Meditations on Improvement: Teaching Where We Think With Children and Teachers

• In Event: 67.053 - Rethinking Our Understanding of Curriculum, Teaching, and Students Through Collaborative Interdisciplinary Inquiry

Abstract

Purpose: Despite the seeming dominance of a theory-practice divide, both philosophy and teaching/teacher education have longstanding traditions that call into question such dichotomies, and which offer more synergistic approaches (e.g., philosophical legacies that emphasize practice and teaching paradigms that emphasize theorizing). The importance of disrupting theory-practice binaries is especially salient in light of the ways “thinking” has been equated with patriarchal and Eurocentric formulations of rationality, and “practice” has been relegated to “women’s work” and to historically minoritized groups. Through a series of meditations both professional and personal, this presentation suggests how philosophy, teaching, and teacher education might be put in productive dialogue to contest framings of educational improvement which undermine an asset-based view of children and teachers. As two women teacher educators situated within the disciplines of philosophy and literacy, we probe our own experiences to surface, inquire into, and reframe the notions of educational improvement that underlie our respective practices.

Perspectives: This work is framed as a philosophical meditation, as articulated in Hadot’s examination of philosophy as a way of life (Hadot, 1995). The frame is strengthened by feminist and de-colonial perspectives that view minoritized identities and experiences as epistemic resources for critical reflections, especially as it pertains to issues of equity (Alcoff, 2006, 2007; Harding, 1993; Mignolo, 2011) and norms of development (Borgnon, 2007).

Modes of Inquiry: The authors will present a series of meditations on their particular, embodied, and material experiences with the logics of improvement inspired by 10 months of systematic conversation.

Materials: The materials for this work include correspondence between the two authors, written reflections on specific practices in teacher education each author engages with, and a set of literary, philosophical, and teacher education texts.

Conclusions: Hadot (1995) emphasizes how the art of living is grounded on critical examination of one’s orienting assumptions. Our meditations illuminate the value of interrogating assumptions about what constitutes improvement in schools, which is so often reduced to mastery of pre-determined objectives. Our dialogue helps us raise questions about how those objectives are entwined in historical and present-day relations of power and idealized formulations of the universal ‘child’ or ‘teacher.’ Sustained conversation helps us counter and question how, and why, notions of what is seen as “ideal” continue to map onto differences of race, ethnicity, class, age, and language. We argue that differently located educators and educational philosophers must work together to reimagine the framings that inform our work with children and teachers.

Significance: Our cross-disciplinary meditations express an urgency to elucidate critically what it means to “teach better” (Lytle, 2006). Our collaborative work has generated fertile ground for examining the underlying logics of the discourse on improvement. We argue that such collaborative work is particularly timely today to foster humane educational work with children and teachers.

Authors

• Maria Paula Ghiso, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Stephanie A. Burdick-Shepherd, Lawrence University