the study, they called for more conservative rather than radical rearrangements. They stuck to individualistic accommodations rather than collectivist reforms. They focused on the present rather than more future-oriented adjustments. An underlying critique was directed at the organization only when they experienced organizational efforts hindering them from being successful classroom teachers. Similarly, an underlying critique was levelled at the organization and its administrators when they experienced efforts that allowed for too much adult interference in their classroom. At no time was any concern expressed with any deficiencies of pedagogical science or of the teaching occupation as a whole. On the one hand, they wanted to be left alone to do their job; on another, they felt isolated and unsupported for their efforts. Schoolteachers portrayed themselves as constrained, underappreciated, and undersupplied. To the outsider, they seemed like complainers who were only understood when they interact with their peers. Clearly, there is a sort of uncertainty and fluctuation to the schoolteacher’s feelings. There can be continuous contradiction as to which path to follow. While schoolteachers yearn for more independence they accept at the

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same time the dominance of the system without which they would not be economically or functionally dependent. They cherish the shelter of the system while at the same time complain of its constraints and limitations. They are, in fact, marooned on paradox. This middle ground between willing constraint and the wish for more independence creates an ambivalent value-system that is never brought into consonance. The attitudes and beliefs of schoolteachers seem inconsistent and yet they seem to be highly committed to their work. Lortie delves deeper into this curious problem by inspecting what kinds of interpersonal relationships matter most to them. As he now approaches the end of his book, his findings begin to become consistent with little surprises remaining. With regard to the schoolteacher’s development, our problems are now becoming clear.

Presentism, conservatism, individualism Lortie is trying to show where investments should be channelled in developing schoolteachers. This investment should pay dividends for the educational preparation of children and youth. Lortie’s research has shown that schoolteachers’ investment of mental and emotional energy is channeled towards all persons, objectives, and ideas concerning individual classrooms. And so we have to come to terms with the fact that a schoolteacher’s “thought processes” (i.e. their “mental energy”) and “moral outlook” (i.e. their bodily energy) are related synonymously with their emotional energy which is, clearly, channeled towards all persons, objectives, ideas, and things in the classroom. It was for this reason that Lortie was able to characterize schoolteachers’ thought processes as “moralistic” rather than as “analytic” primarily. In doing so, Lortie is focusing on the “inner world” of the schoolteacher (i.e. their “psychological world”). They are moralistic, inner worldly, and motivated by psychological drives. These categories foreshadow an important intersection for understanding the schoolteacher’s values and motivations. Understanding an inner world has to connect desire with passions, emotions, and feelings. But for now, Lortie continues to investigate these relationships from a sociological perspective. His examination of relationships will remain focused on human relationships and how group dynamics play a part in developing the schoolteachers as adult learners who work in institutions. He continues to portray schoolteachers as somehow educationally wounded by comparing them to other professionals such as medical physicians and university professors who are not as vulnerable. Clearly, schoolteachers are not only lonely – they lack autonomy over their workplace, their persons, objectives, ideas, tools, and even over their workshop. They are not “free,” and that fact is their essential and determining wound. How does this captivity play out in their relationships with other schoolteachers? Recall that it is individualism that characterizes the schoolteacher’s socialization and that they do not share a rigorous pedagogical science. Lortie characterizes schoolteachers as “entrepreneurs of psychic profits” (195) but adds that no “arrangements” exist for the sharing of these profits. By not sharing, the collegial norms that Lortie describes continue to reinforce individualism. Technical knowledge may be shared but the freedom to select how much is shared preserves how psychic rewards are passed around.

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Having “a good day” outweighs any systematic effort to generate general principles of teaching practice. Individual schoolteachers may pool their knowledge and resources but Lortie found no systematic, formal codifications of knowledge; just exchanges of useful “tricks of the trade” (195). In general, it seems clear that schoolteachers rely on personal convictions and get their satisfactions from outcomes that are also very personal. They do not tend to use stated global educational goals, mistrust mission statements, and see no value in utopian terms to guide their actions. Jackson confirmed this seven years earlier. They defer to personal values, most of which are heavily influenced by past experiences. Their reliance on personal standards and mechanisms of assessment are associated with traditional forms of instruction. These are essential problems that Lortie identifies because this personalism contributes to their endemic uncertainty. He would wish schoolteachers to be more certain of what they’re doing and why. For without the reassurance-structure of professional community, uncertainty can escalate into feelings of downright anxiety. For example, when in the public realm, they want to be shielded from others but not forgotten in solitary confinement. This ambiguous state of affairs contributes even more to an insecure individualism that is neither communal nor solitary. Teachers are nowhere, really, and this makes their personal identity additionally ambiguous. Indecision, irresolution, and anxiety induce conservative conformity and exacerbate an already instable individualism. Finally, Lortie insists that schoolteachers’ obsession with the present and their hesitation to think futuristically contributes to their lack of enthusiasm in working together. Without collaboration they’ll never achieve a pedagogical science. In essence, Lortie concludes that the world of the schoolteacher lacks any underlying order of certainty. Everything is indecisive, indefinite, indeterminate, problematical, and doubtful. And it is this fitful environment into which we introduce children and youth for educational preparation? A more scientific approach would begin to remediate this problem-ridden environment and perhaps provide our children with a more dependable context for learning. But that kind of approach assumes that some underlying order exists in the world of the classroom. That “order” is basically what Lortie is trying to discover in his research. Unfortunately, for Lortie, the existence of some such order is not forthcoming in the teachers’ world. Theirs is an inner world of private experience. And so it’s not surprising that teachers don’t invest rigorous research into general principles that inform them. Why inquire into the external, empirical world when the most meaningful events are either beyond comprehension or disposed to secrecy? Finally, a chronic individualism retards any search for universal professional knowledge. Working alone prevents any empirical common language. If schoolteachers can’t invent common terms to identify and indicate specific events then their mutual interactions will remain informal and superficial. Across the board, Lortie rediscovers three recurrent themes that debilitate schoolteachers as learners at risk: individualism, presentism, and conservatism. These are the significant components in the ethos of the American schoolteacher. He hopes that behavioral science and close empirical analysis can assist recently trained teachers to show greater interest in systematic inquiry. But he leaves his conclusions at this point and ends the book with speculations about change.

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Defining teacher development Lortie concludes his book by stating that “culture” can be variously defined. Forty years earlier, Waller was able to reveal relationships between accommodation and institutional culture. Human beings become accommodated, he wrote, into institutions and become commodities by playing roles and adopting functions. They become integrated into an unconscious unity that seems to have its own generative force. As a generative force, culture has no substance and so demystifying its mechanisms involves delving into the many ways of knowing by its participants. But since teachers don’t seem to think objectively, “ways of knowing” can only be experienced directly; it seems, by living in the institution and experiencing the invisible “ways” of that life. Lortie contributes to this research history by defining this insubstantial force as “the way members of a group think about social action” (216). For Lortie, culture can only be experienced as ways of thinking about social life and we’ve seen that these ways, for the schoolteacher, have everything to do with passionate inwardness. Giving expressions to those feelings through action, and then being rewarded for those actions with some kind of inner spiritual reward is what teaching is all about. The emotional ethos of the school does seem to resemble some kind of religious experience. Some of these emotions may be beyond observation. Some feelings are not socially expressed. However, Lortie believed that a sociological analysis of schoolteachers’ expressions could resolve this problem as well. The distinction between what actually happens in schools and what is theoretically possible is important, he insists, for theoretical possibilities are the most likely sources of positive change. What did he believe we should look for in studying the gap between what is real and what is possible? It is no surprise that he begins by challenging the conservative cultural mindset of schoolteachers. Schoolteachers are “doggedly committed to the past” he accuses. Norms of rationality are going to take hold, he warns, and diversities of all sorts along with the discontinuities that follow are real possibilities in the future of American schooling. Conservatism is no strength – it is a problem, and there has to be a generalized shift toward more adaptability. Lortie also foresees highly structured instructional programs on the rise beyond the 1970s. Without adapting, he predicts, schoolteachers will be suspicious of information provided by business, university, or government proponents that will influence curriculum. But these influences are coming. He also expects that this research and development will spawn new techniques, which could become specialties, such as computer-assisted instruction. The increased responsibilities that will come with these innovations will result in reduced exemption from public review and a public clamor for more “accountability.” And so schoolteachers’ protective monopoly over the classroom will only be attacked rather than congratulated. These innovations will also be introduced by school systems that will be increasingly administered by large state-bureaucracies that will be centrally controlled. These changes could confront schoolteachers with a crisis in the definition of their employment status, for such an enormous administrative structure would increasingly classify them as functionaries of the state or as mere bureaucrats within a governmental structure.

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Schoolteachers, therefore, own the problem that has been the subject of this sociological and psychological research ever since Willard Waller’s introductory sociology. If teachers are to win their autonomy in the face of this onslaught, Lortie recommends that they must somehow persuade state decision-makers that theirs is a “professionalizing” occupation. However, the axes of professionalism that he advocates run against the entire ethos of the schoolteacher’s occupational culture. Their ways of thinking do not conform to what state decision-makers or the general public assumes to be “professional.” So unless there is a shift in teachers’ orientations and especially in their sentiments, Lortie doubts that they will be able to even acknowledge the recommendations of his research. Conservatism will not result in a dynamic, changing occupation, he warns. Individualism will not produce intricate arrangements for collegial judgment. Presentism will never eventuate in growing arcane knowledge possessed by teachers alone. Schoolteachers need esoteric knowledge to support their curriculum decisions and they need to distribute this knowledge by means of more diverse political structures so that they interact with more effective collegial structures. They don’t think about the future implications of their decisions because they’re so obsessed with trivial and immediate psychic gratifications from their pupils. In summary, unless teachers substitute professionally-oriented values for the ones that they express, they will be hard pressed to claim any professional status in a centralized system of public education. The challenge lies in finding “points where intelligent intervention can make a difference” (229). Where are some of these intelligent, intervening points? One goal for intervention, as Lortie saw it in 1975, was reflexive conservatism. Schoolteachers ought not to reject change out of hand but be willing to give serious thought to alternative ways of attacking pedagogical problems. Furthermore, it is clear that the kinds of people that are attracted to school teaching tend to favor existing states of affairs without questioning them. Perhaps students could be screened more carefully to control for this disability. Perhaps advances in psychological testing could screen out those applicants who are wedded to past practices and could integrate more experimentally-minded candidates. Centuries of tradition could be undone with a few simple alterations. Training could then be diversified to encourage resilience and those who prove to be incapable of changing could be routed to other lines of work. It has been shown that in the process of education pupils usually internalize the practices of their own teachers. Novices have to be freed from unconscious influences of this kind. What they bring from the past should be critically examined. Some methods may need to be devised for teachers to gain cognitive control over previous unconscious habits. But the goal is not to entirely reject the past – it should be to increase the person’s awareness of beliefs and preferences about teaching and expose them to personal examination. The new teacher can then be selective and work out a synthesis of past and current practices in terms of personal values and understandings. Lortie was especially puzzled by the absence of the scientific method in the preparation and development of schoolteachers. He heard no mention of the disciplines of observation, comparison, rules of inference, sampling, and hypothesis testing through treatment, in the schoolteacher’s language (231). This militates against the

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development of a technical culture with arcane knowledge and encourages the retention of conservative doctrines where each teacher has their own practical version of teaching truth. Clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers are all able to connect clinical issues with scientific modes of thought. Teachers should be pressed also to forge more connections between theory and practice like other true professions. In conclusion, Lortie does concede that schoolteachers are not completely unlike practitioners in other fields in one area. They will be reluctant to try new approaches unless they believe that they can make them work without damaging their reputations. A more collegial cultural milieu will assist them in adapting to these changes and allow them to maintain their integrity. This would begin to change if self-selection was challenged as a viable means of identifying candidates for school teaching. Self-selection arises when individuals identify with images of earlier times. Lortie began his book with a history of those times, a period when school teaching and individual piety were pedagogically confused. It is clear from Lortie’s research that schoolteachers have traditionally occupied subordinate positions in matters of technical knowledge for a long time. They are intellectually limited and so programs need to be imparted gradually to free them. Waller believed that they are partial to slave-morality. It is clear that Lortie also believed that they suffered from a slave-mentality as well. The chains that enslave schoolteachers are the familiar ones that Lortie discovered throughout the ethos of the school. An automatic conservatism impairs schoolteachers of any specialized pedagogical science. A protective individualism prevents them from trusting shared knowledge. A presentist orientation retards them from making sacrifices for later gains. As he recommends, these three disabilities can be overcome by recruiting different kinds of candidates, socializing them differently into the occupation, and reorganizing their working arrangements so that past practices are overcome in favor of more adaptive arrangements. A stronger guild-spirit and commitment to the occupation’s future will contribute to building the new knowledge base that Waller called for. Teaching is unique, Lortie concludes. There is no occupation like it and there never has been. It seems reasonable to expect schoolteachers to contribute to the development of their occupational knowledge. Lortie believes that their future standing in society and their working circumstances will only improve to the extent that they begin that contribution and promote their own development.

Part II

Teacher development, consciousness, and thought

Chapter 4

Development A conceptual study of a modern idea

Theories of human development relevant to teaching In this chapter, I explain how “development” entered the research vocabulary of universities. By appending the occupation of teaching to that story, we will understand where research devoted to the development of teachers came from. We will see what its intended, unspoken assumptions are. Part I outlined the rationale, the institutional dynamics, and the problems that produced a research context for teacher development. Problematic environmental conditions, primarily economic ones, created the rationale for improving schools as mechanisms to address and solve these problems. As Waller identified, schools are always saddled with this responsibility. He believed that schools had an internal culture that had to be understood if we wanted to recreate them into more adaptive places. But focusing on teachers as the root of the problem is especially relevant. Jackson examines closely the internal dynamics of classrooms and, in doing so, introduces teachers’ thought processes as especially relevant to their continuing education. Lortie revives Waller’s sociological perspective with an intense investigation of teachers as knowledge-workers. In general, these studies provide the basis for a field of study and curriculum problem: society and economy are experiencing serious challenges; schools are to prepare the young to meet and overcome those challenges. However, teachers in schools are not adequate to prepare children to meet and overcome these challenges. Basically, schoolteachers need to be corrected, and working in schools is not helping because these places are not learning environments for them. Even the candidates who choose teaching as a career aren’t the right kinds of people that we need there. And if different kinds of candidates were chosen for the job, then the work itself impedes them from growing. They need to be developed into professionals who approach their work entirely differently. If this problem isn’t solved, then elementary schools are going to become increasingly ineffective as preparatory institutions. Teachers are assumed to be the problem, therefore, and studying “teacher development” should provide theories, methods, and the policies to correct this essential problem. I believe that it is time to divert attention from the objects of study to the theories themselves and to how they’re composed. This kind of approach is referred as meta-

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theoretical. Some may even call it meta-reflective but the title of the method doesn’t really matter. What counts are the entirely different questions and answers that this approach generates. We begin by questioning the name of the theoretical project itself. The compound term “teacher development” is what linguists call a “pleonasm” (Barnett 1996). This means that a much more basic idea lies embedded behind a term that is artificial and awkward. The awkwardness of “teacher development” probably stems from the fact that the term was invented by academics in universities to refer to some kind of improvement that had to take place in teachers’ lives and working conditions. It’s actually a contraction for “teachers’ continuing educational development.” As some kind of continuation, it apparently refers to the ongoing development of teachers as they progress through their careers as school-educators. I’ve spent three chapters portraying how the teacher became the problem. So let’s begin by bracketing out “teacher,” for the moment, and concern ourselves with “educational development” specifically. Note, first, that “education” comes from the Latin word for “leading,” or “bringing something forward” (i.e. educere). In at least one obvious sense, education is synonymous with development, the common impression being that it’s a movement of some kind. However, “leading” suggests guidance along some way, especially by someone who moves ahead of another. “Development” descends from an Old French word, desveloper, which meant to unwrap or expose. A casual glance reveals the relationship between “develop” and “envelope.” When de(en)veloping something, a cover is unwrapped to expose something that was hidden. Therefore, “education” and “development” refer to a very corporeal and tactile activity: someone is being led and passed through some kind of experience, the effect of which leads to the uncovering, unfolding, and revealing of some different perspective on life. And so, a teacher’s “education,” and a teacher’s “development” is really the same experience. It is something very concrete and tangible. In teaching, something is disclosed, as in “unfolded” and this disclosure is accessible through something that the teacher does or, more specifically, by something that the teacher becomes, more fundamentally. This kind of development is a primary experience. It is premature, therefore, to redefine the concept of “teacher development” without some prior discussion of what “human development” is theoretically. A person is always doing something that promotes development. But ahead of doing something, a person is always “being” something that is already unfolding into something new all the time. Granted, any occupation is a specialized activity that involves personal and professional development. But behind any occupation some thing more fundamental is already being developed inherently. That “thing” is human being, a life that’s developing before any person is a teacher, a mother, father, citizen, tradesperson, or any “thing” else. There would be no literature or academic field of teacher research, therefore, were it not for a much larger area of research that focuses on human development. The study of human development actually grew out of the earlier scientific fields of astronomy and philosophy, something that I’ll explore in depth in Chapter 6. In this chapter, however, I begin to tell this story by describing where research on human development came from in the twentieth century. This will prepare the way for telling the story of where particular research on teachers’ development came from. By understanding the

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context in which this research developed, we will understand the challenges that produced it. We can even question to what extent those challenges are still worth pursuing. Finally, by understanding the purposes for which this research was developed, we understand the problems that it was intended to resolve. We can then question whether these problems still merit resolving. Theories of human development always address and respond to challenges that produce them. They also respond to problems and propose solutions. What, then, are “theories” that they take on such enormous importance? “Theory” comes from the ancient Greek word theoria which meant “things looked at.” It came from the verb theorein which meant “to consider.” But its base was theoros, literally, a “spectator.” A theorist is really a spectator who explains what’s been experienced first-hand, based on observation, and then analyzes what’s been observed for someone to understand. They’re really storytellers. In this study I’m writing just like this kind of theorist. I’m trying to be a good spectator of teacher research. My observations were done by reading texts for years (20, to be exact) and this book is the account of my travels through that literature. A good theory, like a good story, has to have special characteristics, and all of these have been applied as I tell the story of this research.1 A lot of random information comes our way every day and these problems can seem overwhelming to us. Sometimes we need formulas and procedures to explain where these problems come from and help us approach them in a systematic way. When it comes to human development, the problems are obvious: life is sometimes very difficult and has enormous challenges. If a theory is rigorous enough, it should organize facts into some kind of thematic and coherent system. This is useful, because if we put the details of our life’s journey together in some systematic way we can simplify, organize, and even explain why problems arise as they do. We build a story to conclude, essentially. Most importantly, we try to understand and predict events before they occur, thereby avoiding those problems. Sometimes, we make progress in areas of our lives where necessary, convenient, and even when pleasurable. Therefore, as human beings, we tend to theorize quite naturally. Most people don’t like confusion or random chaos and story-like theories help us objectify our problems so that we can cope with them at a safe distance. Confusion and chaos is tiring, to say the least; it is frustrating and terrifying at its worst. On a personal level, we may concoct lots of informal theories for why and how things happen the way they do. However, if we’re trying to explain life objectively for the sake of making some general claims for others, then a more rigorous method is called for. One prevalent method of theory-generation is called “the scientific method.” As I said, some large-scale challenges demand explanations and systems of knowledge with rules, based on observation, experimentation, and analysis. Big guiding principles for normative actions and techniques are intended to address more general challenges that all of us face. A scientific theory should first summarize what we already know about a particular area. It can serve as a base from which to explore new perspectives. This is what I’ve done in Chapters 1, 2, and 3, and I’ll generalize the themes of those chapters in Chapter 8 and again in Chapter 10.

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The German language has a very good word for scientific rigor: Wissenshaft. Wissen means “knowledge” and shaft comes from schaffen, which means “create,” “accomplish,” or “manage to do.” Wissenschaft is a working and manageable kind of knowledge created to accomplish something useful. This means rigorous theories should supply workable knowledge that solves the real problems of ordinary people. If they don’t, then they may be interesting, but probably useless. Usefulness is the mark of a good theory, especially with regard to its ability to predict future problems and address them. When it comes to teacher development, for example, any good theory should make sense to teachers first (i.e. it should have what’s called face-validity). It should also be able to assist teachers in addressing the real, lived challenges that they face in their own working lives. It should make sense to them and be “at home” for them, especially in their classrooms. If the theory’s convincing, teachers should want to apply it right away to understand and improve their lives in ways that they see fit. The research movement to develop teachers beyond their initial training was invented by university academics and not by schoolteachers themselves. Defining what it means has to involve an analysis of its classic origins. Redefining what it means, given this history, has to include a survey of where “development” comes from academically. Once that’s done, we can assess to what extent theories of teacher development actually make sense to teachers in their working lives. Theoretically defining development requires some distinctions. The first involves the difference between “growth” and “development.” The philosophical psychologist, Malcolm Watson (2002), defines human development as the sequence of stages and processes that bring about change and reorganization in humans from conception throughout the entire lifecycle. Note the terms that Watson employs for his definition: (a) development is sequential; (b) it takes place according to identifiable stages with processes; (c) processes invoke reorganized changes. To explain this, let’s suppose we take on weight as adults or increase our height as children. That’s growth, but it is not development according to Watson’s definition. We could even increase our skill level in some area of expertise but even this wouldn’t fit his definition. This is because quantitative bodily increases of weight, height, and even the expansion of a “body of knowledge” are all measurable as increases in mass, space, and quantity. We can acknowledge that these expansions are forms of development. However, Watson argues that the most interesting aspects of human development focus on “perspectives.” A perspective is difficult to measure precisely because it involves qualitative processes of how we approach and how we pass through life. A perspective is discernable by the strategies that we uncover during and in the midst of those “approaches” and “passages.” Reorganizations are not just additions-as-growth; they are completely new interpretations of the entire meanings of our experience. And it’s very difficult to punctuate when these perspectives change because they’re intangible and take place neurologically, cognitively, emotionally, and socially. In many ways, therefore, new perspectives come from everything that passes for experience. And so if we want to redefine teacher development, we have to be sensitive to the fact that this development can be connected to everything that takes place from

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conception to death. This span, between arrival and departure where our life is the bridge, is what should concern us as researchers. We should approach this passage with all of the tools and with all theoretical perspectives available to us. If some perspectives are being ignored or shunned as irrelevant, then we have to question why this is the case and this is exactly what I begin doing in Chapter 8. But first, we have to understand origins. We have to understand how we originally develop the processes and principles that we go through, for getting from the beginning to where we are, at any given point in our development.

Conceptual foundations of developmental theory How should we begin to analyze “development”? Watson cites four organizing categories that assist us in answering this question. As we progress through this chapter, I would ask you, the reader, to keep the following four questions in mind. They can assist in formulating a personal theory of development. 1 2 3 4

What is your essential nature as a human being? What are the dynamics of your development? What is the relationship between your inner self and the external environment? What are the characteristics and sequences of your development?

We begin by asking about the essential nature of human beings. There are an infinite number of beings in the world and we certainly do not all share the same way of experiencing the world. What is unique to the common way of being that is “human”? When answering this question, ponder whether there are some elements permanent to your being “human” that were implanted when you were conceived and created to live in the world. Essence is insubstantial. It is the primary property by which you can be identified as being what you really are ahead of everything else. The essential nature will bear on how you’ll define development. It will also determine how you believe learning happens and how teaching develops the teacher. Pondering the common element that’s implanted usually draws reference to what is commonly referred to as a “soul.” Even renowned educationists (such as Shulman 1987) defer to this term when they want to articulate the essential nature of teachers. This is often done to distinguish the development of technical abilities with inner, spiritual qualities. As I mentioned briefly in Chapter 3, references to an inner essence have a lineage that pre-dates teacher research by at least 2,000 years. The term “spiritual” is a difficult concept to grasp because it has many different meanings in contemporary usage.2 The word is derived from the Latin spiritus, which meant “breath” to the Romans (as in inspire/expire), and its ancient Greek etymon, pneuma (from which we get the word “pneumatic”) also meant “breath” in the sense of “halation” (as in inhalation/exhalation). The Greeks noticed that when a living being died it quite literally expired. For them “breath” was the aura (akin to aeAr : “air”) that made a being live. “Halation” is related to “halo,” the energy-field that emanates around the living body. The ancient Greeks also employed psuche (from which we get “psychic”), which we

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now commonly translate as “soul.” Psuche was another word for the “breath of life.” When ancient Greek philosophical writings were translated into Latin, the Romans used spiritus to translate “the breath of life.” This concealed “breath” entirely from the original connotation. With time, the term “spirit” began to be used in contexts that were no longer spiritual. It is often used to refer to any incorporeal part of human life (e.g., “team spirit”). It is also used to refer to immaterial intelligence that’s independent of the body but still tied to the physical organ of oxygen-circulation. We recall this when it’s used synonymously with “heart,” as in “it took a lot of heart to do something that charitable.” In general, “spirit” is understood to be that vital principle in human beings which not only gives life to the physical organism but also inspires, animates, and elevates the intelligence of the conscious state. Dwayne E. Huebner provides an account of spirit, which emphasizes how spirituality contributes to individual growth.3 Spirituality for Huebner consists in the realization that “more” always exists beyond our limited experience. This sense of something alternative to what can be known is what identifies the “spirit” and the “spiritual realm.” Huebner elaborates: The “moreness” in the world, spirit, is a moreness that infuses each human being. Not only do we know more than we say, we “are” more than we “currently are.” That is, the human being dwells in the transcendent, or more appropriately, the transcendent dwells in the human being. To use more direct religious imagery, the spirit dwells in us. (Huebner 1999: 404) To speak of “spirit” and the “spiritual,” therefore, is not to speak of something “other” than humankind, merely “more” than humankind as it is lived and known. In Huebner’s argument the possibility of the unknown presents itself only when we are stretched beyond the limits of known reality. At the edge of this horizon we become overwhelmed by the realization that more always exists beyond what knowledge comprehends. This should compel us to think beyond ourselves towards thoughts of greater purpose. Spirit, as Huebner conceptualizes it, is that which compels the human psyche to rise above what can be known with objective certainty. It is curious that Lortie’s teachers deferred to this language of transcendence to describe miraculous moments when transformational learning took place in their classrooms. It suggests some contact with the immaterial nature of intelligence that they distinguished from the physical or material aspect of classrooms. This vital principle is what elevated them to experience “psychic” rewards. It is an elusive and mysterious force that seems to circulate in the background, like air, without conscious intervention or rational reflection, much as our breath repeats the cycle of life in classrooms invisibly. Obviously, the way in which we choose to conceptualize this aura will determine how dynamics of human development will take place. For example, from a sociological perspective this invisible force of life came to be eventually named as “culture.” This is the circulation that Waller called “instruction.” What are the dynamics of human development? Several choices are available to us as well, all of which have direct bearing on the relationship between the human being

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and the environment. Notice that the way in which you respond to the first question (i.e. your essential nature) determines how you respond to the second and the third. On one hand, people can be theorized as dynamically active beings that play a major role in determining their own development. In contrast, they could be passive things that are moulded by environmental or biological factors. Under the former choice, some inner drive would be directing and orchestrating the choices and the dynamics of our development. But with the latter, we would be moulded, mechanically, by the forces from the outside coming in. There are significant differences, therefore, between the psychobiological approach to human development and the mechanistic alternative.4 As theoretical alternatives, neither is right or wrong. Both assumptions have merit, as I shall show, and it’s up to the theorist to decide which one is more truthful from their perspective. Of course, the “nature vs. nurture” distinction has been a matter of debate for a long time. The debate relates to how the dynamics of development will be played out. For example, does the “inner world” matter more than the “outer world”? If it does, then that’s the psychobiological bias. By contrast, if the environment is more important than what’s inside the person, that’s the mechanistic bias. But you don’t have to choose one or the other. One is not more “truthful” than the other. They are equally valid, as Watson emphasizes. It’s just up to the theorist to justify how those dynamics of development balance out into an equilibrium that researchers identify as “development.” Finally, what about the characteristics of development? When researchers detect sequences of development they tend to theorize them into commonly shared paths. For example, it’s been found that individuals can undergo similar changes at similar ages in their lives from childhood to adulthood. These findings conform to the psychobiological approach of Erikson and Piaget. This finding also conforms to the socio-economic theory of Karl Marx, although he was writing about historical epochs, not individuals. This tendency is also present in Huberman’s (1993) classic study of secondary schoolteachers. I’ll examine that study in Chapter 5. For now, we should be aware that individual differences can also be theorized and that common paths are not always present. Individuals can undergo different sequences of changes within the same population. They can experience and report widely differing schedules in their human development. It is not always the case that common paths are present but researchers do look for these, as Huberman successfully did, because this offers the possibility of predicting when stages occur. However, even Huberman doubted that we could predict stages of development for secondary schoolteachers in spite of commonly exhibited tendencies. Clearly, development is not just “change” or “improvement.” If we want to develop theories that are worthy of teachers, and that meet the practical challenges that they face, then a rigorous conceptual analysis of the developmental side of “teacher development” is necessary. To begin with, questions of essential nature have to be posed. And we can’t pose these questions without trying to articulate what basic energy moves us. Huebner proposes that it’s something alternative to what we superficially know. However, how that energy is defined has to be up to the theorist of development. But the chosen definition will determine every time how dynamics, relationships,

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characteristics, and sequences are theorized and applied. And invariably, these essential questions are not answered in curriculum theories of teacher development. Consequently, we are served with relationships, sequences, and prescriptions with little understanding of the fundamental assumptions behind them. We are merely presented with problems and expected to receive and accept them as universal. Regarding dynamics and relationships, we have basically two choices. On one hand, teachers can be theorized as being organically active beings who extrovert into the environment and exert influence in directions of their own development. On the other, teachers can be theorized as being mechanically passive beings that introvert from the environment and internalize the effects of that external environment. However, they can also be theorized to do a little bit of both. In any case, theorists need to understand how they structure these processes because these will determine ultimately how thinkingprocesses take place. Finally, there are different ways to play out development theoretically. Stages are often used, but not always. Teachers can be theorized to follow common paths and shared paths of development. In contrast, they can be theorized to follow differentiated paths that are unique to the individual concerned. Usually, the choice is not made but is disclosed to the researcher based on how teachers describe their development during interview transcripts. In general, therefore, there are many choices as to how “development” can be construed. In the next section of this chapter, I inspect the history of “development” further to gain an even deeper understanding of how teacher development came about as a twentieth century research phenomenon.

The natural evolution of teacher research The philosopher of psychology, Daniel M. Robinson (1997), demonstrates clearly how Charles Darwin (1809–1882) developed a theory of biological evolution using a “natural history” method of research. This method plots the historical life of the species and of its individual members over a period of existence. A “period of existence” can mean many different things. In Darwin’s case, it was the untold history of life on earth. However, for researchers of teachers, it can mean an entire life, a career, or even one school year. In any case, the method examines lives within a natural context and then tells the story of those features in the actual and natural conditions faced by the individual members (Robinson 1997: III, 123). For example, when applied to research on teachers, this method examines various teachers across their lifespan by observing and interviewing them and then plotting those findings over the course of their career. The researcher would then recount selected defining features of those teachers’ lives in the context of the natural conditions that they face. The goal of this comparative matchmaking is to detect patterns of natural development across a time-span and recommend procedures for improving teachers’ adaptation to changing environmental conditions within that span. Procedures and predictions are supposed to benefit the teachers and this is partly what makes this kind of study “social” science. This “evolutionary” theoretical method is also the overarching framework for social studies on teachers’ lives. More than that, it is also the overarching theoretical framework for psychological research perspectives on teachers. This methodological

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similarity is there because Darwin’s theory was not exclusively biological. It was heavily biosocial. It evaluated life’s characteristics in terms of broad social conditions that favored or opposed those characteristics. The normative goal of the theory was to locate, favor, and identify adaptive characteristics. In other words, it implied that life’s characteristics are never just presented. They come with a risk, as Dewey insisted, and so choices must be made. Characteristics are explained with reference to conditions that favor or oppose the proliferation of those characteristics. In reference to teacher research, notice how Lortie described teachers’ reliance on subjective experience alone with little care for objective knowledge. This is problematic from his theoretical perspective, because the absence of common, objective, technical knowledge results in self-doubt. According to Lortie, that’s maladaptive. Consistent with the Darwinian theoretical perspective, this particular depravity negatively affects the collective because internal (biological) processes with external (social, environmental) conditions become incompatible. This makes teachers less able to respond to wider social changes beyond their school. This environmental threat then motivates researchers to locate, favor, and promote ways to increase teachers’ common, objective, technical knowledge. They assume that internal processes must be brought to bear on external changes to improve their effectiveness in coping with how the external, risky environment is defined. The goal of this perspective is to select, describe, and then implement findings according to their adaptive potential in an objectified environment. The selection of procedures assumes that teachers are maladaptive to changing conditions in the first place. Where teachers’ thought processes are not adaptive, they need to be opposed. Where they are adaptive, they are to be favored and sponsored. We see this clearly in Lortie’s assignment of individualism, presentism, and conservatism as maladaptive social pressures to be opposed. Darwin’s biological perspective did not define “social” to mean “human society.” It meant “animal society.” Social pressures in animal society include bearing and rearing of offspring, the competition between the hunter and the hunted, sexuality and mating rituals, and especially the social pressures that organize the colony or herd. In terms of teachers’ social patterns, we’ve read how social pressures are associated with how teachers self-select themselves and how they compete with students to maintain order in the classroom, how they feel pleasure derived from intimate teaching experiences with pupils (i.e. Lortie’s psychic rewards), and how they integrate into the social organization of the school as an institution of society. This universal social category implies that human psychological attributes are shared by all advanced animal species. Being biosocial, Darwin’s evolutionary theory assumed that the fate of the colony, herd, tribe, or society and the fate of individual were interdependent. Individuals tend to be drawn to attributes that enhance the adaptive potential of the whole group if they are to thrive. The whole group will tend to isolate or even ostracize individuals who are perceived to threaten adaptability. For example, schoolteachers gained pleasure from psychic rewards with individual pupils. They were also drawn to individualistic social arrangements that encouraged a conservative outlook. These could be called adaptive pressures, but more likely there were passions and emotions driving them to be the

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best they could be in their natural environment. We could call it “social,” but from a meta-theoretical perspective remember that social and environmental are synonymous. A rabbit that is born with a deformed leg or a deer that tragically breaks its leg will be ignored or isolated. It has been my personal experience that novice teachers who experience extreme difficulties adjusting to the first year of teaching can also be gently ostracized as a way of notifying them that, perhaps, they’re not cut out for the job. According to Darwin, therefore, there is pressure on the individual organism to demonstrate traits that are of universal interest to the success of the collective. According to this herd-mentality, whatever gives inherent pleasure to the individual organism tends to be vital to the survival of the entire community. In summary, the way in which we theorize human essence determines how we theorize developmental dynamics of biological and social environments. The key to building these relationships is not how we objectify the environment methodologically and correctly. It rests basically on how the Greek psuche, or how the Latin spiritus is translated into a modern equivalent for what is inspired from “the inner world.” Once that is clarified, then the logical process unfolds. Lortie claimed that there was an “inner world” of school teaching (1975: 65). His main concern was that neither observation nor training prepared them for that world. This was of concern because it hindered them from attending to the urgencies of the “outer world.” This tells us that, for Lortie, the source of the human essence is in the social realm of experience. Schoolteachers, as passive recipients of those experiences are not being prepared adequately for exposure to those external experiences. His curriculum prescriptions call for a fascinating transformation in which passive mechanical processes become replaced with more effective psychosocial ones. Where teachers’ essence is not to be altered, they are to be transformed from being passive beings to more active beings that direct and orchestrate their development. This transformation should be the basis for their new professionalism. This new state of affairs is to be more adaptive to the external, social circumstances that continue to be the source of what human beings are: “social” beings. What are the variances of theorizing the relationship between our inner self and the external environment? Darwin integrated what he understood to be internal (biological) processes with what he theorized as external (social, environmental) conditions to implicate the affects of these relationships. As we have seen during the twentieth century, research literature on teaching implicates identical relationships. Jackson also devoted special attention to how teachers’ internal thought processes related to the external life of the classroom. Understanding these relationships was supposed to help us understand what types of learners the teachers were. This would then help us psychologize these processes in ways that would assist teachers in becoming better instructors. Everyone would benefit from this assistance, it was assumed, and schools could become more adaptive institutions. Darwin was not a psychologist of individual psychological processes – that was to come later with Freud – but his theories were broad ecological psychologies in original expression and form. They were also not socio-economic theories of class reform and emancipation of oppressed forms of life. That would be Marx’s application. They were not cognitive theories of internal, individual thought processes. That would be Piaget’s achievement. They were certainly not

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psychosocial theories of secondary schoolteachers’ career development. That application would come much later with Michael Huberman in 1993. In all cases, however, we see a broad “social” science that pays as much attention to context as it does to organic processes of development. Scientific applications of Darwin’s bio-sociological model understand that context and processes are constantly influencing each other. While the Darwinian framework became the basis for Freud’s psychoanalytic theory and for B.F. Skinner’s behavior of organisms, the framework grounded by Waller, Jackson, and Lortie produced its own direct lineage of related research. Darwin’s theory became mutated and integrated into innovative psychoanalytic theories and theories of adaptive behaviorism. The twentieth century movement to develop the teacher was a similarly innovative psychosocial theory of adaptive behaviorism. This ecological perspective and its bifurcation of context and processes remains very much an inheritance of biosocial, Darwinian science. This brings theoretical opportunities as well as limitations as I shall show in the next section of this chapter.

The modern doctrine of development-as-progress Given its theoretical assumptions, what possibilities exist for theorizing characteristics and sequences of teachers’ educational development? To answer this, we have to understand why theories of development have been narrated as they are. It should by now be increasingly clear that there’s a narrated story-structure to them and this structure has been transferred into social and economic processes. These have been applied to the ways in which we justify development without much criticism of the structure and its history. I’ve witnessed this lack of criticism perennially in my university instruction. Over the course of my career I have taught numerous students of educational administration and leadership at the graduate level. During these courses, I survey the history of leadership by contrasting worldviews, such as the ancient, medieval, contemporary Asian, and African with North American native. I do this to expose wouldbe administrators to the relativity of their values. This introduction often results in the sort of constructive confusion that can rebuild values. I am careful to distinguish “worldview,” from “paradigm,” from “theoretical perspective.” The nineteenth and twentieth century theoretical alternatives that I’m reviewing in this book fall within the same worldview; that is, the assumed view of all theories within a given “world” during a current age. This is often not the case when worldviews are compared globally, although increasingly the global village is homogenizing worldviews, which is quite unfortunate. I take great care, therefore, and differentiate “paradigm,” from “worldview,” from “theoretical perspective” because the theoretical perspectives in this book also fall within the same paradigm; that is to say, they share common assumptions, concepts, and values during the current age. Paradigms share common assumptions and values about knowledge. Many researchers continue to confuse theory with “paradigm” ever since Thomas Kuhn’s (1962) analysis of scientific revolutions. Researchers and even the general public often refer to paradigms when they discuss superficial changes of mind, or alternative research methodologies. And many researchers still conflate

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“paradigm” with “theory” or even “method.” Fundamentally, a paradigm is not a theory or a method of generating new theories. It is a collection of assumptions that underpin theories and methods. This is why the paradigm is often concealed when doing research in the social sciences because theories and methods are in the forefront and are what’s being evaluated for their coherence within the paradigm. Paradigms are not explicated because they are the accepted foundations of theory building and lie buried beneath the structure of theory. Unfortunately, this concealment leads no one to question them. They are required, and “given,” but not explicitly questioned. But when scientific paradigms become questioned and unearthed, undermined revolutions in theory and practice can sometimes take place because long-standing and unanswered questions can be finally investigated. In this book, I confine myself to questioning the historical paradigm of research literature that forms part of the Greco-Latin, Judeo-Christian, Euro-American tradition, commonly called “the West” (i.e. “NATO” countries). But I’m deliberately being more invasive by challenging the worldviews of that paradigm; that is to say, I’m challenging how the adherents to that paradigm view their world in its totality. I’m not just interested in devising new methods or reconceptualizing existing theories. I’m trying to redefine teacher development. As students of public administration are almost always unconscious of the historical foundations of their values, paradigms must be brought to consciousness to inspect what values are most important in decision making. It is also important to introduce graduate students to the history of the institutions in which they want to perform leadership. This gives them an introductory meta-theoretical perspective for speculating an alternative method for envisioning future worlds in which they will be asked to become leaders. In essence, I’m trying to re-discipline them. This pedagogical method sums up what I’m trying to do in this book. If we don’t pay self-conscious attention to this method of challenging perspectives, paradigms, and worldviews, then perspectives and values change in any case and just carry us along unconsciously. For example, it has been the general tendency during the twentieth century in technologically advanced countries to believe that humanity is advancing and progressing in its development (Nisbet 1970: 4). What does it mean to “advance”? The historian, Robert Nisbet, identifies two criteria: first, there is a slow but gradual improvement of our ability to cope with environmental and social problems. If there’s progress, it means that we’re allegedly moving towards a greater understanding of how to cope and adapt to our environment and to living in closer cooperation with one another. Historically, this gradual process of improvement has been tied to our ability to gain knowledge of how the world works, how our mind works, and how social groups function. For about 300 years, this kind of knowledge was objective knowledge, the kind of knowledge that comes from systematic scientific inquiry and its conclusions. These systems include the social sciences. We can read about the defence of progress even in the late twentieth century analyses that predict cultural and technological movements from modernity to postmodernity, such as the one by Harvey (1990). But progress is not just about cultural or technological conditions. It also involves alternative spiritualities that profoundly impact human

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aspirations. We see classic examples of this embedded in early modern documents such as the American Declaration of Independence. Life is a human right; but liberty and happiness, freedom from the constraints of nature or society, and the right to enjoy serenity and tranquility during one’s life; all of these are tied to the assumption that humanity is progressing, growing, advancing, and developing. As I shall show in Chapter 6, the doctrine of progress is directly dependant on a faith in natural, scientific, physical laws. Research on teachers and on their development assumes a deep-rooted belief in this doctrine as well. But more than that, the theories and methods of teacher research rely on faith in the laws of physical science. Historically, the idea of progress and its faith in natural, physical laws originates in religious aspirations. The early medieval Catholic saint, Augustine of Hippo (354–430) was one of the first prophets of human progress. His prophecies were outlined in a classic text entitled The City of God. All the essential ideas of modern progress can be found in that ancient text. Augustine believed that a spiritual “age” was advancing the human race towards some ultimate purpose. Human history was a necessary and inevitable linear stream that was flowing towards that future end. The energy behind this temporal stream was the conflict of exclusive oppositions between the perfectly divine and the imperfectly mundane worlds. But the reconciliation of these warring opposites would eventually result in a reformed spiritual age. When this reformation eventually took place there would be an ecstatic celebration in psychological, cultural, and economic terms. It would be a time of affluence, equity, freedom, tranquility, and universal justice (Nisbet 1970: 76). This narrative genre of apocalypse has been re-told in various forms ever since. Aspects of this story find their way into theories of teachers’ educational development as well because they entered the social science of modern university faculties. From 1800 to 1900 this perennial idea of progress reached its zenith in scholarly as well as popular circles. Progress became secularized and lost much of the divine providential relationships with the Judeo-Christian God that Augustine had assumed. Progress becomes a human project with a fundamental conflict injected into human affairs alone. Since then, the play and conflict of the exclusive opposites of divine vs. mundane becomes incorporated into many historical processes and these processes are assumed to be activated and maintained by natural and physical laws. This was especially the case after the scientific calculations of Isaac Newton, which I’ll discuss in detail in Chapter 6. But the spiritual aspirations that refer back to Augustine also appear in the religious movements of the nineteenth century, such as Christian Science, Mormonism, Adventism, and even in secular religions like Marxism and Positivism. Progress becomes the dominant meaning for human development and this meaning remains to this day. It underlies theories of teachers’ development, for its doctrines and laws are ultimately rooted in eighteenth century science. But the psychological aspirations that drove philosophers to give their faith over to science were none other than the perennial religious aspirations that drove medieval believers towards a religious city of God. Starting around 1800, the European obsession with progress became less concerned with reducing constraints on human action than on shaping and improving human

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consciousness. During the nineteenth century, progress became a spiritual possibility located in the secular possibility of mind expansion. Paulo Freire is famous for calling this kind of expansion “conscientisation” or consciousness-raising. But remember that the liberation of consciousness, its expansion and democratic political vision of happiness and prosperity also relate originally to ancient religious ideas. The dreams of equality, social and universal justice were originally transcendent, heavenly aspirations. The history of these cultural ideals and political ideologies displays a slow but continuous ascent from original promises of “inner” freedom. When we consult analyses of revolutionary, critical pedagogy in schools, cultural politics, and the relationships between knowledge, education, and social control, we are reviving the original religious lineage of these promises of freedom. In contemporary terms, we tend to make distinctions between progress, evolution, and development. However, when these ideas were being born, no distinctions like this were being made. In the 1700s and the 1800s progress was the same as biological, natural history. History, progress and evolution were all synonymous terms during the nineteenth century. This meant that anything classified as evolving or developing in biology was also referred to as progressing. In twentieth century terms, therefore, “teacher development” would have been the same as “teacher evolution” and these movements would have carried all of the assumptions that would have come with the bias of “teacher progress.” Whereas the original implication would have been transcendence from the material world, its contemporary application is motivated by transcendence within the material world where transcendence means benefiting from “new knowledge.” These opposites are present in the analyses of Waller and Lortie. Teachers are somehow constrained, impeded from development, and require liberation from bondage. They are not advocating liberation of a critical, revolutionary kind. That is a Marxist persuasion of progress. However, it’s clear that knowledge of social processes and analyses of events external to the school were prerequisites to their emancipation from their alleged slavery, especially in Waller’s case. The economic philosophy of Karl Marx is a direct descendent of the evolutionaryprogressivist tradition of the 1800s. He would have been exposed to these ideas during his university education in Germany. But as I’ve mentioned, the notion of progress as human destiny was already prevalent in scholarly and popular culture. It advocated a stage-by-stage process toward some golden age on earth for humanity. Obviously, this idea would have assumed that technological, cultural, and economic forces were all involved in this reform movement. Marx was mainly interested in the individual’s emancipation from the alienation that comes from owning and distributing private property. When people don’t hold much net-worth they have to sell their labor in exchange for sustaining resources. This relationship makes them vulnerable to an exploitation that resembles slavery. They’re usually powerless to change this situation and they’re forced to feel like aliens in a world where identity is based completely on relative holdings of material property. We saw how Waller stereotyped the teacher as a slave in the material world of social institutions. Their alienation was not based on their lack of material resources but on their low self-esteem relative to other professions. In a sense, they lacked some “property” that other professions had and that commanded

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respect. Notice how Marx connects his theory of alienation within the physical world of “matter” directly. His theory assumes a material rather than a spiritual worldview, unlike Augustine’s, whose fundamental conflict was between spiritual forces rather than material ones. Consistent with Darwin’s, Marx’s scientific materialism is what makes his method bio-sociological and his history natural; that is, scientifically “material.” In fact, Marx was so impressed with Darwin’s Origin of Species that he confessed it was Darwin’s book that provided him with “a basis in natural science for class struggle in history” (Nisbet 1970: 258). In his preface to the 1867 edition of Capital Marx actually stated that his standpoint was one from which society’s evolution can be “viewed as a process in natural history” (ibid.). His goal in that book was to demonstrate laws of essentially scientific processes in that history. These were not laws of natural selection involving incessant conflict of the biological species for survival. They were a material class struggle that was a necessary process in the evolution of capitalism as an economic system. The inevitable breakdown of that system would permit the advent of communism as an equitable, freed, tranquil, and just system. The prime, over-riding purpose of Capital was to show how the necessary natural processes that led to that destruction and rebirth actually operated in detail. In broad terms, Marx demarcated the Asian, ancient, European feudal, and modern methods of human production as epochs in the economic formation of society. This is basically a history of antagonistic opposites and his objective is to show how competitive economic forces created the material conditions for the end of that competitive antagonism. We see again how his story of development mimics Augustine’s religious narrative of the end of the age and the dawning of a new age. But this grand story of freedom is not dependent on divine spiritual laws; it’s run by the same natural, physical, scientific laws that run biological progress. Marx’s goal was to lay bare the necessary and essential economic laws of that biosocial motion of modern human society. The normative tendencies of these alleged laws greatly influence the assumptions behind why teachers ought to be empowered to emancipate themselves in institutions. In Critique of political economy (1859; the same year that Darwin published Origins, and the same year as John Dewey’s birth), Marx theorized that it was through the necessary “iron laws” of motion that mankind was carried through its several stages to eventually arrive at the advanced state of communism (Marx 1992). This was a world-historical movement for Marx. He connected these laws and these motions to the world-biological movement of the species. But this world-movement was also a direct descendent of the struggle between the “two cities” of man and of God for St. Augustine. Both histories were a vital means to humanity’s eventual ascent to salvation. For Marx, it was a struggle among classes that would last until wage-laborers had destroyed all other classes and, with the development of communism, would shed its own class existence – a passage to salvation from all suffering. What would this new age be like for its champions? In the following passage, I’ve paraphrased Marx’s description of this new golden age. I’ve substituted deliberately “teacher” for “worker” to show how influential this genre of salvation-literature can be for characterizing teachers’ development in institutional terms.

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Supposing that teachers were able to teach in a human manner, each of them would in their instruction affirm themselves as well as their colleagues. They would then objectify in their instruction their individuality in its particularity. In their work they would enjoy the individual expression of their life. In looking at their students they would have the individual pleasure of realizing that their personalities were objectified visibly in those students, and thus their power would be raised beyond doubt. In the students’ enjoyment or use of their teaching(s), teachers would have the direct enjoyment of realizing that they had satisfied a human need by their work but also objectified their human essence [i.e. their psychic beings]. They would have fashioned for another human being [i.e. the students] the objectives that met their need. The teacher would then be the mediator between the students and humanity (i.e. “the species”) and thus be acknowledged by the students as a completion of their own essence and a necessary part of their lives. The teachers would thus realize that they were confirmed in the thoughts of their students and in their love (i.e. they would have psychic rewards). In their expression of this life teachers would fashion an expression of the students’ future, and thus in their instruction they would realize their own human and communal essence. In that case, their students would be like so many mirrors, out of which their essence would shine as teachers. (Paraphrased and adapted from Marx 1977: 121–122). Clearly, when theorizing sequences and characteristics of development, scientific paradigms and spiritual perspectives can exert a profound effect, especially in how the narrative of progress is plotted. If Waller’s teachers are actually slaves, then liberating ideologies can justify pursuing “new knowledge” especially if those ideas are based on universal laws that oppose constraint with release. The transition from an ancient to a medieval worldview carried with it a faith in universal laws. It also incorporated the dynamic of conflicting forces that are at play in a grand story of universal deliverance from suffering. These doctrines and laws were really always based on private and communal aspirations. But the history of their ascent and their reiteration in our contemporary theories of teacher development all related back to the passionate inwardness that comes with a desire for inner freedom. The wish for transcendence from all suffering enters cultural stories of emancipation from all forms of slavery. This aspiration, for Marx, was not vertical (i.e. from historical mundane circumstances to transcendent, otherworldly salvation) but horizontal (i.e. from present, negative physical conditions to future, utopian physical conditions). For Lortie, and later for advocates of teacher development, this aspiration is for an occupational salvation called “professionalism.” These aspirations were justified by biological analyses of the physical world by Darwin where progress in human development was based on laws that were allegedly “iron clad.” As scientifically absolute, they carried immense authority and dependability. Finding some authority in sociology was also Waller’s goal, and we saw clearly that this goal also implied the emancipation of teachers explicitly with this method of analysis. For Marx, these were secularized into economic language but still implied the kind of self-realization that could uphold a professional psychology. They could cure the curse

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of doubt that Lortie’s teachers were enslaved by. But overall, these theoretical frameworks are upheld by spiritual aspirations of transcendence that once had direct religious connotations. This foundation of theory in spiritual aspirations must not be overlooked. An explicit contemporary expression of these ideals merits examination and would prove to be highly useful for twenty-first century theories of teacher development.

Mathematics, scientific progress, and human development I have shown that the history of matter and its physical laws are implicated with how theories of teachers’ development are conceptualized and narrated. “Historical materialism” refers to Marx’s assumption that the laws of economics conform to the physical laws of nature as those laws were calculated mathematically in Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica of 1687. In that book Newton described the origin of energy’s motion in nature with principles that evolved into the iron clad laws underlying how everything in the world changes. These laws of natural progress would even affect how teachers’ thought processes take place, which I’ll describe in detail in Chapter 6. As Marx theorized, energetic forces of capital move in conformity to laws of essential oppositions. This was not an original idea to Marx. He learned it from his philosophy professor G. F. Hegel (1770–1831) who actually theorized a movement of parallel opposites. Hegel was talking about historical changes in human consciousness (i.e. spirit and history) and Marx adapted this history to his historical philosophy of opposing material forces. The conflict of opposites applies easily to theories of dynamic change. Dichotomies are found everywhere in nature and this strife is found everywhere in society as well. This philosophical idea dates back over 2,000 years to the earliest days of Greek philosophy (e.g., Anaximander; Empedocles). Those earliest physicists were in touch with natural, native energies and in many ways had foreknowledge of contemporary scientific facts. Notice how a star is held together, for example, by the implosion of gravity, but heat is constantly trying to expand it into explosion. Strife and struggle is a universal dynamic and in all cases this tension involves the play of opposites. The dynamic process of destruction, death, and rebirth is another example of how opposites are essential for the furtherance of life on the planet. For example, forest fires may be destructive, but they are a natural stage in the rejuvenation of new flora and fauna. Just as we have stages of Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern economic cycles, so we can see how the middle class slowly replaced the aristocracy in Europe for economic dominance. But the dynamic motion from aristocracy to middle class to proletariat is not incremental according to Marx. Continuous quantitative movements of this sort eventually open into qualitative “leaps” into a new age. Clearly, this is a very biological model for social and economic change. It is also the basis for the educational theorizing of transformative learning. Transformational learning has some roots in the critical theories of Karl Marx but its roots are ultimately in Darwin’s biosocial, natural history method.

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In theory, when we learn, we ideally improve ourselves into something that the world wants and needs. Otherwise, we regress rather than progress. We learn to be more adaptive because the world reacts in kinder and more generous ways when we’re in line with its processes. This is the notion of development-as-adaptation that is the basis for curriculum science. However, it’s also present in all other areas of science during the modern period such as the political, scholarly, medical, and economic domains. It shows up with the twentieth century assumption that when science is brought to bear on our problems then they are potentially solvable. In fact, in the early stages there was a common faith that social science would get us from a worse state to a better state. This was the Marxist ideal. It is also the ideal that promises to bring teachers to an improved state in which they can be more responsive to such changing conditions. We detected this clearly in Waller and in Lortie. We believe as administrators, government policy writers, and even as researchers, that we can do this because of our faith in psychological and sociological methods of personal or social re-invention. One of its most vivid theoretical portrayals is in Erikson’s theory of personality development. But overall, the fullest expression of personal re-invention is the political movement of freedom from all forms of bondage, either metaphorically or actually that we see in theories of social and economic emancipation such as those synthesized by Marx. Linguistically, if we consider the original Greek derivative of “economy” to be oikos, translated as “home,” then we can see why the economy in general, be it animal or human, forms the basis for these grand narratives of survival and prosperity. In Marx’s case, economy is the base that supports the superstructure of forces and relations; for Darwin, the natural environment is the base that supports the superstructure of subtle relationships that will produce the kind of diversity that is needed for survival and prosperity. Waller and Lortie observed these subtle relationships in elementary schools. For example, Lortie observed how individual elementary schoolteachers were protective with the psychic rewards that they gained from their pupils. This would seem maladaptive because the currency that sustains the healthy economy is not being shared, leaving some teachers deprived and promoting extinction from the collective. However, there is a subtle process of natural selection at work in this economy. The psychic rewards that came with interacting with pupils seemed to function as some kind of essential nourishment that sustained basic needs. This is going to have the effect of selecting and identifying certain maladaptive teachers. If one schoolteacher in the school, especially a newcomer, does not deserve any psychic reward because of poor practice then those rewards are held back by the collective as a way of communicating to that individual that there’s no place for them in the job. As Lortie noticed, the easy teacher “lets the whole side down.” They may be entrepreneurs of psychic profits but that bounty is not shared with those who don’t deserve it. Diversity is only adaptive, therefore, as long as it promotes the longevity of collectivity; otherwise, it can be a threat to its survival and prosperity. If newcomers are unsuccessful in generating psychic rewards then they may be identified as being a threat to the whole group. If a newcomer is uniquely adaptive in generating those rewards then they show promise in transferring those traits to other teachers. Those individuals are of particular interest,

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scientifically, to the extent that they may possess characteristics that render the whole more successful in adapting to changing educational conditions. Administratively, they may be culturally selected (rather than naturally) to mentor newcomers into the collective. From a biological perspective, they will be selected as demonstrating the traits for adaptive survival and promotion. We see this in Shulman’s (1987) selection of “Nancy” in his portrayal of teacher-knowledge. The relationship between the particular, distinct individual consciousness and the collective consciousness becomes a basic theoretical question for Emile Durkheim’s foundations for the science of sociology. These foundations also found their way into analyses of schools, teaching, and of its development (e.g., Hargreaves, D. 1967). In his study of suicide (1951: 310) Durkheim also used a biological and material analogy to describe this relationship: as the living cell is composed of inanimate atoms, so living nature is nothing more than inorganic matter. Likewise, animated and living societies have no other active forces than individuals. If we want to understand social phenomena, we need to examine the relationship between society as a whole and its elementary qualities, and Waller did in his sociology of the school. These qualities are present in the germ of “individual minds” (Sawyer 2002: 232). The complex qualities that we recognize as being social are the transformations that arise when individuals associate with one another. It’s as if special effects come about by individuals mixing together collectively. And these collective effects are unique creations of that association. These collective effects are what Waller and Lortie searched for as “culture.” They are what Jackson was able to describe in the life of the classroom. They are generic properties that emerge from association and they are external to the individuals concerned. Writing about the rules of the sociological method, Durkheim (1964: 113) theorized that if you’re interested in improving the adaptability of the collective you’ll have to be concerned with the elementary qualities or the individual minds that compose that collective. For understanding to take place, there has to be movement from simplicity to complexity. How that dynamic movement is researched is a methodological challenge for educational theorists. However, it’s clear that this challenge is not unique to sociologists or to educational theorists. In fact, I’ve shown how research on the collective adaptability of teachers is based on biological and social scientific research in general. This is exactly why it became the basis for research on teachers and their development. And if we want to redefine the educational development of teachers, we need to question the assumptions that justify this narrative very seriously.

Chapter 5

Purpose, trust, and educational development

Pleasure, prosperity, and the subconscious My review of the eighteenth and nineteenth century idea of “progress” revealed that this idea was highly influenced by the natural history method of Charles Darwin’s biosocial theory. This had wide reaching implications for the growth of psychology, economics, and sociology as disciplined human sciences. It also influenced how teachers were researched throughout the twentieth century because this research was based on the theoretical methods and frameworks of those disciplines. Since these theories tend to be teleological, they can mimic story-forms that resemble heroic sagas. For Darwin as well as for Marx and Freud, some mysterious force is playing in the background, which moves the story forward. For Darwin, it was natural selection, the process by which some genes and gene-combinations are reproduced more than others when a population is exposed to environmental distress. For Freud, it was the pleasure principle, the way in which sexuality is expressed reproductively at various periods in one’s life. For Marx, it was the economic base of all social and economic relations and structures. In that vast superstructure of relations that we call “society,” competing forces wrestle and ultimately undermine and mutate the existing system. In all cases, however, motion, movement, mutation, adaptation, and reformation are common elements. There are basic reasons for the presence of these common elements, which I examine in Chapter 6. In this chapter, I show how this narrative of development takes on psychosocial aspects of personality development. These aspects greatly influenced the composition of research on teachers’ lives and careers. In Erikson’s version, the main character undergoes stages of trial and suffering. Each stage opens to the next thanks to a type of “healing crisis” that forsakes the previous stage. Erikson’s theory resembles an archetypal hero’s journey, a pattern that is universal in many native cultures. A tragic hero encounters “departures,” sometimes leaving the tribe or village altogether on a confusing journey and then returns to the community with a new message of truth and emancipation. The journey of the departure, passage, and return results in a new subconscious awareness. One of the earliest recorded narratives of this sort is the Epic of Gilgamesh and it is also present in Homer’s Ulysses, in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in the Republic (Book VII. 514A -521B), and even in the “wilderness journey” of Jesus (Mark 1: 12–13).

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Consequently, the plot of these theories of dynamic development shares kindred spirits with the wild drama of the animal economy. We share a common home on this planet with all living beings and so our human emotions and intelligence are variations of a common inheritance. However, Darwin and Freud’s theoretical versions assume that animal beings do not engage in this essential struggle with cognitive reflection. This means that they may be acting with a purpose, but the purpose for those actions is only instinctual and unconscious (Watson 2002). As Piaget shows, however, unconscious urges are more than merely instinctual. Cognitive frameworks organize all of the information that a human being is processing to survive and prosper and this is a very conscious act. As a background to this, I have suggested that psychoanalysis is a natural history method of doing research. This method involves a close inspection of a person’s life from the earliest years of childhood right to the later years of adulthood. Freud’s analysis of the psyche is also teleological, which means that the subconscious psycho-dynamic features that are universal to individuals reveal principles that serve the interests of the collective. I’ve shown that this is a bio-psycho-social theory that’s going to assume some of the same teleological theoretical foundations as Durkheim’s sociology. These theoretical assumptions and their principles will form some of the most basic theoretical assumptions of teacher research and development because that research is also bio-psycho-social in its narrative style, its method of collecting data, and even in how findings are implied. It is this teleological method of purposeful writing that relates it to a mythical hero’s journey. In a typical story-form, events move towards purposes, goals, and accomplishments. But if the heroes of the story are being motivated by subconscious, psychodynamic forces, then their purposes and goals may not be conscious. Like in Darwin’s epic tale, forces drive organisms forward into adaptability but the forces are not conscious to the animal. Like in Marx’s epic materialist tale, economic forces and the relations that they forge drive the alienated proletarian forward into adaptability – but these forces and their relations are not conscious to the worker. The goal of the emancipatory educator is to bring those oppressive relationships into consciousness. Then unconscious motivations that are unorganized or individual become conscious, collective, and adaptive. However, in both cases, Darwin or Marx, there’s a basic difference between acting with a purpose and acting for a purpose. This distinction is highly useful when critically analyzing the psychological stage theories of Erik Erikson, Jean Piaget, and Michael Huberman. I do this to begin shedding some new light on a defect to professionalism that Daniel Lortie found in elementary schoolteachers. Waller also observed this defect in 1932. Why were the schoolteachers that these sociologists observed and interviewed so obsessed with the children at the expense of spending time with other teachers? The key to this mystery lies in the dynamics of teacher development as those dynamics are affected by the first several years of childhood. In Chapter 4, I examined internal/external dynamics and how those relationships affected theories of teacher development. In this chapter, I’m concerned entirely with internal processes. I do this to shed some light on what Lortie called teachers’ psychic rewards. My purpose is also to bring the reader to a new understanding of Huberman’s

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classic analysis of schoolteachers’ career cycle by placing that study’s conclusions alongside Erikson and Piaget. Huberman was absolutely fluent in the developmental theories of Piaget and Erikson. My goal is not to discredit those foundations or his findings. I will integrate and expand upon a theme from Chapter 4: engaging in activities with a purpose without conscious knowledge of the purposes for those activities. While this theme is drawn from Malcolm Watson, it originates in Darwin and Freud. Consequently, it also had some showings in Marxist economics. In this case, however, this formula will begin to demonstrate why passions, emotions, and desire are consistently more important than knowledge for teachers’ educational development. This will clarify why Lortie’s elementary schoolteachers made some of their choices without knowing the reasons for those choices. And we shall see that even Huberman found this lack of consciousness to be evident in his Swiss secondary schoolteachers. If passionate inwardness trumps knowledge in terms of competence, then we should re-examine the grounds for professionalizing teachers on pedestals of knowledge. Waller, Jackson, and Lortie all lamented the absence of technical vocabularies and craft-knowledge in their teachers. However, an unconscious awareness of something other than knowledge is what seems to drive teachers’ purposes consistently. They are always acting with these purposes but never for purposes that are known epistemologically. In the animal economy, there’s no conferencing to decide which actions are going to be most adaptive in the face of a more hostile environment. Animals will do what must be done to survive and Darwin assumed that these deeds are the ones that provide them with pleasure. In other words, animal beings and human beings can act with a purpose but not with conscious possession of the purposes for that behavior in the interest of collective prosperity (Robinson 1997: 141). If that purpose guarantees survival then a very close examination of the individual is necessary to analyze how that behavior is a guarantor of universal prosperity. This general property can be ascertained by investigating the individual life history of the individual in particular. But these properties will be necessarily unconscious to the actor. They only surface when requisite degrees of maturation have taken place. This can make them seem instinctual to some degree. Developmentally, prerequisite experiences compound until the learner becomes ready to understand them. Piaget called these compounds “schemes.” A quantitative build up of energy compounds into a qualitative leap into a new perspective. This stage-theory of learning is most expertly expressed by Jean Piaget in his classical twentieth century learning theory. Consistently, however, his learning stages of development are also biosocial and naturally historical. The teacher, as we have read, does many things that are not motivated by reason on a conscious level. Psychic rewards are pleasurable, so the actions that lead to that pleasure guarantee the survival of the teacher. More importantly, however, the events that give the teacher pleasure have been shown by Lortie to encourage the survival and prosperity of the pupil. This is very significant because it indicates where the “collective” is found for the elementary schoolteacher. It is not with colleagues because those individuals are not “the universal community” for the teacher. It is amongst the children! It’s almost like learning in that context feels good, psychically; or learning

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likes to learn what it loves to learn, not what others say has to be learned. Elementary schoolteachers will readily admit that the more fun learning can be, the easier it is to accomplish. Pleasure in this accomplishment was how Lortie’s schoolteachers measured “a good day.” Small wonder most people choose entertainment over learning in a chore-like way. As adaptive learners, we select pleasurable activities when faced with the oppressive forces of our environment in the interest of survival and adaptation. People seem to choose entertainment or addiction over adverse learning experiences. Pedagogically, therefore, there has to be some way to unite pleasure with confronting what’s challenging for the sake of adaptive learning. Entertainments are all engaged in with a purpose–they feel good–which, in the circumstances of a typical school are not done for a purpose, in mind, cognitively. The purposes that schoolteachers and their pupils have are all motivated by self-gratification of a sensual nature. This was certainly evident in Lortie’s schoolteachers. When gratification is not served, however, then learning ceases to be interesting. From a psychodynamic perspective, this is the original principle that is endowed at birth: if it’s not pleasurable then it can’t be valuable for my survival and prosperity. In other words, it has no bearing on one’s personal life. There’s almost a kind of greediness to learning that is not consensual at all. There’s always a trade off between the desire to gratify one’s self because that’s prosperous and the need to consent to others secondarily because that’s necessary for survival. Consensus must also be self-gratifying; otherwise, it has no bearing on the learning that results in adaptive development. For example, why would a pleasure-seeking and motivated schoolteacher choose conflict and consensus with colleagues over the peace of solitude? There has to be some kind of pleasure associated with association that leads to increased prosperity. However, the place where actions are engaged in for the sake of prosperity is the child-centered classroom. It’s clear from Lortie’s findings that self-gratification and the avarice of learning comes from that context and from that context alone. This suggests that there is something fundamental, but perhaps overlooked in that context for meaningful teacher development.

The truism of trust I have said that the natural history method employs a narrative form that resembles a saga or mythic journey. This is especially the case in Erik Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development (Robinson 1997: 142). Erikson criticized Freud’s theory because it was obsessed with sensual pleasure, where this kind of pleasure, for Freud, was expressly sexual. For Freud, the focal point of biological development and social integration was based on the principle that organisms seek pleasure with a purpose. However, in doing so, they are unconscious of the purpose that this pleasure serves in terms of its implication for the collective. For Erikson, in contrast, much more social learning is taking place during the earliest stages of development and these lessons are not entirely biological. They are also not entirely self-serving but are, in fact, very “personal” in terms of humanizing the living, human being. Erikson’s is a theory of “personhood” rather than of the organism or of the psychodynamic being.

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Everything about Erikson’s theory involves the person’s relationship to the world. A human being is introduced into a living environment and it is that being’s challenge to discover the nature of that environment and their purpose for being in it. In this sense, his theory retains the dualistic and biosocial interplay of organism and environment that we have seen throughout Chapter 4. But there are some fundamental differences that relate directly to how teacher researchers theorize the schoolteacher’s development. To begin with, Erikson’s theory places heavy emphasis on transactions between the primary human being and other human beings. For Erikson, the basic foundation for human development is competence and this is where his theory retains an evolutionary quality. But it is also a theory of prosperity. His is a theory of how to attain happiness, serenity, and tranquility in life. All of this abundance comes about thanks to one quality: competence. In order to prosper, therefore, a person must be competent to manipulate the world’s processes and overcome the world’s challenges. For Erikson, the basis of manipulation and overcoming is trust. The initial forms of attachment between the infant human being and its mother initiate this most basic human competence. When infant human beings trust that the world provides care for their body, and when they are rewarded with affection for nourishing that body, then they come to believe that humanity is a context that sustains their body and furthers their goals. Trust is first an emotional confidence and then a logical belief. The emotional experience is what is learned first at birth. Here’s how the logical process unfolds. Personally, trust is discovered when the infant exposes its vulnerable body to other human beings for the first time after it leaves the mother’s womb. We learn to believe that other human beings will not take advantage of our vulnerability. If we experience trust within the first few weeks of our life, then we might take the risk of engaging in the logical and cultural version of trust later in life. This version requires some reflection that resembles the scientific method of experimentation. Logically, trust is experienced when we assess probabilities of loss or gain; we calculate the expected utility of an action based on the data that we collect; we then conclude that a person will behave, or that the results of an action will behave in a predictable manner. Confident in our assessment, or with faith in human nature, we proceed with logical expectations. Emotional and logical trust promotes friendship, love, companionship, security and comfort, the rewards of prosperity, and all of the qualities that are essential for a meaningful life in the elementary school classroom. Even theory building is an act of trust. As I wrote in Chapter 4, if we can put the details of our life’s journey together in some systematic way then we can simplify, organize, and even explain why problems arise as they do. Most importantly, however, we can understand and then predict events before they occur, thereby avoiding problems and progress in areas that are both necessary and convenient. Therefore, trust is not only the beginning of confidence and competence, the two essential components of adapting to the world. Trust is also the basis of structuring our personal, practical theories and worldviews. Trust is what upholds foundations. It is the basis for our introduction into the world and our interaction with the world. Without it, the world remains a threatening place without relief. Therefore, the most basic and essential

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foundation for success in life is to experience trust, not just to learn about it secondhand. If trust is experienced directly at birth, then survival is probable, and prosperity is possible. If trust is not experienced after birth then survival is possible but prosperity is improbable. It was clear in Lortie’s study that elementary schoolteachers were intuitively sensitive to this truism. They evidently sensed it as their vocation to re-instill the competence of trust in the children under their care, especially in selected individuals who were especially disabled in some fundamental personal way. Without being trained developmental psychologists, they were aware of the learning priorities that children bring to the classroom at this stage. According to Erikson, from two to three years of age, if trust has been experienced consistently, the child can begin to experiment with controlling the most important mechanism of the world: their human body. Much of this potential depends on what was experienced before this stage. Remember, trust is the ground of competence, confidence, and even the belief that humanity is a worthwhile project in which to invest one’s energies. Pleasure may be the foundation for the unconscious animal economy, but trust is the basic conscious foundation for the human economy. In terms of Freud’s theory, trust must be a feeling that gives pleasure. It is experienced initially by the maternal transaction of breast-feeding and this initial gift of life is re-minded consciously during the first six years of elementary school. It can be re-minded there if elementary schoolteachers are able to transact the gift of trust by means of companionship, security, and comfort. Therefore, transmitting trust can resemble the transmission of love, as agape, but the responsible teacher understands the subtle difference between agape and eros. Whereas Lortie’s schoolteachers did confess to feeling love for the children, their confession was really about experiencing the intimacy of trust with the children. The years from six to twelve for Erikson are all about the most essential component of adaptability. Without competence and its “industry” the human being is left with a kind of inferiority that leads to extinction in the human world. Beyond the foundation of trust, the next essential layer is the autonomy of control over one’s body (two to three years). Without the competence of personal control, the human being is left to feel shameful or doubtful that they will be able to survive the challenge of being in the world. Asserting control beyond the body and over the world is built on top of personal, bodily independence (three to five years). But if the child isn’t able to experience the trial and error success of experimenting with that control over the world in which they live, they will feel guilty for trying. Mistrust, shame, self-doubt, and guilt, can be a recipe for extinction. These sentiments can even lead to suicide, in fact, but the extinction that I have in mind has more to do with a general feeling of incompetence with regard to surviving and prospering in the natural, social, or economic world. In summary, during the first five years of life, the human being develops three competencies that are essential for survival and prosperity in the human economy. These are trust in others and in the world; autonomy over one’s own body; and then the initiative to use the body’s powers with confidence to assert control over the human economy into which the child was introduced at birth. For the elementary schoolteacher in Lortie’s study, this truism is what drove their curriculum program and its pedagogical

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decisions. Being in touch with human beings at this intimate level does not demand fluency in Erikson’s theories of personality development. They may be interesting upon reflection after instruction is over. But during the fleeting moments when trust is being tested there is only the direct contact that teachers have with the children’s faces. This now-centered moment is when teachers accomplish their most important goal: instilling or reviving trust as a meta-practice of adaptation and prosperity. What is the measurement for these competencies? We must only evaluate them subjectively and this is why they can never be judged with absolute certainty. As a test, ask yourself, my reader, if you can repeat the following seven affirmations confidently. If you can, then Erikson might theorize that you’ve experienced a healthy psychosocial development during the first five years of your life: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

I believe that the world has something good in store for me. I believe that human beings are benevolent and that I can trust them. I believe that I possess physical characteristics that are attractive. I believe that my body has powers and talents that are within my control. I believe that these powers and talents can be channeled to benefit me. The world is a challenging place but I believe that I can use my body to transform those challenges into benefits. I believe that the world is a place where I can create a life of abundance.

There is a binding structure in these beliefs between the body, its inherent powers, the world, and others. If you felt doubt, suspicion, or even harshness for any of the above affirmations in even the slightest form, then this might measure the curriculum of your early psychosocial development. Alternatively, suspicion or sarcasm of these affirmations could indicate experiences that you might have had as an adult that disillusioned you, especially in the case of #1. The first two affirmations are the prerequisites for #3 to #6. And if you can sincerely affirm #1, then perhaps you should be grateful to that first human being who taught you to believe that the world and others were trustworthy. Notice how passions are felt before beliefs are built. Notice how beliefs are committed long before knowledge is formed during these critical stages of human development. This subjective and infantile logic of passionate inwardness remains intact for the duration of the schoolteacher’s life and it is only measured during the fleeting moment of instruction’s intimacy. These affirmations are the prerequisites to being successful in the most challenging environment that awaits the human being since birth: schooling. During the first six years of schooling it is essential to understand what competence really means. Having been a successful elementary schoolteacher for seven years, I understand fully what competence yields for children. Competence generates everything. For example, competence is the medium in which children learn the significance of time. When experiments are considered, planned, and executed, then consequences unfurl. If those consequences are good for the child, then they learn to try even more difficult experiments, which leads to greater confidence. The Canadian composer R. Murray Shafer insists that art is all about the development of competence. Being an artist requires

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constant risk-taking. It demands taking on more ambitious projects when those already accomplished have proven to be satisfying. It is not about the accomplishment of the artistic product. Competence comes with having faith in the artistic process itself. The confidence to keep trying in the face of failure is the fringe benefit of learning to be competent in the world. One learns that the world can be forgiving. If artists can forgive themselves for trying and failing then they understand that artistry is not about being successful but about loving the process of trying to be an artist. This lesson would be impossible without the confidence that comes with trusting in one’s own abilities. And so, competence is also the context in which children learn perseverance and commitment. It is also the essential context for learning to keep one’s promises to honor contracts and to be trustworthy for others’ sake. Confidence, forgiveness, commitment, contractual promise keeping, and trustworthiness are the basic building blocks of self-governance. They are the groundwork for citizenship. More than anything else, however, they are the keys to success and economic prosperity in the human economy. And this is exactly what is learned in the elementary school classroom, as Lortie’s schoolteachers testified. Lortie surveyed that well over 64 per cent of elementary schoolteachers located craft-pride around striking success with one, individual, and single student. This produced an irony for him. The teacher is supposed to be there for every child. But “leaning a little bit toward the child with special difficulties” (Lortie 1975: 123) held the greatest and most beloved unconscious pleasure for schoolteachers. Saving “that single individual” was the personal testimony of creating a “master-work” for the schoolteacher’s craft. Creating a competent singularity is what defines artistry for the teacher because it proves to be satisfying for the teacher. One small success leads to bigger ones, again showing that process counts more than objective measurement, as the teachers reported. Clearly, elementary schoolteachers understand psychosocial development, but it’s also clear from Lortie’s research that they are not conscious of that theoretical discourse in the expression of their art and craft. They are “presentist”; that is, they act with a purpose but not for a purpose. As much as they may understand the biosocial relationships between children and their world, they are not theorists of any kind, or do not hold any technical or rational knowledge of what they are doing. This is because feelings and subjective beliefs are what affirms their actions, not objective, scientifically determined knowledge. Schoolteachers do hold beliefs that are essential to the survival and prosperity of the human species. They are competence-developers and that kind of sensitivity-work produces a special kind of occupational person(a). And as much as they may understand wider economic relationships between schooling and the economy, they are not job-trainers of any kind.

Cognitive processes and the teacher’s personality In 1982, as a student teacher of educational practice, I purchased a book by Jean Piaget and Bärbel Inhelder entitled The Psychology of the Child (1969). At that time I thought that it would be worthwhile to understand principles of human development because I was

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going to be an elementary schoolteacher. I didn’t know at that time that the objective scientific theories of Piaget would not be of much value to me as a classroom teacher. My feelings of trust in a child’s abilities and my belief that I could communicate that trust with children were going to be much more valuable. This was even the case when I taught French Immersion mathematics to elementary school children. I followed the curriculum and improvised based on my intuitive understanding of what would appeal to the children in terms of meaningful activities. Ten years after that experience, then a doctoral student, I found Piaget and Inhelder’s book in my basement. I read the book over again, reviewing my notes and highlights from 1982, and wondered whether I had applied this material subliminally, because I had in fact read it over carefully. Alternatively, I wondered if I was just in union with the children in the room and understood what types of tactile activities would appeal to them to learn mathematics based on my intimate experience as a practicing teacher. Piaget combined natural, biological laws with modern epistemology and created an original psychology to explain how we come to know what we know. He created a field of study called genetic epistemology. As an epistemology, it was a theory of knowledge; as “genetic” it relates to the origin, development, or causal antecedents of knowledge. DNA was not yet known during Piaget’s time. Consequently, genetic epistemology is a theory about how knowledge is pre-structured and constructed. Piaget, like Freud, was influenced by Darwin’s biological science of adaptation. He was also influenced by James Mark Baldwin who, in 1889, was at the University of Toronto as the Chair of Logic and Metaphysics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Mark_Baldwin). Baldwin created a laboratory of experimental psychology at Toronto that coincided with the birth of his daughters Helen (1889) and Elisabeth (1891). Baldwin’s research inspired the quantitative and experimental research on infant development that made a vivid impression on Piaget through Baldwin’s book Mental Development in the Child and the Race: Methods and Processes (1894). Piaget’s own initial work was also inspired by close examination of his own children. Both of these theorists were parents first and theorists by professional application. In hindsight, I tend to believe that my love for teaching and attendance to children’s interests formed the basis for my expertise in the elementary school classroom. I was also a practitioner first before I was an experimental theorist. Had I been approached, at that time, to theorize what I was doing successfully with the children, I would have been puzzled. This perplexity was also evident in Lortie’s (and in Jackson’s) schoolteachers. I was doing what worked in the classroom and getting my results from the childrens’ enthusiasm for my activities and plans. It amazes me, however, that much of my methods were coincidentally very “Piagetian.” Piaget’s theory of development is a theory of mental, cognitive development. His perspective is revolutionary because it rebalances the examination of adaptive mechanisms from external environmental influences to internal processes with which the organism actively constructs knowledge. This innovation means that Piaget is not strictly a psychobiological researcher. His view is that the organism acts on the world and creates knowledge rather than passively reacting to the environment. And so his interest is not just in how human beings change through adaptation to varied

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conditions. He is interested in what takes place within the human being that makes this adaptation possible. We see this approach clearly in Jackson’s study of life in classrooms. Jackson is interested in how human beings develop adaptive strategies and how those strategies maintain themselves as adaptive mechanisms. Notice, furthermore, Jackson’s interest in invisible and generative forces that produce the culture of the school, a clue to an interest in genetic internal processes. All of this indicates that he is not only concerned with environmental conditions, although these are essential to his investigation. More so, he is becoming sensitively familiar with the many ways of knowing in the school. Knowing these “ways” will reveal the patterns and processes of how knowledge is constructed by the inhabitants of the school. In other words, the culture of the school will have a logic of its own and accessing that logic requires an understanding of the unexplored “ways” and “forms of life” in the school. These forms will be represented as ideas, the main product of Jackson’s scientific inquiry. Furthermore, it may even be the case that the teachers in Jackson’s study will have a logic of their own which will supply clues to encouraging their development by systematizing that idiosyncratic development. Examining “forms of life” relates Jackson’s research to the biosocial theoretical perspective that was initiated by Darwin. But delving into the mysterious “grey zone” of the school, which we also call the “culture,” is a departure from psychobiology and would seem like an entry into sociology. However, it is important to note that Jackson is interested in “thought processes,” especially of teachers, and this research interest is psycho-logical rather than exclusively biological. He is interested in internal cognitive processes that influence how culture is constructed so that the “whole” of the school can be distinguishable from the sum of its individual parts, a classic scientific distinction. With this research, Jackson’s method also retains remnants of the natural history method. He examines individuals and looks for general traits that affect the entire collection of individuals. It is a genuine attempt to articulate the development of the culture during its “course of existence.” While this course may not be temporal, as with a career, or school year, it is still a medium in which there is motion and in which those movements can be identified as favorable or as oppositional. Consistently, therefore, his goal is to search for a theory of adaptation whereby the holistic effect of schooling can somehow be grasped in such a way that conditions can be altered to improve the quality of learning that takes place there. All of these characteristics demonstrate the classic scientific viewpoint of his research foundations. These foundations are also present in Piaget’s theory of genetic knowing. I will only summarize Piaget’s theory, as it will apply to my elaboration of teacher development in this book. Internal cognitive processes for Piaget have a structure of motion and movement that is best described metaphorically. Understanding his developmental theory requires the application of three crucial metaphors. These are: 1 2 3

frames of reference schemes and schemata digestion as an analogy.

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It also requires fluency in three main terms that structure cognitive processes: 1 2 3

assimilation accommodation equilibration.

To begin with, Piaget believed that we construct knowledge on top of what we already know. To conceptualize this, imagine a picture of everything that you know. This picture is enclosed by a frame, which borders all of that knowledge. For an adult, that’s a large picture. However, for a newly born child, that picture’s quite concise. Frames of reference enclose what we know and all new learning experiences become introduced into that picture that is bordered by that frame. The frame is composed of parts. These parts are the positions that structure our understanding of the world. Without structures, we would know nothing. These structures of knowledge are called “schemes” or “schemata.” Having taught geometry to elementary school children (from ages six to twelve), I’m very accustomed to applying and introducing schemes to young children. It requires arranging figures for the children in an incremental order. This is most effectively accomplished with concrete objects that the children have and hold in their hands. I have also applied this method when teaching elementary school children French as a second language. Language structures must be introduced in an incremental order. Each structure must be introduced in such a condition that it clearly builds off the previous one. The word “schemes” comes from the Latin, schema, which meant “an arrangement,” or “figure.” As new pieces of knowledge come to us from the environment, we perceive them as arrangements of figures that can be incorporated into our picture-frame that references the world to us. But more interestingly, scheme precedes Latin, where in Greek (scheAma) it came from the verb echein, which meant, “to have, hold,” or “to be in (such) a condition.” Originally, it came to the Greek from Sanskrit (from sahate), which meant “prevalence.” To apply this epistemology concretely, try to schematize, in your mind, how information is pictured for you in the world. How does it arrive, or how is it experienced? For the infant, the most basic and original scheme arrives in three ways: seeing, grasping, and sucking. The youngest newborns do not see in color when they are born. They see in black-and-white, and even then only partially. So we might say that the earliest schemes of any dependability are breathing and sucking because visual frameworks are only experienced opaquely. Grasping (having and holding) and seeing (to be in such a condition) follow behind sucking, and everything follows behind the first breath of life, as was evident in Chapter 4. For an adult, however, these schemes are overburdened by immensely stratified structures. These structures sit overtop of these primary foundations and produce highly complex representations of life. Language is what represents these structures for us with the help of the ideas that we form as we learn to live in the world. And so, schemes continuously appear as simple arrangements of life’s experiences (such as daily tasks and routines) and figures, as graphic sketches or outlines of the world (wonderings and prospects), but also as concise statements,

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plans and programs of action, or even as systematic or organized prevailing ideas or doctrines. This means that these complex schemes that we call “thoughts,” or “ideas,” and even “beliefs” conglomerate into frames that represent the world to us. In a way, it could be called a database, but this is too mechanistic. It’s a picture that’s framed into a repository. As we are what we eat; so we know what we have re-posited. This is why the children are the community of reference for the schoolteacher and why children, who remain in touch with the earliest schemes of their lives, are the ones who actually teach teachers. During the certification process that precedes life in the classroom, schoolteachers bid farewell to the adult world of “the college” and its abstract representations of reality. In the elementary school classroom, reflective knowing is a latecomer. It follows behind speech, behind seeing, grasping, sucking – all the way to the first breath of life. When teachers learn to sense that moment in their pupils’ lives, they are touching the inner life of the soul. That is where schoolteachers must travel to teach the fundamental competence of trust. To begin to understand this journey, think about eating and compare that to your body learning something. When you eat something you take in a new scheme. We are what we learn. We assimilate that food into our body and it becomes a part of ourselves. Our bodies have to modify that scheme, that incoming matter, thought, idea, experience, and assimilate it into our frame of reference. Piaget calls that assimilation. If that new scheme cannot be incorporated into our existing frame of reference, which holds everything that we know, and tries to integrate it, then a new pattern of knowing has to be generated by the human organism. This introduction will reorganize the existing patterns so that the new scheme can be incorporated. Accommodation is the process of adjusting or modifying our current schematic patterns to be able to handle material. Without accommodation, we would become less adaptive, because assimilation of new schemes might lead to nonsense and madness. New schemes are distorting. Digestively, they cannot be incorporated as they enter our body. They have to be processed for assimilation. If we eat something very novel, then the body must adjust its processes for that incorporation. By analogy, reality has to be managed and coped with in a similar way for the sake of survival and prosperity. Accommodation allows us to restructure what we know and expand patterns so that we can differentiate experiences and adjust to the world as it prevails on us. This results in innumerable and interconnected schematic patterns that make up our mental structure. The picture in that frame of reference is vast, profound, and traces all the way back to our birth where the frame was not solid but porous and a picture was all but absent. This absence of solidity and idea would be interpreted by a scientist as conceptual simplicity. But elementary schoolteachers sense this feeling of absence in children. They sense that the presence of simple ideas is stratified on top of this absence. If they are being convinced to reflect on complex ideas as professionals at the expense of the more primal experiences of life, they will not be better teachers. However, they may resemble scientific practitioners. To apply this process personally, recall Erikson’s basis for learning the trusting transactions between a baby and its caregiver. It’s then possible to apply this process to life in classrooms. I recall a friend who was a victim of fraud. He suffered what used to

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be called a nervous breakdown as a result of this violation. In confiding to me, he recounted that it wasn’t losing the money that overcame him. It was the fact that the person who organized the crime was his best friend. This was devastating for him. If we combine Erikson’s theory with Piaget’s on this point, we can see that my friend’s frame of reference had been built around an earliest scheme of trust that was assimilated after birth. That scheme had upheld many schematic patterns that organized how he interacted with others. To have imagined that his friend would betray him was a distortion of reality. In order to accommodate the new scheme – “trust no one unconditionally, because betrayal is as prevalent as trust” – an entirely new scheme had to be accommodated into his frame of reference. This disillusioning event was so traumatic for him that it reached all the way back to the primal scheme of his life. Life had been distorted so profoundly that he had to assimilate that new experience and accommodate it into his “new world.” For the sake of equilibration, he underwent such a traumatic learning event that it caused him to “opt out on life” for a while. He focused on nothing but his tragedy (nothing else had any prevalence), lost time from work (having and holding his job), lost 30 pounds (forgot to suck nourishment), and even contemplated suicide (i.e. he retreated to the moment of his first breath). In other words, his bodily functions temporarily self-destructed so that he could retrace baby-steps, all the way back, to ask himself again, “why am I still breathing?” However, after his recovery, and with the assistance of psycho-therapy, he returned from his traumatic journey with a renewed level of consciousness. He had accommodated a new scheme that would have never been truthful before – people are not basically trustworthy – as an adaptive strategy for his own survival and eventual prosperity. He attained a new state of balance with the world and was able to assimilate new schematic patterns of material that were previously invisible to him into new frames for his reference. Imbalance is unhealthy, because it is not in harmony with the environment. Balance is adaptive because the organism is in harmony with the environment as it is now presented in a new way, forever. There is a passionate desire, therefore, to be in unified harmony with the world into which the body is born. For classroom teachers this desire involves unity with the children for which they are responsible. Scientific theories try to schematize how that union is accomplished inwardly, outwardly, or at the same time simultaneously. In all cases, however, the fundamental assumption remains that “inner” and “outer” are opposed and excluded from one another. The theoretical bases for these exclusive opposites come from the sciences of biology; philosophical epistemology, sociology, and these have been melded into innovative psychologies. Personality development, cognitive development, and teacher development all draw on these innovations to interpret how balance can be regained in the face of multiple imbalances. This is their therapeutic value. If we are able to schematize the therapeutic journey of life’s challenges into some kind of narrative, then this story allows us to greatly assist individuals who come across barriers and challenges in their lives, and in their careers. The most rigorous example of this research on teachers was produced in the early 1990s by Michael Huberman.

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Lives of Teachers: “It is probably better this way” For Piaget, it is not sensual pleasure that drives the learning process. It is also not an economic basis for survival that drives and supports this super-structure of forces and relations for development. It is driven by the desire for intelligence. Intelligence is the process of adapting to the world. It is not a product or an objective. This does relate it to the biological perspective of Darwin and Freud and Marx. Since intelligence is a process, we also see the natural “history” method entering Piaget’s theory. Learning is a journey, as is often said by my undergraduate students. Some may have heard this poetic expression, but I suspect that this is how they actually experience learning. Life is a course of existence that feels like travel. The desire to find a balance on that journey is the adaptive drive for peace and harmony that all beings feel. For Piaget, this desire for equilibrium is the process of intelligence working itself out in our life. Theoretically and practically, we avoid confusion and fear and we gravitate towards order and security. In doing so, we pursue intelligence, and this, for Piaget, is the process of regaining consonance with the material forces and communications of the world, which are constantly prevailing as dissonance. This internal process of adaptation is also found in the course of existence that teachers call a “career.” Huberman (1993) writes that the study of the human life cycle has a relatively recent history as an object of scientific study. He separates this scientific study into two disciplinary threads: one which is psychodynamic, and present in the works of Freud (and Jung) and culminating in the normative conceptualization of Erikson, which I have discussed in this chapter. The other is more sociological in nature and represented largely by what was called the “Chicago School” of research. Two early researchers in this tradition were Charles Horton Cooley, who Jackson cites at the end of his book, and George Herbert Mead, who plays an important role in Chapter 6 of this book. As I have tried to show in this chapter, this work, which is far too vast to survey entirely here, forms what Huberman calls “a crucible” for his biographical studies of secondary schoolteachers in particular. Of course, this crucible is also the one fashioned by Darwin with his “natural history” method of research. It is the one where the historical life of teachers, in particular its individual members is plotted over “some course of existence.” Huberman chooses to construe teachers’ lives as “careers” and delineates a series of sequences or maxi-cycles to that span of existence. Like Piaget, he identifies the development of teachers’ careers as a process rather than series of punctual events. Like Piaget, Huberman employs stages to plot the progress of teachers’ careers. However, by identifying the teacher’s course of existence as a process, he is choosing to narrate the history of the teacher’s life as a story of desire for equilibrium as that desire works itself out in a teacher’s life. There are also methodological reasons for choosing the career as the unit of analysis. It allows him to compare teachers with members of different professions who share the same course of existence. Methodologically, a career contains both psychological and sociological variables. This means Huberman can explore the trajectory of individuals and understand how they influence the institution as well as how the institution influences individuals. This interaction was of concern to all three

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theorists that I presented in Part I. But it is also consistent with the Darwinian theoretical perspective in general, in which internal (biological) processes with external (social, environmental) conditions collide with incompatibilities. Compatibility is the sign of intelligence for Piaget; at least, the ability to bring internal (biological, cognitive) processes and external (social, environmental) processes into balance, harmony, and equilibrium. Huberman will be searching for paths by which teachers are able to achieve this balance, especially in approaching the final stages of their careers. Huberman portrays the central tendencies of his findings on page 107 of his study. It is the consolidation of many other figures and findings in his study, but it does draw out the central tendencies of his findings. There do seem to be three major themes that determine the unhappy or happy exit from the career. These three major themes are stabilization, when earlier difficulties become resolved; self-doubts, when basic questions arise as to whether the teacher should remain in the profession or seek promotion; and experimentation and renewal, when either self-doubt disappears or when stabilization expands into greater confidence and security. Huberman reports that normally all teachers do progress through some stage of stabilization, but oldest teachers can move directly from late entry into the profession either to self-doubt or into experimentation and renewal. Easy beginnings accompany a sense of discovery and optimism, while painful beginnings have more to do with just coping, trial and error learning, and chronic exhaustion. Interestingly, there seems to be some connection between the kinds of beginnings a teacher has and whether they’ll be satisfied or unsatisfied during later stages. First impressions matter, therefore; in fact, stabilization is what Huberman calls the “leitmotif” for the majority of teachers. It is the moment, we could say, when equilibrium is achieved and a certain kind of “intelligence” is attained by most teachers. But this balance is only a passage to another stage. Self-doubt can swing from feelings of fatigue and routine to genuine crises. Teachers who chose teaching for material reasons, such as the salary or the holidays, tend to experience this kind of insecurity more than others. Diversification or career advancement tended to prevent self-doubt. But in general, Huberman could not pinpoint the factors that clearly anticipated the oncoming period of self-doubt. In any case, the stage of experimentation and renewal presupposes that this crisis is eventually overcome, at least by a large number of teachers. Finally, the stage of focusing is where stories come to either a happy or a sad end. There is hope, therefore, for those who move from self-doubt to renewal and then to positive focusing. A “royal road” for some teachers, as Huberman called it, moves from painful beginnings to stabilization, then to renewal, and finally to positive focusing. Interestingly, self-selection, or the calling to teach, was only reported by one-fifth of the secondary schoolteachers. However, positive relationships with students was the most important reason for remaining in the profession, lending some added evidence to Lortie’s psychic rewards as the reason for enjoying teaching. It is especially interesting to note that Huberman was struck by the “unconsciousness” of his informants when they were describing their professional “evolution.” This finding is consistent with the method of writing natural history especially when the

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theories generated from that research are teleological. In other words, in progressing towards purposes, goals, and accomplishments the teachers felt themselves to be acting with purposes without conscious awareness of whether they were acting for a purpose. This assumes that the adaptive actions which took place throughout their career were conducted because they were pleasurable and that these pleasures had a way of working themselves out for the best in the long run in their careers. It also suggests that the desire for intelligence, or striving for equilibrium, is inherently pleasurable. It even suggests that this desire for balance was more pleasing than attaining knowledge. Knowledge is always the latecomer. Huberman wonders at the end of his study whether there would be ways to assist secondary schoolteachers in avoiding unfortunate and unhappy periods in their career. Perhaps, he asks, management procedures could be sensitive to career evolution. Perhaps social and affective support systems could be instituted to promote local experimentation or even an occupational culture to encourage professional exchanges. Would we then see fewer mid-career crises? Put otherwise, what effect do institutional factors have in influencing career phases over and above the psychological dimensions that he has examined? These questions assume that secondary schoolteachers construct schemes and frames genetically. He does assume with Piaget that teachers act on the world organically and create knowledge rather than passively react to the environment mechanistically. And this also aligns Huberman’s natural history method with Jackson’s approach. Both are interested in generative forces that produce reality, although Jackson’s interest is in the general life of the classroom, while Huberman’s is in the career cycle specifically. But both scientists are process-researchers. They are looking for cognitive processes that will promote traits that favor adaptability rather than oppose it. Huberman closes his study by reminding the reader that the career cycles of teachers are not to be understood in a linear fashion. They are certainly not identical, nor predictable. In declaring that they are not identical or predictable, Huberman aligns his conclusions with the epistemological lineage that began with John Locke (1632–1704) and which continued with the mechanistic psychological approach of Albert Bandura (b. 1925 – ). In this aspect, he departs from the lineage that began with the organic perspective of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) and continued with Piaget’s psychobiological approach to development. But then he goes even further. Not only are they not identical or predictable, they are in fact not even explainable, at least, he claims, using “the tools at our disposal.” What sorts of tools is he suggesting we invent or refine to explain the phenomenology of teaching and learning then? In his final statements, he laments a bit sarcastically that this inexplicability is a pity for administrators. For if career-development was explainable and predictable, administrators could recruit and deploy teachers more “effectively.” Then he concludes that for teachers and researchers alike “it is probably better this way.” What is “better” about “this way”? If knowledge of teacher development is not “linear” and not obtainable with the tools at our disposal then what does life in classrooms hide from scientificallyoriented researchers? This needn’t remain a mystery; it’s just not obtainable with the tools that we currently use. Perhaps it isn’t knowledge at all. I will speculate on what this might be in the final chapter of the book.

Chapter 6

The science of teacher thinking

The pre-scientific worldview and the basis for thinking During the pre-scientific sixteenth century the average European believed they were in direct connection with the center of the universe. This does not mean that they were narcissistic, as that would have been a deadly sin. They were profoundly humble as much as they were profoundly and innocently submissive to God as a legitimate authority. This worldview makes perfect sense if we remember that they had no objective standpoint from which to consider any other alternative. This was how the world appeared to their direct sensory observation. It was what’s called a “geocentric perspective.” It was accepted as truthful because nobody questioned what happened during direct experience. And in any case, imagining anything different would have been heresy or even insanity. Consequently, people had an obviously naïf worldview from our contemporary perspective. For them, ordinary objects were directly viewed as arranged around the observer and time was measured on the basis of highly local events with little conception of past, present, and future. Life was very “now-based.” It was what’s called a lococentric perspective (Lawler 2006: 25). When standing on a horizontal plane, the horizon was encircled, and the objects of perception were positioned around human bodies. The pre-scientific worldview, in summary, was geocentric, lococentric, and corporeally communal. In Lortie’s twentieth century terms, their perspective was conservative because it sought to conserve the stability of an unquestioned universe that was divinely created and unchanging. It was presentist, because there was no chance of social mobility, nor any imagination that the stable system could, or should change. Finally, it denied the ability to imagine the kind of democracy that might be possible with a scientific worldview. There was no individualism and there was no self-concept. People did not differentiate their bodies from the world because all of creation was part of one universal body (i.e. Mystici Corporis Christi). There was a biblical basis for this doctrine of universal connection (Cf. Colossians 1: 24) and the practical effects of this indoctrination resulted in the most extreme form of communitarianism. People interpreted external events with reference to themselves because they couldn’t identify with the objective perspective. Events happened to people because that was what was supposed to happen to them. Obviously, people

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associated themselves with a family unit and a village, perhaps a manor, a county, or even a monarchial state. But in terms of their location in the world as living beings, they observed events from an unmoving standpoint. Their bodies were, along with the earth, the center of all things that they beheld around them. The effect of this splendor was not pride or arrogance but extreme humility and submissiveness. Understanding came with belief and without an objective perspective. Oppositions were not exclusive. This is very important to remember. There was no “I” without the universal body of all that existed. There was not subject/object distinction. Opposites were inclusive of one another because all that existed was a part of one universal body. Therefore, experience was directly felt without analysis, because analysis was not yet imagined. Much like the teachers in Jackson’s study, there was a conceptual simplicity to the ways in which people conducted their lives. Their subjective “knowledge,” if you could call it that, was highly immediate, informal, and individually determined. Like Jackson’s teachers, they used very “here-and-now measures” to gauge their success in life. Their “relish” came from highly emotional connections with those whom they cared about directly. Jackson’s teachers weren’t vain or hubristic but he could describe their view of life in general as “myopic.” They had no vision of “distant objects” or of distant objectives. Like the pre-scientific medieval, their world was radically communal in the tribal sense, and fundamentally geocentric in the spatial and temporal sense, both of which denied them the ability to envision objects that were remote from their highly parochial world. For them, their experience and the experiences of the children in their classrooms was inclusive and without the kind of exclusive opposition that the scientific perspective demands. From a scientist’s perspective, this worldview portrays a disempowering slave-mentality. Freeing humanity from this near-sightedness was the motivation for the scientific revolution and for the political revolutions that science and technology inspired. This pre-scientific worldview is passive and does not aspire to better things in life. It sees life as fixed, stable, and unquestioned. The person, while still a “thinking” person, is a passive observer, a mere contemplator, who takes for granted that their physical body is essentially a focal point of some kind. And objective reflection on that point is not imaginable, because the nature of the world reveals itself directly (Lawler 2006: 25). Self and world are not differentiated. For Lortie, schoolteachers focused on conserving this present-tense view of life and their rewards for this conservation were psychically immediate. For the medieval, the best way that we could label this perspective is to call it “occult.” This just means that thought wasn’t abstract and complex. Thoughts always involved specific forms of things exclusively and the reasons behind these thoughts were hidden from view or concealed. This perspective may seem mysterious, paradoxical, or conceptually simplistic as Jackson called it, but it is actually very powerful spiritually and conveys enormous meaning for teachers in classrooms. When compared to a scientific worldview, schoolteachers must also have seemed submissive and enslaved from Waller’s scientific perspective. But thinking was going on, exactly as thinking was happening intensely for the ancient and for the medieval person. It was not the method of thinking that was being born with the medieval guild-spirit; that is, the process that involves risks, calculations, and experiments in speculation of external

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gain. That kind of entrepreneurial thought process assumes a faith in external causes that move the universe with external forces. That’s not how life was for the average person. For the professional entrepreneur, the market is that externality; for the professional scientist it is the laboratory or the external world of empirical forces. Their way of thinking encourages exploration beyond idiosyncratic and lococentric limitations because risks, calculations, and experiments are all intended to understand the world, to master it, and then to control it for the betterment of all. Faith in the manipulation of these external forces is the opposite of a faith in occult forces that are unchangeable, stable, mystical, but still very miraculous in their changeability. From the pre-scientific perspective, all objects are capable of moving themselves because internal causes are what move them, develop them, and change them (Lawler 2006: 26). Things change, therefore, because their inner nature inspires them to behave the way that they do. From this perspective, it is not the external force of gravity that causes Isaac Newton’s apple to fall to the ground. That event is the manifestation of the apple’s own internal nature. It follows its own inner purpose as every human being does as well. The falling apple wants to achieve its natural place in the universe and it is moving itself toward that natural place (Lawler 2006: 27). Its fall is in harmony with a natural stability. In comparison, what is the “natural center of existence” for the elementary schoolteacher? Clearly, it seemed to be the inner force that pulls them vocationally towards their pupils and attracts them to be one with their world. It is to be the one who makes a difference for the single individual at risk of falling by the wayside of life. This natural calling is no scientific experiment and involves no reflection because feeling its connection is immediately obvious. It comes from an intuitive sense that something miraculous is going on that can only be measured subjectively. The force that is at play is “psychic.” The schoolteacher hears, sees, and feels by the use of senses other than the natural senses. Strangely but seemingly, a pre-scientific worldview conforms to the ways in which teachers perceive occult movements in the classroom. It is their pre-scientific worldview that allows them to grasp miraculous events as true manifestations of reality (Lawler 2006: 28). It may seem submissive and powerless to the scientist, but this power comes as the direct inhalation of the aura of classrooms. Time is temporary and fleeting in that environment, as Jackson observed, precisely because the self-moving world of the classroom is based on direct observation of empirical phenomena. Intrinsic forces come from the way in which pupils actually appear to the teacher when they look at them in the eyes. This naïf thinking-structure, which does not result in knowledge, is still a complicated way of thinking that has been practiced for thousands of years. When practicing this primeval thought process, personal development is not about thinking like entrepreneurs or professional scientists; it concerns perceiving qualitative differences in the internal natures of children. As such, teachers have informal understandings of human development that are very sophisticated, albeit highly unscientific. Their ethics are lococentric and involve paranormal sensitivity to children who are at risk. Their politics are tribally communal rather than democratically collegial. These are the natural tendencies of schoolteachers in the unscientific worldview of life in classrooms.

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From their pre-scientific perspective, thinking is essentially passive and immediate as Jackson rightly observed. Knowing, for elementary schoolteachers, is a presentist experience, as Lortie correctly observed. The essential characteristics of a pupil are transferred to the mind of the teacher through this direct connection. A teacher absorbs a pupil’s educational needs by means of direct interaction with a child. This is not a rational and scientific thought process. This is, in fact, a highly complex way of experiencing the world that retains a faith in miracles and mystery. It is actually an esoteric way of thinking that is completely different from a scientific way of calculating and accumulating knowledge of the child or the classroom. However, it is still “thinking.” It is the transmission of characteristics of the object immediately and directly to the mind (Lawler 2006: 32) without reflection. With this direct experience, there’s no need for experimental, hypothetic-deductive methods. There’s also no need for active involvement by the teacher in constructing theoretical hypotheses, in deducing possible outcomes, and then testing them or comparing them with experience. From a pre-scientific perspective, reality is seen as essentially fixed. If reality is fixed, then transforming the natural abilities of human beings, or promoting them and improving them, is also an experience that remains fixed within limits. There isn’t the expectation that educational transformation, promotion, improvement, or development should lead to something very different than what’s being experienced at any specific point in one’s life. To the scientist, however, it would seem as if this limited form of development is not really development at all. It is presently static, conservative, and even individually enslaving. But the teacher is learning continuously at every present moment. There is still motion and development but not in the progressive, chronological, or future-oriented sense. It can’t be measured in a linear and quantitative fashion. It can’t be accumulated and demonstrated or standardized on examinations. It can’t even be calculated abstractly. It escapes the measurements and grasp of science because this experience pre-dates the tools of physical science and its basic assumptions. Alternative ways of appreciating this development are called for and must be developed in justice to the teacher. This kind of educational worldview was universal in Europe prior to the 1700s before the general population became converted by the assumptions of Galileo’s astronomy and Newtonian physical sciences. As such, it does resemble an indigenous, aboriginal way of conceiving the world. This is why the revolution of science is so significant. The Copernican revolution led to profound revolutions in all ways, including economics, civil governance, and public education. Prior to the scientific revolution in Europe, society was stable with fixed ranks. Ordinary people would never have welcomed, nor certainly even imagined the kind of disordered universe that we take for granted today (Becker 1932: 49). The universal design of nature was stable because design was derived from the character of the creator of the design. God was assumed to be good and reasonable and so God’s creation must be good, reasonable, as well as unchangeable and eternal. The scientific revolution was in many ways a renunciation of this divine revelation. Direct and immediate truth, through the revelation of God’s purposes based on biblical scriptures, was the target of the eighteenth century scientific revolution (Becker

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1932: 50). This direct and immediate means of learning is clearly also the target of the twentieth century scientists who critically investigated teachers’ development. Like in the medieval world, life in the contemporary elementary school classroom can be a mysterious kind of place where many spontaneous and miraculous occurrences potentially take place. During the ecstasy of classroom learning, there is no need for a conceptual universe above or outside that real one (Becker 1932: 55). Experience in classrooms is nothing other than temporary and fleeting. This is the manifestation of its power, a power that is incompatible with future-oriented institutions that are founded on the presumptions of eighteenth century science. Granted, this would seem to make life in classrooms vulnerable to external threats. But this fear is only consistent with the insecurity of the scientist who sees all threats as externally caused. In fact, that assumption is to blame for their method of identifying “our problems.” Consistently, it is also to blame for the scientific solutions to problems that ignore the spirituality of life in classrooms. This is why the scientists coax teachers to look outside their classrooms to study the commonsense insights into the nature of their “social” reality, as Waller did. Observing that reality, comparing it with rules of inference, sampling from it, and hypothesis testing through treatment, are all absent in the schoolteacher’s practice (Lortie 1975: 231). What were the original purposes for the scientists who tried to draw us out and obsess over external things and objectified methods? It is important to keep in mind that the founders of the scientific method were attacking very specific problems with their revolutionary theses. They were trying to enlighten people of the perceived darkness of the medieval, feudal past. These eighteenth century biases are not entirely different from the contemporary ones that motivate the twentieth century curriculum scientists of teachers’ educational development. The scientific founders such as Galileo, Newton, David Hume, and John Locke wanted to destroy what they interpreted as a fundamental slavery to an outmoded and anachronistic cosmology that they saw was holding back progress in science, government, and education. This was especially true in the case of John Locke. In Locke’s case, his target was the eighteenth century bias of human “total depravity.” Clearly, Waller and Lortie also diagnose schoolteachers with having this same limiting and debilitating depravity. A much more optimistic view of human nature was proclaimed by these eighteenth and the twentieth century researchers. From the eighteenth century viewpoint, if social reality could be progressive then the human condition must also be progressively improved. If human beings are born in a state of original sin and deprived of being free fundamentally then that is indeed our common problem. Politically and socially, we might resign ourselves to the unalterable fact that guilt, chronic uncertainty, and doubt should be a part of life because these “depravities” cannot be overcome. From this, the scientific philosophers believed that people should be saved, and we see this scientific diagnosis and prescription in the twentieth century sociological analyses of schoolteachers. In contrast, based on Locke’s thesis, what if the human mind was devoid of all implanted ideas and dispositions at birth, especially of all depravities? What if it was a blank sheet – a “tabula rasa” – upon which the world of nature and human association could write whatever it recorded there? Answers to this question have obvious developmental implications for education because it

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permitted the liberation of the human being by means of teaching, learning, and social emancipation (Becker 1932: 64). This aspiration, which Becker calls “the construction of the heavenly city,” motivated eighteenth century scientists and philosophers – and it is this exact aspiration that still motivated the twentieth century curriculum scientists who sought to emancipate teachers in schools through their professonalization. Professionalizing teachers was a scientific project thoroughly and completely. Recall how the depravities of guilt, uncertainty, doubt, and loneliness (or social alienation in Waller’s case) ran consistently in Lortie’s findings. Liberating the common folk with knowledge of their world (e.g., by means of the Marxist heavenly city) is a noble human project with implications for economics, government, and education. Liberating teachers by the same means is equally as noble; however, before continuing to advocate scientific professionalism, we must note some basic differences between the original intent of the eighteenth century scientific project and its descendent twentieth century offspring. The founders of contemporary science truly saw themselves as bearers of “good news” to everyone. This was also the aspiration that twentieth century educational theorists attempt to hold forth to elementary schoolteachers. A little more history will make this comparison clear.

The scientific worldview and reflective practice In 1632, Galileo published a book on astronomy entitled Dialogue concerning the two chief world systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican. It demonstrated that a dominant “worldview” had been prevalent for millennia and that it was time to rethink all assumptions. The Ptolemaic worldview conceptualized the universe as geocentric, which meant that people believed that the sun orbited around the earth at the center of the cosmological system. With that one publication, Galileo introduced the foundation for an alternative way of thinking about the world, a foundation that permitted experimentation with radically new assumptions and methods. New methods bring new findings and solve old problems in radically innovative ways. For thousands of years, Europeans took what we consider as “dead matter” to be alive and self-moving. Before the Copernican revolution, we would have believed in what we see at face-value alone. We now believe instead in what we don’t see, because we’ve been convinced that the external physical forces discovered by science make dead matter move (Lawler 2006: 28). From a secular viewpoint, we’ve substituted a faith in a world that mimics the creator with a faith in creation that conforms to the physical law of inertia. Nothing develops itself. Development is the result of external physical forces. Even my arm, when it moves, does so because of cognitive, chemical, electrical, and muscular re-actions to external stimuli. These assumptions free scientists to actively intervene in those forces and to manipulate them, testing ideas and hypotheses, and then to recommend preferences and improvements based on their findings. This is the basis for traditional medical practice that the early teacher development theorists embraced as a model of professionalism based on esoteric knowledge of these forces and methods. Graduate students of Education are expected to assume this faith in science and its methods so that they can

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learn to intervene in the movements of events in the classroom for the sake of pupils, teachers, government, and even the economy. According to the narrative of science, it’s not from a natural glory, nor from a scriptural authority, but from the external book of nature that the first cause of all development is found. The externality of these physical causes is open to inspection by everyone who can learn to unlock them. Their laws can be recorded by anyone if they learn to record them accurately. This promise is the goal of all research methods courses and it prompts professors of qualitative and quantitative methods to declare that “method is everything.” This is an accurate declaration because scientific authority begins with correct methods of defining what the world is and how it manifests itself for our manipulation. This potential visibility of the cause of all things is also what makes eighteenth century science so democratic. Scientific principles are accessible to anyone who is willing to learn about them. It is important, therefore, for educational systems to broadcast these universal laws and to teach children and youth to master them and apply them in everyday life – because they allegedly free learners from submission to superstition and submission to the authority of direct revelation. Entire societies have been established based on these new scientific foundations. Inspect, for example, the opening of the American Declaration of Independence. It assumes the laws of nature are unique in equal authority to the commandments of biblical scripture. These laws are what move the powers “of the earth.” Why should it not be external physical movements, therefore, that inspire a political system with a belief in a free will to move those external forces: When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. (Becker 1932: 52; emphasis mine) These separate, impelling, and equal laws of nature also ground the science of teacher research. But as was discovered by twentieth century researchers, teachers’ educational development seems to be more rooted in a pre-democratic monastic spirit, and in a pre-scientific shamanic spirit rather than the reflective spirit of early scientists or the entrepreneurial craft spirit of the early guilds. For teachers, their sensory experience of pupils is enough to believe what must be done with subjective certainty. On the other hand, scientific objectivity favors scientific investigation of the simpler components or “parts” that constitute the behavior or performance of pupils. There is the normative tendency to break down and abstract those “parts” to analyze them, comprehend them, and synthesize them into new constructions that can be tested, and standardized. In an almost industrial way, pupils can be delivered into social life as graduated products. The scientific method is “com-positive” and synthetic. It objectifies children

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so that they can be re-formed away from maladaptive parts. It is this method of reconstruction that has also been applied to teachers during twentieth century waves to reform them. Some of this stereotyping might be the result of a highly successful manufacturing model being transplanted into the administration of schools. With the encroaching bankruptcy of that industrial model in North America we may see as much of a radical change taking place in school administration. To explain this model further, for physical and biological scientists, the “parts” of any organization can be categorized in terms analogous to figures, quantities, time, and motion. For social scientists these abstract parts are just differently labeled. We saw, for example, how Waller (and Durkheim) was able to break down the parts of the school organization as if it was a living organism in a bio-economic system. Teachers were conceptualized as organs in an organic system and the school was a unity of interacting personalities with a collective personality or consciousness. This assumes that any organic system functions in a healthy way when its parts are performing in a coordinate manner. When they are not working in coordination then standards decay and quality erodes. These processes consolidate in linear fashion similar to the linear consolidation of geometrical figures. In that basic model of the sciences, points exist in space and these points coordinate progressively to produce a line of development toward a coherent figure or form. Jackson noted that this type of thinking was endemic to the school and was detected in many of its administrative processes. All motion, according to Galilean astronomy, takes place in straight lines towards ultimate consummations in form. Such quantitative developments are only altered by forces that exert an action–reaction relationship onto those lines to bend them. Thinking, from a scientific perspective, follows a similar logic: thoughts coordinate progressively to produce coherent ideas or concepts. Dewey sums this process up well in the following way: First, the process of forming the idea or supposed solution is checked by constant cross reference to the conditions observed to be actually present; secondly, the idea after it is formed is tested by acting upon it, overtly if possible, otherwise in imagination. The consequences of this action confirm, modify, or refute the idea. (Dewey, 1933, quoted in Grimmett 1988: 7) Lines of thought are amended, therefore, when the action–reaction of reflection bends them in different directions. By contrast, unscientific thought is not progressive in this way. The thinker extracts directly from the essence of the self-moving object because self and world are united. The teacher, by comparison, extracts her thoughts directly from the essential experience of the child before her because during good teaching, or during “a good day,” as Lortie’s teachers called it, the teacher’s life and her life in the classroom is united. This feeling of unity brings a “psychic reward.” This is how it is measured. This direct extraction is what makes teachers’ thought processes seem conceptually simplistic for scientists because for teachers, events are connected in very direct ways. Their insights are quick, ready-to-hand, and not complex in the scientific sense. It may seem as if their notions are pre-conceived but they are not. In fact, they

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are immediate and unmediated by scientifically reflective processes. Schoolteachers’ decisions are unscientifically “felt” rather than “known” (i.e. they are moralistic in Lortie’s terms) because their experiences are concrete and available to the senses, not mediated into knowledge. These kinds of myopic deliberations are fundamental to their learning and development. As Carter (1984) illustrates metaphorically, these unmediated feelings are akin to an intellectual condition of the eye in which the rays of distant objects are brought into focus before they reach the retina; in a word, they are “short-sighted.” From a scientific perspective, knowledge is never immediate or felt. Knowledge is mediated by means of a logical process of reflection that is “longsighted” into the predictable future with implications. It swings back and forth between knower and externally known. It swings back and forth between the present, past, and future. And this exchange is the result of forces in the mind that can interface with the external world. This, at least, has been the theoretical assumption for about 300 years. Scientifically, thought begins outside the schoolteacher. There’s a lot of information out there, and so it’s essential to begin with the right starting point when theorizing how the reflective process works. It begins by dissolving the basic components of any experience until the thinker gets to a simple point of departure. That’s when knowledge begins to be built. To do this, we reconnect the aspects of existence synthetically, going in simple steps to the comprehension of more complicated applications and elaborations of any simple starting point (Lawler 2006: 59). It does not center on the individual but is checked by constant cross-reference to the conditions observed to be actually present. That is what makes it geo-metric rather than geo-centric. But instead of passively contemplating the world as it directly appears, schoolteachers are expected to actively comprehend their work, their pupils’ progress, and their identity as professionals with a system of cross-referencing, testing, confirmation, modification and refutation. They must mentally reduce the apparently self-perpetuating development of the children to a complicated system of determined developments that are beneath what is going on directly on the surface. They must mistrust the passion of the moment, in most cases, and replace that immediate superficiality for the rationality of what lies beneath immediate experience. By analogy, feeling the moment of psychic pleasure when the apple falls into one’s lap under the tree is not “the point” of successful teaching; it is in beginning to understand that some cognitive gravity is working behind all things and that its laws are at work at each and every moment. The professional attitude is disillusioning; it removes all illusions, mysteries, and miracles. The world of the classroom is to a considerable extent an illusion that must be connected and corrected by proceeding from the principles of the reflective thinker who understands the physical and biological laws beneath pedagogical events (Lawler 2006: 26). In contrast, sensitivity to immediate, internal forces counts as a viable call to action for the elementary schoolteacher. This is because theirs is an “inner world,” as Lortie identified. But for the reflective practitioner, only knowledge of mechanical, generative causes counts as true justifications for action. To compare these in summary, let’s review the differences between the pre-scientific and the scientific worldview (see Figure 6.1).

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Pre-scientific worldview

Scientific worldview

Geocentric Time is measured on the basis of local events; “now-based” Lococentric; subjective Universally communal; humble and submissive Objects move themselves; objectives move themselves Internal causes; inner nature; inner purposes Occult/tribal/spiritual Thinking is passive and immediate Reality is fixed Ptolemaic Direct extraction of essence; inclusive opposites Geocentric Surface

Helio-centric Time is measured on the basis of passages from past, to present, and to future; time/motion Contextual; objective Individualistic but equal; life, liberty, and happiness are inalienable rights External forces move objects; external causes move events External causes; abstract objectives; reasonable justifications Rational/reasonable/empirical Knowledge is active and reflective Reality is changing Copernican Reflective abstraction of causes; exclusive opposites Geo-metric Depth

Figure 6.1 The pre-scientific and the scientific worldviews compared.

Consider the radical implications of how thought takes place in these two worldviews. If thought processes are theorized to be immediate and internal then human beings are assumed to be passive recipients of power. But as soon as thought processes are theorized to be objectively mediated and externally motivated, then all logical processes become reversed. As reflective thinkers, we actively interfere with the world when we encounter a problem. Overcoming that problem leads to knowledge of how the external world is organized. Methods can be learned to synthesize that knowledge from the particularities of experience. The challenge of twentieth century scientists was to refocus the mysterious, native, ancient, medieval, inner world of the schoolteacher onto the clear, constructed forms of the outer world. Then they’d have a technical vocabulary with working models, plans, and blueprints to fall back on as professionals. With that conformation they might even achieve some unanimity of thought and action so that their development could be marshalled in directions that would be more adaptive. Their new “religion” would be based on a science of how the world works empirically according to “customary laws of cause and effect,” as Jackson assumed them to be. Were this natural religion to be installed, he assumes, events might be as lawful in the classroom as they are in any other sphere of human endeavor. We can see these assumptions clearly over 200 years ago in David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1776; published posthumously in 1779). I present this quote in its original form. I then paraphrase it in the way that sociological research characterizes the culture of the classroom:

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Look around the world: contemplate the whole and every part of it: You will find it to be nothing but one great machine, subdivided in to an infinite number of lesser machines, which again admit of subdivisions, to a degree beyond what human senses and faculty can trace and explain. All these various machines, and even their most minute parts, are adjusted to each other with an accuracy . . . The curious adapting of means to ends, throughout all nature, resembles exactly the productions of human intelligence . . . therefore the effects resemble each other . . . the causes also resemble; and that the Author of Nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man. (Quoted in Becker 1932: 56) Look around the school: contemplate the whole and every part of it: you will find it to be nothing but one great social organization, subdivided into an infinite number of lesser subcultures, which again admit of subdivisions, to a degree beyond what human senses and faculty can trace and explain. All these various subcultures, and even their most minute parts, are adjusted to each other with an accuracy . . . The curious adapting of means to ends, throughout the system, resembles exactly the adaptive thinking powers of human intelligence . . . Even the effects resemble each other . . . the causes also resemble each other to the extent that that the whole system is somewhat similar to the mind of the human being. Note how the original author does not conclude that nature must be rational because God is rational. He concludes that God must be an engineer because nature is a machine. We no longer start with the deity and conclude that nature is divine. As reflective scientists, schoolteachers are to start with the empirical world and from that simple starting point conclude that the science of teaching and learning obeys the same rules that physics does. Teaching is not a spiritual manifestation; teaching is a substantial reality with laws that can be learned if we only have the methods and tools to record them. The culture of the school and the life of the classroom, therefore, cannot possibly be occult, religious, spiritual, nonsensical, ambiguous, fleeting, vague, uncertain, or pre-scientific by any category. Life there must be exclusively reasonable, materially grasped, empirically measured, and perhaps even be standardized for production and reproduction. Therefore, even teachers’ thoughts must be empirically determined logical processes that conform to scientific laws. Were this to be true, then logical methods could be standardized to re-form them according to those categories. Ideally, they could be programmed almost mechanically to adapt to externally changing economic conditions. This reversal of thought processes transformed the ideal image of nature and resulted in the science of the 1700s. Like Darwin did before him, Newton proclaimed God’s glory in his work. But Newton had to demonstrate that “glory” could be mathematically calculated just as Darwin, after him, had to demonstrate how “creation” could be biologically designed. Consistently, therefore, psychological and sociological theorists continue to demonstrate how teacher development can be materially, substantially, and mathematically calculated – that is, de-spirited – because their work is based on a heritage of de-spiritualization. They examine how teachers are developed in

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terms of particles and parts and then synthesize the general laws and principles of their educational development from those formations. This predetermines theories of development as formational rather than vocational. Were they primarily vocational, then their foundations would have to revert back to pre-scientific frameworks. This is because a vocational basis for development assumes a direct calling from the object of one’s desire and attraction. A vocational calling is not abstract but extracted from the object directly. Over centuries, popular works have reproduced Newton’s complex mathematical theories for the average person unsophisticated in scientific methods. We see similar popularizations during the early twenty-first century of the new quantum physics and its supposed “laws of attraction.” Eventually, these natural laws began to become integrated into school curricula until the general public forgot altogether what it was like to believe in a pre-scientific world. However, the occult and mysterious world of mythical nature is never totally forgotten. We can still trace it in remote and marginal regions of life, such as in the life of the classroom. There, it becomes an inconvenience to the scientists who attempt to overthrow it and transform teachers into scientists. We cannot fault them for doing this. The earliest scientists, as I have said, believed sincerely that they were genuinely serving humanity with their discoveries and liberating them, as Waller implies. Jackson may have hoped to liberate teachers by helping them to comprehend the power of knowledge. Waller and Lortie hoped to free teachers by professionalizing them and this required a scientific perspective along with a faith in the findings of that method. Would that this were so, then rational and intelligible thought could make good sense of that uncontrollable context called “life in classrooms” and it could be subdued more easily to the uses of humanity. This was the noble and lifesaving dream for the early eighteenth century founders of these methods. It remains the noble dream of contemporary psychological and sociological scientists who study teachers in schools. This is because the world is, indeed, a world that is fraught with danger, as Dewey observed. And if our economy becomes a threatening world of danger, for example, might it not make good sense to exert control over classrooms and teachers so that they, and we through them, can subdue the dangers of the economy to the uses of humanity? In Chapter 8, I show how this was, in fact, the objective of scientific teacher development all along, as it began for Willard Waller in 1932.

How teachers (should) think Dewey’s theory of knowledge-formation is treated as orthodox in many contemporary North American faculties of education. For example, Donald Schön proposes that Dewey’s theory of inquiry is the legacy that he left for pedagogical practice (1992). Schön’s elaboration of reflective practice (1983) is based in part on Dewey’s theory of inquiry. Shulman (1987), furthermore, refers to Dewey’s theory of inquiry (in addition to Piaget’s theory of human development) as the fundament of the new reform on knowledge and teaching. Credit for these fundamentals is not as often given to George Herbert Mead. However, Mead should be credited for the terms and structure of these theories. Close examination shows that the movement to professionalize teachers with

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esoteric knowledge benefited greatly from Mead’s social psychology as well as from Dewey’s theory of inquiry. With Donald Schön’s incorporation of Michael Polanyi’s personal and tacit knowledge, these various influences come together into a consolidated theory of knowledge. I have already shown how a distinctive scientific process of logical thought rests on various accepted assumptions. I have also shown that when educational researchers interpret “experience” they are largely dependent on inherited ways of understanding the world based on eighteenth century physics, geometry, and astronomy ultimately. These inherited structures are what Lyotard (1979) calls “meta-narratives.” While the original composers of the scientific narrative of education were not university professors, their theories were integrated into university institutions and then adapted by professors.5 These structures were popularized by means of accessible publications to the masses and then proliferated into school textbooks along with basic mathematical, biological, and scientific curricula. Our world-sensibility now largely depends on the separation, theoretically, between subjective experience and objective knowledge, with the hope that knowledge will resolve the alienation between the two. Whenever we experience life, therefore, we can only partially know it, and when we try to “know” life, we are no longer experiencing it directly. We comprehend the world in thought and for these thoughts to be reliable they must be cross-referenced, tested, confirmed, and then modified or refuted for our use. John Dewey applied scientific principles to develop a beautifully poetic co-responsive theory of knowledge. He used three dominant poetic images to develop his theory. The first was the “reflex(ive) arc of experience” (Dewey 1896) which he theorized existed between the world-as-experience and knowledge of it. The second was “the cable of reason” (see Boisvert 1998: 150) which the human mind spun in its construction of knowledge. The third was a traveling metaphor of the sailing vessel as it navigated the sea (Dewey 1991: 39). As I shall show, Dewey’s poetic metaphors for thought’s movement are mathematically inspired. This is not coincidence. The scientific tradition itself, since Newton, is mathematically inspired. Dewey’s epistemology of reflective inquiry is consistently scientific in its method and its goals. As one twentieth century foundation for scientific teacher thinking, therefore, Dewey’s theory of inquiry promotes the tradition of transforming schoolteachers into calculating scientists who should adopt the methods of science and mathematical reasoning so that they can become more progressively professional. In Dewey’s perspective, knowledge is awakened by human interaction within the environment, as knowledge is built through the continuous perception, manipulation, and aesthetic re-evaluation of objects. Ignorance, for Dewey, was exhibited by habits, which were motivated by appetite, sense, and circumstance (1991: 67). Intelligence arises from trained thought, and judged evidence. These characteristics, which distinguish correct training and judgment, therefore, demand special attention when reviewing his theory of knowledge. For example, good judgment is evaluated on the basis of practical consequences (106). Trained thought must project beyond the “now-based” extraction of direct experience, implying that untrained extraction is how the ignorant used to think. Contemporary intelligent thought should be measured on the basis of

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passages from the “now” into the past, through memory, and then back to the present after reflection into future consequences. Clearly, we witness a bending from now to the past and then back to the present after first visiting the future and speculating implications. This bending is the practice of reflection. In Dewey’s conception, the learner does the same thing as the animal in its natural environment, connecting Dewey’s theory to Darwin’s social biology. It was Mead who traced the emergence of philosophical pragmatism to behaviorist psychology and scientific methodology. The behaviorist foundation, he writes, originated in Darwin’s theory of biological evolution. In his words, the methodology of pragmatism is “only the evolutionary process grown self-conscious” (Mead 1936: 364). The human being has a cognitive advantage over the animal, however, as it possesses the powers of memory and self-consciousness. But similar to the animal, educational adaptation comes about when the organism’s attention is interrupted by a problem in its natural or social environment. For example, upon encountering a problem, the teacher should engage in the following logical process: 1 2 3 4

recognize the particular problem recollect past experiences to gather universal ideas for analysis of the problem consolidate universal ideas, to contextualize the particular problem attend again to immediate experience with a newly synthesized solution.

How we think (1991[1910]) is about the interactive co-response between the induction of particulars and the deduction of synthesized meanings of teaching and learning experiences. One goal of the book is to find a single, consistent meaning for “thinking.” The urgency of this goal comes from the need to find deliberate grounds for holding a belief system (Dewey 1991: 6). The question is how, then, should schoolteachers believe in what they are experiencing? Dewey offers a doctrine based on scientific principles. He characterizes thought as “reflective” and as a “consequence” of steps, which determine successive steps toward an outcome, each in turn leading back to its predecessors (ibid.). Returning to the pragmatic foundations of Charles Sanders Pierce (1868), Boisvert refers to Dewey’s metaphor of reasoning as “a cable” in which thinkers gather threads from many different areas and braid them together. Here’s how Pierce expressed this idea: Philosophy ought to imitate the successful sciences in its methods, so far as to proceed only from tangible premises, which can be subjected to careful scrutiny, and to trust rather to the multitude and variety of its arguments than to the conclusiveness of any one. Its reasoning should not form a chain which is no stronger than its weakest link, but a cable whose fibers may be ever so slender, provided they are sufficiently numerous and intimately connected. (Boisvert 1998: 150; emphasis mine) This implies that increased knowledge leads to increased comprehension (i.e. an increased “grasp”) of the problem and to its eventual resolution. The more threads that

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the teacher braids together, the more likely a position is believable as truthfully permitting continued inquiry. As a calculative theory of mind, Dewey’s theory will be geometric rather than geocentric. Dewey’s progressive notion of experience descends from Dewey’s background in German Idealist philosophy. The etymology of the German word Erfahrung – a journey – influences how experience is conceptualized in Dewey’s English (see Leed 1992: 5). The Indo-European root of “experience” is per which can be translated as “to try, to test,” or “to risk,” connotations which persist in the modern English word “perilous.” Per shows up in the Latin experimentum, translated as “experiment.” Secondary meanings of per have referred explicitly to motion: “to cross space, to reach a goal,” or “to go out.” Experience may take on the characteristics of an ordeal, as a passage through a frame of action that gauges the true dimensions and nature of the person who passes through it. In other words, thought begins with the recognition of an external problem and these are everywhere. Notions of risk or danger are present in the Gothic cognates of per, in which the letter “p” mutated to an “f” for the German fern (far away) and the English fare (as in, “how did you fare today”?), fear (as inspired by the risks of crossing a metaphorical space to reach a desired goal), and ferry (which crosses a boundary). These connotations continue in contemporary German. Erfahrung, translated literally as “experience,” is connected to the German word for travel (fahren), with Old German roots in the word irfaren (to wander). This also holds connections to the modern word bewandert, which the Germans use to describe the virtues of being “astute, skilled,” or “clever.” The literal meaning of bewandert, however, is “well travelled” (i.e. “I’ve been around”). Experience, based on this genealogy, is a developmental traveling of conceptual reflection, which is continually taking place between the subject and its objective world, weaving them together and changing them both co-responsively. It is a navigational process that maps the arithmetic co-ordinates of the external world for adaptive movement and manipulation. These inherited concepts of experience and learning poetically compose Dewey’s theory of knowledge and practical reasoning. They show up in all the ways in which he elaborates the logical process of thought and its formation, especially in how it is based on thought as an external physical movement. Consistent with this metaphor of motion, Dewey likens the learning process to setting the tack of a sailing vessel, which directs its gaze on a fixed point on the horizon (1991: 39). He privileges clear sight for the reasoning process by distinguishing between the object “as suggested” and the object “as seen.” Clarity of vision is what qualifies learning. “Suggested objects” include a host of useless “kaleidoscopic flights of fancy” (3); “trivial recollections, daydreams, or castles in the air” (7). These cannot aim to justify commitment and so they cannot lead to knowledge. Clearly, according to Dewey, the ambiguity, vagary, and uncertainty of the classroom in its kaleidoscopic immediacy should not ground a belief-system for teachers. When sailing through fleeting experience, it is Galileo’s telescope that must be the tool of choice. Incidents that merit belief have coherence because they lead to “consummations.” Only coherent parts of information that synthesize into principles should lead teachers to consider the clear object and the objectivity that is worthy of commitment (5). This soundness is

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provided by the methods of scientific inquiry. In Dewey’s words, “facts suggest other facts so as to induce belief in the latter fact upon the ground of the former fact” (8). The goal of inquiry is to coordinate some kind of “map” which leads the teacher to discover the facts upon which beliefs about practice can be justified. This logical process is linear in its geometric conception and origin. It integrates parts, or facts, into complex, objective conclusions (i.e. “consummations”). It is this kind of logical, methodological process that is to ground the professional commitment of schoolteachers during the twentieth century. Weaving the cable of this scientific logic comes in two stages: 1 2

encountering doubt, hesitation, and perplexity researching facts to corroborate or nullify clarity of belief. (Dewey 1933: 10)

Schoolteachers are not supposed to be professional researchers like university professors. But they’re supposed to approach their work and their careers in the same way that scientific researchers traditionally approach their work. Consistent with Newtonian physics, Dewey compares “clarity” with the accuracy and definitiveness of mathematical combinations. He employs expressions such as “calculate, account for, weigh, evaluate and ratio” (56) to describe the route toward clarity. Dewey’s theory of knowledge, therefore, could be referred to as the “ratiocination” that comes about when uneven events are brought into a balance. Ratiocination is not for entertainment, as the teacher must demand satisfaction from reflection. The teaching experience is also not a case of directly extracting a pupil’s essential nature (i.e. “spontaneous combustion”; Dewey 1991: 12) but arises from a state of disequilibrium between teachers and the environment of their classroom. Perplexity always invokes unrest, disturbance, and suspense. These qualities are discomforting. The judgment, which is suspended from stage one to two, above, is experienced painfully and the pursuit of pleasure takes the route of sustained and protracted inquiry (13). A thinking teacher should be future-oriented when they examine the state-of-affairs in the present. Clearly, this theory is a way to integrate present-minded teachers into future-oriented institutions. It is not a theory of surface, but a theory of depth-perception. For example, good choices are not moved by raw appetites or by the sheer urgency of spontaneous forces. Disciplined habits are to turn natural powers into “expert and tasted” powers (62). Those with expert tastes foresee and then justify more prudent actions in moderation (14). It is reflective thought, which frees human beings from servile subjugation to instinct and appetites. Freedom, as Dewey conceptualizes it, comes with autonomous achievement and independent exercise. It comes with the mental power that leads to emancipation from “the leading string of others” (64). It involves braiding one’s own cable and where emancipation places responsibility on the one who seeks understanding. Consistent with the eighteenth century scientific founders, Dewey’s theory of knowledge is intended to liberate teachers from the darkness of occult dependence on the immediate sense of the classroom. We see these metaphors in how twentieth century theorists articulate professional teaching. The

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process of learning-as-adaptation is metaphorically likened to a reflection of light upon a distant objective. Metaphorically, it is out of the darkness of unknowing that the light of professional practical knowledge arises (Grimmett 1988: 11). Referring to Carroll’s Alice, Dewey explains: There is no label on any given idea or principle, which says automatically, “Use me in this situation” – as the magic cakes of Alice in Wonderland were inscribed “Eat me.” The thinker has to decide, to choose, to denote, and there is a risk, so that the prudent thinker selects warily, subject, that is, to confirmation or frustration by later events. (1933: 106) Dewey published these words one year after Waller’s sociological study of schools. Fifty years later, we find the idea repeated in how professionals are to think: In the real world of practice, problems do not present themselves to the practitioner as givens. They must be constructed from the material or problematic situations that are puzzling, troubling and uncertain . . . When we set the problem, we select what we will treat as the “things” of the situation, we set the boundaries of our attention to it, and we impose upon it a coherence which allows us to say what is wrong and in what directions the situation needs to be changed. Problem setting is a process in which, interactively, we name the things to which we will attend and frame the context in which we will attend to them. (Schön 1983: 40; emphasis in original) Justifiable educational programs, therefore, are those, which turn natural and spontaneous tendencies into trained habits of predictable physical action. Through the process of problem setting, selecting, naming and framing, our reflective reasoning fortifies the mind against erroneous habits and cultivates more deep-seated and effective habits that are suitable to various externalized problems (Dewey 1933: 26). As a cable is only as strong as its braid, it is essential to pass beyond sensual and basic needs and into the social realm, and through the social to the intellectual (29). Dewey’s theory of knowledge, therefore, requires a social context in which to demonstrate and to validate the acts of thinking (1933: 136; Boisvert, 1998: 161). This is because external, social forces move objects and external causes move events. This fact is true because the science of physics has proven it. In Dewey’s words, a complete “act” of thought undergoes three successive actions, as if the thinker is involved in some navigational motion in the external world (72–77). These stages follow a pattern: 1

Invocation of self-consciousness: A co-response between a subject and an object of thought is invoked, producing a felt difficulty. At a punctual hour and at an exact location, a problem is posed to thinking. The thinker is called upon to intervene terms and insert them, so that they coordinate a distance between a

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solution and the location of felt difficulty. Notice the geometric linearity of this starting point. Inductive ascension: Necessary observations that require a calculation. This is a crucial step for Dewey, since calculation is the point at which judgment is suspended, and this involves a risk. At this stage the difficulty of the journey of thought is assessed and a variety of alternative routes are considered. The calculations at this stage depend on the “good sense” of the one who is doing the judging (1933: 102). The role of imagination is to envision realities that cannot be exhibited under existing conditions of sense-perception (224). Deductive descent: A direction is warranted based on the acceptance, or rejection, of past experimentation and current or future concrete observation. A conclusion is deduced, hypothesizing that the conditions in question yield predictable results. The disciplined and logically trained mind can judge exactly how far the above quest(ions) needs to be carried in any given situation. Because the warranted direction is based on past experimentation, a professional teacher will be an expert who profits the most from the experiences of the past. This is how they become experts (Dewey 1933: 62), a synonym for “well traveled.”

According to Dewey: “an act of thought has a double movement, therefore, between an initial co-ordinate and the secondary act and can be tracked as an arc-like movement” (79–80). The apex of the arc represents the inductive ascent from confused and recollected particulars toward a more inclusive situation where general and universal contexts can be gathered. The power to think effectively at this apex depends to a large degree on the possession of a “capital fund” of saved and recollected meanings that can be applied to the novel situation. (1933: 116) Dewey provides the following example of how this process begins in action: A man who has left his rooms returns to find them in a state of confusion, articles being scattered at random (invocation of self-consciousness). Automatically, the notion comes to his mind that burglary would account for this disorder. He has not seen the burglars; their presence is not a fact of observation, but is a thought, an idea (inductive ascent). Moreover, the man has no special burglars in mind; it is the relation, the meaning of the burglary-something general-that comes to mind. The state of his room is perceived and is particular, definite, exactly as it is; burglars are inferred, and have a general status (deductive descent). The state of the room is a fact, certain and speaking for itself; the presence of burglars is a possible meaning that may explain the facts. (1933: 82) Consistently, it is the outward, environmental state of affairs in the rooms, which provokes thinking. A process of differentiation then takes place. Problematic affairs are

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looked into and ordered into a staged process metaphorically construed as a threaded cable of reason: thought #1 leads to thought #2, to thought #3, etc. When a suggestion is presented, significant points are identified which exercise a force of direction, continually guiding successively inferred suggestions. In addition, scientifically styled induction begins to apply general principles to particular points, amassing data, facilitating explanation. Signposts of likeness are compared and contrasted (93); anomalous points are sought after; discovered; and discounted appropriately. Eventually, intermediary terms are found to intertwine a thread of meanings toward a conclusion (i.e. a geo-metric form that exhibits meaning). These are the skills of reasoning that distinguish intelligence. And these skills are what an education should accomplish (94). It is this form and method that becomes the foundation for the scientific professionalization of schoolteachers in the twentieth century. Dewey rejects any suggestion that reality can be reduced to ultimate singularities. His view of the world is essentially cellular, such that any unit of reality is heterogeneous to its surroundings. Any event is “a qualitative variation of parts with respect to a whole” (Dewey, in Boisvert 1998: 160), a classic scientific reference. Anything that happens is one part of a whole variation of happenings. As enduring heterogeneous patterns, the elements of any event are just elements of one whole, larger event. Fermentation, for example, is composed of various elements. It takes time and has duration. But at no single moment can we say that any one part of the process is not “fermentation.” The whole process is marked by qualities that characterize each part from other parts – and so it is with our lives. As the earth revolves around the sun, so our lives revolve around the separate and equal laws of “the earth” and others. Graduated parts compose the whole, as we saw in Huberman’s lives of teachers. These are the poetic images that Dewey subscribes to conceptualize how knowledge comes about. It is the poetry of his philosophy of scientific inquiry. Learning is essentially a project of contextualizing relationships from start to finish. Forming knowledge is similar to the practical task of mapping the coordinates of reality. As an agent who can choose, manipulate, and adapt to the environment, scientific teachers are to compile their own atlas of experience, which is the account of all and every particular event that takes place in a whole career. It is scientific to think in this way. But as a traveling theory, poetically, it is not lococentric and subjective. It is contextual, or “social,” and highly objective.

The social psychology of thought Whereas Dewey developed a traveling theory of social, psychological thinking (i.e. a “teleological” theory), his contemporary, George Herbert Mead developed a social psychological theory of knowledge and behavior based on identical scientific foundations. Mead’s theory of continuous inquiry and ongoing analysis recalls Dewey’s conception of an organism integrating with and adapting to its environment. This concept is elaborated upon brilliantly by Mead (1932; 1938b). From Mead’s perspective, knowledge is awakened when the human being interacts with its environment. Reality is not fixed, and external causes are what move events. Knowledge, therefore, is built

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through the continuous perception, manipulation, and re-evaluation of objects in that changing context (Mead 1932). The same year that Waller conceptualized the school as an object to perceive, manipulate, and evaluate, Mead proposed a social-psychological base for building knowledge for these purposes. Mead also employed a naturalist conception of mind, in which the test of intelligence was to be found in human action (Mead 1936: 345). This conception originated from the same source that Dewey used: Darwin’s biological theory. For Mead, the aim of inquiry, indeed of life in general, was to continuously adapt to a changing environment, a perspective that he later refined in his action psychology (Mead 1938a). By 1900, this interpretation of psychology became an established school of persuasion at the University of Chicago, with work being produced and drawn upon by Dewey, Mead, James Rowland Angell, and Harvey Carr (Reck 1964: xvii). Mead integrated behavioral functionalism into his later social psychology in order to develop his interrelational theory of “mind, self, and society,” expressed eloquently in the text of the same name (Mead 1938b). However, Mead also theorized that consciousness comes into existence when the organism’s attention is interrupted by a problem (Mead 1900). Upon encountering a problem, the organism engages in the following process of thinking: 1 2 3 4

recognition of problem consciousness of past experiences grasping universals, and refocusing on immediate experience.

In other words, a problem is recognized “now” (the invocation of self-consciousness, according to Dewey); past experiences are recalled in some tacit dimension of consciousness (inductive ascent); the future is projected through the grasping of potentially universal solutions to the problem; and the problem is again addressed “now” in light of past and future references (deductive descent). The organism’s perception of time in this thought process is determined by the current event, thus rendering time as conditional on the resolution of the problem. But even though the problem is encountered and the solution is addressed during the present, Mead’s conception of thought is not directly unmediated in the pre-scientific sense. To explain this, let’s compare once more the pre-scientific geocentricism with the scientific helio-centricism initiated by Copernicus. From a geocentric viewpoint, the present is stable and eternal because the heavens revolve around the earth as the center of what is constant. In contrast, if the earth revolves around the sun, then all is changeable because all external phenomena are moving according to the laws that move all things around an objective center (as with the sun). As observers, primarily and fundamentally, we are also changing and developing. As potential scientists, it is our challenge to understand these empirical observations and benefit from them so that we can direct our development in adaptive directions. The relationship between the person and the world is a speculative relationship (i.e. it is furthered by questioning and curiosity), and it assumes the existence of a thinking mind that is inspired to think by acting in a changing external world.

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Mead’s philosophy of life-as-movement integrates an evolutionary metaphor of development into a general theory of interaction between the organism and its environment. Later in the twentieth century, this theory of relative movement will be applied as a derived theory of interaction between the schoolteachers and their classroom of pupils. For example, speculative inquiry takes place when teachers perceive problems in their encounter with the world of the classroom. Teacher thinking begins with external contextual objectives. The movement of life in classrooms can be comprehended when teachers attempt to bring a potentially chaotic context into a conceptual whole through their instruction (based on Mead 1938c: 141). We return once more to a scientific part/whole relationship. Mead suggested that this process consisted of three stages: 1 2 3

perception manipulation consummation.

“Knowledge” arrives when the teacher can function satisfactorily in that practical context. Note that knowledge is a product that can be measured and verified, as if it is tested. This process of “thinking out” knowledge, which Mead called “reflective,” arose when the living organism tests the means of carrying out continued action (Mead 1938a: 79). Logically, there were five steps in this thought process: 1 2 3 4 5

presence of a problem stating the problem in terms of its possible resolution getting ideas; forming hypotheses mental testing of hypotheses experimental testing of hypotheses.

Like Dewey, Mead had faith that this procedural method of scientific methodology could even reconcile social and political problems. This was because the logical steps of scientific problem solving were synonymous with the practical, consensual steps of democratic decision making. More important than this, however, is that these logical processes of thinking were accessible to all historically, and this is what makes them additionally democratic as a means of building community. Experience was once considered to be directly extracted without any mediated process because an individual’s experience was united with universal experience. If this medieval occultism is overthrown then scientists need to insert a substitute universal narrative that permits interpretation of reality with common codes and standards for comprehending the truth. This returns consensus of method for thinking and problem solving. Science, decision making, communal practices – all of these are social in nature, according to Mead and Dewey, so the laws of physics are also social metaphorically: parts become wholes after all, and individuals cohere into communities. Furthermore, biological adaptation and social adaptation follow similar natural laws. Since the world is a kind of machine then we can all be engineers in that great construction. Adaptation is to provide,

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first, an equal voice to all individuals and, secondly, the universal satisfaction of diverse interests and desires (Reck 1964: xxxii). Therefore, a scientific researcher-asteacher is expected to adapt and to assist others in adapting, for research is a “continued reconstruction of problems in the face of events of ceaseless novelty” (Mead 1932: 102). The coherence of this social psychology and late twentieth century theories of teacher development is no more vivid than in the following quote from Lieberman and Miller: By teacher development, we mean continuous inquiry into practice . . . We see the teacher as a “reflective practitioner,” someone who has a tacit knowledge base and who then builds on that knowledge base through ongoing inquiry and analysis, continually rethinking and re-evaluating values and practices. (1990: 107) We can even see how Mead’s social psychology of action might have influenced Waller’s conception of the school as a living organism with a “we-feeling.” While at the University of Michigan between 1891 and 1893, Mead was attracted to Charles Horton Cooley’s theory of consciousness. For Cooley, consciousness was “a social process going on, within which the self and others arise” (1930: 700). By integrating Cooley’s influential sociology, Mead developed the position that individualism arose only in the field of social experience and that it necessarily involved the recognition of other “selves” (Mead 1910: 174–180). With this assumption, Mead developed his very influential theory that the “being” that we typically characterize as “human” (that is to say, “consciousness”) is essentially social. Self-consciousness, therefore, assumed that human beings have the capacity to be social with themselves (i.e. they engage in selfreflection). It is this conversation with one’s self that leads to framing and reframing (i.e. further conceptualization). As Schön writes exactly 70 years later, “the situation talks back, the practitioner listens, and as he appreciates what he hears, he reframes the situation once again” (Schön 1983: 131–132). Here is the echo of Mead’s reflexive conversation (1913: 377), which assumes that the human being can make an object of its own self and then learn the rules of development from that external construction. Selfconsciousness arises when human beings talk to themselves (Mead 1912: 105). Even one’s own personal identity, therefore, arises from external laws and consequences. This individualistic perspective is the absolute opposite of a pre-scientific worldview that stressed a universally common experience and it is the basis for the reflective practice of the teacher professional. Clearly, Dewey and Mead’s perspectives were tremendously influential. Why did Mead’s social psychology have more impact than some of his contemporaries? The esteemed American philosopher, George Santayana, for example, was born the same year as Mead (i.e. 1863). Mead and Santayana were both students of Josiah Royce and William James at Harvard, and Santayana survived Mead by over twenty years. Reck concludes that, unlike Santayana, Mead (as well as Dewey) was able to make himself relevant to the American public by embedding his theories solidly in the world of practical problems (Reck 1964: lix). This practical project was facilitated for teacher

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researchers by the luminous twentieth century philosophers of science Donald Schön and Michael Polanyi. Schön’s attempt to articulate a theory of practical knowledge for professionals in general became the epistemological orthodoxy of professionalization for the twentieth century schoolteacher. And this is how scientific inquiry thoroughly infiltrated the contemporary elementary school classroom.

Reflective professional reasoning Mead focused effectively on the interaction between the organism and the world and this became transferred into theories of interaction between the teacher and the school. Like Dewey, his purpose was to make the laws of science useful to specific practical problems rather than speculate on theoretical questions. As John Locke said about himself, every new science has “under-laborers” who must translate esoteric laws into practical and useful terms for everyday life. This practical task for teachers was accomplished for teacher researchers in the analyses of Donald Schön. Schön begins his classic book (1983) by announcing a problem. The established professions are suffering from a crisis of legitimacy, which is rooted in the incapacity to help society solve newly arising problems. It is significant that this announcement comes at the point at which the United States was in the middle of a severe economic recession. From his observation, professional problems are not being addressed successfully in that context because they are being approached with insufficient attention to the external causes that produce them, a classic scientific reference. Professionals try to make sense of uncertainty by applying rational techniques to these problems. But Schön claimed that the application of rational techniques ignored the uncertain and spontaneous predicaments in which professionals find themselves all the time. With this claim, he is reminding researchers that there may still be pre-scientific ways of thinking that science cannot grasp. What is he offering to deal with this? Schön was trying to make spontaneous and unscientific environments manageable for science and this is exactly how his work was applied. In other ways, though, he was trying to test “science” for its potential as a problem-solving network. Given the wellestablished conditions of uncertainty in the elementary school classroom, and given the economic urgency to professionalize those conditions, Schön’s work was well received and timely. His diagnosis of institutional and organizational problems was consistent with what researchers such as Waller, Jackson, and Lortie, were calling for. The chronic uncertainties that were arising from the current economic recessions of his time became easily translated into a diagnosis of problems in the professions in general. However, there are certain aspects of Schön’s recommendations which demonstrate a desire to break free of the scientific tradition altogether. Schön begins his analysis by citing three theorists who have grappled with the dilemmas he describes (i.e. Schein, Glazer, Simon), but he says that each of them tried to fill the gap between scientific knowledge and the external world of practice by privileging abstract interpretations of practice; another way of saying that they remained overly “positivist” in their approach. His emphasis will still privilege what takes place in the external environment

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and so he maintains a scientific worldview. However, others’ abstract perspectives are overly separated from the spontaneous and immediate occurrences of the practical setting. As a correction, Schön searches for a theory that will unify practitioners with their environment because that environment is going out of control. To do this he pursues an inquiry, which he claims can swim in the “swampy lowland” of practice – a place where the problems of greatest human concern are lurking. From a scientific perspective, notice how Schön still tries to unify the professional with the environment because that environment is theorized to be separated from the thinking professional. This is the scientific viewpoint. He does not recommend nostalgically that we return to pre-scientific worldviews where a thinker is always and already unified with the world. Schön is trying to rewrite the scientific narrative with greater emphasis on the practical side of the ratio. It is a reminder of the significance of the external world with instruction on how to learn about its physical laws more effectively. Others have been imbalanced in an opposite direction. With this emphasis, he remains a descendent of the biosocial narrative that also produced Mead and Dewey, whose theory and methods he largely duplicates. Consistently with theirs, his theory of inquiry will try to unify the professional with the natural environment of the world. In fact, his “swampy lowland” is also a poetic clue to his Darwinian evolutionary perspective of adaptive priority. However, he places far more emphasis on what is taking place within the thinking professional, an emphasis that relates his theory of professional learning with the genetic epistemology of Piaget. Schön will synthesize this perspective and its priorities with the structures of Dewey’s theory of inquiry to produce a powerful formula for conceptualizing teachers’ thought processes. Based possibly on current economic conditions of his time, Schön arouses alarm: problems are not being adequately dealt with. Problems should be addressed through a philosophy of action (like Mead’s) implicit in the logical processes by which human organisms adapt to the direct challenges that face them (like Dewey’s). And it seems that Schön is searching for a more meaningful method of professional involvement in the lives of practitioners. Consequently, the logical thought processes that he is attempting to theorize must be highly contextual and empathetic. This is because some practical problems do deal with technical, practical issues. But others can even deal with moral struggles. This assumes that the methods of scientific problem solving are adequate to solving these ethical problems. With regard to the former processes, Mead will surface; with regard to the latter processes, Mead, and Dewey will surface as theoretical sources. But as we shall see, Schön adds one more philosopher of science to this mixture and with that addition he begins to rewrite of the tradition. Schön is searching for a theory of knowledge that is based in “practice,” but still assumes the presence of a tacit mind, a clue to his debt to Mead, and a reference to the importance of Dewey’s “inductive ascent.” In his attempt to conceptualize that tacit dimension, Schön refers to a rebirth of interest in the ancient topics of craft, artistry, and myth. Again, Schön reminds his readers that science is a very young way of thinking about the world. By remaining within the perspective of science, Schön ignores myth, but he does employ a conception of craft and artistry in his “search . . . for an epistemology of practice implicit in the artistic, intuitive processes which practitioners . . .

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bring to situations of uncertainty, instability, uniqueness and value conflict” (Schön 1983: 49). The reference to intuition is significant. Intuition (from the Latin, intueri; to look upon) is metaphorically expressed as the mind’s eye conceptualizing the world while interacting with it. His fascination is with the tacit dimension of thinking, a dimension that may have been the only one imaginable before the birth of modern science. Consequently, Schön argues that we often can’t articulate what we know because “knowing is in our action” (1983: 49) – Mead’s classic theoretical assertion (1936: 345). To support this, he quotes from Michael Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge (1958a: 12): “When we learn to use a tool, or probe, or a stick for feeling our way, our initial awareness of its impact on our hand is transformed into a sense of its point touching the objects we are exploring.” Note from this quote how awareness is transformed into sense by touching the objects. Initial perceptions are internalized as tacit dimensions of knowledge (Polanyi 1958b). We then behave according to rules and procedures that we cannot describe and of which we are often unaware because knowledge arrives in the manipulation of objects (“manipulation” comes from the Latin word for “hand”: manus). Schön’s use of Polanyi illustrates once more his attempt to free himself from the narrative of science, especially the extreme positivism that he calls “technical rationalism.” It is easy to understand why this framework would have appealed to teacher researchers. Polanyi suggested that knowing is a personal experience that can involve results of commitment as well as experimental methods. Passions should be credited, therefore, during scientific exploration especially in the sense of “feeling our way” with our hands. For moralistically-minded researchers, this lets commitment enter into teacher thinking. In other words, personal beliefs influence how a professional comes to know something of value. Based on this, Schön maintains that there are always two minds that are separated from each other but which do communicate. Again, Schön acknowledges the value of Dewey’s problem-encounter, and the value of the deductive descent, but his main interest is in clarifying the purpose and value of inductive ascent after the problem is encountered. The two dimensions of thinking that concern him are: 1 2

a conscious dimension of explicit knowledge an unconscious dimension of tacit knowledge.

Polanyi argued that the tacit dimension relies on assumptions that we acquire during localized experiences but we should not assume that these localized parts have any universal validity in our lives. This suggests that we can learn a lot from inheriting the traditions that we’re born into and these are not always the products of practical experience. We also learn from watching others as apprentices, a natural way that people have learned for millennia. This all adds curious questions to the importance of memory, or sense, and a tacit knowing. Clearly, Schön and Polanyi are trying to depart from a scientific narrative that’s gotten too positivist. They are trying to free science to be more playful. In doing so,

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they cannot help but recall some echoes of the pre-scientific tradition. For example, we read this in Polanyi’s reference to “local contexts,” a reminder of what was once a lococentric worldview. We see this also in the importance placed in “personal knowledge,” a reminder that we are still concerned with knowledge above belief and faith above reason. By tolerating faith in passions and beliefs, they begin to depart from the scientific narrative and point to future possibilities for how learning can be articulated. Knowledge remains externally caused, however, where forces move objects and where motion is reflected to the conscious mind’s eye. But there is a place reserved for knowledge that is only implied or indicated rather than explicitly expressed. Polanyi suggests that actual knowledge is a selection of what exists in total. There’s always much more to “knowing” than there is to “knowledge” and the excessive tacit dimension is always present, even if it is hidden and unspeakable. For a pre-scientific perspective, one would call this dimension “occult.” But from Dewey’s perspective, it might be the place where “presence” is not yet “fact.” It is thought, and idea, and relation. Schön points to this tacit dimension with reference to baseball pitchers and jazz musicians, both of whom learn and perform through on-the-spot adjustments and both of whom develop a “feel” for what they are doing. In other words, they develop what could be called a “theory-in-action” which converts the tacit, unconscious knowing to knowledge-in-action. Unscientific “knowing” is distinguished in this way from scientific “knowledge.” Sometimes what we’re experiencing eludes the comprehending scientific categories of knowledge. At that point, action-theories can surface from the tacit dimension of memory. The question remains, however, at what point do teachers construct new descriptions of actions, and test these new descriptions through on-the-spot experimentation if the tacit dimension is involved. Schön explains how this might work in action. When someone reflects in their actions then they become researchers in the practice context. They are not dependent on the categories of established theory and technique but they construct new theories of the unique case (i.e. of Polanyi’s “local context”). They do not keep means and ends separate, but define them interactively as they frame problematic situations. Implementation is built into their inquiry (Schön 1983: 68). While retaining an image of the professional as researcher, Schön is again looking beyond the scientific tradition with his integration of means and ends. He is not defending what Lortie called “presentism” but is still asking his readers to at least consider alternatives to the past, present, and future continuum. Schön’s, Mead’s, and Polanyi’s tacit knowing is a type of sense that is not knowledge but it is something akin to direct extraction of life. In its immediacy it senses what is needed “in the moment” rather than depend on external causes with abstract objectives exclusively. Jackson detected this pre-scientific sense of life in classrooms. Cooley also had faith in the instinctive wholeness that cannot be touched with logical processes of physical science. As Polanyi suggested, this kind of sense relies on a faith in the lococentric temporality of manipulation. It involves direct contact and direct extraction of reality from the object itself in its singularity. Schön points to the obvious nature of this lococentric sense in his reference to the ecstasy of the jazz musician, the

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athlete, and in his reference to the rebirth of myth and artistry, classic examples of the occult and mysterious world of mythical nature that, again, has never been totally forgotten. It was just interrupted by science for a few centuries. The pre-scientific contact with the immediate, ad libitum, fleeting moment is always a part of how scientific researchers have to describe life in schools. It cannot be ignored but is only alluded to, and sometimes still celebrated, even if only alongside the celebration of our most glorious science.

Part III

The economics and narratives of teacher knowledge

Chapter 7

Economics of educational reform

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must [we] be of learning from our experience? George Bernard Shaw

Introduction Good theories can be tools for understanding reality as it is presented to us and prevails for us. Theories are ways of trying to control chaotic, unpredictable, and ambiguous reality. Theories are applied with a view-in-mind of interpreting the context in which they are developed. They try to respond to the challenges that produced them. They also try to address the purposes for which they are developed and try to provide answers to the problems they are intended to resolve. A good theory should put into order the existing knowledge in a particular area to the extent that the summary can become a logical model or even a working system for predicting future events. I opened this book by proclaiming that the story of teacher development started with economics. In many ways it began and continues with economics even to the present day. In this chapter, I provide a context for showing how theoretical justifications and recommendations for teachers’ continuing educational development were manifestations of economic conditions and problems. Waves, cycles, and tidal recurrences of conditions that return are very much a part of what contextualizes the urgencies for educational reform. Curriculum, managerial trends in schools and, of course, conceptions and research of teacher education and development do not escape these repetitions and their fundamental effects. I do not believe in theorizing predominantly competing communities or classes with competing interests, objectives, and standards when trying to rebalance economic injustice. If we understood economic forces to be tidal, recurrent, and repetitive then perhaps we could be liberated from the ideological naiveté of Marxist millenarianism. It might free us of the resentful temptation to hate perceived ruling representatives of the capitalist system, which is just another form of unfair prejudice. Clearly, we all share the same economic environment and we share in the effects of its destruction and renewal. We inhabit an environment in common, and as “home,” we are all

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unconscious persons acting with purposes, constantly, but not always aware of the purposes for our actions. I believe that we should consider “economy” ecologically to be a living organism with degeneration and renewal purposes much like the ecology of the planet and its cosmic natural phases. Our focus should be the repetitions of economy, how economy shifts in its moods, and how those mood-swings influence theories, policies, and implementations. I believe that this living conception can form the basis for more sensitive and effective educational analyses during the current century.

The ecology of economic waves: from inflation to depression Throughout this section of the book I have shown how various theorists of progress and development have tried to unearth “iron clad” laws of motion and movement. The Marxist utopian dream was not an exception. This was even the case when modern philosophers such as Newton, Descartes, Mead, and Dewey tried to conceptualize the thought processes of the human being. All of these attempts to regulate thinking have their origins in the laws of scientific physics being applied to thought processes. The laws of scientific biology have also been adapted to psychologically composite laws of movement as these laws narrate individual maturation through the lifecycle (as in Erikson); progress through the career (as in Huberman); and even the development of knowledge in teachers (as in Shulman). In this chapter I show how Nicolai Kondratieff’s wave-theory offers a useful foundation for understanding how educational theories are composed and applied in policy. It assists us in understanding the purposes for which these theories were developed. In particular, it allows us to more meaningfully contextualize the classic theories of Waller, Jackson, and Lortie. These authors, along with many others, were respondents to the economic challenges that necessitated their research and theorizing. I show that the purposes for which these theories developed and the problems that they intended to solve were in many ways economically inspired. This is significant, as it provides a basis for speculating on forthcoming theories of teacher development. Nicolai Kondratieff (1892–1938) was a Soviet economist who helped devise and implement the first five-year plan for the Soviet Union between 1928 and 1932. He quickly became critical of Stalin’s collectivist policies. This led to imprisonment in 1930 and to execution in 1938. His research showed that capitalist economies displayed long waves of boom and bust ranging from 50 to 60 years in duration (see Figure 7.1). “Waves” can be compared to “seasons” of boom and bust, or inflation and deflation, and are also characterized by dominant economic “moods”; another way of saying that each economic era has its own consciousness that influences decisions, planning, hopes, and political decisions. The economy of mood is similar to the “wefeeling” of the general will. In practical terms, moods affect patterns of consumption and investment. They also have some bearing on how schooling is implemented in

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The Kondratieff wave Start of secondary recession 1854 War of 1812

Gradually declining plateau

Recession Vietnam War

World War I

Civil War

Early 2000 1970s

Roaring 20s

Primary recession

Recession

Late 1940s Idealized long wave 1800

1843 1820

1840

60 years

World War II 1860

1880

1900

1920

War on terrorism 1940

1960

1980

2010

Figure 7.1 The Kondratieff wave showing peaks and troughs associated with political or cultural events. Source: http://www.thelongwaveanalyst.ca

industrialized societies and even how curriculum is composed and implemented. I will summarize each wave-cycle in written and in graphic terms. During each summary, I relate economics to educational trends.

The common school, urbanization, and early childhood: 1784–1845 During the first Kondratieff wave of 1784–1845 (see Figure 7.2), public education exerted little effect on labor force quality or accelerating economic growth (Mitch 1999: 242). Education on a mass scale was in its infancy during this period, being organized mostly in Germanic and Scandinavian countries. There, formal education was largely an upper- and middle-class activity. However, it was during this wave that the common school movement emerged in Massachusetts around 1820 during the deflationary phase (Mandel 1987: 122). This movement was consistent with standardization and stabilization patterns that were at work throughout industrialized nations. It was a time of economic restraint that altered all forms of agrarian and urban life in the North American settlements. Primarily, restraining economic conditions motivated migration from country to town. Politically, the most significant development was the birth of the nation state after the French Revolution in 1789. Americans adopted the idea of common and universal schooling after its invention in Prussia. The grade school concept was introduced into these schools in America. However, the common

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Season And Mood

First Kondratieff wave: 1784–1845 (61 years)

Ÿ I N C L I N E Ÿ

Spring inflation Mood accumulation affluence excess 1784–1800 (16 years) Treaty of Paris ends American Revolutionary war; French Revolution

Industrial Revolution Ÿ begins with water power; steam engine; agricultural innovations Constitution of US signed, 1787 US Navy established (1794) Dollar currency in US introduced

ź Autumn D deflation E Mood C Mood conservation L stabilization consolidation I standardization regularity N restraint E 1800–1816 ź 1816–1835 (16 years) (19 years) Summer stagflation

War of 1812 (1812–1815) “The Jefferson Era” in the US (1800) Electric battery invented Kaleidoscope invented (1816) Louisiana Purchase (1903) Exploration west of the Mississippi Economic Crisis in UK (1816)

Winter depression Mood retrenchment realignment innovation 1835–1845 (10 years)

“Era of Good Feelings” (1815–1824)

Mexican– American War (1846–1848)

Large scale emigration to US & Canada from British Isles

World food shortages (1840–1850) stimulate migration from country to town; social unrest results

ź Common School Movement (1820s) Grade school concept introduced Erie Canal constructed (1816–1825) Streets of Boston Mass., lit by gas (1822)

Froebel invents the word “kindergarten” in 1840

Vulcanization invented (1839); Artificial fertilizer (1840); Morse Telegraph (1844)

Figure 7.2 The first Kondratieff wave: 1784–1845. Showing dominant “moods” for each economic phase.

school movement and its grade concept came about during the deflationary/ depression phase of the first Kondratieff wave (1816–1845). These educational innovations moved in tandem with the technological innovations of steam, iron fabrication, steel, and railroad construction throughout industrialized countries. Technological innovations would become the dominant means of production during

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the next Kondratieff wave. It begins to become evident that educational innovations tend to emerge during recessionary and depressed economic phases. It also seems to be the case that each successive “season” brings a certain type of economic mood swing. This proliferates into cultural practices that influence consumption patterns, saving habits, as well as investment opportunities and borrowing risks. The general public accustoms itself into making economic decisions (such as whether to take the economic risk of migrating or not) based on how people interpret and then measure personal circumstances. These kinds of decisions are made based on very personal interpretations of general tendencies and patterns. There is often no reason for such personal economic decisions. They are sometimes embarked upon because “that’s what everybody else is doing” or even just by chance. Consistently, in other words, people act economically with purposes but not for self-informed and self-conscious purposes. In doing so, they often become the unnecessary victims of circumstance and happenstance. It is important, therefore, to become more self-conscious of economic meta-patterns that take place all the time but perceived in the most subtle of ways. This sensitivity can assist researchers in theorizing appropriate curriculum policies and relevant instructional practices for the contemporary economic age.

Manifesting destiny, capitalism, and education science: 1846–1898 The period from 1846 to 1864 is the upswing, inflation/stagflation phase of the second Kondratieff wave and the phase between 1864 and 1898 is the downswing of deflation/depression (see Figure 7.3). Socially disruptive movements in Europe during the late 1840s were signs that an economic transition was taking place from the first to the second wave. The destruction of the social fabric culminated with a food shortage in the 1840s, which exaggerated mass migrations from country to the town. Economic shifts always result in migrations of population and capital. These migrations contributed to the riots and rebellions in many parts of the industrialized world (Tylecote 1993: 203–204). The deflation/depression phase of the current wave (which began during the mid 1970s) is also characterized by global food shortages, which will also result in mass migrations of population and capital throughout the world. During the second Kondratieff upswing (1846–1864) the economies of America, England, and Europe grew enormously. This growth took two forms. Oligopolies, trusts, and monopolies drove much of the large-scale international economic growth. Within large cities, however, most firms were small, owner run, and operated in small local markets without vertical or horizontal integration (Sterman 1985: 154). By the 1870s economic power began to become more centralized and monopolized into larger firms. During the last 30 years of the nineteenth century, therefore, we begin to witness the birth of the modern limited liability, professionally managed, and integrated corporations (Sterman 1985: 154). This trend was not “worker friendly” and led to the emergence of the social and economic analyses that tended to condemn the abuses of capitalism. This growing and uncontrolled monopoly power would be the

124 The economics and narratives of teacher knowledge

Ÿ Second Kondratieff wave: 1846–1898 (52 years)

1846–1858 (12 years) Manifest Destiny: America moves westward aggressively; Florida and Texas become American states (1845)

Ÿ Railroads; iron; steel manufacturing American, European, British economies grow; monopolies grow oligarchies grow; “social Darwinism” Wells Fargo and Co. founded (1852) Electric light bulb invented (1854)

1858–1864 (5 years) American Civil War (1861–1865) Birth of modern, limited liability, professional corporations

ź

1864–1874 (10 years) Reconstruction (1865–1877) Karl Marx predicts the demise of Capitalism proliferation of science laboratories

social analyses ź International begin to patents emerge that proliferate in are critical of Germany and capitalism as America an economic system Common public 1.3 million elementary people school is immigrate to proliferated; US from secondary and British Isles vocational (1850–1860) schooling US Congress Progressive establishes child-centered free city mail movement delivery Pasteurization invented (1864)

“Black Friday” on London Stock Exchange (1866)

1874–1898 (23 years) Spanish– American War (1898) Engels expands Marx’s theories; proliferation of science laboratories; patents proliferate University of Chicago Lab School (1896); Dewey’s The School and Society (1899) Pestalozzi establishes a school at Burgdorf Montessori achieves first “Montessori miracle” as director of Scuola Ortofrenica

Figure 7.3 The second Kondratieff wave: 1846–1898.

main ingredient that shaped the social movements of the next wave (from 1899–1949); in particular, the progressive movement in the United States and the Marxist-Socialist movements throughout the world. It was at the commencement of the downward swing of this wave (1864–1874) that Marx researched the theoretical demise of this capitalist economic system. But it was not until the depression phase (1874–1898) that Engels and others extended that analysis. These critiques and applications were very relevant for their day because the

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violent abuses of the capitalist system were vivid during this economic period. As I have mentioned, Marx’s utopian political dream was a logical reaction to the poverty and misery that was inflicted by what was, during this period, an obviously inhumane economic system. While the conditions in Europe and North America have improved substantially, the theoretical analysis remains engaging. This template has been applied to schoolteachers who may appear powerless in the face of a large bureaucratic system, resulting in calls for teacher autonomy and increased control over the curriculum. A classic contemporary example of this genre of writing is Michael Apple’s Cultural and Economic Reproduction in Education (1982). Apple’s text was researched and published during the third recessionary phase of the fourth Kondratieff wave, just prior to the current depression phase. Coincidentally, much of Marx’s theory was also composed and published during the identical phase of the second Kondratieff wave. Researchers should be conscious of these trends as we stand at the threshold of an economic period that will produce radically innovative and applicable theories for decades to come. The downswing of the second Kondratieff wave (1864–1898) is the context of another wave of educational reform and revival. While the common public elementary school was born during the downswing of the first wave, it began to reach its maturity during this downturn. In particular, the reforms of this period focused on the establishment of secondary and vocational schooling (Cohen 1971: 21). But more significantly, this downturn saw the birth and development of the progressive, child-centered movement in American education, which became the hallmark of the American educational system in the twentieth century. While progressivism’s roots began earlier in Europe with Pestalozzi and Froebel, Dewey’s progressive ideas really consolidated the movement for its implementation in America. He began implementing those ideas in the 1890s and the findings from the University of Chicago Laboratory School (founded in 1896) were published in 1899 (The School and Society). The principles of this movement became some of the foundations of the movement to develop teachers during the fourth Kondratieff wave, in particular during the deflationary period from 1974–1996. As I wrote in Chapter 1, teacher development theory was born out of the economic calamity of 1929–1949. It gained its mature theoretical position during the years when three major recessions took place (1973; 1981–1982; and 1990–1991). We can see how the innovative ideas that are born out of each recession/depression become reborn and embedded during the next upward wave, only to be reiterated in almost identical form during the next recessionary/deflationary period. In terms of practice, Dewey’s laboratory method of research at the University of Chicago was no idiosyncratic coincidence. Throughout Europe and the United Kingdom scientific laboratories of all kinds were sprouting along with the increased faith in science and its methods as the remedy for all of society’s ills and troubles. The proliferation of science and the effect of these laboratories resulted in a significant number of patents between 1870 and 1890, especially in Germany and America (Tylecote 1993: 65). Experimental laboratories are especially manifestations of recession and economic depression. They emerge out of an economic consciousness of realignment and innovation because adaptability is threatened. During the late 1800s this interest in science also had the effect of introducing vocational education into

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secondary schools in industrialized countries. Dewey’s interest in occupational skills education was also consistent with this global movement, a movement that coincided with a recessive economic trend worldwide at that time. Much creativity and energy is enlisted during recessionary and deflationary phases to innovate theories and working models that seek to resolve the distinctive challenges that such phases present. As I have mentioned, we shy away from chaos and disorder, and are attracted to the order that seems to be produced during periods of economic expansion. However, once a group of ideas and proposals is integrated through research they constitute the reform practices which are adopted and extended during the following upswing period and define what legitimates educational practices during that phase (S¸ims¸ek 2005: 12).

Fordism, secondary schooling, and the Great Depression: 1899–1949 Marxist theories and progressive movements had one common motivator. They were reactions to the abuses of monopoly capitalism and the oligarchies that maintained those monopolies. They also celebrated the decency of “the common man.” This celebration would become accepted political doctrine during the third Kondratieff wave from 1899–1949. The upswing period of the third Kondratieff wave was 1899–1920; the downswing was 1920–1949 (see Figure 7.4). With the closing of this wave, we enter the current economic era. The stock market “crash” of 1929 is only the traditional historically identified turning point of a downward spiral that actually began several years prior to the crash. Prior to that crisis, governments were reluctant to regulate investment trusts and financial innovations that had emerged during the bull markets leading up to the 1920s. Of enormous significance was the establishment of the American Federal Reserve Bank in 1913 during the height of the economic upswing when monopolies and oligarchies controlled big finance and big industry. After 1929, legislation aggressively began to retaliate and regulate the financial sector. These retaliations included Securities and Exchange Commissions and federal deposit insurance (Sterman 1985: 155–156). Roosevelt’s Labor Relations Act (1935) was clearly a downswing item of legislation, set with the purpose of forging a new relationship between owners and workers. It became a part of what was known as the New Deal. Among other measures, this legislation reserved the rights of most workers to organize labor unions, to engage in collective bargaining, and to take part in other forms of collective activities. Notice once more how responses to the downward spiral became the precursor for the dominant implementations of the next wave. It was during this period that John Maynard Keynes, in his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936), first defended deficit spending during an economic depression and public works as part of government responsibility to achieve and maintain full employment. This general approach to state involvement in macro-economic planning led to a host of welfare provisions that proliferated during the fourth Kondratieff wave from 1949 to 1973 when the next upturn

Economics of educational reform

Ÿ Third Kondratieff wave: 1899–1949

1899–1907 (8 years)

1907–1920 (13 years)

Ford’s first motorized vehicle (“the quadricycle”)

World War I (1914–1918)

(50 years) Electricity; chemicals; internal combustion engines Social, political, and economic developments continue a trend of Progressivism Ÿ “scientific management” Mass production techniques begin Average school in US: grade 8

First “Model T” produced (1908) American Federal Reserve established (1913) Gasoline powered automobiles begin to become common Secondary school enrollment rises from 360,000 to 2 million in the US in 1920 (since 1890)

ź

127

1920–1929 (9 years)

1929–1949 (20 years)

Roaring ’20s

World War II (1939–1945)

Prohibition, of alcohol in US (January 1920)

Smoot– Hawley Tariff Act (1930)

Women vote in America (August 1920)

9000 banks fail (1930– 1933)

America’s “open door” policy to immigration ends (1921)

Willard Waller’s Sociology of the School (1932)

Government ź reluctant to regulate investment trusts and financial institutions

Roosevelt’s “New Deal” (1935)

Stock market “crash” (1929)

Welfare-state reforms implemented UAW established (1935)

Figure 7.4 The third Kondratieff wave: 1899–1949.

took effect. This approach is also recovering popularity during the current economic downturn. This expansionary period from 1899–1920 also saw the widespread application of what was called “Taylorist” and “Fordist” mass production techniques. The recessionary periods from 1920–1949 bore big unions like the United Auto Workers (founded in May, 1935). Big unions and wide-scale mass production was only possible with new styles of management. However, the management–labor negotiations that became the norm, established from 1920–1949, actually germinated during the previous economic wave. Mass production was only an experimental auxiliary process during the 1920s and did not become the dominant and prevailing process of manufacturing until after the structural crisis of 1929. Economic recession and then war-production promoted its proliferation as standard practice after the 1930s. We

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saw this influence in Waller’s fascination with the “stereotype” industrial process as applied to the challenges of industrial acculturation. This developed along with Keynesian analyses that advocated these emerging practices (Freeman 1985: 302). Consistently, therefore, adaptive innovations along with theoretical justifications for them come about during recessive phases and these adjustments become the dominant applications and models for the next upswing phase. In other words, theoretical foundations for innovations are born during recessions and mature during future more expansive waves of economic reform, usually distilled into policies and implementations. This is analogous to how human beings can undergo their most trying learning experiences. Life-changing ideas can be born during the crisis of psychological depression but they wait for the optimism of expansion to be applied for the person’s prosperity. That is how the most transformative learning experiences take place. It is also how the most transformative social, cultural, and educational events take place. The social, political, and economic developments of the third Kondratieff wave (1899–1949) coincide with the birth and growth of the Progressive educational movement. This was a time of wide-scale faith in science as the means for understanding all forms of life. There was also a general respect for the scientist in all matters and endeavors analogous only to what the priest used to enjoy. Educational practices began to become very child-centered and socially developmental, in particular, during the deflationary depression years from 1920–1939. These years were marked by a great faith in the value of community and collectivist action. Five emerging tendencies – social science, humanism, social identity, social equality, collectivism – all mature during the next Kondratieff wave. They especially emerge during the latter portion of the deflationary phase from 1980–1995. This re-emergence is consistent with the ways in which reform movements have recurred throughout the history of economy since 1800 in the West. Theories become born during a “crash.” They become theorized and codified during the recovery. They then become reiterated during the next downswing, given what was learned about their potential use during the previous recovery when they were tested. But implementation is never perfect, exact, or complete. Finally, the fundamentals of those theories become re-conceptualized during the next “crash,” long after the previous generation has retired or passed on. The most important institutional application during the third wave was the proliferation of the secondary school system. Between 1890 and 1920 in the United States high school enrollment rose from 360,000 to over 2 million students (Cohen 1971: 33). So while the second Kondratieff wave (1846–1898) set the groundwork for free public elementary school education, the third wave (1899–1949) instituted secondary schooling. This promotion came in hand with a backlash against progressive education, especially during the downward phase of the third wave (1920–1949). John Dewey’s defense of his progressive philosophy of education (i.e. Education and Experience) was published in 1938 at the point where these principles were being attacked during a climate of economic constraint. Progressive pedagogy was under attack by hard line and anti-progressive attitudes (Cohen 1971: 39). But more predominantly, this conservative era was sowing the seeds for a perspective that was to take hold very strongly during the next wave of expansion, to begin directly after 1945. “Scientism” took hold

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from 1957–1969. The post-World War II economic expansion and baby boom coincides with an almost universal commitment to science, empirical and positivistic, as the guarantor of social stability and rational reformism. This faith in science, along with the celebration of “the common man” as the soldier returning from war, all resulted in expanding open-access to higher education after World War II.

Sputnik, higher education, and the great society: 1950 to the present The fourth Kondratieff wave runs from 1949 to the present day, 1949–1973 being the phase of accumulation and consolidation and 1974 to the present being the phases of restraint, retrenchment and realignment (but also of innovation). Welfare-state tendencies germinating as far back as 1789 really came into full bloom in policy and payment during the upswing phase from 1949–1973 (see Figure 7.5). Consistently, however, the stage for these policies was set during the downswing of the previous phase from 1899–1920. An interesting pattern begins to emerge during this phase. The universal and unquestioned faith in scientific research begins to influence regulatory policies that control citizenship, public privacy, and business practices. Civilly, these trends influenced centrally planned public sectors like health and education. For example, people in industrialized nations increasingly began to expect more entitlement-shares of public wealth in exchange for citizenship. This entitlementattitude begins to really take hold during the era of prosperity from 1949–1974. In response, the public sector becomes more rationalized than ever before to deliver these entitlements. Democratic “statism,” buoyed up with confidence after winning a war against Fascism, now accelerates and centralizes control over all public affairs, including the recruitment and training of teachers to facilitate booming enrollments following the end of war. Consistent once more, educational reforms begin with economic recession from the challenges that arise during that phase of development. They do not mature during that phase; however, their legacy is carried forward into future waves and phases. They then encounter correction during the following upswing to become consolidated and regulated. But they do not mature in full expression during that upswing phase. The fourth Kondratieff wave is associated with “state monopoly capitalism” and its growing state interference, centrally planned socialist state policies, and the expansion of multinational and hierarchical corporations. The state’s growth becomes unprecedented during the fourth Kondratieff wave largely to cope with a growing population, to organize the post-war reconstruction, and to manage a temporary booming economy. The state now becomes a regulatory and redistributive social and political organization. The classic example historically of this are the domestic programs proposed and enacted in the United States under the initiative of President Lyndon Johnson. Two main goals of the “Great Society” social reforms during the 1960s were the elimination of poverty and racial injustice. Major spending programs addressed education, medical care, urban problems, the natural environment, and transportation. Pedagogically, it was a time when the interests and talents of children were appealed to

130 The economics and narratives of teacher knowledge

Ÿ Fourth Kondratieff wave: 1950– present (61 years?)

1950–1966 (16 years)

1966–1973 (7 years)

ź

1973–1989 (16 years)

GI Bill (1944)

Vietnam War (1959–1975)

Deep recession of 1973

Truman’s “Fair Deal” economic reforms (1949)

State monopoly Capitalism

Nixon resigns (August, 1974)

Sputnik (1957) Kennedy’s “New Frontier” (1960) Rate of inflation is 1% Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom (1962) Johnson’s “Great Society” (1964) Synthetics, television, mass air travel, satellites, Ÿ electronics

“Space race” (1957–1969) Widespread access to higher education Centralization of school systems Philip Jackson’s Life in Classrooms (1968) Martin Luther King Jr. assassinated (1968) A man on the moon (1969) Freire’s “Pedagogy of Oppressed” (1970)

Illich’s “Scientism” “Deschooling Society” becomes doctrinaire (1971)

Daniel Lortie’s Schoolteacher (1975)

1990–2012? (22 years?) Persian Gulf War (1990– 1991) Worst recession since 1929 (1990–1991) Brief business cycle upswing (1992–1995)

“Schooling in Capitalist America”(1976) 1997–1999: Longest budget Inflation rises surplus in from 1% to American 14% (1960– history 1980) 9/11, 2001; Deep recession Afghanistan/Iraq (1981–1982) Wars; recession “A Nation at Risk” (1983) “Preparing Tomorrow’s Teachers” (1986)

Sub-prime debt and mortgage financial crisis (2007–2008) Sept. 24, 2008 President Bush warns of “long and painful recession”

“A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the 21st Century” November 14, 2008: first G20 (1986) Summit, Savings & loan Washington DC ź crisis (1986) Jan. 20, 2009 Barack Obama Stock market collapse (1987) 44th President

Figure 7.5 The fourth Kondratieff wave: 1950–present day.

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with the implementation of democratic experimental methods in classrooms. Arrangements for shared decision making in schools paralleled efforts to encourage shared decision making in society. Consistently, however, these progressive initiatives were the mature expressions of Roosevelt’s experimental New Deal especially since they concerned expanded decision-making powers for labor and unions. Many Great Society initiatives, including Medicare, Medicaid, federal education funding, continue to this day and these very programs are now threatened during the recurrent phase of global recession. The year 1973 marks the beginning of the downturn for the fourth Kondratieff wave, triggered by the oil embargo that began on October 17, 1973. On that day, the members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, consisting of the member Arab nations plus Egypt and Syria, announced that they would no longer ship oil to nations that had supported Israel in the Yom Kippur war. I recall living in Florence in January, 1974 and walking the streets devoid of any gas powered vehicles because the Italian government had banned Sunday driving. It seemed like a privilege at that time to experience the city in original Renaissance conditions. But I was unaware that a seismic power shift had just taken place. I was not conscious that an economic tidal wave that had begun in the early 1940s was coming to closure at that moment. Had I been conscious of this shift I might have been able to make more long-lasting and purposive decisions about my future, while still living within the temporary purpose of enjoying my time in Florence. It was during this intersection of recession/deflation that Daniel Lortie researched and published Schoolteacher. It was a classic new interpretation of the occupation of school teaching. It was also a re-interpretation of the previous economic crisis of 1929, come to haunt us once more during similar economic conditions but with entirely new circumstances. Willard Waller’s The Sociology of Teaching and Daniel Lortie’s Schoolteacher are “downturn” economic responses to challenges that emerged out of the previous upturning economic wave (1899–1920). Philip Jackson’s Life in Classrooms, however, is a document that draws on the optimism of an economic upswing. Consistent with Kondratieff’s economic theory, however, Jackson’s assumptions emerged during the downswing period from 1929–1949. Notice once more how responses to the downward spiral became the precursor for the dominant ideas of the next wave, although they mutate accordingly. Lortie and Waller’s studies have much more in common than they do with Jackson’s, although common themes remain intact in all three. Throughout the upswing of the fourth Kondratieff wave (1949–1973) scientific behaviorism influenced the field of education. In 1956, Benjamin Bloom headed a group of educational psychologists who developed classification-levels of intellectual behavior relevant to learning. Several important educational implementations emerged during this time as well. The most important was the GI Bill (1944), which opened universities to a more general population. A continuum emerges, at least in the United States. During the second Kondratieff, elementary schooling became widespread; during the third, secondary schooling become widely sponsored. During the fourth, higher education became available to a mass population. From 1940 to 1960 in particular, educational institutions during this period were seen as great equalizers and

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resources were especially devoted to culturally disadvantaged children. This came to a sharp halt in 1973 with a dramatic collapse in the world economy. However, it was not just the world economy that collapsed. Welfarism, statism, scientism, and Fordism were also beginning to implode as viable economic experiments in western industrialized countries. Just over 30 years later, the vivid results of this implosion came to a head with the collapse of the “Big Three” automakers in Detroit. Significantly, between 1940 and 1960 nation states moved to further centralize and regulate the school system. S¸ims¸ek believes that this systematic centralization initiative might be attributed to the launch of Sputnik in 1957, which led to a “space war” from 1957 to 1969 after which the downturn began, only to mature by 1973. The Sputnik challenge was, in this sense, another “turning-point war” that always opens at the exact transition between periods of economic optimism and pessimism. By the 1970s an intense debate raged that criticized educational establishments. A plethora of books and reports came out during the early years of the 1970s from progressive thinkers such as Freire (1970) and Illich (1971) but also including neo-Marxists such as Bowles and Gintis (1976). The alternatives that these criticisms advocated did not develop fully into a mature reform movement at that time because they coincided with the intersection between downturn and upswing economic phases. This means that the reforms that these authors promoted were inconsistent with the emerging socio-economic mood-swing that was at hand. Their message was appropriate for a recessive and deflating economy and economic events were not displaying these symptoms. That is not to say that their analyses were inaccurate or that their theories were uninteresting; in fact, they were highly engaging and compelling. It is only to say that their perspectives were not coincidentally practicable and applicable to current economic conditions. Recall that even Marx and Engels, the originators of this critical perspective, composed their theories during the downswing phase of a previous economic wave (i.e. 1864–1898). Good theories, like great stories, survive the test of time. Sometimes, though, implementations don’t consolidate them in practice because the economic times are not hospitable to the theoretical proposals behind them. However, that situation changed entirely in 1983 with the publication of “A Nation at Risk.” The report had the desired effect, writes S¸ims¸ek, not because it was a state-sponsored study, but because it was published at the point of transition from the optimism of expansion to the pessimism of an economic downturn. When it comes to theory, therefore, sometimes timing is everything. One of the most dramatic developments during the downturn of the fourth wave between 1975 and 1995 was the emphasis placed on “knowledge.” During this economic phase doctrinaire scientific positivism also gave way to “softer” epistemologies. This shift is commonly known as post-positivism which saw the expansion of qualitative research methodologies. These methods include phenomenology and interpretive/hermeneutic methods that had arisen from philosophical and linguistic traditions during the previous century in continental Europe. Organizational changes took root during this fourth phase, such as restructuring efforts to downsize expansive school systems that grew during the previous upward swing from 1945–1973. Consistent with practice, this gave way to more theories that attacked hierarchical and bureaucratic

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structures such as top-down, Fordist-inspired bureaucratic models. Many of these critiques were also inspired by feminist analyses of organizations which stereotyped Fordist bureaucratic hierarchies as masculine-gendered. Academically, the emphases moved away from scientific analyses of organizational theory towards more humanistic analyses that privilege human resources, site-based management, symbolic/interpretive approaches, and especially “leadership” over “management” curricula. Evidence of this trend in the 1970s is found in debates between Thomas Greenfield and Daniel E. Griffiths. Well-known popular theorists of this era are Tom Peters and Robert Watterman (1987), Peter Senge (1990), and Peter Drucker (1994). All of these and others are signs of the demise of the theoretical priorities of the fourth Kondratieff and harbingers of a fifth wave that will introduce some completely new perspectives, but many of which consistently revisit previous theories in innovative ways.

Economic shock waves of the new world order: the twenty-first century The innovations that are propelling the fifth Kondratieff are microelectronics, robotics, biotechnology, green technologies, and genetics. S¸ims¸ek predicts that these are the growth industries for the current wave. They should give us new insights into how the human brain works, how learning occurs, and how our planet is changing forever. He predicts: Under the premises of the neo-liberal socio-economic paradigm, we [should] not be surprised by the fact that the nation state will retreat even further and many of the welfare gains of the fourth Kondratieff will be reversed during the coming decades. (2005: 28) Many speculations might be made of this prediction. At the national and global levels, the fifth Kondratieff will likely bring new economic and social inequalities as well as opportunities. In fact, Greider (1997), early during the upward wave, has already documented some initial evidence of the return of a nineteenth century rampant capitalism; however, this time it will play out on a global scale rather than national or continental scale. As S¸ims¸ek rightly observes, nation states would lose much of their traditional ruling sovereignty in such a global system. The social programs that were only imagined during the early 1800s, and were conceptualized during the 1860s, then experimented with during the 1930s, and finally consolidated during the 1960s, would recede and fall away. The task of managing and directing a global economic system would likely be carried out by supra-national organizations that emerged during the fourth Kondratieff of 1945–1995, such as the United Nations, the European Economic Community, and certainly by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Results of these developments might include a single North American currency (the “Amero”), and tendencies towards the establishment of One World Government to oversee global economic policies. Of course, as we have seen,

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ominous destinations like these never arrive during one economic phase. The groundwork, the conditions, and the trends are germinated, or at least planted, and set in motion for the next wave when they are refined and sometimes accomplished only partially and contingently. We can see premonitions of this global movement during turning points from one economic phase to another. For example, the current phase, like others, is marked by a transitional war. From 1990 to 1991 we saw a global conflict in the Persian Gulf between coalition partners and Iraq. This conflict coincided with the sharpest recession since 1929 (at least until 2008) from 1990 to 1991. While the first Persian Gulf War would seem to have been an isolated conflict, it was actually a local fight that escalated into a much larger world-conflict that is still underway in 2009. It is noteworthy that Al Qaeda was born during the deep economic recession from 1981–1982 when Anwar Sadat was assassinated in Egypt. Clearly, pivotal communications take place during transition-events from one phase to another and these communications provide clues to the global implications of those events. They also afford us with clues to educational innovations that may be on the rise, only imagined, conceptualized, but far from being implemented. For example, we see the distinctive recurring pattern of investment in successive levels of public education from elementary (1846–1898), to secondary (1899–1949), to higher education (1950–2009). Where are the next installments of public funds headed? Will they travel “full-circle” and return to elementary school education? Or will they be invested in adult education throughout every sector of society to appease the demand of aging baby-boomers who wish to continue their education into their elder years? Where would we search for clues to answer these questions? A close reading of President George H. W. Bush’s State of the Union Address on January 29, 1991, imagines “a big idea” during that “defining hour.” It is “a new world order” where diversities are individualized under a new “rule of law.” At another point, President Bush mentions that “the problems before us may be different, but the key to solving them remains the same: it is the individual.” He then adds: We will get this recession behind us and return to growth soon. We will get on our way to a new record of expansion and achieve the competitive strength that will carry us into the next American century. We should focus our efforts today on encouraging economic growth, investing in the future, and giving power and opportunity to the individual. (Bush 1991) On three other occasions in that address he mentions the importance of putting more “power in the hands of individuals.” In a reordered world system where national monetary policies and regulations become increasingly redundant, individual initiative becomes much more urgent. When social-safety nets become torn and frayed, personal economic survival becomes much more competitive. An “education” for this kind of neo-primitivism would be very unlike the one that we have today. This individualistic new world order would require immense technological competence in a highly inter-communicative and virtual environment. It might also require

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resourcefulness and competence in methods of sustaining one’s self and one’s families, perhaps using methods that are considered outdated and forgotten. For example, how do you grow your own food? How do you produce energy when you’re off the grid? How do you band together with like-minded individuals to compose meaningful and sustaining communities for survival when traditional ones are disappearing? We have to see this potential “new world” as the logical stage of an organic economic development that has been taking place for over two hundred years. And this is why the messages that lie embedded in the Address are not conscious warnings. As has always taken place since 1800, such messages only anticipate events without conscious reasons to believe in the implications of their full realization. I recall again my stroll through Florence without conscious realization of the full implications of “no cars in the streets.” What if there were no cars in any street because there was no fossil fuel any more? Did I witness “a new world order” with “a new rule of law” on that day? Was I thinking for a purpose rather than just with a temporary purpose? As educational researchers, we must be sensitive to the organic movements of economy and to the events that contextualize those developments. This is especially urgent as we enter what may be the most significant economic turning point of the first half of the twenty-first century, when increased international rules of law and cooperation may be essential. Goldstein (1998: 6) writes that economic waves and phases are not mechanical processes but are repetitions of themes, processes, and relationships along a path of an evolving social system. Is it not interesting that we return, once more, to a biological metaphor for the development of economy? It might be more appropriate, then, to refer to Kondratieff “repetitions” or “rebirths” rather than phases or waves. These revisitations of happenstance refer to the kinds of episodic changes that are a part of every evolving system. In fact, as S¸ims¸ek points out, this theory actually finds its source in the “punctuated equilibrium” theory of biological systems (see Gersick 1991; Tushman and Romanelli 1985; Tushman and Anderson 1986; Sastry 1997). It is fascinating that this union of economy and biology is very similar to how Piaget and Erikson united epistemology with biology. For them, incremental progress was interrupted by discontinuous, revolutionary changes after long periods of gradual emergence. Suddenly, new perspectives could announce themselves (according to Piaget) as the result of a crisis (according to Erikson) and a revolution (according to Marx) could take place that reorganizes all political arrangements. A living economy is not genetic or psychological but it is certainly eco-logical because it is concerned with the interrelationship of multiple factors and influences. Theories of teacher education and development over the next 20 years must be more eco-logical in their conception and elaboration. This does not say that they must be partial to the natural environment, although that could be so as well. It is to say that academic examinations of teaching and learning must account for the economic moods and evolutions that conceptualize them. If this were so, then we might be able to intimate moods and implicate these evolutions in ways that make them more directly relevant. In 1932 Waller recommended knowledge to inform teachers of the social dynamics beyond the classroom. These were, of course, useful suggestions that sought

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to raise teachers’ critical awareness of macro-level issues, events, and concerns. But in addition to becoming more economically literate, another important emphasis is essential. Where is the individual teacher and, even more so, what of the individual pupil who remains the most vulnerable person in all of this? On November 15, 2008, twenty-four nations gathered in Washington DC to begin reshaping a global financial order. On the day when the action plan was announced, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown dubbed the conference “the birth pang of a new global order” (Kessler and Faiola 2008). What will be the mature form of what is now being born? As educational researchers, should we not be asking whether we are sufficiently conscious of overarching economic forces that give our work its genre, mood, and relative applicability? A new micro-sensitivity is required that will match the birth pangs of this new order. I do believe that this sensitivity will come from individual initiative, but I do not believe that this initiative will be the kind that we have seen since the scientific revolution of the eighteenth century. As I argued in Chapter 4, we have been trying to solve our problems with too much science and not enough ethics. Economic recessions and global military conflicts will not disappear. In this perennial context of upheaval a new sensitivity of what it means to be a human being must emerge. The defining hour for that big idea is at hand and the pang for its rebirth will be felt in the elementary school classroom. This chapter is a calling to new sensitivity rather than new knowledge because now, more than any other time since the 1920s, teacher leadership is needed to usher in that new order.

Chapter 8

Sociology, classrooms, and economics as war

Introduction In this chapter I demonstrate relationships among the foundations laid by Waller, Lortie, and Jackson. Once common themes are defined and then held for comparison it’s going to be possible to see how they formed the continuum that produced the “golden years” of teacher development research during the 1980s and 1990s. I display these themes in the next two chapters. In this chapter I show how a direct 50-year continuum extends from Willard Waller, in 1932, to “A Nation at Risk,” in 1983. These years were characterized by some of the worst recessions since 1929 (i.e. 1981–1982; 1987; and especially 1990–1991). S¸ims¸ek’s research shows that economic recessions have implications for theorizing about reform. Increased evidence and arguments are mounting that the current economic downturn is, in fact, the onset of a second Great Depression that will rival and perhaps even surpass the one of the previous century (see, for example, Brussee, in press). As I showed in Chapter 7, theoretical prescriptions are perpetuated across similar economic conditions. If we can recognize repetitive themes and recommendations, then we are in a position to theorize alternative perspectives when similar economic conditions inevitably return. We might imagine alternatives that might be more applicable and sustainable during the forthcoming economic crisis. But I also believe that these alternatives are always present as anomalies within the continuum. One only needs to change one’s perspective to let them surface. These anomalies could offer new directions for research during the years ahead, years that I believe will present us with some of the most pressing economic problems in a generation. New questions and new solutions need to be radically different from what we have witnessed perennially during the past century. Speculating on these possibilities is the purpose of my study. Let’s begin by summarizing and comparing themes that are recurrent during the 1930s and 1970s, both periods of economic insecurity and global wars.

The Sociology of Teaching in a decade of depression Willard Waller conceptualizes the school institution as a living organism that is at risk in a kind of bio-economic environment. The school lives in an economic system that is

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suffering in the face of those challenges. Within that micro-organic system teachers are going to be conceptualized as organs in that organic system. This comprehensive image is consistent with the founding sociological perspective of Durkheim who also saw schools’ relationship to society in terms of a whole/part organic relationship. Durkheim also conceptualized the division of labor in society with the organic metaphor of the body and its systematic functions (Durkheim 1984, as reviewed by Blackledge and Hunt 1985: 15). Similarly for Waller, the school is a unity of interacting personalities, suggesting that the school is a collective personality with a consciousness (a “we-feeling”). Any organic system functions in a healthy way when all of its parts are performing in a healthy manner. The macro-economy is no different. When all of the interrelated parts function in coordination, then quality of life and standards of living prove to be fulfilling. When they are not working in coordination, which was certainly the case in 1932, then standards decay and quality erodes. Teachers are the heart of that living system. Therefore, they deserve special analytical attention, as they are the governing organ of the institution. In this sense, Waller plays the part of a sociological physician that is diagnosing the illness of the school body. Waller’s diagnosis for the school in 1932 is as follows. Teachers are “the head” and the classroom is “the body.” Teachers are the mind of the body and their instruction is the energy-force that circulates the life of all relationships in the school. As the head of the body, the teacher is the despot. Instruction always involves intention, direction, and meaning making. Teacher leadership, when expressed effectively, lays the groundwork for stability beyond the classroom. Weak teachers make for weak schools and this makes for a weak incubator for society and its members. Therefore, teachers need to be re-educated and reformed, just as the mind can be for the betterment of the individual. Waller’s purpose is to transform schools into more adaptive instruments that can produce more adaptive students. There is a type of engineering metaphor at work here, consistent with the manufacturing trends of his time. Teachers are mass-produced economic “goods.” They are commodities, in this way, of a system that is malfunctioning. This need not be the case, however, and so the intentions, directions, and meanings for instruction need to be altered such that teachers assimilate new functions. Therefore, a new consciousness is called for. This assimilation might lead to the development of a healthier system that would be more adaptive given challenging macro-economic conditions. Waller’s goal is to let the school heal itself by focusing on the heart of the system and its circulatory functions. In all cases, I had to resort to synonyms of “spirit” to express Waller’s recommendations (e.g., head, mind, consciousness, heart). The place to begin this recovery is the stereotypical debilitation of “teacherishness.” Instruction singularizes the person and unfortunately most people confuse singularity with impotence. This could be because it resembles loneliness. Singularity is also not the same condition as individuality. Individuality is a voluntary public affirmation; whereas singularity is an involuntary solitary duty. Individuality is chosen; singularity is a response to a calling. Few understand this distinction unless they have also selfselected themselves to follow on this solitary path.

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Who does Waller believe follows this kind of calling? Teachers want to promote social security and they want to instruct the means to promoting more security by teaching young people to be communal rather than competitive. Their social values are traditional and they wish to conserve the traditions that have served them well. Their natural inclination is to cooperate with others and to preserve community. Why is this problematic? Ironically, Waller believes that traditional values, such as their desire to cooperate, and their need for security is hazardous to their own interests and to the interests of society. It is as if the values and politics that self-identify teachers are a threat to commercial economy and public prosperity. Hypothetically, if we were to select, train, and then develop different kinds of teachers than what we have in schools then the economy and society would be more adaptive. What explains this assumed connection between economy and pedagogy? Several reasons were theorized for the economic collapse of 1929.6 In 1930, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act raised tariffs on 20,000 goods imported into the continental United States. One thousand and twenty-eight economists signed a petition condemning this legislation, but it was still passed. From 1930 to 1931 the Federal Reserve drastically contracted the money supply by 18 per cent. From 1930–1933, 9000 banks failed. The Federal Reserve then raised interest rates, further escalating this crisis. In general, it is believed that the Great Depression of 1929–1939 came about due to mismanaged monetary policies and practices by the Federal government and by the Federal Reserve (see Friedman and Schwartz 1963). But in response to this downfall, a vast array of measures was implemented in the name of Roosevelt’s “The New Deal.” Along with inappropriate tariffs, poorly timed rising interest rates, and mismanaged monetary policies, could it be the case that “teacherishness” would also have been one symptom – perhaps even a source – of the economic downfall that befell society in 1929? And if this was the case, perhaps re-tooling the school as an integral component might prevent this kind of crisis in the future. What measures would be called for? Note that government legislation that began in 1932 to confront the Depression included laws to empower individual farmers and labor unions. There was a grand sentiment to free economic sectors of society that seemed vulnerable by establishing a minimum wage, increasing the purchasing power of the working class, providing assistance to farmers, and enforcing labor codes and standards. In general, government policies sought to empower communities and individuals. Clearly, Waller saw weaknesses in the teacher corps. For example, they want to be needed rather than require that others need them. They are driven by a vocational orientation to serve rather than solicit service from others. They introvert into the institution and hide behind it for dignity, rather than demand it and extravert beyond the institution. They are humble instead of proclaiming their rightful place in society. In summary, as basic organs of one central functioning economic body, they are weak. This makes them unable to sustain environmental change and as members of a sustaining community, they might even be the cause of common downfall. They are codependent on an inferior community (i.e. their pupils) who they are charged to serve, but who are ironically their masters. In essence, they do not lead; they are slaves, as Waller states bluntly on page 421. Were Waller analyzing the American military at that

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time it would be clear that the country was not war-ready and vulnerable to enemy occupation and defeat. Therefore, “teacherishness” may be one cause of economic weakness and downfall. The school would be a more effective organ of economy if teachers had a guildspirit. They need the confidence of a tradesperson’s technical competence and the entrepreneurial aggressiveness of the lodge-spirit rather than the monastery-spirit that produced them historically. Knowledge will free them from their confinement. They need to collaborate, not worship in isolation in cells. Furthermore, if teachers were more “sociological” in their understanding of the classroom, its dynamics, and its relationship to society at large, then they’d be more conscientious of their place in the macro-economic system. They might become more collegial, more entrepreneurial, and more militant in their self-directed quest for development. Waller recommended that teachers need this kind of liberating knowledge because they had the wrong “spirit.” That is why a new consciousness is needed for teachers and for the school in general. There are only two places for a sociologist to find “consciousness.” Either it is within the inhabitants of the social system or it circulates like air in the form of “culture.” These will become orthodox units of analysis 60 years later. Lortie’s analysis of schooling and school teaching is very similar to the one offered by Waller, and Lortie’s recommendations are also very similar. I believe that this is largely because Lortie was working in front of an economic backdrop that was very similar to Waller’s. Nostalgic reflection on the 1970s may bring back some of the greatest moments for some. For example, it was the decade of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge over troubled waters” and ABBA’s “S.O.S.” Ironically, Simon and Garfunkel’s plaintiff song of 1970 and ABBA’s title hit of 1975 were probably the most appropriate anthems for the decade economically. From 1973 to 1974 oil prices quadrupled! As we saw during 2008, rising energy prices inflated all other expenses throughout the economy. In 1976 the consumer price index rose by 5 per cent. It climbed steadily until it reached just over 13 per cent in 1979. The United States Federal Reserve raised interest rates from 4 per cent in 1972 to 8 per cent in 1973 and then to 10 per cent in 1974 in an effort to control rising inflation. Samuelson (2008) refers to this decade as the “Great Inflation.” He observes that the “economy” is not just about finances, trade, and money. In fact, our economy is a very social, political, and psychological process. This is consistent with the argument that I have been presenting in this book. The economy is a synonym for our “home” and, as such, the economy has a “consciousness” that is far more powerful than the one social culture has. The Great Inflation of the 1970s and the 1980s, writes Samuelson, really damaged the American soul and led to an irrecoverable hopelessness. Samuelson blames Keynesian economics along with a naïf belief that the economic waves of business cycles could be controlled during the 1970s and 1980s. He also blames a general misconception that economic prosperity must include levels of full employment. As a result of these mistaken beliefs, crucial misjudgments arose during these decades that encouraged policies and practices to promote easy-lending and asset accumulation based on credit. Government policies to promote full employment, such as tax cuts, budget deficits, low interest rates, and easy credit, all accelerated price

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increases in goods and services. Apparently, no American president was willing, much less be successful, to calm inflated price increases, except for Ronald Reagan, an achievement that Samuelson praises as his most definitive in twentieth century US economic history. But his presidency was not enough to produce a trend that exists to this day in the American psyche. Rising prices combined with rising unemployment and decreasing productivity levels produced a chronic economic mood of despondency. This economic “mood” is far more influential than educationists assume and treating this wound is not a straightforward educational process. Many theories try to explain this drop in productivity that began in the 1970s. Interestingly, the most plausible one is actually related to educational attainments and the relationship between schooling and economy in general. I have mentioned that the downswing of the second Kondratieff wave (1864–1898) witnessed the establishment of secondary and vocational schooling. From 1900 to 1950 the greatest educational achievement was getting everyone compulsory schooling up to the end of a secondary education. This widely affected job skills, wages, and productivity because it assumed that the purpose of schooling was to promote full employment. For an economy based on manufacturing, this upward curve reached its zenith in the 1970s and has leveled off until this day. Ease of access to higher education after World War II did not increase this employment and productivity curve very much because an elementary and secondary education served a manufacturing-based industrial economy. Therefore, it was access to elementary and secondary schooling that contributed primarily to the economic growth in the United States from 1900 to 1970. Once universal access and compulsory attendance was attained, momentum decreased. This was exacerbated by a sharp decline in research and development-investment, which peaked in the late 1950s in science education, and scientific research (i.e. after Sputnik in 1957). Funds were then redirected in the 1960s towards projects that yielded civilian benefits. After Apollo 11 ( July 16, 1969) and the end of the Vietnam War (April, 1975), however, even this investment slowed down. And so we have, beginning in the 1970s, a very slow but steady complacence in research and development, a steady decay in basic skill development in elementary and secondary schooling, and a general economic mood of hopelessness. This complacence leveled off the productivity curve that began during the industrial revolution 100 years earlier. It was a disillusioning decade as well because western nations finally had to acknowledge that they functioned in a global economy. Increasingly, geo-political tension and global economic events really controlled their destinies more than domestic policies did. This was vividly clear during the OPEC oil embargo of 1973. It remained clear in 2008 when NATO felt threatened by the Russian invasion of the democratic republic of Georgia. In fact, the tension involved little threat to democracy; at least, that’s not what was at stake primarily. The tension involved control of the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline. The reality of economics-as-war was clearly brought into focus in the 1970s. That decade also reinforced the notion, ever since Sputnik in October, 1957, and reinforced in 1983 (by “A Nation at Risk”) that public education can be a vehicle to mobilize the population for war-as-economics. I believe that Waller detected this human resource potential in schools as early as 1932. His book is an early attempt to develop teachers

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into human resources for a global economic conflict. His book is also an early attempt to develop teachers into resources to remedy domestic malaise. In subtle terms, if the general consciousness of the population is one of psychological depression as a result of economic depression, even when faced with inflationary pressures, then schooling can also be interpreted as a vehicle in which to palliate that disempowering mood. Sadly, teachers can be identified as the palliatives for that degenerating state of affairs and this will influence how they will be diagnosed and developed appropriately. This is exactly what occurred in 1975.

Schoolteacher in a decade of inflation Rather than contextualizing his research problem with systems-analogies, Lortie focuses on the role of the schoolteacher immediately. Clear historical relationships exist between school teaching and church ministry in terms of core beliefs. This “core” is of central interest to Lortie. He begins by noting that clear managerial relationships exist between the effects of the school classroom and the church congregation. For example, the school and the church are both social and moral institutions. They normalize, civilize, and discipline the population. This is a problem, however, since they construct the conditions for a command-economy rather than an autonomous, freemarket economy. Command cultures, such as we see in Russia and China, tend to be more socially conservative. Free and open markets can be more responsive to change and these kinds of cultures could be more appropriate models for the micro-context of the school, by implication to Lortie’s analysis. The piety of community sharing is not to be discounted; however, it will not sustain against foreign economic threats and it will not reverse expiring productivity patterns. Therefore, deeply rooted and traditional patterns of thought and practice are no longer suitable for the challenges that lie ahead. Practices need to be uprooted, traditions need to be questioned, patterns need to be changed, and thoughts and practices need to be reinvented. The time is ripe for reform. Waller believed that teachers have to be different. But the malfunction of schools, as organs of a larger economic and social system, is really the problem. He begins by conceptualizing teaching as paid work with a distinctive labor-ethic, an occupational culture, and value-orientations that are socialized during the adoption of the persona of “schoolteacher.” According to Lortie, we must learn how the workplace socializes that persona. We must unmask the teacher and re-costume them with new customs. Similar to Waller’s commodification thesis, that structured (i.e. stereotyped) persona(lity) is a product of remunerated work patterns. These cultural patterns and their resulting structure(s) must become “our research problem.” When knowledge is based on scientifically objective facts and findings then authority for determinations, prescriptions, and recommendations originates in the outer world. But when meaning making originates in an inner world, there’s no public ascent to that knowledge. Teacherishness is an inner worldly experience. Instruction assimilates the patterns of thought and action that construct it. It is mysterious, secretive, and arcane; however, it is not categorized as strength but as weakness (for example, as selfdoubt by Lortie). This is a central point. Whereas the objective professions possess a

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kind of knowledge that produces certainty, schoolteachers’ knowledge results in dubiousness; that is, when they are measured alongside the more objective professions. Given this lack of certainty, school teaching can only be evaluated with dubious categories. From Waller’s perspective, the system cannot be neatly ordered; in fact, it is a chaotic system and this creates problems both micro-cosmically and macrocosmically. For example, Lortie notes that the teacher-persona is conservative. In practical terms, schoolteachers are suspicious. They are mistrustful and hesitant to conform to the prescriptions of the institutions within which they work. This makes them objects of suspicion because they work in institutions that allegedly form adults and prepare them for future outcomes. But their temporal orientation is presentist, not futuristic. This seems to make schoolteachers focus on conserving the present rather than constructing a better future. Many rewards come their way for this conservation. Lortie called these rewards “psychic,” a reference to the inner world repositories of these rewards. Their addiction to preserving the present prevents them from focusing on future-oriented rewards as these are objectively defined by true professions. Building their students’ inner world will not serve them well either, Lortie assumes, because economic exigencies threaten our survival. This makes the entire institution of schools vulnerable to attack from external threats because it is disarmed by uncertainty and insecurity. There are no specifications, blueprints, plans, or working models that can be systematically adjusted and readjusted in accord with moral thought processes. Where Waller saw schools as organic systems, Lortie seems to see them as battlefields where schoolteachers are individually struggling at their own battles like solitary knights without a generalized battle-plan. Teachers have no terms of reference. Their world lacks the certainty that comes with the coordination of a common scientific approach. Conservatism, presentism, and individualism may be adaptive for church ministers who pastor congregations; but certainly not for the schoolteacher who is to prepare pupils for meaningful participation in a struggling economy. Lortie will adopt the same prescriptions for reform as Waller did 30 years earlier because the economic threats that confronted his research were not identical but every bit as demoralizing for the general public. Instead of rampant deflation prices were inflating. Employment was also increasing at the same time resulting in a classic condition that some economists call “stagflation.” If administrators and policy directors are to convince the general public that schools can respond to this general dismay then they somehow must convince the public that teachers can demonstrate a confident, knowledge-based remedy for these problems. They desperately need esoteric knowledge with effective collegial structures so that they can point to something that’s held in common rather than guarded in private. Lortie speculates that this kind of common object might be a “reflexive conservatism.” Reflexive conservatism is not really conservative. It is a state of being “bendable,” another way of saying “adaptive” to changing environmental conditions. We saw this clearly in the way that Mead and Dewey characterized reflective practice. Where Waller was explicit in calling for a sort of entrepreneurial “guild-spirit” or “lodge-spirit,” Lortie compares schoolteachers to the established professionals rather than business entrepreneurs. However, in both cases,

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we see an effort to uproot the person that the teacher is and attempt to graft an entirely new mask onto that body. Since the Great Depression these authors assert that the schoolteacher has been a kind of anachronism. The economics of the world have changed around them but their inner world remains the same, conserved in the present and singularly individualistic. If we could only re-form them, in-form them, and then teach them to con-form to other professions, then perhaps we could overcome and avoid further economic insecurity. While details and circumstances differed, I submit that very similar macroeconomic sentiments and moods motivated the research of Willard Waller and Daniel Lortie. It also becomes clear that a biosocial evolutionary method is at work behind these analyses. This is understandable, given that macro-economic conditions were presenting environmental challenges to society on all levels. Since adults seem to assume form in schools, it’s understandable that a biosocial template can be applied in that engendering process. A sociological method adds assumptions that will determine to some extent how schoolteachers will be classified and characterized. Of course, I acknowledge that economic depressions and chronic productivity-declines are serious problems. If we identify schools and teachers as aggravations to those problems then any perceived vulnerabilities will be potential objects of intervention. However, should we assume that the medical doctors or lawyers possess the confidence and knowledge that make them more adaptive and responsive to economic depressions and productivity-declines? It seems clear that teachers, when asked about their response-potential to these external calamities, display traits that make them inadequate foot soldiers. They are missing something essential and that absence has everything to do with what doctors, lawyers, even therapists seem to have in their possession. But these conclusions overlook whether schoolteachers do possess something essential to survival and prosperity that is being overlooked all the time in this research. And if that might be so, then how do we discover this and articulate it?

Life in Classrooms during the great society The economic decade that produced Philip Jackson’s Life in Classrooms was somewhat unlike the ones that produced The Sociology of Teaching and Schoolteacher. It is not a decade of deflation. Unemployment went down dramatically. With inflation seemingly managed and with low unemployment, a general optimistic confidence purported that the economy could be managed and even mastered. A continuous debate raged about whether government money should be spent on “guns” or “butter,” and so it was decided in the end that money should be spent on both. Military spending in the United States skyrocketed, mostly due to the Vietnam War. But vast sums of money were also directed to what has come to be known as “Great Society” legislation. It was a problem-solving decade when the doctrine of progress and the formula of “cause and effect” reached a state of ecstatic celebration. Any problem could be solved; for example, poverty: War on Poverty (1964); discrimination: Civil Rights Act (1964); elderly without health coverage: Medicare (1965); underprivileged children lack sufficient education: Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1965); civilian travel is unsafe:

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National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act (1966); consumers are unprotected: Truth-in-Lending Act (1968); pollution: National Environment Policy Act (1969). Research and development spending poured into civilian projects and battery upon battery of regulations tried to manage many aspects of civil society. It was during this affluent, opportunistic, but controversial decade that Philip Jackson researched and published Life in Classrooms. Jackson’s book is less concerned with problematizing Waller’s conclusions as it is with describing the consciousness and culture of the classroom. Without the economic urgency plaguing Waller, or even Lortie, Jackson had the liberty to explore what spiritual forces and mechanisms existed in the classroom. He assumes that these “ways” have to be forms of knowledge. Jackson believes that classroom life must be rational and that events there are obedient to universal physical laws of cause and effect. Since events there are “lawful” as in any other sphere of human endeavor, the findings of research must conform to those universal properties. Where Waller speculated on some institutional consciousness, Jackson seeks to establish forms of knowledge that will assist us in understanding what teachers intuitively know. Previewing Lortie, he will provide some clues to what the “inner world” of teachers feels like. Since he is looking for “forms,” he is interested in the effects of instruction and how those effects mechanize life in the classroom. This stance distinguishes him from Waller, his research ancestor, and from Lortie, his research descendant. Where Waller was interested in the school, and where Lortie was interested in the teacher specifically, Jackson is interested in the “life” of the classroom. This means that he is trying to articulate “power.” We have, therefore, a clear triangle of essential research with enormous implications for future work: Jackson’s context, Waller’s institution, Lortie’s personnel. Jackson’s observation that life in classrooms thrives on waiting, exercising patience, and avoiding distraction predicts Lortie’s conclusion that the present moment is what defines events of importance. However, Jackson expands on Waller’s conclusions when he notices that prohibition and inhibition are productive mechanisms as well as inhibiting ones. This is only possible if we recall that Jackson is trying to understand invisible and generative forces. Waiting one’s turn, learning to be patient, and concentrating on one’s own business are basic elements of learning democratic civility. They are some of the elementary mechanics that instruct the “collective will.” From Waller’s research, they are the mechanisms of the institutional consciousness. In addition to this, rewarding, disciplining, and punishing have the effect of manifesting the culture of the school, that invisible force that generally “wills” the collective prosperity of the classroom. Lortie will blame this compliance and conformity ten years later as determining a conservative attitude and a presentist state of mind. But these compliancemechanisms are, in fact, the “ways” of knowing the essential doctrines of the classroom. These disciplinary mechanisms (i.e. the discourse practices) produce the forms of knowledge (i.e. the doctrines) that determine who is successful and unsuccessful in the classroom. During periods of social prohibition (1920–1933 in the United States) and economic restraint (1929–1945) these inhibitions and controls may have been interpreted to be very maladaptive and impeding to progress. During Jackson’s Great Society era, however, this dynamic interpretation has the liberty of

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being less judgmental and more objective. Jackson is looking for universal laws in the inner world of the classroom. In that sense, he is trying to show us the inner worldly motions of development in that mysterious space. However, there are practical implications for this research. If we could articulate these intuitions then we might be able to communicate them objectively to train and develop new teachers. Jackson, like Lortie after him, identifies teaching as “craft,” a synonym for “power.” But in preparation for Lortie’s research, he notes that teachers’ powers do not demonstrate forms of knowledge but justifications for beliefs. We revisit a chronic problem, therefore, in that teachers are believers before they are knowers and moral agents long before they are scientists of any kind. Teachers’ subjective certainties focus on immediate gratification and they are autonomously individualistic in that subjectivity. Their joy comes from serving their students. Lortie also confirms that they are individualistic and presentist in their temporal orientation. And since Jackson is sensitive to context over institution and personnel (although all authors obviously discuss all three areas) he is able to draw out explicit references to the religious experience of the classroom life. It’s not about forms of knowledge as much as about spirited sensations. Lortie’s reference to the “felt” reality of the classroom coincides with this observation. However, in the end, Jackson does identify one of our chronic “problems” with life in the classroom. His assumption that universal laws must determine life in classrooms leads him to evaluate the effectiveness of classroom-culture in terms that are knowledgeable. This assumption and method will replicate the findings of Waller in this respect and presage those of Lortie. Teachers have no technical vocabulary; their discourse is parochial; thoughts are conceptually simplistic. Where Jackson’s teachers connected events in simple ways, and relied on quick and ready insights, Lortie’s were presentist. Where Jackson’s teachers were closed to conceptual alternatives, Lortie’s were conservative. Jackson’s teachers defended their decisions based on how they felt rather than on what they thought. They taught from the heart ad libitum, and so it is no wonder that their rewards, from Lortie’s research, were felt inwardly or rewarded psychically. A consistent pattern of tradition and practice shows up during all three economic eras of teacher development research. And in this regard, it seems to matter little whether economic times are inflating, stagflating, or deflating. Teachers are perennially myopic, as Jackson observed. They place little value in abstraction and put much faith in concrete immediacy. This makes them unprofessional. Ever since 1932, they have been in need of new forms of knowledge that might have the potential to professionalize them. But since they don’t want to collaborate, this potential is elusive. The temporality of their inner world does not concur with the temporality of the outer institutional world. However, this paradox opens a possibility. Citing Cooley, Jackson does concede that the outer world of the institution can be dehumanizing and depersonalizing. Teachers are the human face of that anonymous and faceless school. With this uncanny observation, Jackson offers some insight into the most puzzling aspect of life in classrooms. Jackson detects paradoxes and nonsense in the life of the classroom that seem to be necessary elements of life in that enclosure. He also notices, with Lortie, that teachers

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share a common moral orientation with clerics, therapists, and nurses. While Lortie sought to distance teachers from these professions and attract them to more highly paid professions like doctors and lawyers, Jackson suggests that teachers seem to be caregivers primarily. They respond to suffering, they want to remediate, they want to heal. In essence, they “want to make a difference.” In Jackson’s study, there seems to be a basic distinction showing up between the professionalism of “formation” and “vocation.” Whereas formation is dependent upon knowledge and objectivity, vocation is dependent upon intuitive sense and subjectivity. A large part of our problem seems to be that teachers remain converts to religious experience (e.g., “classroom miracles”; being liberators, lifesavers, and providers of educational salvation) and that researchers are trying to divert them into practicing their craft as a secular experience (being reflexive conservatives that are guild-spirited with knowledge). Whereas teachers seem to be kaleidoscopic, researchers would wish them to be more telescopic or perhaps even microscopic. Where teachers view broad surfaces, researchers wish them to view depth and detail. There is an unquestionable unease and mistrust for religious experience as a dependable foundation for classroom pedagogy and school culture. This is widespread in all three eras and with all three researchers. However, it is most vividly addressed in Jackson’s study. He is centrally interested in “ways of knowing” and the spiritual nuance that he calls “the humdrum.” Waller’s organic metaphor for the institution prepares us to be sensitive to this kind of mysterious force. Lortie identifies its historical origins (eighteenth century ecclesiology) and its reward structure (i.e. inner or “psychic”) as problems, which hinder teachers from professional development. Furthermore, “professional development” in all three cases assumed methods with roots in a Newtonian physical world. Teaching is also consistently assumed to be “a craft” by these authors. If the work is crafted then it must be based on applied scientific principles with practices (such as specifications, blueprints, plans, and working models) that are supported by the knowledge and methods of science. For development to occur, theory, knowledge, practice, and method need to be rational and scientific. This is why knowledge is the basis for professions and crafts. It excludes and includes at the same time. Specialized knowledge excludes those who are unprepared and uncertified and are therefore unworthy of the huge financial rewards and privileges that come with exclusive knowledge. It includes those who are certified to conform to codes and regulations, thereby gaining the public’s support and willingness to pay the fees for access to specialized knowledge. Rites of exclusion and inclusion of this sort are the basis for a medieval guild-spirit. In contrast, one enters a religious order such as a nunnery because of a vocational calling to serve others, not one’s self by means of marketing a profession or trade in the community. Voluntary service when activated by self-selection brings very different experiences to the one who chooses that path than for the one who enters a profession or trade. In no cases for these authors was the ambiguity, unpredictability, multiplicity, objective uncertainty, or the nonsense of the classroom valid media for learning and adaptive development. Classrooms and schools must be rational, as Jackson assumes – as rational, that is, as any other area of human endeavor.

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Schoolteachers as soldiers of economy The research-continuum that Waller conceptualized persists intact to this day. The problems that motivated Waller in the 1930s have not gone away either because the macro-economic context is repetitive and recycles through phases of expansion and contraction, much like the process of inhalation and exhalation. If we briefly survey the economic conditions of the 1980s alongside the most significant educational proposals of that decade, we see the same themes that were current during the 1930s and the 1970s because the economic conditions of that decade were echoes of times past. However, when we look at the 1980s we’re no longer doing a historical study. We’re looking at the economic fundamentals that lead to the present day. Definitions for teacher development from the 1970s began to consolidate during the 1980s and the 1990s. Before concluding this chapter, it is necessary to show what these consolidations were. We will see, consistently, that these definitions and prescriptions were in line with what Waller and Lortie defined and prescribed during times of similar economic constraint. I have written that the 1970s were years when productivity patterns began to unravel. I added that this decline was partially the result of an educational leveling off that began about 100 years ago. It took decades to organize mass and compulsory elementary and secondary schooling. This universal basic education had the effect of increasing productivity in what was largely a booming manufacturing economy. After World War II the GI bill of 1944 provided almost universal access to higher education. This initiative did not seem to have the same effect in terms of productivity that universal elementary and secondary schooling had. While the Civil Rights Act of 1968 desegregated elementary and secondary schools, the Act did not have a noticeable positive impact on industrial productivity that compulsory elementary and secondary schooling had. When it came to productivity, no educational development had the same impact as just getting everyone through elementary and secondary school. Once this goal was accomplished, however, productivity seemed to level off and even decrease. The 1980s introduced some new circumstances to that macro-economic problem. In the 1980s the American Federal Reserve Bank launched a campaign to bring inflation under control. In 1980 the inflation rate was 9 per cent. In 1983 it was 4 per cent and by 1985 it was as low as 3 per cent. This organized campaign brought the United States into a deep recession. Of even greater concern were the affects of trade deficits and budget deficits. To understand this, imagine the United States to be a corporation rather than a country with the Federal Reserve being the bank, which manages all loans and credits for that corporation. The Federal Reserve is a bank like all others and is not controlled by the government. The voters who elect the politicians are actually electing the custodians of their corporation who are entrusted with managing a sustainable context for their livelihood. However, the Federal Reserve is not responsible to the voters who elect those custodians. From 1950 to 1970 the federal debt of that corporation (i.e. what it owed in obligations to all banks, domestic and foreign) and the gross domestic product

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(i.e. what it produced and sold at a profit) grew at about the same rate. However, beginning in the 1980s the rate of debt far exceeded the gross domestic product every year. In 1982 that debt amounted to 120 billion dollars. From 1983 to 1986 that debt grew to over 300 billion dollars. This created a double problem that exists to this day. Since the 1970s, productivity has been decreasing annually and the level of debt has also been increasing annually to the extent that the debt cannot be repaid. This means that the corporation of the United States, which we imagine to be an independent country, is basically owned by the Federal Reserve Bank and foreign lenders. This came about for three reasons. First, defense spending rose by 40 per cent from 1981 to 1986. Secondly, taxes were also cut by the government, which decreased internal revenue. Thirdly, and most importantly, the Federal Reserve continued to raise its interest rate, which increased the amount of money that the government owed to its bank on money that it had already borrowed and which it was continuously borrowing. Along with a decrease in productivity, therefore, budget deficits rose in combination with a skyrocketing debt owed on high interest. A trade deficit comes about when a country consumes more than it produces, causing it to import more than it exports. In simple terms, it buys more than it makes, essentially, and so the country has to borrow from the future to consume what it buys now. Those purchases in the 1980s were done on borrowed deficit money with high interest rates. This led to the situation in which the United States became a debtor-country globally where it was once a creditor. Like a chronic disease, deficits gradually slow a nation’s energy and make it less able to recover from emergencies and crises. And when a body is already weakened, an acute disease can be finishing. These are all well-known facts. I state these to make the same point that I have been making consistently throughout this chapter. When we look at the prescriptions that are provided to address this crisis, we see that they are consistent with the ones that were provided in the 1930s, the 1960s, and the 1970s. In other words, the challenges seem to be recurrent and the solutions seem to be recurrent; but the problems are not going away. I believe that this is because researchers are ignoring the fundamentals behind their methods and theoretical assumptions. The source of the problem is not in schools and it is definitely not with the teachers. Teachers are being defined unjustly. A final examination of the 1980s, in light of what was occurring in the background, demonstrates this misapplication and this indefiniteness. In 1983, public concern about the state of American education was sharply heightened by the issuance of a federal report titled “A Nation at Risk: the Imperative of Educational Reform.” In response to “A Nation at Risk,” the Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy established the Task Force on Teaching as a Profession “in recognition of the central role that teachers play in the quality of education” (Harman 2001). The charge of the task force was to critically examine teaching as a profession in a report to the American people. In 1986, the task force issued “A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the twenty-first century.” The same year a consortium of research universities published Tomorrow’s Teacher. These documents have a 50-year lineage that is traceable directly to Willard Waller’s Sociology of Teaching. They were pivotal in defining what teacher research would be in the 1980s and 1990s. However,

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that research was really conceptualized during the Great Depression and researchers continue to revisit the problems and challenges that were delivered by that great, tragic event. In fact, I would argue that research on teacher education and their continuing development was born out of a series of policy decisions by the US Federal Reserve and the US Treasury that led to an undesirable contraction of monetary policies during the 1920s and early 1930s. To a large extent, the economic contractions and the insecurity that they breed continue to motivate teacher research to the present day. We have to question whether these circumstances are appropriate motivators for continuing to research teachers’ development. “A Nation at Risk” opens with a battle cry: “Our Nation is at risk!” The primary areas of weakness are in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation. The report acknowledges that there are many causes and dimensions of this problem. However, there is one dimension that undergirds prosperity, security, and civility and that is the quality of the education system. This analysis will be consistent with Waller’s sociological analysis of the school being a part of a dynamic system. It also identifies elementary and secondary schooling as curiously responsible for economic mood and sustainability since it is allegedly the engine that drives national preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation. The report warns that others are matching and surpassing national attainments and these “others” are identified as “competitors”; a synonym for “enemies.” We have in this the template of “education-as-war.” Indeed, the report suggests that “an act of war” has been perpetrated, but that this invasion has come about because the population itself has squandered its global supremacy. This has come about because of a unilateral “disarmament” that’s come about because of mediocrity in schooling. Again, we have a systems-analogy in place insisting that teachers will be identified as “our problem” since they are at risk of vulnerability and have lost their supremacy as the nation’s guardians. In fact, the teachers are the ones that are disarming the population. It is important to note that “quality of life” is not claimed to be compromised; that includes leisure activities, cultural resources, safety, social life, or mental health, since these are intangible. The vulnerability comes in more tangible and measured qualities that are associated with “standards of life.” These include material goods, services, and their availability. The “risk,” therefore, is felt with the potential loss of material wealth and this is the motivation for mobilization. This suggestion is repeated on the second page where “international standing markets” are identified as the place of battle. “If only to keep and improve on the slim competitive edge we retain in world markets,” the report goes on, “we must dedicate ourselves to the reform of our educational system for the benefit of all.” Again, this is a clear reference to the systems view that the school and its teachers are organs of a larger system and that system is primarily commercial, industrial, scientific, and technological. We have in these categories the areas in which schoolteachers must better themselves with new knowledge. The authors acknowledge that they are also concerned with developing individual powers of mind and participation in civilian life. However, I find this acknowledgement a bit misplaced. Clearly, “A Nation at Risk” is little concerned with bettering political participation and general

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intellectualism. It is an aggressive rallying call to an economic war where the soldiers must be recruited and trained in classrooms by redesigned teachers. Its assumptions are consistent with Waller’s system’s sociology and its problem is consistent with Lortie’s research problem that schoolteachers require reforming. This will be even more evident in “A Nation Prepared.” Indicators of vulnerability are found in declining achievement levels, declining aptitude, and declining performance in science and mathematics. Remediation rather than enrichment has become the standard. Privileged skills for development are all mathematical, scientific, and technological. The “illiteracy” that is at stake in this crisis is technological and scientific. The Carnegie Task Force will identify the challenge explicitly as one of “machinery.” We get a clue to why teachers are to increase their knowledge and professionalism in areas that have been traditionally the foundation of the traditional professions. We also get some sense of where “craft-knowledge” is to be focused: on machining curriculum in directions that are more technologically adaptive. The report aligns humanities and science with technology for this purpose. The report laments a loss of “shared vision for America.” We have to assume from the rhetoric that what is lost is a shared economic standard of material wealth. The report claims that this loss will be reversed by the creation of a “learning society.” My distinct impression is that this would be reversed, rather, by an “earning society.” If we review the history of economy and its connection to public schooling we can see that the rise of compulsory elementary and secondary schooling had the greatest effect on the quality of wage-labor in America. Greater access to higher education and the civil rights legislation did not have the same effect on productivity as these two initiatives alone. Productivity began to decline in the 1970s and it was clearly detected in the 1980s with an encroaching deficit-economy. Recovery came shortly after the mid-1980s because the price of oil declined, the Federal Reserve killed inflation with its aggressive policies, and the computerized technological and communicative innovations that we now take for granted were just beginning to take hold in all areas of business and commerce. If America was a nation at risk in 1983, therefore, it was not because the educational system was any source or dimension of the threat. The risk was coming from uncontrolled and expanding trade and budget deficits. And schoolteachers had nothing to do with creating that vulnerability to foreign competitors. It is in “A Nation Prepared” that we find explicit connections between the ways in which teachers’ educational development has been traditionally theorized and the deteriorating economic strength. The report opens with a claim that the 1980s will be remembered for two reasons: 1 2

sweeping reassessment of the nation’s economic strength an outpouring of concern for the quality of American education.

The report immediately systematizes the Great Depression presumption that schools and teachers are directly the cause and connection between economic downfall and its reversal. The problem can be logically explained in terms of an organic system:

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the world economy is evolving this evolution is threatening extinction a high-wage workforce is the adaptation schools are the incubators for that new force teachers are the custodians of those adapters.

Therefore, the “changing nature of the world economy makes it necessary to reverse the decline in performance in schools and to reach for higher standards” (Carnegie Forum 1986: 43). Teachers will be identified as the source and dimension of the adaptation. The competitors of the “Far East” are immediately identified as the enemies with which the conflict will be fought. They have the “machinery” that now threatens us. There was a time when these weapons were in the exclusive control of America but now the enemies have them too. In defence, the authors do not claim that the educational system is in decline. They acknowledge surrender: We do not believe that the educational system needs repairing; we believe it must be rebuilt to match the drastic change needed in our economy if we are to prepare our children for productive lives in the twenty-first century. (Carnegie Forum 1986: 44) It is interesting to note with this passage that the report is not calling for reform but for destruction of the system. It would appear that a “new deal” type of revolution is being advocated by the authors. In fact, they say as much when they claim that the “democratic birthright” is being threatened by this crisis. In addition to “machinery” they claim that “knowledge” will be the key to reclaiming that birthright. With this statement, they concur with Waller’s, Jackson’s, and Lortie’s analyses of schooling and of teachers specifically. They claim that “intuitive grasps of the ways in which all kinds of physical and systems work” will remediate the problem faced by America; consistent with what Waller suggested would improve teachers in schools. The economy is becoming “knowledge-based” where it was once routinized and skills-based and so teachers must also become knowledge-based professionals. The education system was designed progressively for a mass-production economy. That economy has now been exported off shore and a new American economic culture needs to be built since the one that built the present system is obsolete. The crucial function of this problem, in their estimation, is the teacher. Therefore, while they do advocate a redefinition of standards of excellence, they do not advocate any redefinition of teacher development. Their recommendations will be traditional and consistent with what has been proposed since 1932. Rebuilding teachers will rebuild cultural and economic obsolescence. They clearly state where teachers are obsolete. Teachers should have: 1

a grasp of how all kinds of physical and social systems work, a reference to what Waller advocated in the 1930s

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a feeling for what data is and to what use it can be put, a reference to what Lortie advocated in the 1970s an ability to see patterns of meaning where others see confusion, a reference to Jackson’s teachers being “myopic” to abstract reasoning.

Teachers need to think for themselves, as Lortie recommended, act independently but collaborate, as Waller and Lortie recommended, and render more critical judgment, as Lortie recommended. This will require “substantial intellectual accomplishment,” a quality that Jackson suggested was lacking in the teachers that he interviewed. Granted, they observe that teachers are frustrated, as Lortie also observed. This will be remedied if we can begin to select, identify, and recruit different kinds of teachers than the ones that are now self-selecting, a recommendation also made by Lortie. Teachers, the authors claim, were once the most educated members of the community. Lortie showed us that this was so because they had received theological training in preparation for church ministry. But now, the authors continue, everybody has their basic level of education and nobody respects them anymore because they don’t have something “arcane,” as Lortie writes, in their possession, which distinguishes them. Their solution is to refer to six traditional working conditions of professionals to show how teachers in schools lack all six (Carnegie Forum 1986: 47). These are: 1

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Professionals think for themselves and bring special expertise and judgment to their work. Lortie and Jackson also noted this. Lortie, in particular, advocated a professional autonomy for schoolteachers. Waller, Jackson, and Lortie advocated special expertise in identifying that teachers lack technical knowledge and vocabulary. Professionals have a high degree of autonomy in their work. Waller and Lortie concluded that this was lacking in the teacher’s world. Professionals define their standards of excellence. This is in reference to the guildspirit and the lodge-spirit of Lortie and Waller. Professionals have a major voice in deciding what program prepares novices and peers. This, again, is part of the guild-spirit and Lortie made this recommendation. Typically, organizations that employ professionals are not hierarchical but collegial. The lodge or guild is characteristic of this freedom, a characteristic advocated by all three basal authors. Finally, professionals are organized such that they can influence peers to maximize client services and policy direction for their workplace.

However, write the authors, that’s not what schools are like and that’s not what the teacher’s world is like. They are describing the characteristics of a “guild.” The guild-spirit is engendered by professions being able to select their clients and determine competitive fee-schedules. Members of a professional organization are always self-employed and are paid according to their productivity. They are not unionized and

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are very seldom, if ever, civil servants; although, they may contract their independent services to civil organizations. They are driven by a formation-spirit; that is to say, their activities are certified by their educational formation in higher learning institutions and by means of professional, peer-refereed credentials. As the authors acknowledge, “this is not the world of the school and not the world that teachers live in.” In response, they propose a plan. We need to draw inspiration from the established professions to professionalize teachers. They need codified knowledge, as Waller, Jackson, and Lortie recommended and this new knowledge should be refereed by the state and by peer-evaluation. Standards should be raised for selection, as Lortie also concluded. Tomorrow’s Teacher offers no new solutions or analyses. It is consistent, again, with what’s been recommended perennially since the 1930s. Teacher education needs to be made more intellectually solid to recognize levels in knowledge and commitment. Standards must be more relevant and defensible according to scientific criteria. Collaborative networks must be established to make schools better places for teachers to work (Anderson 1988). A basic assumption is lost in these recommendations. The craft-spirit of guilds developed without the assistance of the public treasury. They were autonomous from the beginning and depended on the fees of their clients whom they selected autonomously. The authors of “A Nation Prepared” acknowledge that their country does have a history of meeting educational crises head-on. This is true, but regulations and initiatives of the past such as New Deal and Great Society were intended to mobilize the entire population not just a select cadre. The recommendations make sense only if we accept the assumption that teachers are some nucleus of trained personnel who are capable of controlling or training others to rebuild an economic infrastructure. It is as if they are cast as a cell of potential revolutionaries who can promote the interests of the indoctrinated. Without this revolution, it is assumed, we will all be lost. Clearly, the writers of these reports place far too much onus on teachers in schools. They write as if “the economy” is some mysterious and uncontrollable force with a will of its own. The economy is our home – it is “us.” However, standards of material living and productivity standards are determined by monetary and government policies. Teachers cannot be blamed for compromises in material standards of living and they are not responsible for recessions. The Carnegie Task Force claims that “the public” has to understand that committed dollars will lead to a more competitive position in world markets. It will also lead to wider participation in an expanding economy. Their recommendations, they insist, are about preserving democracy in the twenty-first century. This seems very inconsistent, almost as if to apologize for blatantly arguing that their report is all about maintaining a material standard of living. They conclude that professionalizing the teacher workforce is the place to start their plan. But the basis for this plan is increasing teachers’ salaries to competitive levels of other professions and providing them with similar levels of support personnel and equipment. These recommendations perpetuate the characterization of teachers as specialneeds learners who are somehow disabled. Established professionals and their self-

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policing organizations exist in society because they have independently self-organized. They have become autonomous as part of free-market evolution. Teachers are highly skilled trades-people who provide services within government-sponsored institutions. They are (the) civil(ian’s) servants, not professionals even according to the definitions outlined by the Carnegie Task Force. Their spirit is vocational not formational and this spirit is consistent with their origin and historical development. The “risk” that was being experienced in the 1980s was not from foreign competitors. As “A Nation at Risk” did identify, “we have allowed this to happen to ourselves.” However, what has been “allowed,” as historical evidence shows, is expanding and debilitating trade and budgetary deficits and inappropriate monetary policies. These are not to be solved by rebuilding the education system and professionalizing teachers. They are solved at the ballot box and by critically challenging elected officials to institute more prudent monetary policies. And we should be asking whether it is in a governing party’s interest to critically educate the constituency that maintains their control of state legislatures. It is more in their interest to maintain their power by manipulating propaganda and policies to suit their vested interests. In the end, are these problems not solved by being more responsible in how we manage our own personal and economic affairs? There is a lot to be said for “empowering the individual” in this way, as President Bush advised in 1991. In conclusion, we can see consistently how perennial recommendations have tried to redefine teacher development for almost 80 years. These recommendations have come about as a result of perennially defining teachers in schools as learners who are at risk and lacking in essential knowledge. These recommendations to redefine teachers inappropriately have been justified by erroneously blaming them for economic shortcomings and assigning them the task of recovering those failings. In fact, teachers were always caring about their pupils and students as best they could for the short time that they had them in their classrooms. In doing so, they were always setting foundations for economic vitality. However, Lortie charges that teachers were never concerned with building or rebuilding their economy because they were always and only concerned with the immediate present. The future of economic outcomes of their immediate interactions with children and youth were beyond their control. And concern for those outcomes would have necessitated an objective stance to their concrete and subjective concerns that was inappropriate to their work. An objective theoretical framework that attempts to mechanize teachers’ activities as organs in an economic system misses the contribution that teachers are making in classrooms entirely. This contribution can only be appreciated if an alternative theoretical framework is applied to teaching, a framework that is at home in the inner world of teaching. This “world” was always visible, lives on its own terms and functions with its own idiosyncratic categories. It has been there for researchers to see all along, but it was overlooked because they have tried to rationalize teaching into a science fiction and to command that research narrative into a force that might rule the economy. In this, we have failed. We have failed at this project only, however, and we can succeed in understanding where teaching remains essential for our survival and prosperity. Were this to be done, then we might recognize that the reasons for

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economic decline and falling standards of living are to found in monetary, trade, taxation, and treasury policies, not in educational or curriculum policies. Theorists have been trying to synthesize incompatible worlds for decades and this has come largely at the expense of understanding the inner world of the elementary school classroom. That world has survived our analyses, thankfully, and is now waiting to be rediscovered.

Chapter 9

Of narratives and knowledge

From scientific formation to an emotional vocation My historical analysis in Chapter 7 was intended to provoke educational researchers to ask what our responsibilities should be in the twenty-first century. Given the possibility that economic cycles and waves have their own lifespan, and given that these spans are beyond our direct control, what kind of life do we want to promote in classrooms? What sort of teachers do we want to develop? The functionalist assumption that schools should prepare young people for success as adults leads educational researchers and governing policy directors to assume that institutional childhood education should assist our economic adaptation. Granted, schooling should instill competence and confidence in the young. But to directly connect what goes on in the elementary school classroom with the needs of a global, competitive economy is unfair to children and to teachers alike. As a result of the dangers and anxieties of this external environment, two dominant assumptions have emerged in the twentieth century literature: 1

2

Elementary schoolteachers have some kind of responsibility for promoting national economic success; therefore, their curriculum, pedagogical content knowledge, and knowledge of learners must promote adaptation to changing economic conditions. Elementary schoolteachers should engage in thought processes and practices that resemble the scientific professions; therefore, these logical processes and practices must be the means and methods of transforming them into professionals.

In the past, professionalizing teachers was seen as a way of marshalling resources to respond to declining economic stature. Teacher development has been in this way highly conflated with economic development. If we could liberate teachers from these enormous burdens and obligations then we could begin redefining their development alternatively without bearing the loads of economy and science. These alternative ideas were always a part of the research discourse. They were latent in the twentieth century

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foundations all along. For example, recall once more how Waller observed that teachers in schools longed to serve humanity and be called into the service of others. He theorized a collective consciousness in the school and that these thoughtful processes were based on commonsense insights. More than that, he noticed how teachers worked sacrificially and how they tolerated a debilitating singularity in exchange for that martyrdom. Jackson also found this with his teachers. Recall how Jackson’s teachers used the children’s faces as their entire reference point for present-oriented joy and glory. They were altruistic (a word that is related to the Latin word for “other,” i.e. alter) which meant that their momentary actions of impulse totally concerned sensuous communion with those whom they served. In an agapaean way, they truly loved their pupils and this proved that they loved humanity as well. They loved their work, if they were left alone to perform it with commitment. Recall, finally, how Lortie connected piety with pedagogy. Schoolteachers were self-selected vocationally. Their inner world and their outer world were logically inclusive. An exclusive opposition was imposed between the “now” of their world and the future of the institution, and this brought them grief and confusion. It seemed as if they didn’t participate in collegial collaboration. But this prejudice was imposed so long as a working model was injected from other trades that are not vocational. They were in communion with children, and radically so, but this only appeared as individualistic when researchers ignored that communion in favour of adult collaboration. These prejudices and assumptions sprang from a social scientific perspective. In fact, Lortie could not ignore occult and psychic power of school teaching, the submissive servant relationships that inspired them, the “hosting ethic” that sustained them, or the moralistic thought processes that bonded them together as colleagues. All of this came along with the uncertainties, the anxieties, and the doubts that even Huberman observed. But as Jackson wondered, perhaps these “faults” are not faults at all but existential strengths that make their lives in classrooms distinctive from all other professions. These anomalies are exactly the entry points to a redefined research on teacher development. Waller, Jackson, and Lortie always provided us with the bases for these redefinitions but they were always sidelined as anomalous to how development was to be defined and theorized. Throughout this book we have read how researchers have always alluded to the ancient and spiritual foundations of school teaching. They were always there in the background but because we were blinded by science we were unable to welcome, value, and validate these alternative foundations. In this chapter, I refer to research that was conducted during the late 1980s and 1990s in what I am calling the “golden years” of teacher development research. If “golden” means abundance, then this is an appropriate designation. These were the years that the rhetoric of professionalism and its connection with scientism matured into a unanimous chorus. My own voice as an educational researcher became part of that establishment (e.g., Neufeld 1991). Abundance and unanimity is consistent with how S¸ims¸ek applies the Kondratieff theory to educational research. These years were part of a routine wave of educational reform when themes matured into a widespread research agenda. However, we are entering a wave when new ideas are sorely needed and will emerge if we are sensitive enough and aggressive in developing them. We are

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entering an era when curriculum theorizing will germinate and blossom with radically new and unorthodox ideas. But we must be open to these ideas. We must promote them and experiment with them in text, through study and instruction, with discourse, and by conference. If we examine the course of ideas-generation and their relationship to economic development historically, then it is clear that we are privileged to be living at a time when educational and curriculum ideas are budding for long-term future development. This is a most opportune time to be graduate students of Education in a generation. It is also the most exciting time to be professing Education. We have a sufficient knowledge base for theorizing teachers as reflective practitioners and professionals. But there is grossly insufficient research on the spiritual dimension of life in schools and how that alternative world, that was with us all along, holds the keys to re-visioning schools into the institutions that they are to become in the twenty-first century. In Chapter 6, I took great lengths to illustrate how the scientific tradition in educational discourse provides the knowledge base for equating human thought to the laws of physics. Thought’s origin in the external world, the part-whole division of reality, the linear reasoning process of emerging knowledge, its relationship to biological evolution, and the conception of infinitesimal developments towards consummation – these themes convince us that what was once the “spirit” of human thought is now an expression of material “physicality.” Even our own bodies have become materials to be objectified, studied, treated, and conversed with reflectively. Cognitively, we allow ourselves to accept the physicality of our thoughts and of our spirits. We believe that thought takes place in miniscule portions of the brain and that these processes are beyond direct observation by ordinary means (Becker 1932: 17). Granted, “mind” is immaterial, but we assume its functions are the result of subtle fluids and electrical impulses. These fluids and impulses operate according to the basic laws of physics. We’ve come to believe that these “infinitesimal developments” are the movements of our cognitive development and these movements drive the progress of our development. We cannot grasp these material motions because they are microscopic. As a result, we rely on a history of reflective reasoning to organize this process for our use and application. This meta-narrative of thought began to be told in the mid 1600s with telescopic technology, the first great instrument of human objectification. As an elementary schoolteacher, I was a masterful product and disciple of this metanarrative; of its implied methods, and of its aims. From 1982 to 1990 I taught children mathematics from the age of six to twelve years. I specialized in geometry and I instructed this subject in the French language. I was respected by my peers, admired by the administration of my school district, and taught the methods of my work to colleagues at provincial pedagogical conferences. I was a consummate “professional.” However, I was completely unaware of explicit scientific methods and of their goals during those years. I was a student of Humanities and modern languages before I was a certified classroom teacher. I was also completely unaware of the economic “meltdown” that took place in 1987. During those years, my life was entirely devoted to the children in my classroom and I don’t even recall hearing about recessions at that time.

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It is difficult now, and would have been very puzzling for me then, to have imagined that all my knowledge of those children and of my classroom’s activities, began with sensation. However, naively and pre-scientifically I could acknowledge that everything about the children in my classroom environment was conveyed to me through perception. I can’t imagine then, and even in hindsight, that I would have acknowledged anything differently. Those experiences would have been imprinted and internalized in forms that were identical, essentially, to what they were, as I perceived them to be. As an early apprentice, my thought processes consisted in extracting the essential forms of life in the classroom as it was presented to me. That world, which absorbed me, appeared to me directly and I tried to respond immediately without reflection. My experience was of a private inner world that I had difficulty sharing with outsiders because it was internal to me as a teacher. So when I described that world during pedagogical conferences, my presentations consisted of videotaped footage of the children in the process of learning and actual artifacts of their manufacture as testimonies to good practice. I then answered questions from colleagues and referred to concrete examples rather than to abstractions. During one presentation, I actually brought a large group of pupils to the conference and they described their learning processes to other teachers in their own words. The other teachers then asked them questions. You can imagine how emotional I felt during that exchange. I could not “abstract” those experiences from their natural setting because I believed that their appearance was the truth. As much as I was able, I had to show others the actual forms of my professional competence, even include showing them the actual “sensory objects” themselves (i.e. the actual pupils), so that they could speak for themselves. And this was because my “knowledge,” as a teacher, consisted of what had appeared to me directly without any mediation. Its form was identical to its essence and there was no division between me, as one sensory object, and any other aspect of what was experienced in those classrooms, including all of the children. This absorption is exactly what Schön refers to when he’s comparing the feeling of professional knowledge-in-action to being in “the groove” for the jazz musician. For Polanyi, it would be as if knowledge was at the hyphenated touch between my fingers and the strings of my wooden instrument. For teachers, that “groove” lies between their bodies and the bodies of the children in the classroom and its music is played when learning is happening in that medium. As Foucault would say, its power arises in discourse. Schön, however, who locates power in action, was completely unknown to me in those days, even though he was writing and publishing at exactly this time (i.e. 1983–1987). How might we align my essentially emotional experience to the thought processes and knowledge of the sciences? We would begin by recalling, in those terms, that I was never actually united with that experience. Instead, my concept of that experience was conveyed to me as sensory, mediated, and universal “ideas” – never as the actual, sensuous experience. Had I tried to represent and convey my ideas and their concepts abstractly during those teacher-collegial conferences, I would have written and read an academic paper. The teachers at the pedagogical conferences would have found that to be useless. By showing videotapes, handling artifacts, and by actually bringing my children to the conference I was trying to display the actual, sensuous images of the

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experience itself. My goal was not to give my colleagues knowledge; it was to invoke their emotional engagement with my teaching and learning, that is, with my teacher “development.” In contrast, transmitting knowledge involves teaching some kind of little history that begins with particular sensations of simple external objects and then following a scripted process that ends up with synthesized knowledge. I’m not claiming that I was ignorant of these scientific processes completely. In hindsight, I now understand that my use of these principles was restricted to how I organized my subject-matter knowledge. I organized my curriculum into graduated structures, obviously, because I was teaching six grades at once in rotary. I specialized in mathematics and so I had to hold some implicit respect for scientific reasoning. And while my delivery of the curriculum was admittedly scientific in its design and structure, my subjective experience of its delivery was anything but that. Let me explain this in the following way by trying to characterize what happened in that classroom with the rhetoric of physical, scientific reasoning. To begin with, it would be bad pedagogy to ask a six-year-old to grasp the concept of a triangle in graphic form. Piaget helps us understand why this would be inappropriate. We have to introduce the simple idea of angularity and provoke mental operations for the child that will eventually lead to the more complex concept of tri-angularity in its objective “form.” Children are introduced into an external world where the general essence of a triangle does not exist. Only individual things that exhibit these characteristics exist and we begin by interacting with them. My goal, as their teacher, therefore, is to incite mental operations. I want to expose six-year-olds to the universal principles that are products of objects that are “outside of them.” I do this by presenting them with problems that they will want to solve in order to stimulate ascension into inductive reasoning. Of course, they’re totally unaware that this is going on. I provoke it because I’m the teacher and I measure its effects when I observe it happening. I was not trying to create people with scientific worldviews. In those days, I was just trying to help children fall in love with “tri-angularities.” I wanted them to have an aesthetic fascination for those qualities and that was all. A young child will take pleasure in tracing, coloring, feeling, playing with, manipulating, patterning with, and constructing sensory objects that have a triangular shape long before they are able to measure, theorize, or apply the drafting-power of that form. They don’t even name it when they’re six years old. In this way, the operations of the mind produce, rather than extract directly, the general idea of angularity. Therefore, the connection between abstract ideas and their inner reality has to remain indirect. To help them abstract their sense of geo-metrics, I had to help them withdraw simple ideas from complex realities. I had to help the children select ideas and then encourage them to generalize them with memory of other external experiences that I provided. After many sensual encounters that I organized as their teacher, some children eventually encountered the universal, one, complex idea that could then be applied to many unique cases: “a triangle.” At the outset, I had guided them into deductive descent. It takes a few years, sometimes, for that complex and distinct idea to synthesize from the fog of their primitive experiences. But eventually, they adopt a technical vocabulary that is only reserved and delivered after deduction descends back

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into concrete life. Universal ideas can then be applied to many other individuals with other qualities and names – e.g., isosceles, scalene, and right – but that’s for the 10-yearolds. In the mean time, the universal idea of “triangle” is the product of a mental process that would have been going on years earlier involving distinct instances of individual “tastings,” in Dewey’s words. These led eventually to expertise in geometry. But the younger children just ran to enter my room (the grade one pupils called the class “jontemry”) because the activities simply provided them with aesthetic pleasure. I did this all in the French language, as I mentioned, and language played a fundamental role in forming complex ideas. Language is indispensable to knowledge because language links several truths together into complex frameworks. It is important, in my view, that teachers be highly articulate in the native language of the classroom. Without a complex command of one’s own language in the classroom, how can the teacher command and communicate complex concepts at any grade level? But each grade level received a different level of complexity depending on what I was trying to expose them to from the external world. With their growth of knowledge, their ability to engage in reasoning emerged and grew, as did their command of language. Reasoning, therefore, is only glue. It binds knowledge together after simple ideas have undergone the logical process of moving from parts into complex wholes. Reasoning holds together the history of our mind, and language marks its signposts for directionality. Knowledge can only be a scientific achievement. Knowledge in itself has no power. Control and dominion over the external world from which simple ideas originate is powerful. It’s powerful to be in control and to have dominion over the world because then we can adapt when the world presents us with its problems. And from a scientific perspective, the world is only a problematic environment. I suppose my service to those children could be represented as providing them with control and dominion over their world. Maybe some of them even became engineers, or doctors, architects, even mathematicians, or what have you; but from a presentist perspective, they were only and always the children, and nothing more. It was my calling to help them love geometry and to comprehend its beautiful concepts. At that time, I recall telling my friends that I instructed language “arts.” Teaching six grades together in rotary allowed me to exploit acts of memory regarding past and similar experiences. It permitted me to grasp and hold several memories for pupil-development so that they could recognize similarities and distinguish them from other sensations that they’d had over the years. It provided me with direct access to their inductive ascensions so that I could stimulate powers of abstraction. Eventually, it was my role to indoctrinate them into believing in the methods and goals of the Newtonian worldview, even though neither I nor they had any conception whatsoever that I was actually doing that. My role as their teacher was to train them to control and master their ideas because ideas can be reflected upon. Very occasionally, I encouraged the upper grades to manipulate the concrete objects as they had done when they were younger. I did this to reinforce their ideas. They enjoyed these activities because they saw it as mere “play.” However, it was also my responsibility to assist them in enjoying the complex forms as much as they had enjoyed playing with those

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concrete objects in years gone by. They were aware that they were to eventually say farewell to the childish objects because it was their responsibility to understand that they were working with ideas all along. The scientific worldview comes to its maturity when we recognize that our ideas are the only and true appearances of reality. We cannot grasp the sensory objects in the essence of their physical laws. We don’t touch atoms, protons, and nuclei. We remain separated from the essential, external, physical world just as those 12-year-olds knew that their bodies were separated from those objects. For the 12-year-olds, those objects were abstractions of the ideas that they were finally in command of. They could organize them into complex patterns that could serve their purposes as adaptive masters of a scientific and technological world. Perhaps this mastery is what’s being expressed at this very moment in their labs, in their engineering or architectural firms, or within their medical practices. As a responsible teacher, I had to subject the children’s experiences to standards and then discipline them into those standards. Six-year-olds can play with tiles and build things with blocks. But in the process of that play I am looking for the earliest conceptualization of abstracted principles that are universal to the geo-metered world. I must teach them to abstract consciously and deliberatively, not just unconsciously or by accident. That’s “instruction” and it’s the discipline that Waller refers to as debilitating because it’s not just play – its “work.” I had to become very familiar with dwelling in the world of simple, sensory ideas. Waller also believes that this is debilitating for the adult. The work also required forcing as many children as I could to conform to the learningmethods of science, a completely artificial way of thinking about the world for them. This is what Waller called despotic. I had to investigate their thought processes, identify with them, and then align the children with science consciously. I then had to evaluate them constantly, as Jackson observed, according to their success in achieving artificial and objective standards. Thought may be as constant as breath. But reasoned processes of organizing material and data are not constant. They are acquired and highly trained skills. Thought is part of the inner world and is common to the thinking of the animal kingdom. What made us distinctive, as Mead claimed, are memory and self-consciousness, or induction and deduction, as Dewey theorized. It was my duty as a teacher to redirect children’s attention on immediate and direct sensory experiences to the outer world of nature’s physical laws. As my graduates, they left the school with a highly sophisticated scientific worldview. But that occurred without any conception or recollection of any alternative because the pre-scientific view was the one that they were born into. I had helped them to forget it and to lose all faith in it, because that was not “the way” of their world. A mature, professional foundation had to be laid with the laws and reason(s) of science. It was my responsibility to convince those children that the constructive actions of the mind would provide them with the true account of reality. It was my role to train them to abstract and construct complex ideas so that those ideas could emancipate them and empower them in the external world of problem posing and problem solving that they were entering. Maintaining the authority of this meta-narrative has also been the role of teacher-education professors as they prepare their candidates for the classroom.

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I see all of this now only as a reflection. Reflection comes from the Latin word for “bending.” My reflection in this chapter bends back to those years and bends forward into my present for the sake of making a futuristic argument in this book. I now comprehend these experiences in a new way. But if Dr. Jonathan Neufeld, the university researcher, had visited Jonathan Neufeld, the elementary schoolteacher, and analyzed his work on these terms, I would have become very impatient and irritated with him, as some of Lortie’s teachers were during their interviews. The language of science could not have helped me to understand how to reach that one, single child at risk, who I knew in my heart I could reach with an innovative experience designed just for him or her alone. When I work with university students I feel withdrawn again into the same ecstatic present that called me into teaching in “the first place,” there, in 1982. And for me to undergo this scientific process of reflective analysis now would be just as troublesome and inappropriate as it would have been then. Clearly, this exercise has shown me that knowledge of subject matter was fundamentally important. But knowledge of the social dynamics, educational contexts beyond that immediate one and, to some extent, of ends, purposes and values and their philosophical grounds were not relevant to what I valued in the flight of those teachable moments. In those days, I was not interested in the “self-formation” that came from such reflections. I was ignorant of how scientific thought processes were theorized. I was instead constantly and continuously obsessed with the “self-invocation” that arose from direct and sensory relationships with my pupils. This sentiment made me very protective of outside interference, as Waller and Jackson confirmed. In fact, the more that I objectively analyzed the dynamics of education from a social-scientific perspective, the further away my interest moved from the needs of the classroom because those ideas seduced me away from its immediacy. Ultimately, those social sciences caused me to forsake the children in the elementary school classroom altogether as I mutated into a professional, reflective researcher.

Knowledge, teaching, and the foundations of formation During the time that I was proficiently teaching children geometry Shulman (1987) published a summary of knowledge and teaching as foundational for reforming teachers into professionals. Close examination of that paper reveals its scientific fundament. It also provides clues to where Shulman is looking beyond the scientific worldview because that view limits teacher development in some very significant ways. By now, the reader should recognize these themes when they are referenced. The reader should also begin to be somewhat familiar with alternatives to the scientific worldview, as these have been alluded to by the various authors that I have reviewed. For example, notice how Shulman prologues his essay with “a portrait of expertise.” If we are going to study the teacher as some kind of expert, then we’re going to be examining coping and adapting to the ways of the world as externally presented. An expert, according to the tradition, is someone who’s well traveled in that external environment. More to the point, however, Shulman writes that his essay is going to be about “the management of

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ideas within the classroom” (1987: 1; italics in original). Therefore, we should prepare ourselves for a scientific examination of what the teacher does expertly and for a defense of science as the foundation of the new reform to professionalize teachers. However, consistently with the other authors in this examination, Shulman leaves room for a pre-scientific perspective. He does this on various occasions. It begins with his description of Nancy, the expert, who was “like a symphony conductor” structuring, expanding, and controlling the “rhythm of the classroom life” (2). She cannot only conduct her orchestra from the podium, she can sit back and watch it play with virtuosity by itself (3). Clearly, knowing was in her ad libitum action(s) as much or even more than in how she managed her ideas. Nancy may be a 25-year veteran teacher; she’s also an artist. By deferring to musical and rhythmic metaphors to describe Nancy’s work, Shulman leaves some space for the occult vocation of teaching and learning. He will avail this space on other occasions in his paper but his main task is to assign scientific metaphors for her knowledge. At the time of Shulman’s publication, the political environment of the United States was searching for all means of coping with a failing economy. As I have shown, the professionalization of teachers was touted as a means of overcoming those difficulties. Various stakeholders were calling for the elevation of teaching to a more respected, more responsible, more rewarding and better rewarded occupation (3). He cites the Holmes Group (1986) and the Carnegie Task Force (1986) as two sources of this call. Standards were to be raised and this tells us that ideas needed to be reformed more than anything else. When these could be re-managed then teachers could be trained to become elevated accordingly. The assumption of all arguments in those reports was that a “knowledge base” could be codified for teachers in terms of skill, understanding, technology, ethical disposition, and collective responsibility as a means of communicating what a professional teacher should be. He then adds, The rhetoric regarding the knowledge base, however, rarely specifies the character of such knowledge. It does not say what teachers should know, do, understand, or profess that will render teaching more than a form of individual labor, let alone be considered among the learnèd professions (4). In response, Shulman presents an argument for the content, character, and sources of such knowledge. He takes advantage of the kinds of insights that Piaget provides from his investigations of knowledge growth. These insights will determine his perspective to a large degree. It will be a biosocial viewpoint that will look to the external world as the source of internal thought processes. He will also base his examination on Dewey’s theory of inquiry, another reliance on the foundations of the scientific worldview. Teachers’ knowledge base will be scientifically based, therefore, and this conforms largely to standards from the National Board of Medical Examiners (5). Clearly, teachers are to be certified based on external standards. These standards must be legitimized by three factors: 1 2 3

they should be closely tied to scholarship and academic disciplines they should be tied to foundational processes of education (i.e. psychology; sociology) they must have face-validity; that is, they have to make sense to actual teachers.

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The third factor is the problematic one. It is possible to abstract teaching from the lived context of the classroom as I did in the previous section of this chapter. It is difficult to align those abstractions with the actual life in classrooms. Shulman clearly separates his perspective from behaviorism in psychology as it discourages the rich and extensive viewpoint that he will promote. His view of teaching is assisted by Fenstermacher (1986) who advocates the value of understanding and comprehension in the formation of a knowledge base. The use of the word “base” demonstrates that this investigation is intended to locate an objective storage or cache memory of universal ideas or abstract principles that can serve to legitimize teachers as learnèd professionals. This is visible when Shulman asks how teacher knowledge might be categorized if it were objectively portrayed in a handbook, encyclopaedia, or “some other format for arraying knowledge” (8). In such a manual, we might see various repositories of knowledge, such as content knowledge, curriculum knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, knowledge of learners, of educational contexts, and knowledge of educational ends, purposes, and values. Of these, pedagogical content knowledge is the most difficult to isolate with precise accuracy because it is the most difficult to set in place and order. Shulman assumes that schoolteachers are members of a scholarly community rather than a collegial trade. He wishes to define them essentially as a learnèd profession. If they are to be associated with scholarship then we have to acknowledge that they’re going to be conceptualized as would-be scientists. He cites Plato, Dewey, Neill, and Skinner as foundations for this scholarly tradition, as well as Piaget, Maslow, Erikson, and Bloom. Reflecting personally, I was first exposed to the writings of A. S. Neill as a young Humanities undergraduate. My undergraduate colleagues generally found his writings and work at Summerhill to be fascinating. But when he and his work were presented once more to me during teacher certification, the mood of the class was one of abject horror. We were also exposed to the writings of Piaget, Maslow, Erikson, and Bloom but saw little value in these theories at that time. And I even find it difficult to excite graduate students of education with the writings of Plato and Dewey. I love these theorists, as my book betrays, because I’m a researcher of teaching and learning. I teach these theories. But elementary schoolteachers don’t teach theories. They teach children. And as undergraduate, pre-service teacher candidates, we knew in our hearts that we were going to be called upon to draw out some kind of inner wisdom that the instructors of the teacher’s college didn’t even acknowledge. Unanimously, that year was a waste of time and tuition because we were desperately looking for something that we could not articulate. We only knew that we needed some revelation of what we were searching for by self-selecting ourselves as teachers. We wanted to know why we were being called into this service. Shulman tries to acknowledge this most overlooked aspect with his reference to the “wisdom of practice” (1987: 11). The wisdom of practice is the least codified in part because it cannot be codified mathematically. But Shulman continues to try to apply this “wisdom” to some sort of codification scheme. He claims that unlike architecture, law, or medicine, teaching is done without an audience of peers, which makes it devoid of a history of practice. It lacks what he calls a “system of notation” (12). I have shown that this “system” is in fact mathematical in its origin. Mathematics and mathematical reasoning are de-notative

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systems that have been applied to the classic professional disciplines that he cites. These professions have been the perennial references to what teaching is supposed to resemble. They show up in Waller, as well as Lortie, and in the policy documents of the 1980s. Shulman echoes these when he writes that the practitioners simply “know” a great deal that they have never even tried to articulate (12). Therefore, A major portion of the research agenda for the next decade will be to collect, collate, and interpret the practical knowledge of teachers for the purpose of establishing a case literature codifying its principles, precedents, and parables. (Shulman 1986: 12). “Wisdom-of-practice” studies are difficult to codify, Shulman writes, because our current “blueprint” for teachers’ knowledge has many cells and categories with only the most rudimentary place-holders, much like the chemist’s periodic table of a century ago. We have to notice the stark resemblance of this project to the ways in which earliest scientific disciplines were codified. As recently as 1975, Lortie called for such “blueprints” in an attempt to codify the spontaneous features of school teaching so that it can be somehow controlled for standardization and evaluation. Since these analyses arise from policy reports that grow directly out of economic uncertainty (e.g., The Carnegie Task Force on Teaching as a Profession, 1986) we can conclude once more that these strategies to professionalize teachers are all about economic mobilization. Shulman continues this project with the method that is now familiar. Teaching begins with 1 2 3 4

an act of reason (encountering a problem) continues with a process of reasoning (inductive ascent) culminates in performances of imparting, eliciting, involving, or enticing (deductive descent) It is then thought about until the process can begin again. (13)

These actions duplicate the reflective reasoning processes of Mead and Dewey. Teaching, for scientists, is comprehension and reasoning, or transformation and reflection (13). These claims are based in part on Fenstermacher’s (1986) goal of teacher education, which is to “educate teachers to reason soundly” and to “perform skillfully.” Accordingly, good teaching is not only about effective behavior; it must also rest on a foundation of adequately grounded premises (13). Premises are what uphold reasoned arguments like legs hold up a table. It is necessary, therefore, for potentially professional teachers to be able to hold up justifications for their decisions like lawyers. If they claim that their decisions “felt” right, rather than “they knew what they were doing” based on evidence and reason, then their decisions would be ungrounded and unprofessional. Logical, scientific thought processes underlie decisions about pedagogy and they should also underlie normative, ethical decisions (13). They should ground methods and strategies as well as teachers’ purposes for choosing and

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continuing to choose their vocation. Personally, I would have found this impossible to articulate when this article was published in 1987. At that time I was immersed in the activities of my classroom and this language would have only puzzled and confused me. When faced with my children, this would have had no validity. I can apply these principles now that I am far removed and remote from that immediate and emotionally intensive setting. It is the language of formation; that is, creating “forms” from simple and sensory ideas. It is not the language of vocation which would have inspired me in 1987 and which continues to inspire me to this day. Shulman clearly identifies the scientific perspective of his argument when he writes: “This image of teaching involves the exchange of ideas” (13). In beautifully classic terms he lays out how ideas are “grasped,” probed, and comprehended by those who turn them “about in their minds.” The ideas are then shaped so that students can grasp them. Grasping, however, is not a “passive” act, but a vigorous process of interaction. This kind of language relates back to eighteenth century physical science and John Locke who is its self-proclaimed under-laborer. Consistently, ideas originate externally to the teacher. They are initiated by some form of “text”: a book, syllabus, and an actual piece of material that the teacher wishes to have understood (14). In any case, however, some sort of material almost always is involved. This conception of pedagogical reasoning assumes that the teacher is presented with the challenge (i.e. the problem) of taking what he or she already understands and making it ready for effective instruction (14). The starting point and terminus is “an act of comprehension” (14). We have here the classic framework of scientific reasoning that is based on the Newtonian physics of straight-line motion, but which in many ways reaches directly to John Locke’s theory of human understanding (1690). This is a powerful and effective foundation for treating and resolving problems in our physical environment. However, it is my position that this foundation and its heritage are inappropriate to sensing the pedagogical interactions between schoolteachers and their pupils. Shulman’s model of practice (i.e. “Nancy”) is a secondary schoolteacher. Perhaps this reasoning process has more face validity for that level of instruction. But if we return to Shulman’s description of her teaching we read references to music and drama rather than to physics and mathematics. She was highly interactive and improvisational. She “played” the classroom. If we look at the description of how she delivered her material, we do observe subtle aspects of the scientific method. For example, she broke reading skills into consequent levels (1987: 2): 1 2 3 4 5

translation connotation interpretation application evaluation.

Her combination of subject-matter understanding and pedagogical skill was dazzling, according to Shulman. She had a flexible style and adapted to the characteristics of the learners. When they encountered problems, she “self-consciously” stayed at the lower

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levels of the reading ladder. When these problems were absent, she let the students teach each other. Her patterns and styles were not “uniform” or predictable. Sometimes, she sat back and watched the classroom play on its own. There’s no scientific reasoning here. We are witnessing the ad libitum improvisation of the jazz musician. This is not about knowledge, although knowledge of how to play the instrument must pre-date the fleeting and pleasurable “groove” of being one with the music. Clearly, subject-matter knowledge and linguistic fluency are pre-required. However playing in the groove of instruction is about an aesthetic sense of being united immediately with the students in the classroom and extracting their sensory image. It’s about being in some inner world where Nancy is and where she loves to dwell. The subject matter is a medium for that psychic union and for the rewards that come with that experience, one that can only resemble religious ecstasy. Shulman distinguishes this experience from science when he states that “the key” to distinguishing the knowledge base of this teaching lies at the intersection of content and pedagogy, or in Nancy’s capacity to transform the content into “forms” that are powerful yet adaptive to variations of ability. As long as we organize communication into “forms” or “ideas” then we remain within the scientific worldview. It is possible, of course, to organize Nancy’s music into this sort of linear cable, and Shulman does this (16): 1 2 3 4 5

preparation representation instruction adaptation tailoring.

All of these processes of transformation, he writes, result in a plan, or set of strategies, to present a lesson, unit, or course. This rhetoric of formation objectifies Nancy’s music as if removed from her club, studio, or basement jam session, so that it can be communicated and standardized as media for external evaluation. Understanding these ideas begins externally to the actual experience of the performance itself and it ends in a context that is also external to the aesthetic experience. Forms, ideas, and standards are not for Nancy, but for researchers and policy directors to understand. Having been a teacher like Nancy, and having been a musician myself for years, I understand how I was successful in this book at reflecting and reasoning out the process that I underwent on a daily basis with my pupils in 1987. But at that time, I could not have communicated what I was doing to an apprentice with this scientific language. Of course, I could have evaluated their performance according to these standardized forms, almost as if they were “still life” inanimate objects to be captured as they actually lived. As Shulman states perfectly: Reflection “is what a teacher does when he or she looks back at the teaching and learning that has occurred, and reconstructs, re-enacts, and/or re-captures the events, the emotions, and the accomplishments” (19). This is exactly what I did at the opening of this chapter. I might agree with Shulman that this scientifically based “set of processes” is how a professional learns from experience. It is how I re-captured and re-presented what I did 20 years ago. And

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I acknowledge that I probably did reflect on my strategies on an ongoing basis in those days. But I don’t actually recall having done that. However, I am able to recall the emotional and spiritual elation and ecstasy of my life in classrooms during that time. Shulman adds that the processes of his “model” are presented in sequence (i.e. as a linear cable that reaches from the external world) but they are “not meant to represent a set of fixed stages, phases or steps.” This cannot be so. Shulman’s “models, plans, and blueprints,” as Lortie literally called for, assume and rely on the basic and fundamental laws of physics. It may seem to the objective researcher that processes occur in a different order. They may even seem truncated, ignored, or given short shrift in this model. But in any case, Shulman concludes, “a teacher should demonstrate the capacity to engage in these processes when called upon.” If these logical thought processes do not seem to be displayed in a lawful manner, then more observation is required by the researcher, because fixed laws are under these processes and we can vary our description of their manifestation in practice. But scientific physical laws that underlie life in classrooms, if assumed, are either true or untrue. And since performance can be standardized according to physical laws, any teacher should demonstrate the “capacity to engage” with them “when called upon” or when trained to do so (19). Thus Shulman concludes his essay with a summary of the relationships between knowledge, teaching policy, and educational reform. During the late 1980s and early 1990s investigations, deliberations, and debates regarding what teachers know and should know have never been more active. This was a time of widespread confidence in teacher professionalism as a means of economic reformation and rebirth. As Shulman cites, these interventions included raising standards for admission to certification programs, establishing state and national examinations, expanding the preparation time for teachers (allegedly because there’s so much more to know), and organizing programs of induction and mentoring of new recruits (because the most important learning occurs only in the workplace). It is noteworthy that “learning” and “socialization” are used synonymously, an influence from the research tradition of Waller and Lortie. I acknowledge that these are all worthwhile efforts that might benefit teachers and schools. However, we must note that these reforms, in large measure, [C]all for teaching to follow the model of other professions that define their knowledge in systematic terms, require extended periods of preparation, socialize neophytes into practice with extended periods of internship and residency, and employ demanding national and state certification procedures. (Shulman 1987: 20) In 1992, Gottlieb tried to document what kind of new knowledge was being made available for policy makers, schools of education and the teachers’ professionalization project. He and his research team began by closely reading the US education reports of the l980s (“A Nation at Risk,” 1983; Tomorrow’s Teacher, l986; and “A Nation Prepared,” 1986) as “founding texts” in which a particular US discourse of educational reform manifests itself. They showed how this rhetoric entered the transnational knowledge system, and was used to legitimate and accommodate reform reports and

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local policies in other countries, e.g., Israel and Korea. “Upgrading” teacher education from an undergraduate to a graduate program involved reforming the discourse of teacher education. This research looked closely at the specific linguistic and rhetorical tools used in documents describing the “old” undergraduate programs and the new graduate teacher-education programs to understand what this formation/reformation of teacher-education discourse has entailed, and what consequences it has had for the teachers’ professionalization project. Close examination of the earlier quote illustrates language that imitates the preparation of medical professionals (e.g., “internship,” “residency”). With the addition of “systematic knowledge” and “national and state certification” we can begin to see how the early reforms predicted by Waller and Lortie became implemented. We also see how teacher-education reform depends on the codification and certification of ideas, as “forms,” as the basis for re-forming the ideas that teachers bring to their work inherently. As Shulman writes, standards are necessarily predicated on images of teaching and its demands. Standardized “codes” will originate in the external features of teachers’ work and those forms will reform teachers’ lives in classrooms based on an overall image that imitates the models, plans, and blueprints of the medical profession. This conception of pedagogical reasoning places emphasis on the intellectual basis for teaching performance rather than on “behavior alone” (Shulman 1987: 20), a reference to the limitations of behavioral psychology and its conception of teacher-effectiveness. But in moving to this “intellectual basis” researchers are still adopting the same scientific basis and method for developing teachers. This scientific worldview, as I showed in Chapter 6, may revise scholarly foundations, organizational dynamics, and curriculum content coherently. Content knowledge can conform to scientific foundations, organizational dynamics can be analyzed with scientific methods, and curricula can be prescribed that assume the scientific worldview. But as long as we remain under the unquestioned purview of science we will always be abstracted from the immediate life in classrooms. Shulman ends by warning that we must avoid rigid orthodoxies. We must standardize without standardization. But this cannot be so. The foundations and laws of science are orthodox and they are to be standardized. And when he cautions that researchers must be careful not to produce an overly technical image of teaching, or a scientific enterprise that loses its “soul,” he identifies exactly what the implications will be from this professional reformation. As with medical science, he notes, problems arise when doctors treat diseases and not “the person.” Similar problems arise, I would argue, when teachers have to teach according to the demands of standardized tests rather than to the demands of single individuals who are at risk. He closes by reminding his readers that “Nancy” is the model; which is to say, she is the “predicated image of teaching and its demands” and, as such, what she accomplishes and demonstrates is the basis for the re-formation. But Nancy is a model of vocation, not the image of any orthodox and standardized formation. Nancy is “a single individual” who is called to love her students through the communication of the signs, gestures, and values of what she teaches. She is responding exactly to the same calling that beckoned me from 1982 to 1990. It is not an abstract and codified knowledge base, not an understanding of the

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sources of that knowledge, and not the cognitive complexities of the pedagogical process that make the emergence of such teachers more likely. It is nothing other than what is taking place in her inner world, or her “soul,” as Shulman so rightly indicates, that invokes this emergence.

Emotion, commitment, and the response to vocation In 1994 Michael Fullan stated that there was “depressingly little fundamental analysis” of what the concept of teacher development actually signified (1994: xi). Almost 15 years later, this book alleviates that depression. I would rephrase this by stating that we had an inadequate analysis of the conceptual foundations of the research literature, especially at the stem of its basal texts. And when, during the high tide of teacher development research, Lieberman (1994: 28) wrote that initiatives were accompanied by “a new language describing new ideas such as hope, commitment, and connection” she was not far away from where the research was headed. However, with the imperatives of science and its methods of getting to the truth, these ideas became overcrowded and muted. I have already shown where established forerunners of the field gave these perennial ideas some mention. But if we delve a bit into a few of the texts that arose during the closing years of the twentieth century we will see again where these ideas were predicted. Their time has now come after what will soon be the end of science as we’ve known it for about 300 years. I believe that if we were to continue inspecting texts from between 1980 and 1999 we would slowly detect reference after reference to embedded anomalies to the scientific narrative and its assumptions. This is because it’s impossible to characterize teaching scientifically without making at least some passing reference to what science cannot begin to represent. We read how Schön and Polanyi did this on a number of occasions. For example, they had to refer to lococentric passions and beliefs as forces beyond knowledge. The act of “knowing” was not the same as having “knowledge.” Knowledge may have made “good sense,” according to Dewey, but Jackson, Schön, and Polanyi all alluded to a sense that was not knowledge. There was always this tacit dimension of occult knowing that was more than what knowledge could grasp. Even when successfully outlining the bases for an externally codified and evaluated knowledge Shulman had to acknowledge the unscientific “soul.” There was something “more” that had to be added to what constituted the professional teacher without which there could be no teaching. In more words, there was something “Nancy” always had as a teacher that was in excess of logically reflective thought processes of inquiry. These are not just passing references but admissions that there is a vast dimension of experience that never was accessible to the scientific method. When it showed itself, it was denied validity or ignored because it was “more” than what science could explain or even ridiculed because it was what science was invented to destroy. How could that esoteric energy and spirit be codified, standardized and evaluated? The answer is quite simply, it cannot be, using “the tools at our disposal” because it is not in the same class as our scientifically established measures. It is a perennial and much older manifestation. But it is not forgotten or lost. It is the power

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of the future for teacher development and for student development. It is the motion and movement of our future. Has this post-scientific power been alluded to directly in teacher development literature? In 1994 Andy Hargreaves was trying to retrieve some kind of binding force to address what was becoming an increasingly disrupted and fragmented economic environment among all “G-20” countries, but especially in North America. He identified two immense social forces that were at odds in educational discourse and he named them at that time as “modernity” and “postmodernity.” He was successfully demarcating two spiritual realms that have been at odds for centuries: the worldview associated with science and alternative worldviews that always were in the background but that are now returning quickly into the foreground. By identifying this fundamental distinction he was predicting the economic crisis that is now unfolding on a global scale. His alarm sounded out a crisis in confidence, especially a crisis that makes it difficult for us to trust institutions of all kinds including government and financial institutions. This mistrust reached critical levels with the collapse of some of the largest banking and credit institutions in the United States in 2008. This “loss of spirit” as Hargreaves called it had its earliest origins at the close of the twentieth century. Hargreaves cites the rapid pace of “technological change” as one manifestation of the problem, a code for the rise and eventual demise of scientific dominance in the everyday lives of ordinary people. In trying to comprehend the omnipresence of science and technology, teachers in schools were looking desperately for practical moral codes to guide them but without success (Hargreaves 1994: 39). In an attempt to conceptualize this authority Hargreaves tried to devise “a general system of moral law” which was really an attempt to free teachers in schools from natural physical laws that were increasingly invading their moral sanctuaries and oppressing them. Hargreaves distinguishes the competing worldviews exactly as “scientific certainty” and “situational ethics” (39). His search for an alternative “wholeness” to the scientific certainty of the past is a search for a futuristic ethics that has to bind dispersion and fragmentation in a way that science no longer can. If we read closely how Hargreaves describes the energy of successful teacher-collectives, we detect reminders of how perennial lococentric micro-cultures bound themselves together adaptively. We witness this especially in traditional and native tribal collectives. Hargreaves calls these micro-practices “collaborative cultures” (192). If we extend our vision beyond the limitations of science, we can begin to sense the future-shift (from Toffler 1990: 216) of these tribal collectives. Hargreaves describes how their relations move as a mosaic and this is probably one of the most effective metaphors to describe how personal development moves in these ethically-based collectives. They overlap, they blend, they interconnect, and their divisions are opaque with membranes that meld together as they shift and move (Hargreaves 1994: 66). These mutations are what made them adaptive to the environment because their qualities made them successful in binding directly with the environment of which they were inextricable. It is this type of spiritual mosaic that will prosper in the coming age of uncertainty because truth, he writes, will not be an abstract scientific concept there. It will be a part of people’s every day activities; in a word, it will be lococentric. But it will not be individualistic in the

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contemporary, narcissistic sense because that style of individualism looks outwardly for its fulfillment. It must do so in order to conform to the scientific perspective of its parentage. The type of individualism that gets its satisfaction for sensory objects and then achieves its ideas of happiness from that outward moral process will not survive the coming age of uncertainty. As Hargreaves warns, the ways that things appear are not necessarily the way things are (76) and perhaps, not the way they are going to be. He is trying to retrieve relations of power that are not hierarchical, as existing from simple to complex scientific ideas. He is trying to conceptualize connection in the world that is not alienating as it has been perennially with a subject/object dichotomy. Hargreaves is also trying to move beyond the logic of exclusive opposites which separated the individual from the world, scientifically, and which separated one individual from another politically. He is trying to mix opposites and, in doing so, he prepares theorists for the ultimate postmodern turn uniting belief and passions with understanding. The only way to accomplish this ambitious goal is by appealing to an alternative metaphysics; another way of saying, by appealing to the fundamental nature of reality that has indoctrinated our theories since the 1700s. If we enter that level of discourse then we are able to propose the kinds of alternatives that result in what Thomas Kuhn (1962) called a shift in paradigm or a scientific revolution. It is exactly this kind of shift that Hargreaves is proposing for research on teaching. It is the kind of shift where all theories, laws, generalizations, methods, and experiments that are performed to support research are re-visited and revised. This new vision must be based on alternative assumptions and result in theoretical formulations that produce radically alternative findings. Ultimately, it must rely on completely new methods of experiencing the world. In the coming age of economic uncertainty and mistrust, teacher development theorists are being called to the forefront of leadership on university campuses and in the chambers of governance. We must answer this call with a new language of hope, commitment, and connection and with new methods to celebrate these practices. Hargreaves calls for a new “metaparadigm” of all organizational changes. His is a call for some new transcendent expression of human nature upon which to ground these ethical principles. But this spirit and these principles were with us always. It is our challenge to retrieve them and rebirth them anew for the sake of teachers, pupils, students, and ultimately for all of us. Meeting this challenge will bring us to some kind of renewed “common vision” that Hargreaves is predicting (249). Where are the allusions to this vision in his text? As researchers, we must speak with allusions at this point because we cannot point to something externally objectified and declare, “there, that’s it.” This is not how the old vision was felt, and it is not how the new vision of wholeness will be experienced. We can only say, “this is what it might be” or, “it’s something like this,” because this new vision must now be researched. We can recollect what it might have been like before the birth of science but we are not children of the seventeenth or eighteenth century. We are children of the future twenty-first century, an era which is highly technological, artificial, and virtual in its humanity, and global in its community. Hargreaves even cites the awkwardness of this context for what he’s trying to articulate with clarity. We are trying to speak like children of the future and that speech resembles the

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babbling of an infant. But it must be attended to with care and respect because it grows into a mature form of discourse with time. And so, just as we heard remnants of this speech in the basal texts that we’ve reviewed, we have returned to the birth dates of science. There we’ll also hear whispers from the birthdays of this new spirit of the future. In tracing the foundations of the ethical tradition that paralleled the birth and growth of modern science, Charles Taylor discusses certain eighteenth century presumptions of a profound source of universal benevolence within all human beings. He identifies various spokespersons for this vision (1989: 411) such as the romantic poet, Friedrich Schiller, the French psychologist and political scientist J.J. Rousseau, and even the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Certainly, the philosopher Catharine MacCauley should be added to this list. The differences are great in particular but, in general, these spokespersons were trying to maintain some connection to an ancient and perennial ethic that they saw being exterminated by the growing secularism and technologism of early modernity. One earliest articulation of this ethic is found in biblical expressions, such as in 2 Corinthians 9:13–15 and in Ephesians 2:4–9. There, agape is the ancient Greek term, which denotes a universal love that is bestowed to human beings by virtue of being united with a divine power. Human beings then extend a binding love towards one another in gratitude for this gift. We should note two things here. First, this feeling of universal justice and well-being comes about when human beings are in communal union. It is inherently good, therefore, to mix with others in trusting and loving relationships. Secondly, this feeling of communal bonding is similar with the feeling that comes with a divine bond. We should note what these dynamic relationships depend upon. Religious experience comes with gratitude for this gift and this gift can be shared with others. This dynamic relationship is no different from the perennial and pre-scientific relationship that human beings felt prior to the emergence of science when objective processes tried to specify how this feeling of “oneness” could come about. We witness these feelings with Rousseau’s praise of “sympathy” and in Kant’s virtue of “good will.” These may have been new ideas for their age but they were not articulating anything that had not been embraced for centuries by sharing, trusting, loving, and caring human beings. Indeed, Hargreaves indicates that this pervasive theme, as it has shown up throughout the late twentieth century teacher research literature, deals pervasively with “the truism of trust” (1994: 251). He quotes Lieberman, Saxl, and Miles, as an example, where they refer to “Trust and rapport . . . are the foundations for building collegiality in a school” (1988: 148). Hargreaves supplements this with reference to the sociologist, Anthony Giddens (Hargreaves 1994: 34), who explains that trust, when defined as “confidence,” is the foundation for reliability in another person as well as in an institution. Confidence is the binding principle that expresses the relative degree of certainty that a person will place in any community (Hargreaves 1994: 252). Clearly, when we examine schools it is not the binding principles of science that should aid us in understanding life in classrooms. Instead, faith in perennial principles that pre-date and post-date those of science must be more useful in understanding the lives, commitments, and development of the elementary schoolteacher.

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If we wanted to read one example of where an early religious writer tried to unify the methods of science and of spirit, we would consult 1 Corinthians 12:22–26, where Paul tries to teach the affluent and educated Corinthians the basics of this new style of community. He writes that this experience of binding and sharing is analogous to an organic body which, while composed of many parts, can function in perfect unison, an image of Durkheim’s “organic solidarity.” This type of solidarity is not narcissistic but inspires the search for what is good for the collective. It adapts to challenges that seek to undermine it. Through love, individuals can understand clearly their role and that of the community. It inspires the trust and confidence that promotes competence. But more than that, by means of this bond with others, human beings can realize the meaning of their self-conscious being. From the twentieth century psychological perspective of Maslow, therefore, agape provides the kinds of peak-experiences that are self-actualizing. They are self-motivating in themselves and it is these inherent motivations that drove Jackson and Lortie’s teachers to bond with their pupils. Practices associated with agape, though never explicitly mentioned, are often alluded to in Hargreaves’ text (e.g., “needs of others” (Hargreaves 1994: 72); “praise,” “sharing” (p. 192); “warmth,” “intimacy” (p. 254)). Trust, confidence, faith, hope, and love; these are the normative principles intended to bind teachers into the professional community and enable them to feel “at home” in their schools. They are the fundamental bases for a healthy economy. And they are the origins from which health, throughout all institutions, can be regained and sustained when trust and confidence is lost and squandered, as is the case currently.

Meta-narratives of teacher development Scientists have always been extremely uncomfortable whenever traditional religious texts are integrated with research analyses. We have to be forgiving. The emergence of heliocentric, objective, scientific, and reflective worldviews in the seventeenth century came about as competition to the unmoving doctrines of the Christian church. Science was proclaimed as the doctrine of progress and so scientists still ridicule what they interpret to be regression into scriptural authority. If Christians who read this book draw encouragement from it for their interpretations of pedagogy and curriculum, then I am very happy to welcome them as my audience. But certainly they must be even more forgiving if I transgress further back into pre-Christian occult interpretations of reality. And this is exactly what I will do, because Christianity has no absolute monopoly on these sentiments and signs for community. They are perennial, concern all religious persuasions, and are a part of world philosophy and world religion. As I argued at the introduction of Chapter 4, as researchers we need to be open to any perspective that will allow us to accurately represent theories of teacher development that are at home in their personal environment. As a theologian, the apostle Paul was trying to privilege his version of agape from another version that was prevalent during his time of writing. Pagan spiritualities rivaled the fast expanding Christian community throughout the Roman Empire and this rivalry continued for several hundred years. Critical of these, Paul wrote that, without the unifying chorus of love, the voices of believers may

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resemble “a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal” (l Corinthians 13:1) – a probable reference to the cacophonous singing and instrumental music that accompanied the pagan festivals of his time (1 Corinthians 8:1–13, 10:14–22; 2 Corinthians 6:14–15). We are at the threshold of an identical transformation that has lasted for several hundred years as well. As Hargreaves concludes, a struggle is pending outside the gates of the schoolyard – a struggle that will determine the ways that schools are administered for some time to come. According to him, current patterns of educational change are being determined by a conflict between two immense social forces – modernity and postmodernity (Hargreaves 1994: 3). He is accurate in this warning, but I believe that these forces are immensely more widespread than merely social and economic. Whether theoretical formulations of teacher education in general should be either modern or postmodern is completely irrelevant to me. Far too many authors have mistakenly interpreted postmodernity as a historical age that post-dates modernity. This is the result of a sociological perspective that privileges material and technological change to be the measure of wider changes in society. It is also because we’re still disciples of the old doctrine of progress and believe that research has to move us forward chronologically or socially in directions of improvement. This has led to a lot of misunderstanding and confusion as academics try to be “postmodern,” a ploy for being “cutting-edge” or even futuristic. Worst of all, this confusion has led academics to dismiss postmodernity altogether because it was never explained clearly or because they never understood modernity in the first place. For this reason, I have chosen to outline the scientific foundations for teacher research because this theoretical perspective gives us greater clarity as to what is at stake in this supposed grand change. It also clarifies where fundamental changes must take place in our thought processes and methodologies. These are the changes by which we will be able to better serve teachers in schools in their development. It will also be the means by which we will alter our own development as researchers. It is important, therefore, to ignore the misleading terms “modernity,” “modernism,” “postmodernity,” and “postmodernism.” We should highlight instead the central concept of Lyotard’s book from which this jargon originated. It is Lyotard’s concept of “meta-narrative” that has direct bearing on redefining teacher development beyond its present limited definitions. We have to stop thinking of modernity and postmodernity in linear, temporal, and historical terms. Lyotard is not a historian but a philosopher. He is trying to define modernity so that it can at least be redefined into something that is un-modern, more accurately, rather than postmodern. He is trying to speculate on alternative ways of thinking about the present more so than trying to predict how we should think in the future. He is not trying to predict but trying to retrieve something that’s being lost so that it can be reborn in the present age. Mine is an identical project to Lyotard’s, except the context of my discussion has not been a philosophical worldview in general. I am trying to shed a new light on a vast curriculum literature and the conceptual and ideological assumptions that underlay it. Like Lyotard, I’m trying to articulate the metanarrative of teacher development and I’m professing incredulity towards specific scientific foundations underlying that narrative.

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Obviously, articulating and professing this message also presumes a loss of faith in the foundations that have produced and upheld the curriculum of teacher development from the beginning. I’m not just trying to be vain or fashionable in my loss of confidence in rational explanations for experience and my suspicion of scientific methods. I hold these views in the interest of teachers in schools because I do not believe that rationality and science are appropriate foundations for teachers to experience their work and develop as practitioners. I don’t actually believe that teachers assume these foundations to be immediately useful either, and interview transcripts in Jackson’s and Lortie’s studies demonstrated this. A good theory, to repeat, should be immediately useful to teachers rather than to researchers. To explain my position, it’s more useful to translate the actual word that Lyotard uses in his original text. The French term translated as “meta-narrative” is grand récit: literally, “epic recitation,” or “big story.” I’ve shown how certain big stories are being told over and over again without which there wouldn’t be the main story of “teacher development.” I’ll identify those big stories explicitly further on and I’ve also alluded to them throughout the book. For now, think of a meta-narrative as a grand, epic story that tells some overarching tale about the world. But it’s not the existence of the story itself that’s really the issue. I want the reader to focus on the universal pretensions that have underpinned certain kinds of stories. It is the pretensions that determine how teacher development is defined. I’ve also not been suspicious of mega-narratives but the overarching claims of meta-narratives. To explain this distinction, the biblical creation story of Genesis is not a meta-narrative. Homer’s Odyssey is not a meta-narrative. These are, indeed, really big stories – they are mega-narratives. However, these stories, along with the Epic of Gilgamesh, do not claim to legitimate themselves by appealing to a supposedly universal, scientific reason as the basis for their legitimacy. They were proclamations by tribal people and demanded a response of faith by the people by whom and for whom they were written and recited. In contrast, teacher development is a meta-narrated curriculum through and through because its claims of and for development are based on the pretensions of a narrative of science. For example, scientific stories from modern biological sciences (Darwin), sociological stories about historical materialism (Marx), along with stories about human development (Piaget), and inner processes of development (Freud and Erikson) are all what premise the theories of development for teachers. The processes for thinking in these stories assume the straight-line movement of the physical sciences according to Isaac Newton’s mathematical principles. All of these tales presuppose a line of universal reason behind all other movements and motions in the world. Indeed, many of the founding theorists, such as Waller, Jackson, Lortie, Schön, and Shulman, among all others, advocated that teachers actually conform explicitly to autonomous universal reason in their pursuit of some kind of knowledge. The drive to professionalize them in general was also premised on the promise and pursuit of this meta-narrative. A tension always exists, therefore, between the objective certainties of science with its reasoned thought processes and subjective certainty of ancient pre-scientific worldviews that premise myth, spirit, and magic. Narrative knowledge, which should not

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really be classified as “knowledge,” is grounded in the direct experience of the tribal culture and it is this kind of micro-culture that we witness occurring in school classrooms. In those contexts, custom does not extend beyond the boundary of tribe. It is founded on the experiences of the people and auto-legitimate the narrator-as-teacher. Clearly, twentieth century definitions of teacher development were based on distinctive experiences of an internal micro-culture and the accounts of those experiences were relayed by the teacher-as-narrator. The people and their subjective experiences are what actualize the authority of the story, not the objective definitions of a scientific method. I ask the reader at this stage to be self-examining of their reaction to my words. Your reaction will betray your allegiance to the meta-narrative of science vs. the mega-narrative of a much older, perennial worldview. People place enormous stock in the big stories that they believe explain the world and their presence in the world. If you are a disciple of the scientific meta-narrative, you know it. However, if you are disillusioned with its scientific methods for explaining the truth, then perhaps this book will assist you in finding an exit-strategy to alternative perspectives that are, as yet, to come. The theorists in this book have all alluded to these forthcoming perspectives because it was impossible to represent the life of the classroom without those allusions. With the disappearance of European tribal culture, beginning with the expansion of Rome, natural and tribal folklores began to disappear along with all of the healing remedies that came with them. With the rise of early modern, eighteenth century Europe these stories began to be lost, forgotten, ridiculed, and persecuted (in the case of shamans and healing women branded as “witches”) in favor of the consensus of a universal story of how the world came about and how it should function. This meta-story became the scientific worldview that I outlined in Chapter 6. With this encroachment arose the practices of modern medicine upon which some theorists in this book believe teacher development professionalism should be modeled. With the subsequent expansion of a Greco-Roman, global, Euro-North American culture regional languages in general began to disappear. With this disappearance we also lost more and more tribal mega-narratives and practices. But more than anything else, we lost the ability to think about the world in spiritual ways and this greatly reduces our understanding of how learning is taking place in classrooms and beyond. Because of this tragedy, contemporary authority for research and methods has to take recourse to a universal criterion: scientific methods; a universal stamp of approval for findings, conclusions, and prescriptions. It is the basis for why teachers become saddled with responsibility for rebuilding the failing economy when, all along, they have always been busy trying to teach children the foundations for a healthy economy. Scientific knowledge, which is considered to be a triumph over occult, spiritual, tribal narrative knowing, has covertly been masquerading itself as just one more narrative that was really religious in its style all along. But we have never lost our sensitivity to alternative ways of sensing the world. We only denied it. These alternatives were even suppressed throughout the twentieth century especially by the fundamentalism of scientific positivism. In fact, as I have said on several occasions, the theorists throughout this book have been alluding to alternative spiritualities all along. They’ve

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just never privileged this aspect of teaching and learning in their attempt to legitimate universal, rational, scientific reason. We can find these allusions to the spirituality of teaching and learning in the anomalies that have been present in their research. These anomalies are deviations from the common rule of law. They are irregular procedures that do not conform to regulation. That’s usually why they’re suppressed. I’ve been careful throughout the book to include them in my analysis so that I can cite and celebrate them in the final chapter. Researchers were tolerantly open to the possibility of these alternatives but were rigorous in privileging the spirituality of reason alone in their explanations, justifications, and implementations. This was because a general acceptance existed within the audience of their work that the universal criterion of reason and its science should uphold research. Otherwise, why should they have been taken seriously? The meta-narrative of science was once the common authority of our work. Being anomalous to this doctrine would have been heretical or just seen as being trivial and not rigorous research. It would have been tolerated because one politic of the scientific movement was to be tolerant, as long as we agree that the scientific worldview is dominant and ultimately authoritative. However, it is now time to be more than permissive with this alternative because it is time to do this on behalf of teachers and their pupils. During the twentieth century, academic researchers made the grave error of assuming that the challenges of domestic and international economy could be solved by manipulating curriculum and pedagogy in schools. It is time to stop this attack on the classroom and on the teachers’ world and begin examining other solutions for these problems. I have shown throughout this book that a general bias has existed in this research, a bias that has been overpowering for over 300 years. Postmodernity, new millennium, post-structural, New Age, etc.; it matters little what we wish to call the research age that is to come. In fact, we should call it nothing and just get on with our valuable work. What matters now is that the scientific worldview is losing its dominance quickly and opening to an era when the findings of educational researchers will be more important and necessary than ever.

Conclusion

Teaching, learning, and the spirit of the future

Chapter 10

Redefining teacher development

Introduction I cannot redefine the “pleonasm” of teacher development in this final chapter. I can only begin to speculate on what that redefinition would have to be if we truly distanced ourselves from the founding metaphors, narratives, assumptions, and structures that have produced late twentieth century definitions and theories. Redefinitions emerge only after making basic distinctions of the kind that I’ve done throughout this book. For example, I began to show in Chapter 4 how the rhetoric that composed twentieth century teacher development theories was by no means arbitrary or random. They infiltrated university discourse as part of a scientific worldview that was prevalent throughout those institutions and even in general. This worldview was highly distinctive from the pre-scientific version and originated in astronomical discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo. The real transformation of knowledge began with Isaac Newton’s new physical sciences. Jean-François Lyotard was able to show how that worldview promoted a meta-narrated paradigm that dictated theoretical perspectives and determined what methods were acceptable to elaborate on those theories. With regard to development specifically, I showed how its “story-form” had ancient and especially medieval origins and that this story of emancipation was transferred into biology along with methods that came from the scientific worldview generally. When the social sciences took hold of this worldview along with its paradigmatic methods and its theoretical perspectives, “development” took on a life of its own especially when it became implicated with the modern doctrine of progress. The concept even adopted a consistent pattern of movement that conformed to astronomy and to geometry. Development became processed into stages that lined up into progressive steps of adaptive improvement. This linear, temporal process of incremental change is overwhelmingly geo-metric. With that model of research, points coordinate progressively to produce lines of development toward a coherent “form.” That form, or picture of the developed teacher to be evaluated and professionalized, could not have been imagined without the groundwork of scientific formation of principles upon which to build a theory and method of development. Throughout this whole story, therefore, a general theme has prevailed which has determined in many ways how progress, development, and even thought processes were to be conceptualized. To be specific, I could not have

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described Waller’s earliest rendition of the rationale for teacher development without using the word “form” a total of 27 times. Teachers personalities were solidified in their formation; theorists hoped to transform the school by assimilating new forms of understanding; theories prescribed measures and methods to better form (i.e. “prepare”) and reform teachers; a “stereotype” for the ancients was the “visible form” of an object; and Waller was interested in how instruction, as a mass-production process formed identical copies of the person that the teacher “is.” This perspective of thought-procedure originates in scientific astronomy and mathematical geometry. Both sciences relied on precise forms of measurement and calculation, the basis for reflective reasoning and for the doctrine of progress. Thinking, therefore, depends on the formation of ideas that consummate into forms of practice that are applicable to problem solving. The twentieth century theories of teacher education were predominantly formation theories of development because they were based on meta-narrative foundations of science. Of course, there are exceptions to every predominance but these were generally anomalous to dominant theories. In this final chapter, I begin by distinguishing formation from vocation as overarching modes of theorizing teachers’ educational development. This distinction is largely literary and rhetorical. But I have begun to show in the last chapter that our ways of theorizing were, in fact, literary and rhetorical all along, as Lyotard argued. If we take the structures of eighteenth century physical science as granted, and if we then unconsciously begin to adopt narrative and metaphorical poetic devices that conform to those scientific structures, we will logically construct theories of formative development that are supposedly authoritative – because the foundations are unquestioned. The twentieth century formative theories of teacher development are as mythical as any other explanation for this reason. I am not trying to destroy the existing mythology; I am only trying to show its limitations so that anomalies can be welcomed back into the community of theory. These differences are what will propel us into the current century and permit us to meet, address, and resolve the problems that are already confronting us as researchers. In this final chapter I distinguish two ethical persuasions – formation and vocation – and show once more how formation has dominated teacher research. This emphasis has been one of our main “problems” all along. Teachers have always been summoned by vocational thought processes but have been pressured to accept formational thought processes. I show that vocation ethics are actually fundamental to economic prosperity but only if understood ironically, as Max Weber did in his classic sociology. These ironic “spirits of capitalism” can complement pragmatic religious experiences, which I’ve been defending throughout the book. I believe that pragmatic spiritual experiences are the meta-practices that will ground some of the most exciting educational developments in the future. But this can only come to pass if researchers and theorists think and work together in developing them.

Vocation: the spirit of economic prosperity I introduced this chapter by referring to two dominant modes of theorizing. Formation is a direct translation of an old German word that was used for centuries to

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define educational development. Bildung was related to the verb for building or construction (i.e. bilden) and it was related to the noun for “picture” (Bild). To be educated, therefore, was to be “formed” according to a preconceived cultural ideal of what it meant to be an educated person. Notice how this inherited attitude is latently present in the rhetoric of teacher professionalism in terms of structure, training, personnel deployment, and even epistemology. A structural formation is an arrangement of people who act as a unit to fabricate something. For this to occur there has to be some uniformity to their distributed energies. Unity and uni-form-ity has to occur to a large extent for teachers to be professionalized. In terms of training, formation is used traditionally to refer to the kinds of preparation that precede entry into a religious order and this comes from historical usage of the word. But this heritage still remains in how we lead novices towards accredited qualification for their registration into “the order.” As we know, a period of intensive exposure precedes teacher certification and, appropriately, it is often referred to as “pre-service,” a reference to its religious origin. Lortie made this connection explicit in his book. Waller had a military background and so, for him, this literary theoretical heritage would also have been present in his view of personnel deployment. In that context, a formation is an arrangement of players or soldiers at the beginning of a game or battle. Units and subunits are grouped according to different functions depending on training, tasks, and roles. The goal of the formation is to win the game or be victorious in battle. It is not surprising, therefore, that teacher development became integrated into the metaphorical reasoning structures that sought to overcome competitors in a global marketplace during the 1980s. This confusion results from the literary heritage by which we theorize development from other contexts where formation-education is the normal way of problem resolution, such as sport competitions, military battles, industrial fabrication, or even the religious seminary. This determines our theories of what accounts for knowledge to a large extent. Epistemologically, thinking-as-formation is very Newtonian and based principally on the theories of understanding of John Locke. But we also detect formation thinking clearly in Dewey’s theory of inquiry. As I showed in Chapter 6, formation-processes of thought take place through selection and organization of data after sensation and perception transfer simple ideas from the external environment to the mind. This creates a relationship between foreground (external) and background (internal) for the construction of complex ideas. Reflective thinking processes exercise formation, that is, they “form” ideas as the basis for decisions. This is why there is coherence to formation pedagogies. And the coherent method of these theories dominates prescriptions for teacher development. But there are always anomalies to every general rule and it is in those exceptions that we will discover conceptual progress. In sharp contrast, vocation-ethics assume entirely alternative foundations. These were uncovered by one of the founders of the sociological method. In his sociological analysis of Protestant ethics, Max Weber (1954) became interested in the psychological conditions that led to the development of the economic system commonly known as “capitalism.” This system is characterized by control of large financial resources that are produced by speculation, money lending, commercial enterprise, and even by buccaneering and war, all of which yield excessive riches to their masters. Weber theorized

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that sophisticated but subtle codes of ethical conduct and systems of human relations had to be harmonized with a social psychology for this to occur. Capitalism was the social and economic counterpart of Calvinist theology, he concluded, of which the central motivating idea became one’s “calling” (Weber 1954: 2). Like the German word Bildung, “the calling” is not easily translated and defined. In other words, it’s difficult to provide a dictionary definition of “the call.” Conceptual definitions of such ethereal phenomena have to be pieced together by analyzing how people act when they believe that they’re being called. This is exactly why it was essential to examine how twentieth century psychologists and sociologists analyzed the individual practices of schoolteachers. Clearly, Waller, Jackson, and Lortie found what the cultural ethos, or the ethical sentiments, of their teachers really were. And by means of this, they pieced together the distinctive thought processes that were behind these sentiments and practices. Formatively, they illuminated the background by illustrating foreground expressions and practices. In doing so, they also indicated anomalies to the dominant practices that they selected to be significant for program and procedures of development. It’s in those anomalies that we find the meaning of “the call to vocation.” By reviewing the genealogy of this normative tendency we can see that schoolteachers were always displaying a highly refined ethics of professional practice. Beginning to articulate those ethics of practice is the purpose of this concluding chapter. The meaning of vocation has been given some attention by scholarly educationists. Several have applied the term to the ethics of institutionalized teaching and these references verify the historical and cultural connections of religious service to the responsibilities of teaching. Booth (1988) for example, illustrates the meaning of vocation through biographical essays that relate to his own career as a university professor. Huebner (1987) emphasizes the value of “service” as a foundation for good teaching practices. He does this to contrast institutional barriers that hinder the expression of these practices for the sake of demanding institutional reform. In another context, Lesage (1966) alludes to the concept in his defense of faith and its importance to selecting a life of religious service as a priest. Clearly, “self-selection” as an indicator of being called to the profession of teaching was documented in 1975 by Lortie’s definitive study of schoolteachers. Even Huberman (1993) added empirical findings to this phenomenon through qualitative interviews and longitudinal studies of teachers’ careers. Frankena (1976) discusses the attitudes and practices that constitute his assessment of the “good life” and gives it a fair treatment. However, his analysis is embedded within considerations of the nature of that type of good and “moral life” and his examination remains a bit abstractly removed from life in classrooms. To date, Hansen (1995) provides the best-sustained examination of the concept with regard to teachers and teaching practice. His analyses are empirically derived and provide findings into how teachers express the grounds for their motivation to select teaching as a profession and how the ethic of service sustains them throughout their career. I will never forget the excellent paper that David Hansen read for the International Study Association for Teachers and Teaching in Kiel, Germany, in 1997 (subsequently published in 1999). Following his presentation, Max Van Manen initiated a discussion inquiring into “the calling of the call.” He agreed that the vocation to teach was an important normative

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tendency, but he got the audience wondering where the origin of that calling came from. I recall a noticeable discomfort in the audience with that question to the point where it was never fully addressed. And this was because educationists are not accustomed to practicing ontological research. I believe that this is a weakness imposed upon us by the scientific methods that have reared us as researchers. This final chapter is a response, in some ways, to Max Van Manen’s question. But it’s more so a calling to research teacher development specifically, and educational development generally, with methods that welcome alternative voices that have been calling us all along as researchers. We just haven’t known what to do with those voices. In German, the modern concept of one’s professional vocation is translated as Beruf. Beruf is related to the verb rufen, which is commonly used when hailing someone by name. This usage, Weber suggests, is one early biblical indication (180–132 BC) where the significance of labor in exchange for sustenance began to become more than merely mundane. In fact, one’s calling in these regards became an activity that transcended the tangible world and was actually ordained as an expression of holiness. “Work” was becoming purified as something sacred. Diligence in the devotion to one’s own affairs, therefore, becomes a service to the community in general that is worthy of recognition and reaps justifiable rewards. Weber concludes that, of all ancient languages only Hebrew shares a similar usage and reference to the German Beruf.7 This derivation is in fact related to the Hebraic infinitive “to send.” One’s “sending” in life, therefore, or one’s “destiny” becomes associated with the modern concept of “mission.” The modern English word “mission” is also derived from the Latin infinitive mittere, which translates literally as “to send.” Its past participle is missum the origin of our “mission.” Weber then explores how the New Testament, and especially Pauline literature, determined how this concept was applied to early Christian ecclesiastics. The world of the early apostolic Christians was treated with indifference and outright disdain because they obsessed over the eschatological and imminent return of Jesus (see 1 Corinthians 7:29). Their disdainful indifference towards the mundane world generated a highly conservative attitude when prioritizing daily tasks. One’s daily affairs were to take place in attendance of the apocalyptic expectation of Christ’s return to earth to fetch them at any moment (1 Corinthians 7:20). This was precisely because everyone was to “remain in the state in which they had been called” (1 Corinthians 7:20) while awaiting Christ’s return. This made daily life very “now-focused.” The appointment of that event was expected at any unannounced moment. As the captive of one’s calling, one should lead a life that is worthy of listening to that call (Ephesians 4:1). Worthiness of captivity was demonstrated by the exercise of self-denial, patience, and this sometimes brought some suffering along with it. Worthiness was most displayed, however, by “loving one another” (i.e. agape). This kind of selfless ecclesial sharing (translated as koinonia) was possible because the human body and the sacred spirit of community were united. Notice how the pre-scientific conception of direct experience without mediation is incorporated in this expression of community sharing. This is because world, body, and others are united in agapean love. As Weber shows, the members of those early persecuted churches were obsessed with the feeling of being hailed by a divine power that originated in some place that was “more than” their world. The

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“calling of the call” was some voice from alterity. When being hailed by that occult spirit, certain kinds of attitudes and certain sorts of practices demonstrated a life of happiness and fulfillment. Attitudes, practices, rituals, and rewards for participation were genuinely real to the committed believer because they were shared within a community of like-minded believers. Ironically, standing by one’s task and attending to it diligently with self-denial brought happiness and endurance that was needed for a fulfilling life. Serving this chosen course of life was a manifestation of devotion and gratitude, and the rewards of that life included material possessions. And therein lies the irony that Weber uncovers: immediate material and financial rewards became obvious tangible examples of the view that following one’s calling was the right thing to do. Weber was not only interested in how the acquisition of material and financial goods was interpreted as rewards for piety. He was also interested in the rational practices associated with piety, some of which included regular marketing of goods, bookkeeping, precise calculability, and the systematic pursuit of profit by legal means alone. In his study of the “spirit” of capitalism, Weber also wondered how a belief in predestination became coupled with the economic and social life of Reformation Christians. He concluded that Calvinists were plagued with “salvation anxiety” (Parkin 2002: 45). In other words, they were never certain whether or not they were pre-destined for condemnation or pre-elected for salvation and for heavenly admission. In response to this chronic anxiety, they searched for signs of grace that were immediately accessible and tangible. Salvation anxiety transformed the doctrine of predestination from what seemed like a passive stance towards the world into an extremely active and busy one. The chronic uncertainty of ultimate forgiveness, the need to measure the progress of one’s salvation (in the sense of John Bunyan’s “pilgrimage”), and the psychological need of its testimony generated the “capitalistic spirit.” The associated notions of “salvation” and “vocation” assumed a particular importance in this spirit, given sociological and psychological conditions of uncertainty and their resulting depravities and urgencies. It was, in fact, chronic uncertainty that gave rise to the distinctive “work ethic” that we associate with capitalism. Weber claims that this new social ethic offered modern capitalist employers sober, conscientious, and industrious employees who clung to their work as if their God commanded it. The suffering of salvation-anxiety produced a need to suffer in fulfilling one’s work and to sacrifice one’s self for the sake of one’s occupation. In effect, diligent and self-conscious workers began to actually feel guilty if exertion didn’t produce some kind of suffering. If we trace over Waller’s historical genealogy we observe where the schoolteacher’s work ethic integrates with their chronic anxieties, guilt, and feelings of uncertainty. We can also see where their strengths are misinterpreted as depravities. In fact, teachers in classrooms, as they were observed by Waller, Jackson, and Lortie, are living exemplars of the robust foundations of healthy capitalist economy.

The logic and ethics of vocation I have said that this type of analysis and discussion is uncomfortable to social scientists and psychologists who’ve been indoctrinated by scientific methods because those

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methods were invented to exclude the anti-reason of vocation. But these normative passions always seem to be documented to provide a full picture of what’s going on in classrooms. As ironies and anomalies, they become sidelined as irrelevant or even identified as hindrances. There is a need to redefine classroom teachers’ educational development in ways that incorporate these undeniable normative tendencies so that they can complement formation-perspectives. It has never been my intention to eliminate scientific reasoning from the teacher education curriculum. It has never been my intention to distinguish exclusive opposites between formation and vocation. Excluding the opposition of vocational thought(s) from scientific research was the intention of an eighteenth century scientific worldview that categorized those thoughts as superstitious and biblically dogmatic. But as I’ve shown, this movement produced its own dogmatic meta-narrative that tried to eliminate an enormous realm of experience from the experience of teaching and learning. It has never been my intention to return to an ancient or medieval past. It is my wish to help the reader understand the need for mixing vocation with the scientific perspective so that a co-existent theory of teacher development can be defined in ways that have never been defined before. This theory must not be nostalgic but must be a theory of the future. For this hybrid to be born, it was necessary to first define teacher development based on its twentieth century foundations, and secondly, to distinguish the meta-narrative of scientific formation from the pre-scientific narrative of vocational thinking. Once these were distinguished, it is possible to begin mixing these opposites in ways that are of benefit to teachers primarily. Figure 10.1 lists what these basic distinctions are for organizing this theory. I briefly discuss how these distinctions show up in theory construction, before showing where Waller, Jackson, and Lortie incorporated vocational thinking into their analyses. It is important to recall that these two perspectives are not just methodological stances. They are actually two ethical perspectives, as I shall show in my discussion. When Waller asked researchers to investigate common sense insights of teachers he challenged them to inform teachers with “new knowledge.” This knowledge would then be assigned and delivered as principles to inform teachers of their state of affairs in classrooms and aid in interpreting those events. However, this is evidently not how teachers in classrooms bring their lives into existence there. They invoke the spirit of learning by summoning actions into existence. They make appeals and request the attention of forces that have little to do with “knowing” and more to do with sharing. A vivid example of this contrast is found in Barack Obama’s acceptance speech at Grant Park, Chicago, on the evening of November 4, 2008. Obama is clearly not a “formation-administrator.” His interpretation of the presidential office is guided by a vocation-ethics. We see this in his proclamation that we are “not a collection of individuals” inferring that we are a unity of self, world, and others. He cites gratitude for what his campaign workers had “sacrificed” and reminded the assembled crowd that “change” (i.e. “development”) cannot happen “without a new spirit of service, a new spirit of sacrifice.” Metaphorically, this translates into some suffering in the short term: the “road will be long” and “our climb will be steep,” but “as a people, we will get there.” Following a vocational spirit is worth the associated hardship because personal stories may be singular, but “our destinies are shared.” Therefore, he proclaims, “a new energy

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INFORM

INVOKE

The assignment and delivery of knowledge and The summoning of actions into principles existence by appeal or entreaty INFORMATION Logical facts for conclusions; processed data; technical glossaries; abstract principles REFORM To rescue an inadequate state of affairs with new knowledge CONFORMATION

INVOCATION The establishment of conscious ties with alternate powers in times of need REVOKE To suppress one’s calling and rescind one’s power CONVOCATION

A structural arrangement that makes judgments An assembly of believers invoked with based on “true forms” of assessment evocative passions UNIFORMITY

UNIVOCITY

The use of identical accountability policies; the A universal calling that is received standardization of events and transactions singularly and interpreted existentially

Figure 10.1 Formation and vocation: two logical and normative tendencies.

must be harnessed.” As he said explicitly, “let us summon a new spirit of patriotism, of responsibility, where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after, not only ourselves, but each other.” This new spirit is summoned by determination, but also with humility, the opposite spirit of the one that inspires narcissistic individualism. That spirit, he concluded, will “heal the divides that have held back our progress”; that is to say, “our educational development” as a whole people, in addition to being a mere “nation(al) state.” Barack Obama’s acceptance speech was a classic invocation. He was mixing oppositions in every way, certainly social, racial, economic, and patriotic. We don’t just need to be informed of what we must do based on the statistics and standards that produce new knowledge. A new spirit needs to be invoked which calls us to respond with renewed responsibility. We must collectively choose our destiny but the call to respond remains singular. In proclaiming an end to the political philosophy that preceded his administration, he foresaw an end to the exclusive oppositions that formed the worldview of the past. This may be threatening to some. However, many

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problems remain unsolved because some of the problems are actually the result of this worldview. Therefore, they cannot be solved without methods that are radically alternative to the ones that created them. Over the past century, teachers were always quietly summoning a vocation spirit together with their pupils in classrooms. This marginal practice now needs to be researched, explicated for view, and articulated. For example, information deals with logical facts from which conclusions can be drawn. It involves data, usually factual in style, that’s been processed and then communicated into a format that’s understandable. The goal is “new knowledge” and the format of this knowledge leads easily to a glossary of technical terms that come from recorded data. Technical principles can be applied to measure states of affairs and events. That’s their controlling power. In contrast, invocation is a completely different kind of “gathering.” It has its own logic entirely. Its power arises from establishing conscious ties with an alternate power that is summoned to help a people in need. It arises out of humility, not the arrogance that comes with collecting data from an external world. It is a “calling in” of inspiration and a willingness to respond with perspiration. When something is reformed by reformation it is rescued from error with the assumption that the existing state of affairs was inadequate or defective. Twentieth century teachers in schools who were living according to an ethics of vocation were diagnosed as defective largely because they were not performing true to form; that is, they believed that they were on a mission instead of thinking and behaving as if they were conducting experiments. And because far too much attention was being placed on the institution of schooling from a sociological perspective, waves of reform were instituted to correct those defects. All along, teachers were only exhibiting an authentic vocation-ethics. These were largely ignored because a subjective existential perspective that would have privileged them could not be admitted by objective, empirical, scientific methods. The scientific perspective, in fact, tried to revoke “the calling of the call” and rescind its spiritual power because it was not able to incorporate that spirit into its conceptual framework. But in fact, the call to teach was actually consistent with the ethical principles of the capitalist system of economy all along. The ethics of sacrificial service, humility, and self-denial for the sake of others were actually saving powers rather than impediments to teacher development or to the economy. But because these ethics were reminiscent of a subjective, lococentric, and even religious worldview, they seemed overly passive to scientifically trained researchers. The recommendations of Waller and Lortie have the tendency to promote actions that accord with external expectations and adherence to prevailing standards. The drive to professionalize teachers promotes structural arrangements that conform to criteria by which teachers can be assessed and judged on the basis of a “true form” (i.e. the German Bild). It assumes that teachers can be built into likenesses of each other so that they can be recognized as informed professionals by the general public. In contrast, a convocation model of professionalism still involves convention and assembly. In fact, that model of community is the one that Hargreaves was trying to describe in his image of the “moving mosaic” (1994: 66). However, it is very unlike the tradition that built the medical profession. It involves gathering in response to a summons that teachers

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inherently and intrinsically have always attended to. But this summons is not necessarily recognizable to the general public because it has to be self-selected, even when the destiny may be shared. That singularity is what makes them appear to be aliens. The voluntary invocation to commune used to be called ecclesia by the ancient Greeks, which was related to the word eklegein, “to select.” But we recognize the contemporary cognate in the word “eclectic.” Teachers who assemble and recognize one another as self-selected draw together the best practices from diverse doctrines, methods, and styles. Their pedagogy would be a collage from various sources of the style that we would call “ecumenical.” This word comes from the ancient Greek as well (oikoumenikos) where it meant “the inhabited world.” That “world” is the classroom. Notice how it is related to the Greek word for “home” (oikos). A moving, mosaic, convocation of teachers has all of the qualities that Hargreaves advocated. It overlaps, blends, interconnects, and the divisions of that style of professional community are opaque with membranes that meld together as they shift and move. In essence, he is describing a hybrid organization that is able to mix its opposites in such a way that distinctions are not discriminated nor reduced to the margin but incorporated into one body while maintaining the integrity of all singular differences. It can do this because it has no stable formation. Its development is invoked by evocative passions. That is the nature of its energy. Evocation is the goal of convocation-professionalism and this type of association is not the same as formation-professionalism, which seeks conformity, even though its advocates would deny this. Uniformity is the goal of formation-professionalism. Institutionally this shows up with the use of identical accountability policies in different sites that standardize events and transactions. In schools, it can show up as grading systems that are used to denote how well diverse units match one another in terms of conduct, opinion, form, manners, and even appearance. When these units are schoolteachers, uniform normative accountability practices conform conduct and knowledge. That is the goal of formation-professionalism. The logical normative tendency of formation-professionalism is to eliminate differences, sometimes in the guise of accommodating them. This was evident in how Waller characterized accommodation as the amalgamator of divergent interests. Formation, as a mode of adaptation, tends to incorporate and unify differences rather than diversify and proliferate them. This is why the vocation-ethics of teacher development were actually classified as malformations by scientific methods because they were the practical ethics that science was concocted to eliminate. But we are no longer living in the eighteenth century. And it is my view that many twenty-first century problems remain unresolved in our society precisely because they cannot be solved, much less even be inquired into, without a new spirit that’s summoned to address them. This spirit is not new at all. It is only suppressed and must be recalled in a twenty-first century style. Scientific methodologists will be uncomfortable with these kinds of spiritual interpretations and their implications for practice as their methods sought historically to exclude the spiritual perspective of vocational thinking entirely from view. An aformation from that suppressing tendency is required and this is uncomfortable at first. It cannot occur today or even tomorrow because, as I have shown, the paradigmatic formations of science took decades and then even centuries

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to solidify. For vocation to be the guiding motivational principle alongside formation, therefore, we must begin to summon a new spirit of responsibility. But to most this still seems to be quite mysterious, given the profound heritage of our research assumptions that took centuries to consolidate. The great pragmatic philosopher, William James, was acutely aware of how ideas, knowledge, and paradigms become aformed. As a former medical expert, James described the process of aformation in terms that were similar to a healing experience. A shift in perspective is not always sudden but occurs after a long infection of the previous mass of knowledge. Analogous to a cancer, the conditions for a change in perspective are often present latently in the fully formed structure (James 1955: 184). This suggests that the conditions for aformation are already latent and incubating in that structure long before the transmutation takes place. I have shown how this has been the case with teacher development theory all along. Aformation is nothing like a conversion experience where consciousness is raised to a new level suddenly. The conditions for acceptance of vocation alongside formation have to “seep in” during periods of vulnerability to allow for their “influx” (James 1996a: 307). This means that the existing structure has to be slowly withdrawn into a kind of sickness, quite frankly, from which it has to undergo a healing crisis. However, the formal structure is not aware of its illness because the place into which it has to be led cannot be named abstractly (James 1996b: 285). This sums up my theoretical dilemma and it’s not unlike the one in which Schön (1983) found himself when he discussed the Meno paradox. I cannot be forced into naming the place to which I am trying to lead practitioners, because that place has to be self-selected by each researcher. This is consistent with the vocational method. I could not have begun this book notifying the reader of where I was going because the existing theoretical “formation” that has made us into researchers seems to be robust, healthy, and vibrant. However, I had to show where it was ailing and, more importantly, where it might be failing teachers in classrooms. See for example how all three classic foundations – Waller, Jackson, and Lortie – incorporate the “spirits of capitalism” into their observations, but mostly view them as inconveniences to teachers’ educational development. Waller noticed how teachers had a wishful longing to serve humanity and to be called into that service. When enthralled by that service they seemed to be detained by a collective consciousness that superseded the expectations of the institution. In fact, they seemed to be imprisoned by the spellbinding confinement of their classroom. They actually saw their living martyrdom as a path to freedom. This could be considered to be problematic if we are trying to institutionalize development according to principles that are abstracted from teachers’ “sharp existential boundaries,” as Jackson called them. But as soon as we understand that these central motivating ideals and subtle codes of conduct are actually consistent with the founding ethical principles that build our economic system, we should begin to theorize how these ironic ethics could be encouraged for the sake of that system’s adaptation during times of need. When Jackson entered the ecumenical inhabited world of the classroom, he immediately sensed a certain spirit that circulated as an immanent force there. Immanence is the

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opposite of transcendence. Obviously, Jackson would not incorporate transcendent forces to be present in a world that is powered by the same physical forces that power all other mundane worlds. However, I agree with Jackson entirely that the forces that he perceived in classroom life were entirely immanent and not transcendent. This is where I differ from Huebner (1999), for example, because he is still trying to theorize a bifurcated structure that separates immanent from transcendent forces in the classroom. In a vocational world of mixed opposites, all energies and forces can be immanent to the life of the classroom and we can incorporate invisible spiritual forces as well. Jackson theorized that the forces have something to do with “knowing” because he could not theorize otherwise if he was looking for knowledge. He was not looking for the opposite of knowledge, which was spirituality, faith, and religious experience. But if we examine his classic text closely we read how the regenerative spirits of economic prosperity showed themselves constantly in that inhabited world. They were not acknowledged only because they were not a part of his scientific theoretical lens. For example, teachers tried to accommodate to the desires of the whole class by encouraging the group to share. There was a conscious effort to unite that inhabited world with each person, bodily, by teaching the importance of universal love and responsibility. To do that, life in classrooms had to be very “now-focused.” Here-andnow measurements are what demonstrate the authenticity of the teachers’ calling to their inhabited world of the classroom. It was as if life in the classroom could end at any moment – that’s how intense it was – and teachers disdained the distraction of others who tried to draw them away from that present moment. The “look on the children’s faces” was what gauged their success. Future-oriented institutions could take care of themselves. They were present-oriented practitioners and obsessed with the immanence of the moment. Their worthiness was displayed by a common love and their mission was driven as if they might lose the urgency of the teachable moment at any time. Those moments were fleeting and could only be described as miraculous. For these miracles to be invoked the teachers had to become captives and stand by their task in self-denial. Occasionally, this came with some suffering on behalf of their children, but this was part of their calling because they sensed that suffering was sometimes the means to reach “that special one.” Their thought processes seemed simplistic but that was only because a scientific worldview searches for depth. It ignores the breadth of the infinite surface of events. When all existence is immanent, then events may seem connected in simple ways. Insights may seem simple rather than complex and working definitions may seem narrow. But when a teacher summons actions into place within the limits of immediate experience alone then world, bodies, and others become united. This is not the kind of experience that transforms simple ideas into complex ideas reflectively. As I showed, this kind of ecstasy can be framed reflectively in hindsight and be translated into information for communication. But immanent experience is not simplistic. It is highly forceful, energetic, and powerful. It is just not “deep.” It stretches into the margins of reality infinitely and this can only be understood when it is experienced existentially as life in classrooms. Obviously, from the perspective of a scientific methodologist it may seem myopic and shortsighted but this is only because the formative standards that are being applied to measure it

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are inappropriate. A mosaic collage is kaleidoscopic and extends over a surface that incorporates the entire classroom all the way into the margins where the most vulnerable students are hiding. It makes all particularities there into one, whole unity where all differences are still able to thrive. That, in essence, is the purpose for classroom discipline. It allows for humility to show itself in safety so that the caring teacher can detect vulnerabilities and respond to them immediately as they arise. More than any other of our classic theorists, Dan Lortie reveals the spirits of economic prosperity that are present in the school classroom. He does this by illustrating what seem to be the deformities of the schoolteacher, when, in fact, he is actually showing us their evocative power. As self-selected individuals, a vocational apprenticeship initiates a journey into immanence, a state that Lortie labeled as an “inner world.” Teachers seem to lack a glossary of specialized terms for this immanent world; they don’t seem to share general principles in common; and they don’t even seem to participate in any meaningful professional community, as Waller also lamented. This is because their calling is not information-based and they are not conforming to any abstract form of perfection. They are able to survive waves of policy reform because they are perennially tied to the needs of their pupils. Their calling to devotion, to duty, and to diligence is received singularly but interpreted existentially. They will comply with policies that mandate some degrees of uniformity. But in the intimacy of their classrooms they will reject any revocation of their primary mission. As institutionalized labor, there are obvious rational practices associated with the work that earns their salary. These include bookkeeping, calculating grades and assessments, and sundry systematic pursuits of a bureaucratic nature. But when faced with their mission, they experience the classic uncertainty of salvation anxiety and this leads them to be highly active and busy. They feel the need to measure their progress and in doing so always feel unworthy and even dejected at times. They search for immediate psychic rewards amidst this self-doubt. In fact, they even demonstrated the need to suffer, at times, as if to feel guilty if their exertion didn’t produce some suffering. This chronic anxiety gives rise to their work ethic. This makes teachers seem like victims to a sociologist who’s accustomed to searching for theoretical justifications that emancipate a proletariat in chains, or slaves in a bureaucratic iron cage. This is a vestige of the urge for transcendence that reaches all the way back to Augustine of Hippo. The immanence of the teacher’s world prevents them from pondering the future. This makes them seem presentist and conservative to the scientist. So when compared to traditional professionals like therapists, doctors, architects, social workers, and the like, they seem odd and in need of reforming. However, compared to these others, schoolteachers are distinctly unique, as Lortie acknowledged, as they are the only ones who invoke a transformational power from their own self-effacement. Paradoxically for Jackson, this meant that they displayed a human imperfection in the faceless institution. But in fact, it is the teacher who is faceless, a synonym for “selfless,” every time they gain their glory from privileging the faces of the children. Ironically, their submission aroused competence and confidence in their pupils. Those were the traits that maximized adaptability in the micro-economy of the classroom.

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A religious experience of classroom life Never before in history has mankind been so much of two minds, so divided into two camps, as it is today. (John Dewey, A Common Faith, 1934) Two years after Willard Waller wrote his classic sociological foundation of schooling at State College, Pennsylvania, John Dewey published his version of religious experience and aesthetics in Chicago. If the roots for teacher development theory had found their grounds in religious experience and art instead of in sociology, social psychology, and reflective epistemology, we would have a very different field indeed. To provide some foundation for what I mean by this, I will show how Dewey’s definitions of faith and artistic expression are bases for theorizing teaching as a variety of religious experience. In addition, I will show how the early twentieth century American pragmatist William James is a prototype of what the twenty-first century teacher researcher might be. So long as we examine teachers’ sentiments as vehicles to getting a grip on the culture of the school we will continue to look for deformations to that culture and prescribe reformations to it. If we paused for a moment to withhold our faith in culture then we might begin to become sensitized to the religious experience of learning that predominates the classroom. These subjective personal experiences are what Waller called “conscience” and what Lortie labeled as “morality.” They are the fractional human elements that Cooley called “the ideal” aspects of the institution. Rather than conforming to scientific knowledge-professions, we might consider championing the singular ideals of elementary schoolteachers without expecting them to conform to other professions. In fact, we should be investigating other vocation-professions to compare those with teaching as the modal-type of spiritual vocation. Institutional religions share the need to establish some transcendence and immortality beyond nature with their associated dogmas (Dewey 1934: 2). In all cases they try to super-naturalize human beings from the inhabited immanent world. Like science tried to do, they abstract human beings from the immanent experience of the world. Dewey believes that we have to free religious experiences from these transcendental supernaturalisms and their institutional confinements. If we were able to emancipate the religious from these encumbrances then these experiences could be free to develop on their own account (2). This can only begin to occur if we completely separate a religion from “the religious.” With this distinction, he is interested in the adjectival qualities of the religious experience, not religion as a substantive noun. Dewey claims that our commonly accepted religious institutions are hangovers of outgrown cultures (6). This is not unlike our commonly accepted Copernican, Newtonian, and Darwinian social and psycho-sciences are hangovers of outgrown meta-narratives. In either case, we are burdened by meta-narrated encumbrances and by the institutions that sponsor them, including universities. Since we no longer live in the eighteenth century, Dewey calls on us to emancipate elements and outlooks that have always been “religious” but were restricted because they were misrepresented and misunderstood. These elements and outlooks should be liberated so that researchers

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might be liberated from dogmatic positions. He stresses that the “religious” denotes nothing in the way of a specific institution or system of beliefs. It has no knowledge system and cannot be appended to a national state education system (9–10). It is somewhat more of an attitude that someone assumes for a purpose and moves someone to respond with a purpose towards the accomplishment of that purpose. This purposeful response can belong to aesthetic, scientific, moral, political, educational, and business affairs. It comes with the belief in a special kind of relationship that arouses security, stability, and peace into those affairs; in short, “the religious” promotes the conditions, energies, and spirits of mutual prosperity. Lortie suggested that we might want to evaluate whether self-selected individuals are the best candidates for school teaching. But self-selection to a calling is the way that religious experience speaks to individuals. The emotional earnestness of that selection is the psychic reward that first identifies the potential schoolteacher. This event is not a trivial matter. As Dewey reminds, it involves a “change of will conceived as the organic plenitude of our being” (17). It is the kind of experience that my betrayed friend went through in Chapter 5. He often told me that he was going through “a religious experience,” as his total being was altered to the extent that it changed the shape and gesture of his entire body. In terms of Eriksonian developmental psychology he went all the way back to his birth to relive his whole life over again up to the point of that moment of betrayal. It was a sore experience to undergo but it opened him to a new perspective, like a rebirth, when his whole life became united with that moment in his life. That experience taught him what it meant to be “now-focused” in the present. This is what a religious moment of self-selection can be like for the inspired teacher. It is the moment when their biography is rewritten for the purpose of being a teacher, and from that moment onward their lives take on a new narrative performance. Knowledge has limited value during these kinds of events and sometimes it even hinders undergoing the shift in perspective. Resources beyond knowledge usually involve what Dewey calls “things not seen” (19). We read how Jackson was puzzled when schoolteachers favored invocation of enthusiasm over formal evaluations. Schoolteachers appeared to Jackson and Lortie to be present-minded practitioners in future-oriented institutions. But they were deeply in touch with the many implied relationships of their mentorship. They did not need to “know” where their work would lead the children because the force that led them had less to do with “knowing” and more to do with “faithing.” They did in fact share what Dewey called “an anticipatory vision of things that were invisible” (19). Faith, like hope, is accustomed to an uncertain future. Faith had to be a more powerful motivator of security and stability than knowledge because the teachers were acutely aware of the limitations of their finite and erring nature. Jackson, in fact, detected their human imperfectability in a nameless institution but was unable to fully appreciate its significance at that time. Cooley helped him understand why vulnerability and humility were important but, even so, Jackson and Waller remained convinced that all teachers’ development had something to do with “knowing.” The best that most researchers can do when they theorize this is to label the faithbased practices of teachers as “moral.” Lortie did exactly this, and remained convinced

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that moral processes were inferior to intellectual ones. However, these faith-based thought processes are much more than rationally moral. Pragmatic religious aspirations have been referred to as moral because of an overriding faith in scientific discourse. Repulsion for the encumbrances of institutionalized religion prevents researchers from experimenting with alternative terms for these “epiphenomena,” as James calls them (2005: 122). Teachers do not lack a technical vocabulary; as trained researchers, we are the ones who lack the research vocabulary to interpret religious experiences. For this reason, when we suspected them to be present, they were dismissed, deemphasized, or misrepresented with moral, social, and cognitive labels. It may seem to the social analyst that teaching individuates the schoolteacher to the point of being anti-social and uninterested in collegiality. This overlooks fundamentally important interactions and relationships that have no need of social intercourse. Religious experiences have ways of personalizing those who are self-selected by them. As intensely personal, the religious experience of teaching in classrooms does not require a deity or a superhuman person to oversee them. They involve only the immanent divinity of events and this is also why psychic rewards were the indications for teachers that conversions and miracles were taking place when they invoked them with children. Even the teachers had to defer to traditional language to try to describe these to university researchers. It is not surprising that these terms were categorized as deformities to development because they pointed to completely unscientific contexts and to what seemed like anti-social solitude. Research needs to be done in the pragmatic aspects of religious experience to provide what Lieberman accurately claimed was the birth of a new language articulating “new ideas” relating to hope, commitment, and connection. But this language is not scientific and not even moral. It has a voice of its own because it is vocational, not objective and not formational. It involves the birth of new practices for understanding the pedagogical power of these alternative voices. I imagine William James as a young medical student required to conduct human autopsies. I imagine him looking at the cadaver and lamenting how that objectified piece of matter on the slab was once a living, breathing being with a spirit that emanated from its soul. I imagine him considering ideas of how that spirit might be named and how its energy could be pragmatically applied philosophically for the sake of theorizing a meaningful and developing life. James speculated how we might begin identifying and naming such ideas. He suggests that we begin by taking seriously “first things in the way of being and of power” (2005: 115). “First things” overarch and envelop our lives in ways that make it impossible to escape their effect on us. To identify the effects of such “first things” I could refer, once more, to my betrayed friend. But I would say here that these “first events” are exactly the ones that are taking place at every moment in every elementary school classroom. Teachers are aware of them for it is their responsibility to move children in directions that are life changing in terms of their hopes, their commitments, and their connections. As James describes, these immanent events invoke “total reactions to life.” As he writes: You have to go behind the foreground of existence and reach down to that curious sense of the whole residual cosmos as an everlasting presence. That presence

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is intimate as well as alien, terrible as much as amusing, and lovable even though it is equally odious. (James 2005: 115) When it concerns immanent events, there is no difference between good sense and nonsense. Life in classrooms as teachers are aware is a life that mixes all opposites. It is a “whole” experience that maintains the integrity of all singular differences. On really “good days” schoolteachers know what it feels like to reach down to the whole residue of life and feel its everlasting presence. As adults, we can all recall incidents that invoked these kinds of intimate, alien, terrible, amusing, lovable, or odious passions. As elementary school children, these intensities overarch and envelop their lives continuously because they do not have total control over their lives. Theirs is a vulnerable and dependent life for the most part and they want to have faith in the classroom teacher to provide them with security, stability, and the peace that will promote their prosperity, especially when they do not have it at home. What is the mood of the classroom that is characterized by this kind of economy? James characterizes this mood as “solemnity” (2005: 116). But he adds that scientific rigor and objective precision lack any understanding of this solemnity because it is not a matter of cultural conditioning. Solemnity deals with the “active relations” of the classroom and its mode of passionate intensity. Solemnity is a subjective emotion. There is no question what solemnity feels like for the person who is selected to feel it, James insists, because like all feelings of passionate inwardness, it is one-sided, exaggerated, intense, and extreme. These experiences elude objective measurement and relative evaluation according to traditional methods. New methods need to be invented to appreciate them; but before we theorize new methods we must begin with acceptance and appreciation of religious experiences as necessary and essential complements to knowledge. To provide an example of where these experiences might be helpful, I have said that religious experiences have been labeled with other names because theoretical frameworks were invented to replace and silence them. These experiences cannot disappear when silenced. They are only named with disguises. A clear example of this pretexting is found in research on teachers’ emotions. Van Veen’s and Lasky’s (2005) excellent treatment of this theme demonstrates how emotions can be interpreted in terms of physiological, philosophical, historical, feminist, organizational, anthropological, and psychological theoretical frameworks. In general, however, the authors assume that emotions are embedded in the social context. By ignoring the religious dimension completely, this assumption ignores the being and power of emotions as a passage to “first things.” This causes authors to limit themselves to the proverbial “tip of the phenomenological iceberg.” There are reasons for assuming that emotions have to be social constructions. The living context for “change” in teacher development research has come to be overwhelmingly interpreted as objectively scientific and chronologically futuristic. Consequently, research on emotions concerns their “professional lives,” and their “personal and professional identities.” As a consequence, Van Veen

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and Lasky search for deeper understandings of how teachers experience “their work” and “educational change” because they seek to be informed in areas of change theory and professional development that help teachers reform. This work assumes that by raising self-esteem and minimizing vulnerability teachers will be more adaptive as agents of change of school reform. However, this initiative assumes that vulnerability is a weakness in the classroom, a clear anti-religious bias. As long as we are uncomfortable with religious experiences then emotions will be subsumed as sociological or cognitive processes alone. Furthermore, manipulating and controlling the environment for human purposes can only come to pass if emotions are theorized to be biological and social constructions, mediated by social structures, cultural tools, and cultural identities. Clearly, the conceptual rhetoric of this research is entirely Darwinian, and when applied to social emancipation, it is even Marxist and utopian. This is the kind of prescription that researchers will adopt if they are forced to portray emotions as entirely social constructs, a tendency that originated in Lortie’s schoolteacher. There is nothing sinister about this. It is only to say that religious experiences must be emancipated from silence so that researchers can let them speak on their own account and, in response to that call, allow teachers to speak for themselves. Dewey and James advocate such an emancipation. I am also advocating the emancipation of teachers from becoming scientifically objectified as human resources to be deployed and reformed according to external economic and political agendas, which have nothing to do with the primary religious experience that they share with their children. How do we begin to accept, appreciate, and then measure these kinds of passionate experiences? Knowledge about an experience is never the same as having the experience itself. If you understand the causes of drug addiction, and even if you sympathize with the plight of the drug addict, you can never fully appreciate the full experience of being addicted to narcotic drugs. Knowing about addiction is nothing like being an addict. Scientific research might come to understand everything about the elements of school teaching and might even then decide which elements are going to be qualified to represent the true form of teaching for professional definition. And yet, the best and most rigorous researcher of those definitions and standards might be the worst of all teachers. The attitude that a teacher finds impelled to take towards these kinds of events, such as a sacrificial attitude, or the kind of humility that a teacher may feel when they “save” a single child at risk requires a new language of research that appreciates rather than criticizes these experiences. These experiences demonstrate relative degrees of passionate inwardness that occur with univocal intensity. They are very “of the moment.” They occur all-at-once and so they can’t be measured in terms of time and motion, nor can they be objectively evaluated. They are deeply ethical experiences that generate existential objectives. As James writes, scientific processes can classify facts, interpret them, even define them, but these processes cannot generate facts (2005: 118). Social science constructs are always latecomers to the scene of vocational experience. They are in fact pictures of reality but only narrow windows of the whole experience. As James writes, there is always a plus, excess, a more, a “this-ness” to events. It is the generative force of events that stimulated Max Van Maanen’s question about the “calling of the call” to David Hansen in 1997. These origins have very little to do with

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“knowing.” Teachers reported to Jackson and to Lortie that this generative power had something to do with enthusiasm and children’s “faces.” James implies that the pivot around which the religious life revolves is the “private personal destiny” of children (121). This was so vivid in the teachers that Jackson and Lortie interviewed. This is another reason why subjective certainty is the dependable measure for this kind of attitude. Science has utterly repudiated this personal point of view, in James’ opinion. The idea of “divinity” that the scientific meta-narrative recognizes is the deity of universal laws exclusively, one that “does a wholesale business not a retail business” (122). We saw this in Jackson’s belief that life had to somehow conform to the universal laws that pertain to human endeavors. However, the divine power of science cannot accommodate its processes to the convenience of the singular individual because that was never its purpose. For me to attack the shallowness of the scientific attitude, I had to provide some background to the story that it was trying to tell and sell. There is nothing “wrong” with the scientific attitude and I am not advocating that we reject it or forsake it. Institutions are imperfect and sometimes completely inhumane, as Cooley observed. They need reforming constantly because they have to be adaptive to changing social and economic conditions. But when logical processes of formation and reformation are applied to human beings we always risk committing an inhumanity because human beings are not social institutions as Cooley warned. “Present-oriented” and “futureoriented” categories commit injustice to teachers because they frame them as enemies of what’s supposed to be the only adaptive trait available. James theorized that we are always being faced with two different worlds of experience, one, which is subjective, and the other, which is objective. Cooley was astute in his observation that “the person” represents the subjective wholeness of life in objectifying institutions. As social formations, institutions are certainly conservative and conformative. But instinctive, plastic, and ideal persons are antithetical to institutional formations. We cannot escape death. We may try to escape taxes, but we cannot escape institutions. We must exist alongside them and this along-sidedness may be a universal example of how opposites are dissonantly mixed in our lives. The inhumanity of science tends to assume the possibility of inclusive opposites, the kind of condition that led Marx to theorize the unification of all differences into a communist utopia. This interpretation of universal “wholeness” eliminates difference and is the antithesis to adaptability. To repeat an earlier caution, I am not advocating a return to the pre-scientific attitude that science tried to reform. I am advocating a recovery of what the scientific attitude was ordained to silence but with a completely original twenty-first century attitude appropriate to the challenges that we now face. This will involve writing about how faith and reason are already mixing to generate the universal and common religious experience of learning in schools. The school can be a place where the external reality of empirical science and the personal experience of persons are mixed in one imperfect mosaic collage. Shulman acknowledged this by admitting that we have to account for the teacher’s soul, even though this was a completely marginal idea to codifying standards for their professionalism. As James insisted, each of us has a psychical entity far more extensive

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that we can know. The sense of self manifests through the physical organism but there will always be some part of your “self” or some power of organic expression that remains in abeyance or in reserve. The teachers in Waller’s, Jackson’s, and Lortie’s studies tried to indicate these parts, powers, and expressions but they had to be disclosed in forms of imperfect memories, silly anecdotes, inhibitive tendencies, or even dissolutive phenomena, as James called them. In other words, “good sense” comes out along with “nonsense” because one cannot exist without the other. It may seem as if good sense is what is closest to us. But James hypothesizes that “the farther side” of reality or the excess of nonsensical religious experience is actually closer to us than we may initially believe. “Subconscious continuations” (James 2005: 128) guide us more than we want to admit. We could see that teachers had to allude to these continuities when they tried to express vocational generations of what they do and why they do it. And for this to be possible, they had to defer to what James calls “over-beliefs” (128). Over-beliefs are kinds of metaphorical bridges that bind the finite self with the infinite self. James maintains that the most interesting thing about any person will be these over-beliefs. For teachers, these are the most interesting things about working in schools. Historically, they are made of what people appealed to when they had various kinds of visions, when they claimed to hear voices (as when being self-selected), when they encountered raptures (as when a class of pupils “see the light of day,” “wake up,” become “uncorked”), and even when they entered into “openings” like witnessing little “classroom miracles.” Over-beliefs are the binding forces when teachers “reach out” to develop meaningful connections with their pupils. That is when they commune with “the farther self,” and it’s then that work is done on the finite personality of those children and they are turned into “new persons” (129). The timing of these over-beliefs has nothing in common with future-oriented institutions and their clock-driven schedules. Technological processes, which budget time and which many educational researchers may take as granted, are entirely socially invented and constructed to enforce social conformations to institutional life.8 All the while on top of this rational and future-oriented plane of knowledge, teachers overly-believe that “divine facts” can come to them with a common faith that miracles can be invoked in their classrooms. The whole drift of William James’ education, including the medical education that he had to forsake to affirm his over-beliefs, persuaded him that the world of our present consciousness is one of many worlds of alternative consciousness. This implies that there are many temporal worlds manifesting themselves simultaneously in the classroom in spite of the clock-machine’s oppressive dominance. And these other worlds and other times contain the experiences that have meaning for the pupils’ and their teachers’ lives. However, James had faith that these worlds do mix and become continuous at some “points,” and it is at those intersections when alternative energies can filter in. Those are the moments of most passionate learning. They are the moments that teachers quest for because they are the ones that “make the difference.” James concludes that we can, of course, put ourselves in the sectarian scientist’s attitude, and imagine that the world of sensations and scientific laws and objects may be all that there is to teacher

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research. Jackson was tempted to believe this. But the total expression of human experience urges James beyond narrow “scientific” boundaries (131). The world is more intricate than science allows, he believes, and so subjective and objective conscience together holds him to the over-belief that he expresses as the earliest proponent of classroom-spirituality. How does “teacher development” take place from this religious perspective? Dewey would acknowledge that the purposes that move teachers to develop are indeed partly composed of the “hard stuff” of social and physical experience. And so we must never discount or ignore the data that we accumulate from traditional scientific inquiry. This would eliminate an entirely integral component of immanent experience. But there is a vast and fleeting manifestation that we forget to integrate if we focus on this dimension alone. Spiritual conditions are present in physical material, and energies are at play in that matter before the measurable events of science enter the equation (Dewey 1934: 51). These conditions and energies are not inherent to the matter itself, however, but are present in the “active relations” that produce religious experiences. To appreciate these relations, we need to stop thinking in terms of the exclusive opposites that built the scientific disciplines and begin thinking in terms of mixed opposites. We would begin by accepting and appreciating religious experience as a valid and worthy experience alongside science and reason. In an age far too distracted by science, the need for this kind of “both/and” perspective is urgent. The actual and the ideal, the immanent and the transcendent, and the finite and the infinite are all categories, which allow us to be open to the psychic experiences of teaching and learning development. The logic of mixed opposites also helps us to understand that teaching and learning are not distinctive capacities but are essentially mixed in their development like a moving mosaic. It also helps us understand that there is no longer a distinct dichotomy between the individual and the collective. With the mosaic logic of mixed opposites, life in classrooms is fleeting, as Jackson noticed over and over again. It is a fluid convocation of mixed degrees of intensity rather than a chronological train of successive events to measure, evaluate, and standardize.

Foretelling meta-practices of teacher development Dewey published A Common Faith during the same year that he published Art as Experience. It was his belief that we should restore continuity between our refined and intensified experiences that we call “works of art” and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute our experience. I will conclude by arguing that there is an unquestionable dynamic relationship between religious experience, art, and the immanence of our embodied lives. These are the fundamental relationships that constitute teachers’ development. Dewey observed that human bodies do not float unsupported on the earth. They are not transcendent but, in fact, they do not even rest upon the earth. Human bodies are the earth in one of its manifest operations (Dewey 1958: 3). It is the artist who cares for

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these manifest operations but does not shun moments of resistance and tension in caring for them. In fact, the artist cultivates moments of resistance and tension just as the caring teacher cultivates interactions that manifest learning. Dewey acknowledges that the scientist is also interested in problems and in situations where tension between the matter of observation and of thought is marked. However, the difference between the artist and the scientist involves how the living body interacts with the earth. Whereas the scientist operates with symbols, words, and mathematical signs, artists become artists when thought is immediately embodied in the earth. The artist thinks in the qualitative media in which they work and their thoughts lie so close to the objects that they love that they actually merge directly into them. Their inner world has stability and peace when their thoughts are made in direct union with their environment. This is the learning context of a teacher’s development. Mead, Polanyi, and Schön all stood at the doorstep of this possibility but they could not forsake the doctrines of science. Waller condemned this pre-scientific power as a “narrow mental horizon” and Jackson seemed to despond this as “myopia.” For the pragmatic artist, however, every living experience owes its richness to “hushed reverberations” (Dewey 1958: 19) and to the epiphenomena of their private medium of creation. It is responding to the calling of this call that makes art religious in its experience. Artists long to become reverberations of the experience itself and swim solitarily within that medium. To become appropriated by the first things of this being and power Dewey believed that it was necessary to have recourse to an “animal life” below the human scale, the level that Cooley called “instinctive.” We should not overlook that anima was the Latin word for “soul.” Dewey knew that in the work(ing) of art, different acts, episodes, occurrences melt and fuse into a unity but do not disappear or lose their own character as they do so (1958: 36–37). Artistic expression occurs in phases of a developing and underlying quality. It emerges in moving variations. It is not separate and independent of the world but manifests in subtle shadings of one pervading hue (37). Like the moving mosaic of a pure musical experience, there is continuous interchange and blending but it remains a dynamic unity of mixed opposites, where all of the differences retain their playful integrity. In the work(ing) out of art, the existence of unity is constituted by a single quality that pervades the entire experience in spite of its constituent parts. The mood of this epiphany is psychic and it is longed to be felt repetitively, immanently, and cathartically. This is why, in the teacher’s experience of thinking, premises only emerge as the catharsis becomes manifest (Dewey 1958: 38). Purposes and processes are very “now-focused” and presentist. From this point of view, the experience of teaching in classrooms is like watching a storm. It reaches its height and subsides as if to be one continuous movement of diverse but integrated subject matters. Like the ocean in the storm, there are series of waves, suggestions reaching out and being broken in a clash, or being carried onwards by repetitive, cooperative waves. If a conclusion is reached and the children become temporary “new persons” from those movements of anticipation and culmination, then an observer might notice that the lesson reached some sort of completion, however temporary. However, for life in classrooms, “conclusion” is never some separate and independent thing. It is the consummation of a repetitive

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and artistic movement much like the recurrent theme of a symphony that the children hum for the rest of their lives. During the height of teacher development research in 1992, Andy Hargreaves called on researchers to consider theoretical possibilities that would reorganize power relationships so that teachers’ development would not be constrained by principles of hierarchy and alienation. From a social science standpoint, this could be understood to mean that teachers should be liberated from institutional arrangements that oppress them and oppose working conditions that separate them from meaningful contact with pupils. However, let us imagine if power-arrangements stopped being merely social. Imagine if we emancipated religious experiences from all institutional encumbrances. Where does that leave the categories of hierarchy, alienation, reconciliation, and wholeness? Where do we begin finding the “first things” of being and power for this emancipation? In 1994 Hargreaves suggested that such first things had to concern themselves with “reconciliation” and “collaboration” (1994: 244). He nominated collaboration as a “metaparadigm” for this kind of organizational change (254) and called for the generation of more metaparadigms of understanding, analysis, development, and change in order to interpret, analyze, synthesize, and respond to specific paradigm shifts in technology, organizational life, and intellectual thought (245). I have shown that the perspectives that have been used to interpret analyze, synthesize, and respond to teachers in schools have been based on a meta-narrative that is really quite young and undeveloped. For the sake of technology, organizational life, and intellectual thought this narrative of science will continue to grow and influence us in every area of life. But throughout it all, the first things of religious experience will also continue to grow and influence us, if we allow them to. Hargreaves called for a metaparadigm. He was one word away from identifying what was sorely needed to retrieve what we are losing by obsessing on science whenever we think of teaching and learning. Recall that a paradigm is a pattern or a model. It is a collection of assumptions, concepts, and values that constitute “a way of viewing reality” especially for one intellectual community that shares them. Think of a metaparadigm as a “worldview of all the disciplines” that is shared by that community. As researchers, we are all disciplined by our common view of the world and we apply enormous vested interests in maintaining that view with clarity and focus because it maintains discipline within the community insofar as what can be thought, written, and taught. If we were only willing to genuinely reconsider challenging the meta-physics of our assumptions, concepts, and values then we might lay bare the fundamental principles that we depend on to explain all that there is for us to explain. We have to appreciate that this is always a difficult task and it is often not chosen but thrust upon us. First principles are “first things” and the “things” that should interest us are our research practices. Meta-practices are wrought by thought processes that go far beyond assumed disciplined views of the world. They can emancipate elements and outlooks, liberate dogmatic positions, create new persons by opening new perspectives, and they overarch and envelop our lives in ways that are impossible to escape. The meta-practices that propel educational researchers into this century will originate in collaborative thought processes. The most propelling

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educational ideas have always been conceived during periods of uncertainty, unpredictability, and instability. Our spiritual responses to the current downward spiral and its forthcoming new world order will be the forerunners for the implementations of the future. Together, we stand at the door of opportunity and pupils, teachers, and schools have never needed us more than at the present fleeting moment.

Notes

1 This summary originates in Dale E. Goldhaber, Theories of Human Development, and in Patricia H. Miller, Theories of Developmental Psychology. I have also benefited from the summary by Malcolm W. Watson. Watson’s comprehensive interpretation of human development forms the basis for several parts of my analysis in this chapter. 2 I thank one of my graduate students, Mary Rupcic, for her research of this etymology. 3 I thank Mary Rupcic for bringing this chapter to my attention. 4 This distinction between the mechanistic (generally associated with John Locke and Albert Bandura) and the psychobiological (generally associated with Rousseau and Piaget) originates in Dale Goldhaber’s Theories of human development: Integrative perspectives. It is an excellent contrast; however, he chooses the word “organismic” to define Rousseau’s perspective. I find “psychobiological” to be more literally clear and to the point when contrasting the organism’s initiative and the more passive mechanical perspective of John Locke and behaviorism. 5 Following Isaac Newton’s publication of his revolutionary principles, anyone who was literate could read popularized implications of his unreadable mathematical treatise. Examples were Benjamin Martin’s A plain and familiar introduction to Newtonian Philosophy, in Six Sections, Illustrated by Six Copper Plates (1751), of which there were five subsequent editions; James Ferguson’s Astronomy Explained upon Sir Isaac Newton’s Principles and Made Easy to Those who have not studied Mathematics (1756) which ran seven editions; Voltaire’s Elements de la philosophie de Newton in French as well as the English translation (1738); Count Algorottie’s Il Newtonianismo per le dame, which ran three editions in Italian and was then translated into French (1738) and then into English as The Theory of Light and Colors (1739); J.T. Desaguliers’ The Newtonian System of the World and the Best Model of Government, an Allegorical Poem (1728); Colin Maclaurin’s An Account of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophical Discoveries (1775). In these books common people could find Newton’s philosophy and apply it to fundamental human problems. 6 I’m grateful to Timothy Taylor (1996) for the economic statistics in this chapter. Taylor connects the productivity decline that began in the 1970s to educational factors in American society. 7 The Old Testament word mlaka is used to denote work, labor, or “business” enterprise. For example, in Genesis 39:11, the writer refers to someone who “went out of the house to do his work.” In Exodus 5:13, taskmasters or foremen urged their laborers to perform their work as “their daily task.” Exodus 31:5 connects these tasks to the practices of “craftsmanship.” 1 Samuel 8:16 refers it to domestic labor. A similar usage is found in 1 Chronicles 4:23 and in 29: 6, in which labor is spelled out as “doing the King’s work.” In 2 Kings 12:12, mlaka is used to refer to “repairs” to the God’s temple. This is likewise the case in 1 Chronicles 9:13, 23:4, and again in Nehemiah 11:22. In Esther 3:9 as well as in Psalms 107: 23, The New Oxford Annotated Bible (from which the above translations originate) translates mlaka as “service to the

208

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king,” perhaps by showing diligence in one’s work as respect for the sovereign. The book of Proverbs (22:29) clearly demonstrates this sentiment: “Do you see a man who is diligent in his business? He shall stand before kings!” 8 Eviatar Zerubavel (1985) provides an excellent historical analysis confirming the arbitrary social function of calendars, schedules, and clocks. E. P. Thompson (1967) provides a very detailed historical account of how timepieces entered common cultural prevalence.

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Index

Baldwin, J. M. 82 Bandura, A. 89 Becker, C. L. 95, 96, 100 behaviourism 103, 131 bio-psycho-social theory 61, 64, 65, 74, 75, 77–81, 83 biosocial theory 62–5 Bloom, B. 21–2, 131 Boisvert, R. D. 103 Booth, W. C. 186 Bowles, S. 132 Brown, G. 136 Bush, G. H. 134, 155

religious experience of classroom life 196–203; solemnity 199 cognitive processes 81–6 collaboration 14–15, 52, 140, 153, 158, 173–4, 205 common school movement 121–2 communism 69–70, 201 community 5, 14–15, 76, 90, 139 competence 80–1 compliance 20–1 confidence 175–6 consciousness 73; Cooley’s theory 111; Jackson’s view 20; lack of consciousness 76, 88–9; Mead’s view 109; progress 67–8, 71; Waller’s view 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 12, 13, 140 conservatism 19, 38–9, 47, 48–9, 50, 51, 52, 63, 90, 91, 143 Cooley, C. H. 32, 87, 111, 115, 196, 197, 201 culture 60, 73 culture of the school 16–20, 83; discipline 8, 9, 17–18, 20, 41–2, 195; ethos 34–5, 46, 50, 186; evaluation 17–18, 19, 20; indoctrination 17; linearity 17, 18, 20; necessary attendance 16–17; power 19–20, 160, 205; self-discipline 18–19, 20

capitalism 69, 124–6, 129, 133, 184, 185–6, 188, 193 careers 87–9 Carter, R. E. 98 child-centred education 125, 128 children’s thought processes 21–7, 160, 163 citizenship 40–1 civil rights legislation 144, 148, 151 classrooms: attention 21, 22; children’s thought processes 21–7, 160, 163; compliance 20–1; culture of the school 16–20, 83; institutional life 27–30, 83; as learning machine 20–2, 83; personality 21;

Darwin, C. 62–5, 69, 70, 71, 74, 75, 76 despotism 4, 8, 18, 41, 163 developmental theory 55–73; conceptual foundations 59–62; conflict of opposites 71; development-as-adaptation 72–3; development-as-progress 65–71; human development 56–9, 60–1; natural evolution of teacher research 62–5; scientific method 57–8; sociology 73; transformational learning 71–2 Dewey, J. 22, 63, 97, 101–8, 125–6, 128, 165, 172, 185, 196–7, 203–4 digestion as analogy 83, 85

abstraction 163 accommodation 5–6, 84, 85–6, 192, 194 aformation 192–3 agape 26–7, 79, 175–7, 187 Apple, M. 125 artistic expression 203–5 assessment of learning 23–4 assimilation 5, 6, 84, 85 attention 21, 22 Augustine of Hippo 67, 69, 195 autonomy 24–5, 153

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Index

dignity 11–12 discipline 8, 9, 17–18, 20, 41–2, 195 discourse 14, 27–9, 37 Drucker, P. 133 Durkheim, E. 73, 138, 176 economic crises 5–6, 12, 112, 113 economic theory 4, 10, 61, 68–71, 72, 74, 75 economics-as-war 141 economics of educational reform 119–36, 157; Kondratieff’s wave theory 120–1, 121f; 1784–1845 121–3, 122f; 1846–1898 123–6, 124f; 1899–1949 126–8, 127f, 137–40, 141–2; 1950–present 129–33, 130f, 134, 140–1, 142–7, 148–56; 21st century 133–6, 173 education-as-war 150 emotions 199–200 Engels, F. 124, 132 equilibration 84, 86 Erikson, E. H. 72, 74, 75, 76, 77–8, 79–80, 85–6, 135 ethics 173–4, 175, 185–6, 188–96 ethos 34–5, 46, 50, 186 evaluation 17–18, 19, 20 experience 104 expertise 164–72 Faiola, A. 136 Federal Reserve Bank 148–9, 150, 151 Fenstermacher, G. 166, 167 focusing 88 Fordism 127, 132, 133 formation 7, 11, 42, 93, 147, 154, 183–5; aformation 192–3; foundations of 164–72; knowledge-formation 101–8, 185; reflective thinking 185; and vocation 189–95, 190f Foucault, M. 17, 160 frames of reference 83, 84, 85–6 Frankena, W. K. 186 Freire, P. 68, 132 Freud, S. 74, 75, 76, 77, 79 Fullan, M. 172 Galileo 95 genetic epistemology 82–6 Giddens, A. 175 Gintis, H. 132 Goldstein, J. S. 135 “good days” 45–8, 199 Gottlieb, E. E. 170–1 Great Depression 5–6, 128, 139, 151 Great Society 129, 131, 144–7 Greenfield, T. 133

Greider, W. 133 Griffiths, D. E. 133 Grimmett, P. P. 97 Hansen, D. T. 186 Hargreaves, A. 173–4, 175, 176, 177, 191–2, 205 Harman, A. E. 149 Harvey, D. 66 Hegel, G. F. 71 higher education 131–2, 148, 151 Huberman, M. 61, 75–6, 86, 87–9, 186 Huebner, D. E. 60, 61, 186, 194 human development 56–9, 60–1 Hume, D. 99–100 idealism 30–2, 47 ideas 162–3, 165, 168 Illich, I. 132 immediacy 23–4 individualism 48–9, 51, 52, 63, 111, 134–5, 143, 174, 198 individuality 25–7, 138 indoctrination 17 informality 24 information 191 Inhelder, B. 81–2 institutional leadership 8 instruction 3, 4–5, 6–8, 60 intelligence 87, 88, 102–3 intuition 28–9, 114 invocation 190–1, 192 Jackson, P. 16–32, 89, 131, 144–7, 193–4, 197, 204; classroom as learning machine 20–2, 83; culture of the school 16–20; idealism 30–2; institutional life of the classroom 27–30, 83; teachers’ thought processes 22–7, 28, 64, 91 James, W. 193, 198–9, 201–3 Johnson, L. 129 Johnson, M. 6 Kant, I. 175 Kessler, G. 136 Keynes, J. M. 126, 140 knowledge: and expertise 164–72; and knowing 172; and language 162; narrative knowledge 178–9; reasoning 162 knowledge base 165–6 knowledge-formation 101, 185 knowledge-in-action 28, 115, 160–2, 169 Kondratieff, N. 120–36, 121f, 122f, 124f, 127f, 130f

Index Kraft of the teacher 22, 42–5, 72, 81, 147, 151, 153 Kuhn, T. 65, 174 Labor Relations Act (1935) 126 Lakoff, G. 6 language 162, 168, 198 Lasky, S. 199–200 leadership 7–8 learning 23–4, 71–2, 87 learning society 151 Lieberman, A. et al. 111, 172, 175, 198 linearity 17, 18, 20 Locke, J. 89, 94, 112, 168, 185 Lortie, D. 33–52, 75, 131, 140, 142–4, 167, 191, 195; assumptions and methods 33–9; defining teacher development 50–2, 70; “good days” 45–8; Kraft of the teacher 42–5, 72, 81; objective uncertainty 39–42, 45, 63; presentism, conservatism, individualism 48–9, 51, 52, 63, 90, 91 Lyotard, J. 102, 177, 178, 183 MacCauley, C. 175 Marx, K. 61, 68–71, 74, 75, 76, 124–5, 126, 132, 201 Maslow, A. 176 mathematical theory 100–1, 102, 166–7 Mead, G. H. 87, 101–2, 103, 108–12, 204 meta-narratives of teacher development 159, 176–80 meta-practices of teacher development 203–6 metaparadigms 205 Miller, A. 111 modernity 173, 177 moral education 33–4, 40–1, 42 narrative knowledge 178–9 “Nation at Risk, A” 149, 150–1, 155 “Nation Prepared, A” 149, 151–4, 155, 165 National Board of Medical Examiners 165 natural selection 62–5, 72, 74 Neill, A. S. 166 New Deal 126, 131, 139 Newton, I. 67, 71, 100–1, 183 Nisbet, R. 66, 67, 69 Obama, B. 189, 190 objective uncertainty 39–42, 45, 63 occult perspective 91–2, 101, 105, 110, 115, 158, 165, 172, 176 occupational stereotypes 7, 8–13; dignity 11–12; economic determinant 10; ethos 34–5, 46, 50, 186; self-selection 10, 34, 38,

217

52, 88, 147, 158, 166, 192; social disability 11, 14, 154, 198; status 6, 10, 11, 13–14, 46, 68–70; “teacherishness” 138–40; training 11, 35–7, 51–2 over-beliefs 202 paradigms 65–6, 174, 205 Parkin, F. 188 Paul, Saint 176–7 personal leadership 8 personality 21, 25–7, 35, 38–9, 81–6 personality development 74–5 Peters, T. 133 Piaget, J. 75, 76, 81–6, 87, 88, 89, 135, 161, 165 Pierce, C. S. 103 pleasure principle 63, 74, 76–7, 79, 89 Polanyi, M. 102, 112, 114–15, 160, 172, 204 post-positivism 132 postmodernity 173, 177 power 19–20, 160, 205 pre-scientific worldview 90–5, 99f, 163, 165, 178–9 pre-service 185 presentism 48–9, 51, 52, 63, 81, 90, 93, 143, 155, 162 professionalism 153–4, 158–9, 165, 170, 185 progress 66–71, 177 progressivism 125, 128 prosperity 68, 72–3, 76, 77, 78 psychic rewards 39–42, 43, 45, 47, 48, 60, 63, 72, 76, 97–8, 143, 158, 169 psychoanalysis 65, 75 quality of life 150 Reagan, R. 141 reasoning 162, 167, 168, 171, 178 Reck, A. J. 111 reflective practice 14, 97, 98–101, 102–4, 105–6, 110–11, 112–16, 164, 169–70, 185 reflexive conservatism 143 religion and religious experience 205; agape 26–7, 79, 175–7, 187; classroom life 196–203; education 10, 17, 33–4, 35, 40, 42, 67–8, 147; pre-scientific worldview 90–1, 93–4; and scientific worldview 96, 100; vocation 186–8 remediation 151 respect 11 Robinson, D. M. 62 Rousseau, J.-J. 89, 175 Samuelson, R. J. 140–1 Santayana, G. 111

218

Index

Sawyer, K. R. 73 schemes and schemata 76, 83, 84–6 Schiller, F. 175 Schön, D. 101, 102, 106, 111, 112–16, 160, 172, 193, 204 school as a living organism 4–6, 137–8 schoolteachers 6–9, 19; alienation of 7–8, 14, 43, 46, 47–8, 64, 68–9; conservatism 19, 38–9, 47, 48–9, 50, 51, 52, 63, 90, 91, 143; discourse 14, 27–9, 37; idealism 30–2, 47; individualism 48–9, 51, 52, 63, 111, 134–5, 143, 174, 198; leadership 7–8; role 32; as soldiers of economy 148–56; stereotypes 7, 8–9; see also occupational stereotypes; teacher thinking; teacher–pupil relationship; teachers’ thought processes scientific method 57–8 scientific worldview 95–101, 99f, 113, 159, 160–4, 165, 168, 171, 178–80 scientism 128–9, 132 secondary schooling 128, 141, 151, 168 self-detention 10, 13 self-discipline 18–19, 20 self-doubt 88 self-selection 10, 34, 38, 52, 88, 147, 158, 166, 192; see also service; vocation Senge, P. 133 service 10, 20, 25–7, 30, 33–4, 40–1, 147, 158, 193 Shafer, R. M. 80–1 Shaw, G. B. 10 Shulman, L. S. 59, 73, 101, 164–70, 171–2, 201 S¸ims¸ek, H. 132, 133, 135, 137 singularity 138 situational ethics 173–4 social psychology 108–12 sociology 73, 185 soul 30, 33, 45, 59–60, 85, 171, 172, 201 spirituality 59–60, 158, 159, 175–6, 179–80 Sputnik 132 stabilization 88 standardized tests 23–4, 96 standards 44, 121, 152, 153, 163, 165–6, 167, 169–71; personal standards 25, 49; standards of living 138, 150, 154, 156 statism 129, 132 status of teachers 6, 10, 11, 13–14, 46, 68–70 stimulated recall 22 subconscious 76, 77 supra-national organizations 133 Task Force on Teaching as a Profession 149, 151

Taylor, C. 175 teacher development 183–4; Lortie’s view 50–2, 70; meta-narratives 159, 176–80; meta-practices 203–6; professionalism 153–4, 158–9, 165, 170, 185; rationale 3, 34; Waller’s view 13–15, 68–9, 70, 191 teacher thinking 90–116; Dewey’s theory 101–8; knowledge-in-action 28, 115, 160–2, 169; pre-scientific worldview 90–5; reflective practice 14, 97, 98–101, 102–4, 105–6, 110–11, 112–16, 164, 169–70, 185; scientific worldview 95–101, 113; social psychology 108–12; see also teachers’ thought processes teacher training 11, 35–7, 51–2 teacher–pupil relationship 11, 19, 26–7, 32, 40, 42, 88, 158, 164 teachers’ thought processes 22–7, 28, 64, 83, 91, 160, 167–8; autonomy 24–5; immediacy 23–4; individuality 25–7, 138; informality 24; intuition 28–9, 114; moralistic 45, 48, 197–8; see also teacher thinking Tomorrow’s Teacher 149–50, 154, 165 transformational learning 71–2 trust 78–81, 85–6, 175–6 Tyack, D. B. 37 Van Manen, M. 186–7, 200 Van Veen, K. 199–200 vocation 43, 79, 101, 147, 172–6, 197; economic prosperity 184–8, 195; and formation 189–95, 190f; logic and ethics 188–96 vocational education 125–6 Waller, W. 3–15, 75, 131, 137–40, 141–2, 144, 189, 204; consciousness 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 12, 13, 140; future of teacher development 13–15, 68–9, 70, 191; instruction and accommodation 4–6, 192; occupational stereotypes 7, 8–13; school as living organism 4–6, 137–8; schoolteachers 6–9, 41; “teacherishness” 138–40 Watson, M. 58, 59, 61, 76 Watterman, R. 133 Weber, M. 184, 185–6, 187–8 welfarism 129, 132 wisdom of practice 166–7 worldview 65; meta-narratives of teacher development 159, 176–80; pre-scientific worldview 90–5, 99f, 163, 165, 178–9; scientific worldview 95–101, 99f, 113, 159, 160–4, 165, 168, 171, 178–80; situational ethics 173–4