In "Empowering the scholarship of teaching”, Carolin Kreber (2013), firstly, challenges narrow interpretations of the scholarship of teaching as an evidence-based practice; and, secondly, offers a reinterpretation of what ‘making public’, widely accepted as the distinguishing feature of scholarship, might entail in the scholarship of teaching.
A narrow interpretation of the scholarship of teaching as an evidence-based practice, Kreber proposes, tends to pay too little attention to the fact that practitioners are personally invested in that practice through the judgements they make as professionals in specific contexts. Thus, while practice may be evidence-aware or evidence-informed, the evidence produced by research does not determine the decisions that professionals make; it only informs them.
The two serious reservations which have been raised in relation to the notion of evidence-based practice in the context of education are, first, that such discourse is overly concerned with the effectiveness of pre-determined ends to the detriment of questions about the desirability of the ends towards which it is directed and the means of achieving them. Second, a concern for prediction and control underlies certain conceptions of evidence-based practice. While this may be understandable, Kreber notes, it is nevertheless an attempt to escape from the complexities, frailty, contingencies and unpredictability of human action.
In order to develop an approach which is capable of dealing adequately with that complexity and unpredictability, Kreber borrows concepts from Hannah Arendt and Jurgen Habermas. One key concept which Kreber utilises is that of ‘action’ taken from Hannah Arendt, a concept which itself is a re-working of Aristotle’s notion of praxis. Thus, for Kreber, following Arendt, a person takes a stance and discloses who he or she is through action. To act authentically or truthfully in teaching, as well as in the scholarship of teaching, requires an investment of one’s self in one’s actions. The knowledge required in the realm of praxis, or human interaction, is of a different kind to that required for production or making (Aristotle’s poiesis). Aristotle called the knowledge relevant for praxis phronesis.
As Kreber clarifies, to act on the basis of phronesis, which might be characterised as practical wisdom as distinct from pragmatic prudence [1], means to assess a given situation and make an appropriate decision, while abandoning the security offered by a rule-bound and regulation-based approach to such situations. Good judgement, for Aristotle, is informed by theoretical knowledge or systematised knowledge, as well as concrete evidence and an awareness of the situation. One of the roles played by phronesis, indeed, is to facilitate the mediation between the universal and the particular, so that specific moments or instances can be recognised as cases or problems of a particular kind.
The stress upon truthfulness or authenticity in the Arendtian understanding of action as disclosure can be related to the Habermasian differentiation of three kinds of knowledge, based on three kinds of knowledge-constitutive interests:
the technical, which articulates an interest in controlling and predicting the environment;
the practical, which evinces an interest in arriving at shared understandings and co-operation; and
the critical, which is interested in developing or becoming empowered.These interests give rise to certain forms of coming to know (learning), along with corresponding domains of knowledge. A technical interest gives rise to the empirical-analytical sciences, whose concerns is to establish ‘objective truth’. Practical interest gives rise to interpretive science, leading to an understanding of what is considered right in the light of the norms that prevail within a certain social context. Critical interest is associated with a critical social science, leading to emancipation, i.e. freedom from oppression and ideology; or, rather, freedom to challenge deterministic understandings of social interaction and the political. [2]
Given these differentiations, it would be inappropriate to subject all forms of coming to know and knowledge to one and the same form of rationality and/or knowledge claim. Thus, Kreber, following Habermas, delineates,
theoretical discourse, which is concerned with claims to truth;
practical discourse, which is concerned with claims to rightness; and
aesthetic discourse, which is concerned with claims to truthfulness or authenticity. Each mode of discourse implies a different kind of validity claim.To these Habermasian categories, themselves developed through a critical relation to Arendt’s thought, Kreber adds those of labour, work and action taken from Arendt herself. Arendt associates labour, work and action with the spheres of life, world and the political or political society, respectively. Taking this Arendtian approach, Kreber argues that teaching can be seen as a form of labour, as it does to some extent concern learning how to live or how to behave, even if that is not its focus. Arendt defines the sphere of life and labour as being concerned with the human being as ‘animal’ with its animal behaviour - animal laborans.
From Kreber’s perspective, teaching can be seen to concern ‘work’, i.e. the fabrication of the human world, an artefactual and artificial world that is distinct from that of ‘nature’ and animal behaviour, and through which a degree of control over natural phenomena and animal behaviour is achieved. For Arendt, work generates a safe space for humans to live, i.e. to elaborate human behaviour through and beyond animal behaviour and to create a human world. In the context of her tripartite scheme, Arendt (1961: 195) argues that the function of the school, as the place between home and the public world political action, "is to teach children what the world is like and not to instruct them in the art of living.” To the extent that teaching is involved in the making of products that can be used, reused, shared and built upon, it can be viewed as work.
More important than understanding teaching as labour or as work, Kreber argues, is the task of developing an understanding of teaching as action. As already noted, Arendt derives her notion of action from Aristotle’s praxis. In as far as a person discloses themselves through action, this can be understood as a process of ‘making public’. Thus, action involves stating one’s opinions freely and publicly. This also serves, however, as an invitation to others to question the claims to validity embedded in one’s arguments.
Action, as 'making public' through words and deeds, opens up to dialogue, although in a context of agonistic pluralism, not in Habermas’s sense of ideal speech situation. Action is always constrained, the political sphere is always conflicted and its order hegemonised, as Mouffe (2013), differentiating herself from Arendt’s view of pluralistic agonism, argues. Kreber argues that, through action, ‘making public’ is related to questions of social justice and equality, i.e. political and ethical acts, in and through higher education.
Significantly, the validity claims that arise in action are not principally those of ‘objective truth’. Rather, they are concerned with ‘rightness’ and ‘truthfulness’ (or ‘authenticity’). Given this framework, evidence is not just what research has shown to ‘work’ (in whatever sense ‘work’ is taken here). Evidence also includes what is recognised as right and truthful in contexts of dialogue across pluralistic differences.
If this is the case, then the sense of professionalism held by scholars, according to Kreber, is oriented not just to questions of what works (on the basis of what evidence) and to questions of what one is supposed to do (rightness as properness or propriety) but also to questions of why one does it (rightness as purpose or transformation) and who benefits from it (fairness and truthfulness as authenticity).
In sum, if the scholarship of teaching is understood as action, in the Arendtian sense, it can be seen to involve not only formal studies undertaken into matters of pedagogy narrowly conceived, but also includes enquiry-oriented public dialogue among diverse stakeholders, each differentially located, where diverse points of view about educational processes and purposes are disclosed and openly debated.
In this way, the relationship between the scholarship of teaching, as action, and questions of the purpose of education, not just its processes, can be clearly understood.
Notes
[1] Zhang (1997) contends that,
"As a result of the rationalization of modern society, however, instrumental rationality, or calculative rationality as Heidegger calls it, has penetrated and dominated all aspects of our life. Benefit, effect and utility become the highest criteria, for evaluating, whereas both for Plato and Aristotle and for Confucius and Mencius the ultimate principles were non-utilitarian. Today, there is ever more pragmatic prudence, but less and less practical wisdom.” (Zhang, 1997)[2] In the context of education, Mezirow developed these three forms of coming to know and knowledge into a categorisation of forms of learning, which he names instrumental (technical), communicative (practical) and emancipatory (critical). Mezirow has been criticised for placing too much emphasis on transformation as an individual act which does not reflect the sociological emphasis of Habermas’ critical theory. Mazirow contends that in saying this the critics misunderstand transformation theory (Fleming, 2002).
Although far from the traditions in which these distinctions are developed, in an act of creative alignment, these schemes might also be related to Griemas’s actant theory, in which he identifies three axes, that of power, desire and transmission (or communication).
This brings to attention the recognition that a dynamic understanding of forms of coming to know and knowledge is required.
References
Arendt, H., 1961. The Crisis in education. In Between past and future: six exercises in political thought. New York, NY: Viking Press, pp. 173–196.
Fleming, T., 2002. Habermas on civil society, lifeworld and system: unearthing the social in transformation theory. Teachers College Record, pp.1–10. Available at: http://www.tcrecord.org/Content.asp?ContentID=10877. Accessed on 1 March 2014.
Kreber, C., 2013. Empowering the scholarship of teaching: an Arendtian and critical perspective. Studies in Higher Education, 38 (6), pp.857–869. Available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03075079.2011.602396 [Accessed February 19, 2014].
Mouffe, C., 2013. Agonistics: thinking the world politically, London: Verso.
Zhang, R., 1997. Is an ethics of economic activity possible? In X. Yu et al., eds. Economic ethics and Chinese culture. Washington, DC: Council for Research in Values & Philosophy, pp. 123–133.
