I want to tell you a story about my life as a teacher so far. I'll be using relaxed, comfortable language, just as I would if we were talking in a staffroom or at a conference. This way of sharing ideas and insights is similar to Connelly and Clandinin's (1988, 1990) "personal experience method", and Webber's (1993) "narrative anecdotes".
Formal, distancing ways of speaking and writing are a legacy which has been passed on to science education from a positivist view of science. The best way to make sure that science is done well, according to that tradition, is to remove the faulty, fallible human element. When we always spoke in the passive voice "330 g of iron sulphide were placed in a conical flask", apparently without human intervention. Of course, pretending that human bias is absent is not the same as actually removing it: someone (possibly with a bad hangover or a distracting cold) did put that iron sulphide in the flask.
So one of the things that I, as a science teacher, have learned about communicating is that perhaps it's better to acknowledge that science is a human activity, and to identify the people involved. We can never eliminate human bias, so the best way to deal with it is to get it out in the open, and try to state our biases up front. Of course, this argument applies doubly to science teaching.
This paper looks at my own growth and development as a classroom teacher between about 1991 and 1994, my third to sixth years as a teacher. I use two different sets of ideas - Habermas' (1972) theory of knowledge and human interests, and a number of forms of constructivism - to describe that growth. These come from quite different areas of human endeavour, and highlight different facets of what was changing during this time. I believe that using the two description systems to complement one other gives a richer view than would be possible by using either one alone.
But this is not just about me; it would be pretty boring for you if it were. I hope to challenge you to look at your own growth as a teacher, as a way of fostering further personal and professional growth. I'm certainly not holding up my own development as a yardstick for others, but I believe the description systems that I used might offer a useful catalyst for your own reflection on your growth as a science teacher.
The technical mode is "based on empirical knowledge, and is governed by technical rules" (Mezirow, 1981, p. 144). It is the one that is purported to be used in the natural sciences (I suspect that those who create new scientific theories probably operate in other modes). Technical rationality is concerned with the discovery of predictable, generalisable relationships of cause and effect, with cost-benefit ratios, and with...the efficiency and effectiveness of the means used to attain ends which themselves remain unexamined. (Gore & Zeichner, 1991, pp. 122-123)
The technical is also the mode on which my early teaching was based. Early in my teaching career, I had very significant discipline and class control problems with my Year 9 science classes. Because I was operating in a purely technical mode, I wanted to develop a 'package' to solve this problem; a technique, material or teaching approach which was the correct treatment to transform this rowdy rabble into a mostly silent, perfect class. I did attempt to develop such an approach, but its abject failure, coupled with my new commitment to constructivism (discussed below), meant that my attention was forced to the issue of communication. Habermas' practical interest is concerned with human relationships and communication, with the building of consensus and mutual understanding.
This understanding and mode of inquiry has as its aim not technical control and manipulation but rather the clarification of conditions for communication and intersubjectivity. It is not the methods of the empirical analytic sciences which are appropriate to this task but systematic inquiry which seeks the understanding of meaning rather than to establish causality. (Mezirow, 1981,p. 144)
Practical actions, therefore, are those which extend communication and understanding, and allow for the improved construction of shared meanings. Learning to operate practically, in Habermas' sense of the word, involves trying to understand what others are saying on their own terms, to give them a voice, and to use persuasion rather than coercion in negotiation and discussion.
...in practical reflection, the task is one of explicating and clarifying the assumptions and predispositions underlying teaching activity and in assessing the adequacy of the educational goals toward which the activity leads. (Gore & Zeichner, 1991, pp. 122-123)
Geelan's Most Important Law for Psychology, Sociology, Philosophy, Theology and Particularly Education: People are Complex! Human beings just are not simple, predictable and standardised enough to be understood using only the technical mode: people are much more complex than that. In order to understand people and truly communicate with them, the practical concern with understanding and meaning is necessary.
Incorporating a concern for practical action into my teaching forced me to try and understand my students as individuals, rather than as a faceless group. In order to establish and improve communication, it was necessary for me to strive to understand each student from his or her own perspective, rather than to label the students from my perspective. As discussed later, this change coincided with, and reinforced, my change from a transmissive to a personal . constructivist and toward a social constructivist view of knowledge.
Emancipatory actions involve self knowledge and reflection on the effects of one's own life, and a commitment to questioning normally unquestioned power structures and societal expectations. This mode is related to the empowering of human beings through the critique of ideologies. Gore and Zeichner (1991) use the term "critical" rather than "emancipatory", however their definition of this mode is similar to that of Mezirow:
...critical reflection incorporates moral and ethical criteria into the discourse about practical action. Here the major concern is with whether educational goals, activities and experiences lead toward forms of life that are characterised by justice, equity, caring and compassion. (Gore & Zeichner, 1991, p 122 123)
I don't see these three modes of knowing as a hierarchy, in the way we often see, for example, Piaget's (1972) stages of cognitive development. I have not moved from technical, through practical and into pure emancipatory knowing, nor is it possible to do so. Rather, the modes are layered on one another (see Figure One), leading to more powerful understandings.
In science teaching, the technical mode - understanding generalisable rules and causality - is valuable and necessary. If we are to communicate well with our students and colleagues, the practical concern with communication and relationship is essential. And if our teaching is to be freed from constraints which cause unjust practices, and our students are to be emancipated from unfair power relationships, the emancipatory or critical mode of knowing is also necessary.
To what extent can you see these interests exemplified in your own teaching practices? Are your classroom management strategies based on technical control, practical communication or emancipation?
You'll notice that the images I used in describing knowledge suggest that it is some kind of 'substance', which can be stored, moved around from one place to another, and bought or sold. This is an example of a transmissive theory of knowledge: the idea that knowledge is transmitted from one reservoir, the teacher's mind, to another, the student's mind. (The best known statement of this approach, of course, being "jug to mugs" ! )
When I began to teach, I felt that I had spent years developing a store of knowledge, that I had an array of textbooks as additional knowledge stores, and that my job was to cram all of this fantastic scientific knowledge into the, presumably empty, heads of my students.
But teaching wasn't quite like that. The students often already had quite clear, well elaborated ideas of their own about the scientific 'content' I was trying to give to them. And the knowledge didn't seem to just go into their heads, wait there until exam time, then come back out in good order. Instead, some strange alchemy seemed to occur, in which the scientific ideas from school mingled and bubbled together with the students' existing ideas. From my point of view, it was antialchemy however: the golden knowledge I was dispensing seemed to be transmuted into base metals!
Personal constructivism (Driver & Oldham, 1986; Glasersfeld, 1989, 1993; Kelly, 1955; Piaget, 1972; Pines & West, 1986) presented itself, through my Master of Education studies at Melbourne, as a possible new epistemology for dealing with these problems. I was particularly taken with George Kelly's (1955) 'Personal Construct Psychology', which I encountered through the excellent little book Inquiring Man (Bannister & Fransella, 1971).
Personal constructivism seemed to me a much more powerful way of understanding my students' (and my own) thought processes and knowledge growth. It suggests that knowledge is not transferred from place to place, but is individually constructed within the minds of human beings. What is stored in books is not knowledge, only information: it requires human understanding before it can rightly be called knowledge. Constructivist teaching implies that teachers should have an interest in the prior knowledge of students; the ideas which they have gained before they arrive in our classrooms, through their rich and complex life experiences. Because new knowledge must be integrated and constructed on the 'foundations' of the knowledge which already exists in the mind, it is no longer appropriate to simply assume that knowledge is 'placed in the container' and can later be taken out intact. New knowledge interacts in complex and intricate ways with existing knowledge to produce genuinely original insights for each person. Because of their different histories, no two people possess identical knowledge and, therefore, no two people construct new knowledge identically, even if they are exposed to the same experiences. We understand our new knowledge 'on the foundations', 'through the lenses', 'from the perspective' (or whatever other metaphor we choose) of our existing knowledge of the world.
Personal constructivism changed the way I taught science. I tried to understand each student as an individual, not only on moral and ethical grounds (which I had tried to do before), but also on educational grounds, in order to provide experiences which would help each student's individual construction of new knowledge. For a year and a half, l was a convert, spreading the gospel of personal constructivism to anyone who would listen, and applying it in my classroom. And I believe it did lead to improvements in my teaching.
Such difficulties as did occur were due to one simple problem: while I was changing my epistemology (theory of knowledge), the students remained unchanged. I tried to pass control of their learning over to them, but they didn't want it! What they wanted was for me to return to my traditional role as a (relatively) omniscient source of answers for the final exam. I should have negotiated the changes in my role expectations with the students, but personal constructivism as a teaching perspective didn't really encourage me to think in those terms.
A concern with Habermas' practical mode, which I unfortunately did not encounter until later, would have alerted me to the need to explicitly re negotiate teaching and learning roles with the students, rather than simply assume that their epistemologies would change as did mine.
After some time, however, three things happened. Firstly, I began to wonder about the excessively individual nature of knowledge in personal constructivist epistemologies. This did not ring true with my own developing understanding of what happens in classrooms. I knew that students working in groups learned better, that learning occurred better where relationships were good, and that 'side talk' between students increased understanding. All of the personal constructivist perspectives described here do include discussion of the importance of social factors in learning, but their central focus is on the learning of individuals. Kelly's (1955) theory suggests that we can only take part in social processes with others to the extent that we can construe their construction processes: the individual's construction of reality is the central focus of such psychological perspectives. I was becoming interested in the social face of learning, and felt that personal constructivism was not the best epistemological approach for supporting that interest.
Secondly, I moved to Papua New Guinea, and began teaching students with cultural backgrounds dramatically different from my own. My teaching career to this point had been carried out entirely in private Christian schools, in suburban areas on the east coast of Australia, with students very similar to myself in ethnicity, socio-economic status and cultural background. My realisation that the constructivist curriculum approaches that I had developed in Melbourne and Sydney, which relied on adversarial discussion techniques such as debate, were culturally inappropriate in Port Moresby brought home to me very clearly the fact that culture plays a major role in learning; a role difficult to understand using personal constructivism.
Thirdly, I began reading papers describing such perspectives as social constructivism (Ernest, 1992, 1993; Solomon, 1987; Tobin, 1990), social constructionism (Gergen, 1992; Steier, 1992), contextual constructivism (Cobern, 1993) and sociocultural constructivism (O'Loughlin, 1992, 1993). These perspectives, with their emphasis on the social construction of knowledge, the effects of social and cultural factors on learning, and their heightened awareness of the consensual nature of scientific knowledge, seemed to me to be more valuable in helping me to teach effectively in my difficult new context.
I was made much more aware of social relationships, power and discourse as they occurred in classrooms, and of re-evaluating my own role. I was also made very aware of the need to negotiate change, and indeed all of learning, in meaningful ways with my students. If control of their learning was to become truly theirs, it wouldn't be because I gave it to them, but because they chose to take it.
It was at this point in my development as a science teacher that I encountered an approach, critical constructivism, which combined the two description systems (see Figure Two). This description system yielded a more powerful picture of teaching and learning, and more widely useful tools for understanding and transforming education.
What is your own epistemological perspective, your theory of knowledge ? Has it changed since you began teaching ?
...a repressive myth that renders as natural the teacher's classroom role of teacher as controller and that locks teachers and students into grossly asymmetrical power relationships designed to reproduce (rather than challenge) the established culture. (Taylor,1994, p. 18)
To put it another way, these myths are invisible assumptions we have about what is 'natural' in education. They make it very difficult to question unfair and unsupportive practices, simply because we don't see that it's possible to ask those questions. Emancipatory rationality provides us with the tools to look critically at school culture, and to imagine ways to make schooling more free, fair and equitable for students and teachers.
Critical constructivism may be seen as a "social epistemology" (Taylor, 1994, p. 11) which emphasises that, since the cultures of schooling are socially constructed by communities of teachers, students and administrators, desirable changes to such cultures will have to be negotiated by empowered groups of teachers and practitioners, rather than by isolated individuals.
"Critical constructivism is a social epistemology that is concerned with the ethics of discursive practices: it addresses the sociocultural context of knowledge construction and serves as a referent for cultural reform." (Taylor, 1994, p. 11)
I am now beginning to try and understand more fully the moral dimensions of teaching. Sockett's "professional virtues" (1993), which I've just encountered, are suggesting some interesting possibilities for the future. I've found Griffiths and Tann's (1992) paper on reflective practice to be enormously useful in thinking about the activity of dynamically reflecting on my current practices and knowledge in order to transform them.
But this story, as I promised earlier, is not only about me. It's about you. I want to encourage you to take up the tools (either these old ones of mine, or whatever others appeal to you), take the time, and reflect on your own growth and development as a science teacher.
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