Dewey on the Danger of Routinized Praxis

• In Event: Deweyan Perspectives on Standardization, Accountability, and Assessment in Contemporary Education

Abstract

In my work with pre-service teachers, I at times encounter a kind of polite resistance. As I am teaching them how to create English Education lesson plans, a student often asks, but we learned to do it this way in another class so shouldn’t we always do it like that? I have been asked this often enough to no longer feel my initial surprise that students would think there was a single right way to achieve anything in education. Their assumption seems to be that there is a formulaic way to approach the complex and dynamic activity of instructional planning. I realize that their reaction can be attributed to, at least partially, their age and inexperience; however, I also wonder if it is due to the way we (and I am using that to refer broadly to those of us who work in teacher education) are socializing them into the profession, one that has been bracketed by “the outcomes emphasis” of accountability for decades (Cochran-Smith & Villegas, 2016). It is indeed, as Luke and van Kraayenoord (1998) warned us might occur over twenty years ago, as if the “descriptive minima” [of standardization] has become “prescriptive maxima” (p. 61).

Throughout my years working with pre- and in-service teachers, I have noticed a kind of narrowing: many students seem to be primarily concerned with learning the authoritative “right way” to approach practice rather than being willing to tolerate uncertainty and risk as part of teaching and learning. They seem reluctant to accept that “…education can never be practised through fixed protocols, because in a very fundamental sense we are always dealing with unique and new situations” (Biesta, 2015, p. 19), an admittedly intimidating state of things for novices. My observation is anecdotal but is one that has influenced my own praxis as I question what I am communicating to students who are learning what they might expect in the complicated and often-overwhelming profession of educating other human beings.


While we might be teaching pre-service teachers the routines of instruction, we may also be communicating that teaching can be comprised of inflexible habits and theoretically- and philosophically-poor practice. Dewey warned us that, “Nothing has brought pedagogical theory into greater disrepute than the belief that it is identified with handing out to teachers recipes and models to be followed in teaching” (MW9: 176-177). What my students are tempted to do, in the face of increasing standardization, is to treat lesson planning as a recipe to be followed closely, lest the result, which might well be measured by a standardized test that is then used to judge their teaching efficacy, be jeopardized. An emphasis on standardization can cultivate a disposition that values uniformity rather than responsive praxis as educators are “being de-skilled through the use of prescribed formulas for teaching diverse students and forced to critically reflect about their development without being provided the needed time or the intellectual space to do so” (Brito & Ball, 2020, p. 20).

Author

• JuliAnna Avila, University of North Carolina - Charlotte