Reclaiming Teaching as an Intellectual, Experimental Enterprise

• In Event: Reclaiming the Teaching Profession: What Are We Reclaiming?

Abstract

Objectives

In traditional teacher education programs focused on effectiveness, there is a tendency to emphasize the practical skills teachers will need in their classrooms (e.g. how to write a lesson plan). There is the need for an educational discourse on intelligence that affirms the varied richness of human ability and a foundational commitment to education for the sheer power of and pleasure of thinking creatively and gracefully, questioning and solving meaningful problems, and increasing our sense of moral responsibility. I aim to contribute to this conversation by focusing on how teacher educators might encourage teacher candidates to think seriously about and articulate their motivations for wanting to become a teacher in an effort to reclaim teaching as an intellectual undertaking. Teachers are legitimate sources of knowledge of teaching and learning, and this understanding begins through opportunities to make sense of what it means to be a teacher, what it means to teach, and the exploration of who they are becoming as a teacher. This is an act of inquiry, discovery, and of adapting a learning stance to the intellectual possibilities of classroom life.

Perspectives

Educators have previously discussed the ideological and economic forces that have contributed to what Giroux (2012) terms the “proletarianization” of teacher work, and Apple (2013) calls the “Wal-Marting of America,” the tendency to reduce teaching and learning to a market transaction and view teachers as specialized technicians. I argue that teaching is intellectual experimental work, an idea embedded in an education for democracy framework emphasizing the need to liberate and humanize education with a pedagogy of questioning, an approach that opens opportunities for thinking, wondering, and critically examining, which form the basis for developing teachers as transformative intellectuals who combine reflective inquiry and practice in helping students to be thoughtful and engaged citizens (Dewey, 1916; Giroux, 2012).

Methods and Data Sources

I use narrative analysis as a method for examining and interpreting written narrative discourse (Daiute, & Lightfoot, 2004) in this case teacher stories and memoir, to reframe what it means to teach and be a teacher, as opposed to what is required of teaching in the current climate of standards-based accountability and economic competitiveness.

Results and Significance

In higher education very little, if any, of pedagogy is focused on inner inquiry: “Who am I?” “What am I doing here?” “Where am I going?” and “Who am I becoming?” Academic culture simply does not encourage the exploration of such questions (Palmer, 1998). Nevertheless, how we make sense and meaning of our lives and experiences may be among the most significant component of human development. Until we engage our students in complicated conversation around the question “why teach?” we may never be able to understand teaching in its truest form as an intellectual search for meaning and understanding, and the negotiation of creative, caring, and meaningful relationships in the classroom.

Author

• Andrew J. Stremmel, South Dakota State University