From Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995 (Forthcoming)
The final lens through which we can view our practice is the lens of theory. Although this book argues strongly for the importance of learning from experience, this doesn't mean that formal educational literature is, by definition, irrelevant. Far from it. If I believed this I would have wasted a good part of my own life writing words that meant nothing. Educational literature can help us investigate the hunches, instincts and tacit knowledge that shape our practice. It can suggest different possibilities for practice, as well as helping us understand better what we already do and think. In this chapter I want to examine how reading educational theory, philosophy and research can provide new and provocative ways of seeing ourselves and our practice.
Before examining the contribution of theory, I want to say a few words about the unsound and unworkable distinction often made between 'theorists' and 'practitioners'. The musings of educational theorists are often contrasted with the practicalities of teaching. Theory and practice are viewed as existing on either side of a great, and unbridgeable, divide. I believe that this theory-practice dichotomy is a nonsense. Making this distinction is epistemologically and practically untenable. Like it or not, we are all theorists and all practitioners. Our practice is theoretically informed by our implicit and informal theories about the processes and relationships of teaching. Our theories are grounded in the epistemological and practical tangles and contradictions we seek to explain and resolve. The educational theory that appears in books and journals might be a more codified, abstracted way of thinking about universal processes, but it is not different in kind from the understandings embedded in our own local decisions and actions. As Usher (1989) suggests, formal theory serves as "a kind of resource and sounding board for the development and refinement of informal theory - a way of bringing critical analysis to bear on the latter" (p. 88).
Reading can assist us in naming aspects of experience that elude or puzzle us. When we read an explanation of a contradictory experience that interprets it in a new and revealing way, it makes it comprehensible. As a result, we feel that the world is more accessible, more open to our influence. When someone else's words illuminate or confirm a privately realised insight we feel affirmed and recognised. In her study of classroom chronicles, Isenberg (1994) shows how reading others' depictions of the crises, anxieties and dilemmas that she thought were uniquely her own, helped her put her own problems in perspective. Also, seeing a personal insight stated as a theoretical proposition makes us more likely to take seriously our own reasoning and judgments. This does wonders for our morale and self-confidence. It also strengthens our ability to state clearly the rationale informing our actions.
Literature can also help free us from falling victims to the traps of relativism and isolationism. To quote Freire (Horton and Freire, 1990): "Reading is one of the ways I can get the theoretical illumination of practice in a certain moment. If I don't get that, do you know what can happen ? We as popular educators begin to walk in a circle, without the possibility of going beyond that circle ..." (p.98). By studying ideas, activities and theories that have sprung from situations outside our circle of practice, we gain insight into those features of our work that are context-specific, and those that are more generic. Embedded as we are in our cultures, histories and contexts, it is easy for us to slip into the habit of generalising from the particular. Reading theory can jar us in a productive way by suggesting unfamiliar interpretations of familiar events and by suggesting other ways of working.
For teachers who lack the opportunity to belong to a reflection group, and who are unable to benefit from listening to the contrasting perspectives and interpretations of colleagues, the written word may be the only source of alternative viewpoints available. By reading books and articles we can engage in a simulated conversation about practice with interested colleagues. Freire (Horton and Freire, 1990) puts it like this: "when I meet some books - I say "meet" because some books are like persons - when I meet some books, I remake my practice theoretically. I become better able to understand the theory inside of my action" (p. 36). A conversation with a book is written, not spoken. Books which end up with comments scrawled throughout the margins, pages turned down, and peppered with yellow slips, are books we have talked with.
Even for teachers lucky enough to belong to a reflection group, reading educational literature still serves an important function. It supplies provocative elements of dissonance that can shake up comfortably settled frameworks and assumptions. Teachers in peer learning groups often display an ideological homogeneity. As a member of one group commented, "It was important that we all shared certain values - mostly that we all took the job seriously and wanted to do it well, but also that we had the same basic idea about, for example, how the children should be treated" (Nias, 1989, p. 174). Members of informal support groups tend to share paradigmatic, framing assumptions about purposes and methods of education that are so deeply embedded that their existence is hardly even realised let alone subjected to critical analysis. Teachers in these groups tend to value the same ideas and resources, disagreeing only on technical matters concerning how best to realize common aims.
In such groups the prospect of groupthink - of an uncritical adherence to certain formal beliefs and informally developed norms - is very real. There is a mutual reinforcement of pedagogical correctness, and a corresponding dismissal of inconvenient points of view as irrelevant, immoral or ideologically unsound. To stay intellectually alive, groups may need the stimulus of unfamiliar interpretations and perspectives. As one teacher put it when talking of her involvement with such a group: "we did need to keep changing - if that had stopped happening, and nobody had changed we could easily have stopped growing" (Nias, 1989, p. 175).
Having the study of educational literature as a regular feature of a reflection group's existence reduces the likelihood of groupthink and intellectual stagnation. This is especially true if group members deliberately seek to expose each other to ideas and materials that have previously been considered off limits, radical or contentious. Viewing common practices through the lens of an alternative theoretical critique can expose contradictions of which we were previously unaware, and can help us make explicit those paradigmatic assumptions that are part of our intellectual furniture.
Without the regular and serious study of theoretical literature we can easily remain immersed in a pragmatic fixation on the puzzles of our own practice. We struggle with the problem of how to use participatory and experiential methods in classes of over 100 members, or of how to connect with every one of our widely diverse students. We agonize about how we can catch teachable moments, diverge from our lesson plan, and build on spontaneity, while still getting through the syllabus.
Theoretical literature helps us remember that these puzzles are not just procedural kinks or tangles to be unravelled, but politically sculpted situations illustrating the internal contradictions of the systems in which we work. Critical theory views these problems as the predictable consequences of having teachers work alone in arbitrary periods of time under a centrally controlled system. Reading this literature means that we reframe what we consider to be the 'problems' in our practice. Our 'problems' become defined as the refusal of the curriculum council or accreditation agency to let us develop materials specific to particular contexts, or the educational institution's placing of intolerable burdens on teachers who are expected to take on more and more students with no additional help.
Despite numerous injunctions and exhortations by teacher educators about the value of doing a critical reading of theory, very few examples are available of how this might be done. Detailed suggestions such as those given in Connelly and Clandinin's (1988) chapter on "Unlocking the Literature" are very much the exception. In this chapter I want to build on my own experience working with teacher reflection groups who decided to make the study of theoretical literature a central part of their activities. I urged these groups to structure a critical reading of theory around four general categories of questions - epistemological, experiential, communicative and political. Asking a set of questions about a text provides a structure for critical inquiry that makes this activity seem less daunting. The reader has a road map to take her into unfamiliar terrain.
When we ask epistemological questions of a text we want to find out how an author comes to know that something is true. Epistemological questions inquire into what writers regard as acceptable grounds for truth. If the truth proposed is of an empirical kind (for example, 'research shows us that when students are involved in planning their learning they are more engaged and do better') we need to know what kind of evidence supports this generalization and how it is obtained and interpreted. If the truth is of a more prescriptive nature (for example, 'teachers should be co-inquirers with students into problematizing their own position of authority in the classroom') we can also ask questions about the experiential, theoretical or philosophical grounds for this belief. We want to know something about the intellectual traditions influencing the writer. These traditions often shape the questions or problems that she feels need addressing and they tend to undergird the specific pedagogic injunctions and advice that are offered. We also want to know what autobiographical experiences the writer has had that inform these convictions.
Specific epistemological questions a teacher can ask about a piece of educational literature are the following:
Are the ideas presented by writers already predetermined by the intellectual paradigm in which they work ?
Educational theorists are just as confined within their own comfortable and familiar intellectual paradigms as are learners or teachers. It is hard to see how a confirmed behaviorist convinced of the appropriateness of Skinner's ideas for organizing classroom instruction around the sequenced pursuit of predetermined behavioral objectives could write a piece that would end up advocating experiential flexibility. Conversely, an author schooled in the critical theory of Habermas or Gramsci is very unlikely to write a piece supporting nationally imposed curriculum standards designed to produce a highly trained workforce that supports our global economic competitiveness. So, one of the first things we should find out as we approach a piece of educational writing is the intellectual tradition with which the author is most closely allied.
Sometimes this allegiance is already known from our acquaintance with that person's previous work. Sometimes authors make explicit at the outset the traditions on which they draw most strongly. Indeed, it may be our familiarity with the writer's previous work, or the predominant intellectual traditions within that work, that draws us to a new piece by that same person. When we come to a piece 'cold', however, it is important early on that we gain the best insight we can into its author's intellectual orientations and biases. We can begin with a careful scrutiny of the preface and acknowledgments sections in books to find out what prompted the author to write the text and to see if we recognize the people and ideas cited as being most influential. We can scan the index to see what sources and which authors are most frequently cited. By this time we will have picked up some good clues about the author's biases before doing a more detailed reading.
To what extent are the central insights of a piece of literature - whether these are framed as research findings, theoretical propositions or philosophical injunctions - grounded in documented evidence ?
Uncontested claims about the fundamental nature of teaching and learning, or the universal characteristics of teachers and students, abound in pedagogic literature. Depending on who you read (Henry Giroux or Allan Bloom, Paulo Freire or E.D. Hirsch), the best conditions to encourage learning are those where culturally important pieces of knowledge are clearly specified beforehand, or those where students and teachers negotiate democratic process and question the means by which certain voices and ideas come to constitute the dominant discourse. Methods such as small group discussion or experiential assessment are either lauded for their emancipatory potential and their capacity to connect to students' lives, or derided as meaningless and self-absorbed disclosure representing a softening of serious academic standards. Multicultural curricula are viewed as a much needed counterbalance to Eurocentric worldviews or condemned as a scoundrel's retreat into an intellectually flabby relativism.
When teachers encounter assertions regarding the fundamental truth about learning or educational process they can ask themselves 'what is the evidence this writer produces to support this claim?' By evidence I don't mean only quantitative or experimental studies conducted according to classical canons of scientific procedure. Personal experience is wholly valid empirical evidence, provided that it is rendered as fully as possible and that the context for the experience is made clear so that readers have a chance to check for possible distortion. Asking 'what evidence is provided for these claims?' does not exclude a whole genre of experientially inclined writing. Instead, it helps us approach such writing in a more critical way so that we can distinguish between generic and idiosyncratic elements of the experiences discussed. Evidence can also include theoretical analysis. A theory that accurately accounts for events in our practice is just as much a piece of evidence as the findings of the most exhaustive empirical survey.
To What Extent Does the Writing Seem Culturally Skewed ?
In its tendency to deal in aggregates and universal categories, theory about learning and teaching can be culturally blind, neglectful of gender, and disturbingly ethnocentric. Every time we come across a generic use of terms like 'students', 'learning', 'teachers' and 'teaching', we can get into the profitable habit of asking what specific kinds of students and teachers are being written about and what particular kinds of learning and teaching are being discussed. Do these students come from a variety of cultures and classes ? Is attention given to feminist ways of knowing that emphasize interdependence and connectedness, as well to the development of independent critical thought ? Is there an unacknowledged hierarchy of learning, with university sponsored skills of formal logical analysis valued over everyday cognition? Is intellectual acumen viewed as a more evolved thought ptocess compared to practical intelligence? Are holistic and intuitive models of learning treated with the same credibility as those dealing with logical cognition?
To What Extent are Descriptive and Prescriptive Writing Fused in an Irresponsible and Inaccurate Way ?
Apparently objective claims regarding the essential features of educational process (for example that students' intellectual development is recognized by their increasing self-directedness, that effective learning depends on students knowing objectives beforehand, or that using simulations increases students' affective connections to knowledge) are often philosophical prescriptions that wear only the thinnest of empirical disguises. A great deal of educational writing fuses descriptive and prescriptive elements in a dangerous way. As we read theoretical work we can look at generalisations about students, teachers and educational processes and ask ourselves the extent to which they are an uncritical reflection of the writer's philosophical preferences.
Of course, writing that springs from deeply held philosophical and ideological convictions about what education should look like is often provocative and compelling. It is also more likely to influence teachers than formal experimental or statistical research. In my own life, Myles Horton's words have shaped much of how I think and act as a teacher, yet I can't recall Myles ever citing a single piece of published scholarly research in support of his assertions.
In one of many memorable 'Talking Teaching' discussions I have had with colleagues at the University of St. Thomas, we each took turns to name the books we saw as being the most influential in terms of changing how we taught. Noone mentioned formal research studies or careful statistical analyses. Instead, we all chose what might be described as experiential or philosophical analyses: personal statements like Clark Moustakas' The Authentic Teacher (1966), speculative essays like Herb Kohl's I Won't Learn From You (1994) and powerful polemics like Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1993). That the St. Thomas group is not alone in being moved to action by polemical writing is evident from the teachers in Kreisberg's (1992) study who spoke convincingly of how reading authors such as Jonathan Kozol, John Holt and A.S. Neill had triggered their own determination to infuse their teaching with social activism.
I believe that philosophically grounded writing is powerful and necessary and that openly polemical writing is strongly desirable. Indeed, much of my own writing has this flavor. However, I am also aware that this kind of writing (my own included) is often imbued with a reading of the world, and of education's place within it, that appears to be self-evident. Part of being a critical reader of pedagogic literature is getting into the habit of detecting those times when philosophical prescription is presented as self-evident empirical description.
Experiential questions help us view written depictions of teaching and learning through the lenses of our own experiences. Asking these questions demystifies academic texts and brings them closer to home. It reduces the distance between what we regard as legitimate, academic codifications of what teaching and learning is, or should be, and what we dismiss as our own irrelevant, or inadequate, personal histories as teachers. When we ask experiential questions we become much less willing to give away our histories.
Before beginning this description of experiential questions, however, I want to stress the danger of going to ridiculous extremes on the theme of valuing our own experiences. The honoring and dignifying of teachers' experiences is necessary work, but it does contain some implicit dangers. As Richert (1991) comments, "research in cognitive psychology cautions us about the difficulty of learning from experience by suggesting numerous ways of misapprehending experience and thus mislearning from it" (p. 113). This is why autobiographical experience needs the critical checks provided by the multiple lenses of students' eyes, colleagues' perceptions and literature.
Cultural distortions affect how we have, interpret, and learn from experiences. Aronowitz and Giroux (1991) point out that uncritically affirming people's histories, stories and experiences risks idealizing and romanticising them. They write "within this perspective it is assumed that ... experiences produce forms of understanding that escape the contradictions that inform them. Understanding the limits of a particular position, engaging its contradictory messages, or extending its insights beyond the limits of particular experiences is lost in this position" (p. 117). There is a fine line to be drawn between acknowledging the importance of experience and recognizing its potential for distortion.
So, finding a discrepancy between our own experiences and what we read in textbooks does not mean that critical reflection has somehow occurred. To attribute total validity and accuracy to our experiences while sneering at the distortions perpetrated by theorists is as crazy as saying that when it comes down to having to make a choice, we are always right and books are always wrong. Being a critically reflective teacher means that we regard both phenomena - our personal and collective experiences and our reading of formal theory, research or philosophy - as important elements in our critical journey. They are dialectically connected, with one constantly illuminating and informing the other.
How Do Metaphors and Analogies Reveal the Writer's Ideology ?
Educational writing is chock full of metaphors and analogies that describe the act of teaching. Identifying and scrutinizing these is one good way to slip behind the formality of much academic prose and come to an understanding of the author's orientation. If someone describes the learning process as osmosis, that says a great deal about how he or she conceives the role of teacher and the kinds of behaviors expected of students. Writing about classrooms as war zones or battle sites, or of teachers as fifth columnists working behind enemy lines, clearly displays a certain ideological orientation.
When we discover metaphors and analogies that appear repeatedly in a piece of writing we can analyse them from several perspectives. Do they embody fluid processes, or are they essentially static? What are their intellectual origins ? Do they spring from engineering systems of thought, from the natural biological world, or from artistic images ? Do they have embedded within them clear power differentials in terms of students and teachers' roles and obligations? Do they contain the implication that teaching, or learning, is predictable and can lead to a predefined conclusion ? Or, do they suggest that these processes are inchoate and open ? What kinds of metaphors and analogies are most frequently invoked ? Are they military and sporting ones with teachers described as coaches and intensive courses referred to an intellectual boot camps ? What about the prevalence of capitalist metaphors that see educational processes and market values as interchangeable ? Does the text speak of education as a product to be sold to consumers ? Is skill development written about as tooling ? Do learners have to buy into or own an idea ?
What Experiential Omissions Are There In A Piece of Literature That, To You, Seem Important ?
Pedagogic theorizing purports to help us understand our lives as teachers. As you read a piece of academic literature you can ask questions about the fit between your own most important experiences and what writers argue are teachers' most important concerns. Are your most common dilemmas contained in the piece ? Are the writer's problems your problems ? What help are an author's words to your efforts to deal with the things in your teaching that keep you awake at night ? What has this research to say about what to do when you feel like you've totally lost control ? How does it help you deal with hostility and anger directed at you by students ? What responses does it suggest you make when external boards or administrative superiors change your curriculum without warning? Are your feelings of impostorship acknowledged ? Educational writing should not deal only with teachers' experiences. But if a writer's theoretical insights are shown to be grounded in, or connected to, experiences that teachers recognize as their own, then it is taken more seriously and has greater impact.
To What Extent Does A Piece of Literature Acknowledge and Address Ethical Issues in Teaching ?
Facing dilemmas is a constant and pressing feature of teachers' lives (Berlak and Berlak, 1981). Few of us get through the day, let alone the week, without being faced with some kind of dilemma that seems methodological yet that has implicitly ethical dimensions. Do I let a colleague's insensitivity to a student go unremarked ? How much time do I spend writing detailed comments on students' work when I know that writing scholarly articles is what will get me tenure ? How far can I push my commitment to critical thinking with students from cultures that venerate the teacher's wisdom and see education as a process of initiation? Does my commitment to student choice mean I have to honor a student's request to write the terms of his learning contract for him ?
The area of practice about which many teachers agonize the most - making evaluative judgments of students' work - is so painful because the decisions they make are ethical as much as methodological (Brookfield, 1988). To what extent is it ethical for teachers to keep evaluative criteria secret from students ? Is it ever justifiable to give poor students an unduly favorable report so that they stay in a program until they've had the time to develop the necessary survival skills ? What happens when we know that a student is not going to make it and will sooner or later be made aware of that fact, yet every human impulse in us tells us that we should affirm and praise what he has done for fear of doing irreperable damage to his self-concept as a learner ? How do we reconcile our desire not to get fired with our horror at being forced to give institutionally mandated computerised tests that we know are assinine ?
Given that we live on the horns of impossibly complex ethical dilemmas every day of our teaching lives one of the first reality checks we can apply to a piece of educational writing is the extent to which it addresses ethical issues. Is there a chapter or section devoted to these ? If not, are they discussed throughout the narrative ? Which of the ethical dilemmas posed do we recognize as our own ? When we do find one posed, is the dilemma framed convincingly with all the contradictions and cul de sacz we experience ? Or, is it staged to lead to a conclusion that we realise confirms the author's prejudices ? To what extent does the writing make us aware of dilemmas we had previously ignored ? And, more practically, do we gain any insight into our own actions as we try to work through the dilemmas discussed ? All these questions are useful ones to ask as we decide whether a piece of literature is worth our serious attention.
Communicative questions focus on matters of form, style and presentation, so they may appear to be apolitical, superficial even. Yet, such matters are highly political. Who decides on what forms of academic language are allowed to appear in scholarly journals and textbooks ? How are decisions made that certain expressive styles - such as colloquial language - go against the 'house' policy of a publisher, and therefore should not be allowed ? Why are some journals off limits for qualitatively inclined researchers whose mode of presenting research is seen as too sloppy, subjective, or costly (one graph or statistical table is cheaper than a thousand quotes) ? Communicative questions asked of texts help us to be aware of the politics of power and control in educational writing.
Whose Voices Are Heard In A Piece Of Academic Writing ?
Teaching-learning interactions involve a multiplicity of voices and we can examine literature for the extent to which this diversity is acknowledged. In research focused on learning we can judge the extent to which learners' own voices are evident. Is there sufficient quotational data - descriptions of learning given in learners' own words - to support and amplify the theories, models and concepts advanced ? Does the author use a detached, distanced, third person style referring to 'the researcher' or 'this writer' in an objectified way ? Or, does she write in the first person and acknowledge the centrality of her experiences and personality to the report ? Are the findings presented in a formal, memorandum style with the research described in a smooth linear fashion ? Or, does the presentation of the research acknowledge the hestitations, leaps forward, feelings of depression, and intuitive insights that accompanied the writer's efforts ?
If axiomatic concepts are advanced to describe how people learn or teach are these grounded in people's own words so that they would be recognized by the people from whose experiences those concepts sprang ? Is there an explicit attempt to include a range of voices, and a variety of expressive forms such as poetry, fantasy, overtly colloquial language ? Does the terminology employed reflect one class or cultural linguistic code, or are there variants by ethnicity, gender and cultural location ?
When we seek answers to questions like these we see that the books and journals we are reading - particularly those widely regarded as prestigious and weighty - are not put together by chance. They are political artefacts representing certain interests and ideologies (Apple and Christian-Smith, 1991). It becomes clear that "texts are sites of pedagogic and political struggle" and that as we approach them we need to raise "important questions about the ideological interests at work in forms of textual authority" (Aronowitz and Giroux, 1991, p. 105). These interests are perhaps most easily discerned in handbooks or encyclopedias within the sub-disciplines of education. The knowledge that makes its way into these collections is 'official' knowledge. By that, I mean it is codified knowledge that has been scrutinized and approved by the field's gatekeepers. The knowledge that never sees printed form, or that appears only in occasional newletters produced by groups of activist teachers, can easily become labelled as inherently radical, off limits or irrelevant.
Books and journals are not put together by chance. They are the result of specific political processes in which personalities, academic reputations, loyalties and ideologies all play their part (Miller, 1994). Analyzing a piece of educational writing as a commodity makes us realize that the words that end up on printed pages in scholarly tomes are produced by people working in specific, often priviliged contexts. This is sometimes a deflating realization for those who believe that the answers to their problems can be found in educational literature. But mostly, it is a welcome exercise in demythologizing. Teachers begin to feel much less guilty about the fact that their own problems and responses appear only rarely or obliquely in academic writing.
To What Extent Does The Literature Use A Form Of Specialized Language That Is Unjustifiably Distanced From The Colloquial Language Of Learners And Teachers ?
In the literature on education, as in most other forms of academic writing, a specialized form of discourse often develops. At times this rarefied language is necessary to capture the complexity and distinctiveness of processes that cannot easily be described in colloquial terms. At other times, however, writers throw around terms that are understood only by an 'in' group of ideologically sympathetic theorists. So, when specialized language is used in literature on teaching we can ask ourselves whether or not we feel this is justified because it promotes clarity of understanding, or whether it is simply a kind of coded, scriptural signalling.
Whenever we encounter specialized language we can ask whether or not the writer provides an abundance of examples, analogies and metaphors to help our understanding. We can get in the habit of checking whether or not a clear definition of a new term is given every time one is introduced. When generalized definitions are offered we can search for specific examples of the processes that these definitions represent. When a theoretical or philosophical framework is presented we can look for a grounding of this framework in descriptions of events, dilemmas or contradictions of practice. It is possible to write accessibly about difficult theoretical ideas. Erich Fromm and C. Wright Mills have shown that intellectual sophistication and clarity of expression are not mutually exclusive. Both men interpreted daunting intellectual traditions (psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt school, Marxism) in an engaging, clear and provocative way.
For me, Myles Horton's words describing his work at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee provide the best expressions of an intelligible language of critical practice. Through talking about very specific political battles and educational situations, Horton proposed many general truths about educational process. His injunctions, insights and analyses on the nature of teaching and learning (many of which are scattered throughout this book) are rich with implications for anyone working to help people think and act more critically. Because of his distaste for academic writing - with what he saw as its sterility and lack of connectedness to action - Horton's ideas gained attention primarily through his actions. Fortunately, he also gave interviews to people who believed that his life was full of meaning for educators in all kinds of settings (Kennedy, 1983; Conti and Fellenz, 1986). In his weaving together of stories, metaphors, strategies, political analysis, parables and pedagogic insights, Horton's speech is accessible yet challenging, inspirational yet familiar. He referenced few, if any, secondary sources that could be described as 'formal' research. Indeed, if he had been proposed for tenure at most American universities, he would probably have been turned down for his lack of publications. It is hard to imagine a more damning indictment of the appalling schism between the world of educational research and the daily experience of educational practice.
Paulo Freire, the Brazilian literacy educator, has tried to avoid the sterility of much academic writing by relying increasingly on transcriptions of his conversations with other educators in a series of talking books (Shor and Freire, 1987; Freire and Macedo, 1987; Freire and Faundez, 1989; Horton and Freire, 1990; Escobar, Fernandez, Guevara-Niebla and Freire, 1994). As he says, speaking rather than writing a book induces "a certain relaxation, a result of losing seriousness in thinking while talking. The purpose is to have a good conversation but in the sort of style that makes it easier to read the words" (Horton and Freire, 1990, p. 4). Groups of teachers have also published records of their conversations on practice as academic books (Berman and others, 1991; Branscombe, Goswami and Schwartz, 1992; Gitlin and others, 1992; Clandinin, Davies, Hogan and Kennard, 1993). Perhaps the best way to demystify and reduce unecesarily formal, academic literature is to insist that more people speak their ideas to others and then have these conversations transcribed, rather than starting with the idea of writing for scholarly publication. Reading the two interviews with Henry Giroux in his book Border Crossings (1992) and comparing these to the prose in the rest of the book shows how transcribed conversations work as a good introduction to more complex theoretical ideas.
We raise political questions about a text whenever we ask whose interests a piece of work serves and how it stifles or animates efforts to create a more compassionate and just society. To teachers who see themselves as value free expositors of objective knowledge - whether this be about history or mathematics, biology or philosophy - political questions are largely irrelevant. Indeed, at a time when political correctness is used as a term of abuse, advocating a political approach to reading educational literature is full of pitfalls. However, most teachers are ready to admit that in constructing curricula or in deciding how to evaluate students they exercise choices from a range of alternative options. Having admitted this, those teachers usually acknowledge that there are some values and preferences that underlie their choices. Making those values and preferences clear, investigating their origins, and asking whose interests they serve and preserve, are the purposes of political questions.
Whose Interests Are Served By A Piece Of Literature ?
Words are weapons which have great power invested in them. They create, as well as mirror, reality. Anytime words appear printed in the public domain they serve to advance certain ideals, images, stereotypes, paradigms and sets of assumptions. Educational books and articles are no exception to this. They play an important role in creating the conditions for educational discourse. They frame what is considered to be the limits of acceptable educational practices, philosophies and purposes. What teachers, reformers, policy makers, parents and students talk about - the issues or problems that they feel need attention and action - is often shaped by what is published. To see the truth of this we need think only of the public debate about education during the 1980's spurred by E.D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy (1987) or Allen Bloom's Closing of the American Mind (1987). These framers of public debate about education worked within a predominantly conservative paradigm. Consequently, the issues and problems that came to be seen as needing attention and action were defined by representatives of a dominant political ideology.
The ideological basis to Hirsch's arguments that cultural literacy represented the stock of cultural facts that every American needed to know is nicely illustrated by Donald Macedo's Literacies of Power: What Americans are Not Allowed to Know (1994). Taking items from Hirsch's list of culturally necessary facts, Macedo offers alternative interpretations. For example, against Hirsch's quoting of the Gettysburg Address definition of democracy as government of, by and for the people, Macedo offers this comment: "These words were not means for African-Americans, since Abraham Lincoln also declared 'I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of white and black races ... I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race'" (p. 70).
Some specific questions that can be asked about the interests served by a piece of educational literature are the following. Is the text written to increase students' or teachers' sense of democratic agency ? Does a foundation sponsor the research and, if so, how does the foundation's ideology manifest itself in the author's words ? Are the texts' images of schools, teachers, students and the learning process ones that reinforce conformist, conservative notions of education, or ones that emphasize its activist role? What are the authors' intended audiences ? Are they writing primarily for themselves, so that they can understand phenomena through the act of writing? Are they writing for a group of interested colleagues, whose reactions to their ideas will help them come to greater insight? Or, are they writing for as yet unknown members of future tenure committees ?
To What Extent Are Models of Pedagogy Reified ?
Teachers often feel, as one of them put it, that "you have all kinds of situations and forces in your classroom over which you have absolutely no control. And you're frequently set up to fail by the system" (Britzman, 1991, p. 180). Facing the prospect of sustained chaos, they often yearn for curricular and pedagogic models that promise stability and that exhibit the stamp of enduring authority. For anyone who feels like the victim of uncontrollable forces any literature that promises 'the answer' or that suggests 'the right way' has an understandable appeal. The eagerness to discover a path through what seems like as series of intractable and endlessly repeated dilemmas sometimes produces a corresponding disinclination to read critically.
So, whenever we come across models for good practice we can ask how far they promote the epistemic distortion that suggests that someone, somewhere, has an approach that works successfully, in exactly the same way, across all cultures and contexts. Rushing to embrace decontextualized, standardized formulas for teaching dampens teachers' sense of agency. It removes the inclination to make their own futures in an ambiguous, morally flawed world, and replaces it with a quest for a reified, omniscient, pedagogic savior. This is devastating for the development of democratic action or an engagement in critical conversation. Any text that emphasizes the importance of teachers' existential choices in the construction of their work is, in a sense, a political text.
To What Extent Do Texts Present Teaching As An Individual Act ?
Teachers fall easily into the habit of thinking they are both the cause and solution for all the problems that arise in their classrooms. One reason for this is their widespread acceptance of the myth that within the classroom they are responsible for all that happens. This myth leads almost inevitably to unbearable accumulations of guilt about their inability to make everything perfect. As Britzman (1991) noted in her study of new teachers, "because they took up the myth that everything depends on the teacher, when things went awry, all they could do was blame themselves rather than reflect on the complexity of pedagogical encounters" (p. 227).
This myth has such a hold on teachers because of the predominance of individualistic ways of thinking about their work. We need only think of the metaphors used by teachers to describe what they do - chefs, coaches, lead mountain climbers, symphony orchestra conductors, and so on - to realise the strength of the individualistic paradigm. Yet, crucial to teachers' survival is an appreciation of collectivist thinking. Collectivist thinking regards individual and collective advancement as inseparable. It recognizes that what are perceived as individual problems are usually structurally caused and therefore only addressed by collective action.
As we read educational literature we can look at whether the images of teaching provided are individualistic or collectivist. Are models of learning and teaching placed squarely in a social or political context so that educational practice is seen as culturally constructed and transmitted? To what extent is professional autonomy elevated as a primary goal of teaching ? Do the metaphors and analogies used to describe teaching bolster the idea of teachers as rulers, behind locked doors, of the classroom domains they survey? Are the disciplinary and political divisions between teachers and teachers, and teachers and students, presented as the natural order of things? Or, is there a recognition that compartmentalizing disciplines and segregating teachers as workers in individual pockets of production, represents an importation of factory modes of organization into the educational arena?
When we look at writing on teacher evaluation we can inquire as to how far models and techniques of evaluation focus on the individual teacher and on individual practices. Is pedagogic excellence defined in terms of individual content expertise and methodological fluidity ? Or, is the ability to cooperate with, and support, colleagues equally valued ? Do evaluation protocols include peer collaboration as an item or cluster of items ? Is collaboration with colleagues a central component in performance appraisal documents? Does an engagement in mentoring appear as an important criterion by which to judge teachers' efforts?
What Contribution Does A Piece Of Writing Make To The Understanding And Realization Of Democratic Forms And Processes ?
Literature on teaching can help the democratic pursuit in different ways. It can help us analyse and critique the forces that create in us the belief that the way things are is the way they should be. It can help us understand how the culture of our institutions privatizes teachers' work and stifles the spirit of collaboration and collectivism. It can give us tools, techniques and tips on how to make curricular and evaluative decisions that are negotiated rather than imposed. It can suggest ways of minimizing teacher talk, increasing students' contributions, and modeling respectful disagreement. It can also alert us to the possibilities of malefic generosity, of false empowerment, and of the unwitting creation of distance and barriers by the same teachers who are committed to breaking them down.
For democratically inclined theorists who wish to develop teachers' critical consciousness, one of the hardest things to recognize is when their own writing reinforces traditional notions of authority. Theorists committed to empowering teachers can find, paradoxically, that their work is having the opposite effect. This happens when the power of their critique makes them appear as superhuman in their capacity to detect oppression. They write as if they are heat seeking critical missiles able to focus in, at great speed, on oppressive practices that reproduce dominant cultural values.
All too often an analysis intended to liberate teachers creates an unfortunate dichotomy. On the one hand there is sophisticated critical theorist able to penetrate hegemony, dominant cultural values and structural distortions with a single withering glance of pure clarity. On the other hand we have the teacher as unquestioning dolt, duped into an uncritical acceptance of structural oppression, economic inequity, racism, sexism and the silencing of divergent voices. When we read literature that announces its emancipatory intent, we can be on the look out for the perpetuation of this dichotomy.
As we read this literature we can also ask that it help us think through some of the tactical struggles we are bound to face as we try to work democratically. The terrain between rhetorical exhortations to emancipation and the realization of these ideals is pitted with landmines. Activist educators like Paulo Freire, Myles Horton and Ira Shor frequently warn of the dangers of unreflective activism, where naive but inspired teachers without allies or strategy rush to take on the educational establishment. Educational literature that urges democratic practice can be scrutinized for the extent to which it offers tactical advice on how to circumvent the impediments that institutions and the wider political culture place in the way of this.
We can ask whether or not the writing contains suggestions on how to survive as a change agent in hostile territory ? Do we learn from this literature how to research an organizational culture so that any action we take has the greatest possible effect with the least possible personal harm ? Are the typical risks and dangers of democratic practice (burn out, martyrdom, isolation, professional exclusion) laid out clearly ? Does the literature explain how we might turn an organization's language and symbols back on itself so that we can justify what we are trying to do in unimpeachable terms ? Do we read about how to recognize the most fruitful pressure points for change ? Is the importance of accruing institutional credibility prior to pressing for democratic change acknowledged ? Can we find recognizeable simulations and case studies of democratic practice that help us anticipate, weigh, and plan for the consequences and risks involved ?
I want to end this chapter by placing critical reading in perspective. Time and again commentaries on critical teaching (Shor, 1987a, 1992a), critical thinking (Brookfield, 1987) critical reflection (Mezirow, 1990) and critical pedagogy (Smyth, 1988) stress the overwhelming importance to learners of their seeing the process of critical analysis modelled in front of their eyes by someone whose credibility they acknowledge. The importance of critical modeling was acknowledged in one of the earliest treatises on adult education when Lindeman (1926) wrote that whatever the facilitator brings to the group in the form of opinions, facts and experiences "must be open to question and criticism on the same terms as the contributions of other participants" (p. 120). In Berlak and Berlak's (1987) terms, "If we as teachers hope to encourage critical thought in others, we must engage in it ourselves. Throughout our teaching careers we must participate in an ongoing, collaborative process of reevaluation of, and liberation from, our taken-for-granted views." (p. 170).
This means that those of us who are trying to get colleagues to identify and question their assumptions, or to look at their practice through different lenses, must do the same where we are concerned. We must think of "putting ourselves into practice rather than putting theory into practice" (Collins, 1991, p. 47). We must invite and welcome public critical scrutiny of our ideas and actions. We must acknowledge that we may change how we think and teach as a result of engaging in critical conversation with our peers. We must stress that the ideological and methodological outcomes of a critical conversation are always open. We must admit to the possibility our own most deeply held paradigmatic assumptions might be challenged and changed by what our colleagues say and do. Liston and Zeichner (1987) argue this theme as follows: "radically oriented teacher educators must serve as living examples of the very kind of critically oriented pedagogic practices that they seek to have their students adopt" (p. 113). Put simply, critical teachers must be seen to be critical learners too.
