Toward a Praxeology of Teaching

Despite much research on teaching, (preservice) teachers in the field still experience a considerable gap between theory and the prescriptions for teaching and their own day-today practice. We conceptualize this gap in terms of the difference between descriptions of practice and practice itself. Descriptions are problematic because they (a) can not include the tacit understanding (background, practical sense) against which specific acts of teaching become meaningful and (b) are inherently out of synchrony with unfolding practice. Using a number of exemplary vignettes from an extensive video database documenting our own and our collaborators’ teaching, we illustrate how Bourdieu’s notion of habitus accounts for the generation of appropriate actions in situations where there is no “time out” and how co-teaching can support (preservice) teachers’ development of this habitus. Toward a praxeology of teaching 2 It was hard, for I remember at the university you’re hearing all these ways and methods and these idealistic ways. When you actually get out there it’s different, putting it into actions . . . I don’t know what anybody else did, but I was sort of stumbling through things myself. And so I know that in September it was a real struggle and a real battle. [Nadine 980128] Such comments from preservice teachers are familiar, perhaps even expected. And despite our empathy, we have come to recognize Nadine’s experience as constituting much of the history and lore of teachers’ first professional experiences. Part of her frustration stems from the rift she experienced between the theoretical discourse of the university and the reality and demands of the classroom. We maintain that the nature of this division between technique and actual practice can be characterized in terms of temporality and context. Furthermore, we argue for a praxeology (Gr. praxis, action & logos, talk, speech) of teaching rather than a theory of teaching practice and propose co-teaching as a venue for its development as well as a model for inservice and preservice teacher development, evaluation, and research. Exemplary vignettes drawn from our own classroom experiences as well as the experiences of preservice teachers with whom we have worked illustrate the gap between technique and practice and the manner in which co-teaching can help to unify this division through the development of an appropriate habitus. Methods and Idealistic Ways Teacher education programs generally include courses on the “methods of teaching.” Underlying many of these courses is the presupposition that teaching can be described and, therefore, decomposed into a set of techniques which are then offered as “methods” to university students: Empirical and theoretical research in cognitive psychology make possible the construction of theoretical models [of instructional strategies], on which predictions can be based. The application of a model of [student] understanding of physical phenomena leads to detailed specification of a strategy for beginning physics instruction which can be expected to produce desired changes in students. (Champagne, Klopfer, & Gunstone, 1982, p. 46) Teaching, in this representation, is a matter of identifying the appropriate strategies and assembling them into a (lesson) plan to be deployed in the classroom. Such rationalist views of teaching continue to pervade the field: Knowledge of teaching is described as declarative and procedural, located exclusively in the mind (e.g., Clermont, Borko, & Krajcik, 1994) and called up by talking about practice (e.g., Copeland, Birmingham, DeMeulle, D’Emidio-Caston, & Natal, 1994). It comes as no surprise that university teacher education classrooms continue to be filled with talk about strategies, techniques, and skills. Yet, despite a large amount of research on teaching, discontinuities persist between university discourses about teaching and the practice of teaching (Liston & Zeichner, 1991; Roth, Masciotra, & Boyd, 1999; Tom, 1997; van Manen, 1990, 1995). This begs the question why, despite all the research being done and efforts to make Toward a praxeology of teaching 3 university education of teachers more relevant to their daily experience, does the rift between descriptions of teaching practice and enacted teaching practice continue to exist? One answer is that practice becomes problematic when work is thought to be knowable in the abstract. The nature of the problem lies in the contingent and extemporaneous character of practice, neither of which are captured in theories of practice which consist of decontextualized and detemporalized descriptions (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). This, in turn, may lead to an emphasis on technique rather than actual practice, the difference being that technique is removed from context, whereas practice demands consideration of the unfolding time and context in which action takes place (Orr, 1998). Descriptions and Prescriptions Common discourse about practice (in teaching, business, and administration alike) implies that practice can be viably described in the abstract. That is, that it can be decomposed into sets of techniques to be considered, changed, deployed, taught, and learned independently of the contingent and temporal constraints of situated practice (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992; Hargreaves, 1994; Orr, 1998). For example, consider the following pedagogical dictum: CONTROL THE TIME AND PLACE FOR DEALING WITH OFF-TASK BEHAVIOR: You are more likely to achieve a productive interchange about preventing recurrences of off-task behaviors in a private conference with a student than you will when both of you are worried about others in the vicinity. Do not make the mistake of making a major issue out of one student’s off-task behavior in front of other students in order to exhibit the undesirability of the off-task behavior. (Cangelosi, 1993, p. 207-208) Such recommendations for action are characteristic in many teacher education classes. However, students as individuals and collectives are dynamic entities. It is therefore an entirely different matter what those teacher actions look like that can be described a posteriori as embodying the cited prescriptions. To illustrate, consider the following recent (1998 calendar year) experiences of Cam, Nadine and Ken. Cam, a student in a master’s urban teacher education program, came to school with a well-prepared lesson plan. However, what the lesson plan could not contain were the contingencies that would arise at the moment Cam was to teach his lesson, and it could not contain the temporality of the unfolding events. I tried to introduce the lab, move the desks, get them in groups, and get them started on the lab. But no one would go with me. I had probably 5 or 6 kids out of the 25 in the class actually interested in doing what I wanted them to do. They Toward a praxeology of teaching 4 were unruly. Totally disrespectful, loud and obnoxious. Everything I wanted to do took about 3 times as long as I wanted it to. When I finally got around to handing out the materials and getting them started, it was 10:15, 19 minutes left in the period and they hadn’t even started the experiments yet! (Cam 981104) The lesson plan did not unfold as intended. What these plans did not and could not embody were the contingencies of the moment, and the interactions themselves that are the grounds for, and lead to the construction of “teacher” and “student.” Cam experienced a difference between what he expected and the actual trajectory of the unfolding curriculum as it took unexpected turns in response to the dynamic interactions of people with each other and their setting. Nor did any of the techniques that Cam was familiar with work in the here and now of this classroom. Cam’s experience illustrates a problem created by the gap between theory and practice—plans and techniques are abstract representations that do not embody the temporality of lived experience, a temporality that is always enacted in and as part of praxis. Over a four-month study in Nadine’s classroom (e.g., Roth & Boyd, 1999), there were repeated instances when students such as Tory questioned her request to leave the classroom to deal with him away from the other students, “Why do I have to leave, I haven’t done anything?” Although the request worked with some other students, it did not always work with Tory. As she expressed in the opening quote, she was stumbling through the first few months of her student teaching without being able to address important aspects of teaching (discipline problems, productive questioning) in a satisfactory way. To deal with “discipline problems,” Nadine, knew (in the abstract, that is, out of situation when the unfolding events leave her time to reflect) a number of “techniques.” Among these were: (a) take the student outside the classroom and talk to him/her without an audience present, (b) write the name of the “misbehaving” student on the chalkboard with action to be taken after class, (c) talk quietly to the student and attempt to dissolve the issue, or (d) continue the discussion in the forum selected by the student. Which of these or any other options solves a situation? However, as Nadine found out, knowing these techniques in the abstract does in itself not help acting appropriately in the particular of a situation for in praxis, there is no or little time for deliberation. For Nadine, her interactions with Tory seem to continuously lead to similar problems. Furthermore, a technique that worked one day did not always guarantee future success. [Nadine:] Well I think, I think that it’s just the here and now. And I mean it’s easy to think of, well somebody says this to me, then I follow this and this and this. But every situation is so different and every student is so different. [980424] Here, Nadine recognized the essential indexical quality of instructions: “Every situation is so different and every student is so different” so that it is uncertain how an instruction (“[a more experienced teacher] says this to me”) grounds out in the particular. Yet the Toward a praxeology of teaching 5 problem does not lie with poor instructions, but rather with the ontological differences between instructions and actions (e.g., Suchman, 1987). Thus, instructions have an essentially indexical quality that means that their significance with respect to action does not inhere in the instruction; rather, the instruction follower must find the significance with reference to the situation of its use. The specifics of the relation between the instruction and the particular situation has to be worked out in the here and now of a situation. At this point, there may be a temptation to suggest that both Cam’s and Nadine’s experiences are simply indicative of their inexperience—all new teachers suffer through such events. Although this may be true, we would suggest that the lack of congruency between prescription and practice is something that remains consistently problematic throughout a teacher’s career. Ken has been teaching a science class in the “Opportunity” cluster of an urban school with an almost exclusive African-American clientele (e.g., Roth & Tobin, 1999; Tobin, Seiler, & Smith, 1999). Many students in “Opportunity” have histories of academic failure, criminal records, are teenage mothers, and have sporadic attendance at school. As Ken began teaching in “Opportunity,” and despite 35 years of experience, Ken (who previously had given his student teacher Cam a lot of advice) generally failed himself to teach the science that he had planned. [Ken:] During an end of topic test I had occasion to speak privately to about four students because they were speaking at a volume that was not only audible but also quite distracting to others in the class. When I spoke quietly to Ramon, his public response to me was that he had finished and it therefore was acceptable for him to talk to others, exchange papers, and relax. At that point I had several options. I could speak to him outside, try to continue the discussion quietly or continue the conversation in the forum he had selected. Each option is fraught with clear problems. If I ask him to step outside and he refuses to do so then the incident has been escalated to a degree that will result in either detention or suspension. It also leads to confrontation. If I speak quietly to him and appeal to his sense of reason and good citizenship it moves the responsibility back to him to be decent and not distract others. However, his actions prior to me speaking to him suggest that he is unlikely to agree to interact privately. He wants to win any debate and he needs a jury of peers to have a chance. The option of having the discussion at a level that is loud enough for all to hear is unacceptable because it disrupts everyone from their work and gives others like Ramon a chance to join the exchange. A final alternative is to walk away from Ramon and ignore his efforts to be disruptive. This alternative only forestalls the inevitable next occurrence of unacceptable behavior. [field note, 990301] In Ken’s past experience, speaking quietly with students normally led to situations in which he could negotiate with the student what to do next. The situation was different in this science class, because what normally worked even without having to objectify the Toward a praxeology of teaching 6 situation and next move, did not work here. Thus, when Ken asked Ramon to step outside, the latter refused to leave the classroom; Ken was now forced to deal with a situation Cangelosi (1993) in the above citation explicitly suggests to avoid. Rather than having an opportunity to negotiate, he was forced to consider his next move and, in this, be even less synchronous with the unfolding events.1 All too often, manuals of teaching methods are based on the assumption that assemblages of objectified techniques are capable of describing actual practice a priori; that is, such manuals offer (theoretical) prescriptions to be implemented in praxis. When actual teaching does not “implement” such prescription, it is the teacher who is held accountable (by supervisors, administrators, students, parents or other teachers) rather than the inherent gap between prescription and practice. Yet readers will certainly have had one experience or another of the difference between reading an instruction manual (i.e., cook book, software manual, programming instructions for VCR, assembly guidelines for furniture) and finding in their actions what the instructions seem to describe. That is, teachers have to find in their own actions the coherence with another organizational class of material, the instructions. It is in and through their work of teaching that this coherence is established rather than being given a priori. For this reason, prescribed technique often breaks down under the pressure of context and time. Under this pressure, then, excellence and masterful practice cease to exist when (preservice) teachers begin to base practice on techniques—artificially isolated elementary units of behavior that only partially and inadequately describe practice—extracted from practice for the purposes of communication (Bourdieu, 1980). One domain of research has taken a particular interest in understanding the relation between practice and descriptions of it, particularly with the relationship between instructions and what instruction followers actually do: ethnomethodology (e.g., Amerine & Bilmes, 1990; Bjelic, 1992; Bjelic & Lynch, 1992; Law & Lynch, 1990; Sharrock & Button, 1991; Suchman, 1987). Ethnomethodological research underscores that motivated and competent readers of instructions (or descriptions, documents) will overwhelmingly arrive at definite conclusions about what the instructions say. These readers will do so despite the fact that the instructions may be only marginally adequate to what may be necessary for determining their meaning; and there are no specifiable methods for reading such instructions. Instruction followers will, then and there, in the here and now of the particular situation, contrive ways of dealing with the seeming discontinuity between instruction and action. But to do so, they have to draw upon their understanding of the possible and actual courses of actions and outcomes in such situations. That is, to know what a teaching technique “really” means, teachers need to read them under the auspices of their involvement in, and familiarity with, circumstances under which such teaching techniques are applicable. This is not a simple matter, as our examples from Ken, Cam, and Nadine’s teaching show. Even an experienced teacher may not be familiar with the particulars of some setting: Ken had not previously taught in an urban school and therefore had neither been involved nor was he familiar with circumstances in which these 1 Although objectification of experience and consideration of options may appear to fly by, the detachment from the situation and time required are sufficient for the teacher to “lose touch” with the situation (Masciotra, Ackerman, & Roth, in press; Roth & Masciotra, 1999) and make “reflection-in-action” impossible (see Eraut, 1995). Toward a praxeology of teaching 7 techniques are descriptors of appropriate actions. His experience is not unique (e.g. Bullough & Baughman, 1997) and illustrates the intricate relationship between temporality, context and technique. Teachers attempting to employ a particular technique need to understand not only how the techniques work, but also how particular techniques work in a particular situation, and what kinds of things may actually rather than conceivably happen. Temporality of Practice Unfolding Practice and Time Practitioners engaged in their daily work know the world but in a way that does not establish itself through the exteriority of a knowing consciousness. In many ways, practitioners understand the world too well—like the proverbial fish understand the water they inhabit. Practitioners do their work without objectivizing distance, as going without saying, precisely because they find themselves there in situation; they are part of the setting which they inhabit “like a habit [clothing] or familiar habitat” (Bourdieu, 1997, p. 170, our translation). Thus, everyday praxis—teaching, repairing photocopies, doing research or cooking and gardening—is better described in terms of transparent coping rather than in terms of rational action (Dreyfus, 1991). For example, the keyboards that we use to write this article are transparent to the activity of writing; we are concerned with the ideas, the text, choice of words, and similar activities. A keyboard only emerges from the background, rises into our conscious awareness, in cases of breakdown (or when we describe our activity of writing a research article) noticed as a change in the normal ways of functioning. Temporality is not captured in existing “theories” of practice (Agre, 1997; Bourdieu, 1997). Practice unfolds in time, irreversibly, with its own rhythm, tempo, and directionality. The experience of practice is therefore asymmetrical with respect to time, in that it can be known only from its beginning to the present moment, but not in its completion. This temporality is constitutive of the very meaning of practice. However, this temporality is destroyed by the objectifying gaze of the researcher, for to be knowable, the practice (or some aspect of it) has to be completed so that it can be lifted from experience in its totality. But as a completed entity, the described practice, the techniques, have lost not only the context from which it was lifted, but also its temporal aspect. In this process of “freezing” (Collins, 1990), polimorphic (multiple uses) and polithetic actions (multiple meanings) are converted into monomorphic and monothetic actions, that is, into techniques (Berg, 1998; Bourdieu, 1980). Such freezing is not problematic in itself; but it is problematic when texts conflate and therefore confound the frozen images of practice with practice itself. Yet teachers, preservice and experienced alike, often begin with these and similar descriptions and prescriptions for teaching only to be surprised that in the day-to-day praxis of their teaching, things often do not work out in the way described. As we could hear so vividly described by Nadine, there is a difference between the description of practice, a technique or skill, and the practice itself. Toward a praxeology of teaching 8 This still leaves unanswered the question, “How do teachers come to act appropriately despite doing so contingently and extemporaneously?” With Bourdieu (1980) we answer, because successful teachers have developed habitus.