Talking about education: the significance of teachers’ talk for teacher agency (2017), Journal of Curriculum Studies (original) (raw)
Related papers
Talking about education: exploring the significance of teachers’ talk for teacher agency
Journal of Curriculum Studies, 2017
The interest in teachers' discourses and vocabularies has for a long time been studied under the rubric of knowledge, most notably teachers' professional knowledge. This interest can be traced back to Shulman's distinction between different kinds of teacher knowledge and Schwab's interest in the role of practical reasoning and judgement in teaching. Within the research, a distinction can be found between a more narrow approach that focuses on teachers' propositional or theoretical knowledge and a more encompassing approach in which teachers' knowledge is not only the knowledge for teachers generated elsewhere, but also the knowledge of teachers. This is the 'stock of knowledge' gained from a range of sources and experiences, including teachers' ongoing engagement with the practice of teaching itself. In this paper, we focus on the role of teachers' talk in their achievement of agency. We explore how, in what way and to what extent such talk helps or hinders teachers in exerting control over and giving direction to their everyday practices, bearing in mind that such practices are not just the outcome of teachers' judgements and actions, but are also shaped by the structures and cultures within which teachers work. Introduction: teacher agency and teacher talk The interest in teachers' discourses and vocabularies has for a long time been studied under the rubric of knowledge, most notably teachers' professional knowledge. This interest can be traced back to Shulman's distinction between different kinds of teacher knowledgecontent knowledge, general knowledge, curriculum knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, knowledge of learners and their characteristic, knowledge of educational contexts, knowledge of educational ends, purposes, and values and their philosophical and historical grounds (see Shulman, 1986, p.8)-and Schwab's interest in the role of practical reasoning and judgement in teaching (see Biesta, 2013; Schwab, [1970] 2013). This work is itself embedded within wider discourses about knowledge and judgement in a broad range of professional practices (see, e.g.
Theory and Research in Education, 2017
This feisty little book is a collection of papers prepared for a series of symposiums on teacher education held at various locations in the United Kingdom in 2011 and 2012. The philosophical perspectives on teacher education articulated here tend to operate in the long shadow cast by R.S. Peters, who argued that schooling should aim primarily at individual intellectual and moral cultivation and who assumed that teachers have something of a natural right to control the curriculum. The volume nonetheless presents a trove of insights into how the kind of critical and systematic reflection associated with philosophy might enhance our thinking about the goals, content, and structure of teacher education. For the purposes of this review, I will present just one nugget from each of the volume's nine chapters. Of course, the task of singling out the 'best ideas' from such a dense and heterogeneous collection of essays is hopelessly subjective and personal. Nevertheless, I hope it will give readers a sense of the value of this compilation.
Constructing Teacher Knowledge: Conflicting Views and Synthesizing Posibilities
2002. International Journal of the Humanities. Teacher education in England is enmeshed in a conflict between two seemingly opposing views of practice, the ‘standards based model’ (‘technical rationality’) and the reflective practitioner’ model (practical knowledge, wisdom). Yet there is no clearcut version of the standards based model from which to extract a typology, and there are many interpretations of reflection on practice. The paper briefly outlines this context and using some concepts from the work of John Dewey develops a view of how teachers learn in practice, in which a reconciliation between the two opposing theories are suggested. Dewey’s naturalistic epistemology can account for the experiential nature of practical experience and practice based learning: it provides an ‘epistemology of practice’. Critiques of Dewey’s position for the construction of knowledge are acknowledged.
12 The Teacher and the Curriculum: Exploring Teacher Agency
The SAGE Handbook of Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment: Two Volume Set
A key debate in the curriculum field has centred on the extent to which teachers should or could achieve agency over the curriculum they enact. Threats to teacher agency have come from top-down control of curricula, either through input regulation (prescription of content, methods and/or teaching materials) or output regulation (steering through outcomes). Drawing upon an ecological model to explore the concept of teacher agency, this chapter will illustrate through empirical research conducted in Scotland and Cyprus, how it manifests in various ways through teachers' work. The chapter concludes with a discussion of why it is important to understand and take into account teacher agency when formulating and developing curriculum policy.
The Teacher and the Curriculum: Exploring Teacher Agency
The SAGE Handbook of Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment: Two Volume Set
A key debate in the curriculum field has centred on the extent to which teachers should or could achieve agency over the curriculum they enact. Threats to teacher agency have come from top-down control of curricula, either through input regulation (prescription of content, methods and/or teaching materials) or output regulation (steering through outcomes). Drawing upon an ecological model to explore the concept of teacher agency, this chapter will illustrate through empirical research conducted in Scotland and Cyprus, how it manifests in various ways through teachers' work. The chapter concludes with a discussion of why it is important to understand and take into account teacher agency when formulating and developing curriculum policy.
Teacher agency: perspectives and limits
2017
Although many of the elements of the concept of teacher-agency have been present in Italian-language scientific debate for some time, the related international literature appears to be wholly refocusing its reflections to critically analyse the figure of the teacher in substantially new terms: according to a precious perspective in the light of the current opening to new areas of development of both initial and lifelong in-service teacher training. This paper, that discussed and referred to 17 articles on the issue of agency in teachers’ professional learning and development by selecting of the international literature, is divided into two parts. The first offers a pedagogical understanding of agency within a continuum in which this term can be interpreted in problematic way both as a teacher’s individual and collective characteristic and as a collective relational process. The second part, instead, reflects on teacher agency considering the interactions of this construct with indiv...
Economic and Political Weekly, 2005
The National Curriculum Framework 2005 articulates a new vision of the school curriculum as an inclusive space that extends beyond the conventional textbooks into the realm of teaching-learning processes. While this vision has the potential to enable education to become a critical catalyst in the process of social transformation, it fails to engage enough with a most crucial link -the agency of the teacher. The proactive engagement of the schoolteacher with processes of curriculum redesign is a necessary condition to ensure the success of the NCF. However, as this paper argues, radical change in the school curriculum without changing the central reality of teachers in Indian classrooms can do little to alter educational processes and outcomes. The exercise of curriculum renewal must attend to the equally vital need of transforming the state of teacher education in India, if the NCF's vision of schools as sites of social transformation leading to an egalitarian and just social order in the near future, is to ever become a reality.
Teacher Agency in Curriculum Making: Agents of Change and Spaces for Manoeuvre
Curriculum Inquiry, 2012
In the wake of new forms of curricular policy in many parts of the world, teachers are increasingly required to act as agents of change. And yet, teacher agency is under-theorised and often misconstrued in the educational change literature, wherein agency and change are seen as synonymous and positive. This paper addresses the issue of teacher agency in the context of an empirical study of curriculum making in schooling. Drawing upon the existing literature, we outline an ecological view of agency as an effect. These insights frame the analysis of a set of empirical data, derived from a research project about curriculum-making in a school and further education college in Scotland. Based upon the evidence, we argue that the extent to which teachers are able to achieve agency varies from context to context based upon certain environmental conditions of possibility and constraint, and that an important factor in this lies in the beliefs, values and attributes that teachers mobilise in relation to particular situations.
The valuation of knowledge and normative reflection in teacher qualification
Teaching and Teacher Education, 2013
diverse knowledge base for teaching is discussed. Section 1.2 discusses how a goal for teacher education might be chosen, against the background of section 1.1. In section 1.3 an argument is set to challenge the precision and coherence of the idea of a single teaching profession, as teaching involves differences between and within many different groups. These three sections lead to several hypotheses regarding differences between different groups of teachers, and in the rest of the article these are presented, empirically examined and discussed. 1.1 The practical, scientific and normative demands of teaching The knowledge base for teaching has been described by many as involving a tension between practical knowledge and academic knowledge (e.g., Joram, 2007). However, as is well known, good teaching does not rest solely on academic or practical knowledge. Labaree (2008) argued that "teaching is an enormously difficult job that looks easy" (p. 298). Successful teachers must acquire content knowledge, general pedagogical knowledge, curriculum knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, knowledge of learners and their characteristics and knowledge of educational contexts and of pedagogical ends, purposes and values (Ben-Peretz, 2011; Shulman, 1987). Teaching is by no means a neutral enterprise; as in all professions, there is a strong normative aspect to professional practice, and teachers have to perform many normative, discretionary acts in their work (Berlak & Berlak, 1981). Teaching professionals are given a mandate by society to provide education to its citizens, and teachers' task is to carry out this mandate in the best way possible. Hence, teachers have to make judgments in many situations, constantly thinking on their feet and having to make quick, practical decisions while considering values and dilemmas. Some have described decision making as the basic teaching skill (Shavelson, 1973) because classroom work is multidimensional, simultaneous, immediate, unpredictable, public and cumulative (Doyle, 1986). This approach to decision making refers to the immediate decisions that teachers make during class. In early teaching research, these decisions were investigated in the classroom, via meticulous recording of teachers' decisions as they happened. As the kinds of ethical dilemmas involved in teachers' work are often broad and long-lasting, and at their