The Importance of Philosophy in Teacher Education: Mapping the Decline and Its Consequences 2019026859, 2019026860, 9781138386365, 9780429426827

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of Contributors
Editors’ Introduction
PART I: Diagnosis and Prognosis
1 The Decline of Philosophy in Educational Study and Why It Matters
2 Schools of Education and John Dewey: The End of the Romance?
3 Habermas’s Emancipatory Interest for Teachers: A Critical Philosophical Approach to Teacher Education
PART II: Philosophy and Teacher Development
4 Philosophy in Teacher Education
5 Philosophy for (Thinking) Teachers
6 A Problems-Based Approach in Philosophy of Education
7 The Contribution of Philosophy to Science Teacher Education
PART III: Historical Perspectives
8 Philosophy, the Liberal Arts, and Teacher Education
9 The Value of Educational Foundations in Teacher Education
10 Philosophy, Teaching, and Teacher Education at Teachers College, Columbia University: A Program Story
Index

Citation preview

The Importance of Philosophy in Teacher Education

The Importance of Philosophy in Teacher Education maps the gradual decline of philosophy as a central, integrated part of educational studies. Chapters consider how this decline has impacted teacher education and practice, offering new directions for the reintegration of philosophical thinking in teacher preparation and development. Touching on key points in history, this valuable collection of chapters accurately appraises the global decline of philosophy of education in teacher education programmes and seeks to understand the external and endemic causes of changed attitudes towards a discipline that was once assigned such a central place in teacher education. Chapters illustrate how a grounding in the theoretical and ethical dimensions of teaching, learning, and education systems contributes in meaningful ways to being a good teacher, and traces the consequences of a decline in philosophy on individuals’ professional development and on the evolution of the teaching profession more broadly. With this in mind, the text focusses on the future of teacher education and considers how we can ensure that philosophy of education feeds into the excellence of teaching today. This book will be of great interest to graduate and postgraduate students, as well as research scholars, in the field of educational philosophy and history of education. In addition, it will be useful for those involved in teacher education, and in particular, course, module, and programme development. Andrew D. Colgan is a high school Science Teacher in London, Ontario, Canada. Bruce Maxwell is a Professor of Education at the University of Quebec at Trois-Rivières, Canada.

Routledge International Studies in the Philosophy of Education

Education and the Pursuit of Wisdom The Aims of Education Revisited John Ozoliņš Flourishing as the Aim of Education A Neo-Aristotelian View Kristján Kristjánsson Democratic Education in a Globalized World A Normative Theory Julian Culp Education and the Public Sphere Exploring the Structures of Mediation in Post-Colonial India Suresh Babu G. S. Epistemology and the Predicates of Education Building Upon a Process Theory of Learning Thomas E. Peterson Semiotic Subjectivity in Education and Counseling Learning with the Unconscious Inna R. Semetsky The Importance of Philosophy in Teacher Education Mapping the Decline and its Consequences Edited by Andrew D. Colgan and Bruce Maxwell

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Routledge-International-Studies-in-the-Philosophy-of-Education/ book-series/SE0237

The Importance of Philosophy in Teacher Education Mapping the Decline and Its Consequences Edited by Andrew D. Colgan and Bruce Maxwell

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Andrew D. Colgan and Bruce Maxwell to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Colgan, Andrew D., editor. | Maxwell, Bruce, 1972– editor. Title: The importance of philosophy in teacher education : mapping the decline and its consequences / edited by Andrew D. Colgan and Bruce Maxwell. Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2020. | Series: Routledge international studies in the philosophy of education | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019026859 (print) | LCCN 2019026860 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138386365 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429426827 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Education—Philosophy. | Teaching— Philosophy. | Teachers—Training of. Classification: LCC LB14.7 .I48 2020 (print) | LCC LB14.7 (ebook) | DDC 370.71/1—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019026859 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019026860 ISBN: 978-1-138-38636-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-42682-7 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

List of Contributors Editors’ Introduction

vii 1

A N D R E W D. C O L G A N A N D B RU C E M A X W E L L

PART I

Diagnosis and Prognosis

13

1 The Decline of Philosophy in Educational Study and Why It Matters

15

RO B I N B A R ROW

2 Schools of Education and John Dewey: The End of the Romance?

25

DAV I D I . WA D D I N G T O N

3 Habermas’s Emancipatory Interest for Teachers: A Critical Philosophical Approach to Teacher Education

45

M AT T H E W J . H AY D E N

PART II

Philosophy and Teacher Development

63

4 Philosophy in Teacher Education

65

L E O N A R D WA K S

5 Philosophy for (Thinking) Teachers J A N E T O RC H A R D A N D C A R R I E W I N S TA N L E Y

86

vi Contents 6 A Problems-­Based Approach in Philosophy of Education

105

DI A N N E GER ELU K

7 The Contribution of Philosophy to Science Teacher Education

121

M I C H A E L R . M AT T H E W S

PART III

Historical Perspectives

143

8 Philosophy, the Liberal Arts, and Teacher Education

145

D O U G L A S W. YAC E K A N D B RU C E K I M B A L L

9 The Value of Educational Foundations in Teacher Education

165

LEE S. DU EM ER

10 Philosophy, Teaching, and Teacher Education at Teachers College, Columbia University: A Program Story

182

DAV I D T. H A N S E N A N D M E G A N J A N E L AV E RT Y

Index

209

List of Contributors

Robin Barrow is a Professor Emeritus of Simon Frasier University, Canada. Lee S. Duemer is a Professor in the Educational Psychology and ­Leadership Department, College of Education, Texas Tech University, USA. Dianne Gereluk  is a Professor and Dean at the Werklund School of ­Education, University of Calgary, Canada. David T. Hansen is the John L. and Sue Ann Weinberg Professor in the Historical and Philosophical Foundations of Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, USA, where he also serves as Director of the Program in Philosophy and Education. Matthew J. Hayden  is an Associate Professor of Education at Drake University and the Director of International Programs for the School of Education, USA. Bruce A. Kimball is a Professor in the Philosophy & History of Education Program at Ohio State University, USA. Megan J. Laverty is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, USA. Michael R. Matthews is an Associate Professor in the School of Education at the University of New South Wales, Australia. Janet Orchard is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Education, University of Bristol, UK. David I. Waddington is a Professor in the Department of Education at Concordia University and the Associate Director of the Centre for the Study of Learning and Performance, Canada. Leonard J. Waks  is Distinguished Professor of Educational Studies at Hangzhou Normal University, China, and Professor Emeritus of Educational Leadership, Temple University, USA. Carrie Winstanley  is a Professor of Pedagogy at Roehampton University, UK. Douglas W. Yacek  is a Lecturer and Research Fellow in the Leibniz School of Education and the Institute for Special Education at Leibniz University Hannover, Germany.

Editors’ Introduction Andrew D. Colgan and Bruce Maxwell

Over much of the history of formal teacher education, from the middle of the 19th century onwards, a certain mastery of educational philosophy was widely regarded as essential to the craft of teaching. For this reason, educational philosophy as an academic discipline invariably occupied a central place in programmes of study leading to teacher certification. Philosophy’s fall from grace in teacher training has been nothing if not dramatic. While topics such as instructional methods, curriculum, and, since its inception  a  century ago, educational psychology have always been more or less constant features of teacher education, philosophy of education, not long ago  a  staple of teacher education, has experienced a marked rise and fall in prominence (Arcilla, 2002; Colgan, 2017, 2018; Hare, 2007; Kincheloe  &  Hewitt, 2011; Wilson, 1993; Winch, 2012). In response to a perceived need to provide future teachers with content regarded as directly relevant to the day-­to-­day tasks of contemporary classroom teaching, present-­day professional preparation in teaching is decreasingly likely to introduce students to the classic writings in educational philosophy or even explicitly encourage the development of the intellectual skills associated with the discipline of philosophy: critical reflection, argumentation, and conceptual clarity. In the field of educational philosophy itself, philosophy of education’s decline in teacher education has been extensively and passionately debated. Some scholars lament the marginalization of their field, regarding it as symptomatic of the intellectual degradation of teacher education (e.g. Barrow, 2008, 2014). Some point to the institutionalization of teacher education and the expansion of policy directives in teaching, which has resulted in a loss of a liberal form of teacher education (­Colgan, 2017). And still, others argue that the eclipse of philosophical and other humanities content in teacher education is due to corporatism—­powerful regulatory or economic forces that compel administrators in teacher education to incrementally reduce and replace coursework that does not provide so-­called “evidence-­based” research (e.g. Carlson, 2011; ­Kennedy, 2011; Kline, 2012).

2  Andrew D. Colgan and Bruce Maxwell One thing is certain, however. To accurately appraise philosophy of education’s decline in teacher education and understand its causes, we must revisit this history and see why early teacher educators assigned philosophy such a central place in “modern” teacher education. For prospective teachers in 19th-­century North America and Britain, teacher education consisted primarily in attending summer or evening seminars in education, some of which were soon formalized to “teacher institutes” led by the headmaster of a local common or grammar school. At this time, formalizing the preparation of teachers was one of the many challenges faced by social reformers like Henry Barnard and Horace Mann in the United States, and Egerton Ryerson in Canada. Inspired by  a  factory model of education, such promoters of  a  system of mass public education that was “free and compulsory” were committed to the idea that teachers’ work, their workplace—­i.e. schools—­and teacher education be standardized and that quality controls be put in place. The reality of 19th-­century teaching, however, was that most teachers worked in one-­room rural schools where the tasks teachers had to perform were multiple, unpredictable, and varied widely from school to school. Considering that the work of teachers consisted more in what could be called “school keeping” (see Colgan, 2017) than instruction as such, teacher education pioneers like Mann thought that the kind of knowledge that was favourable to effective teaching in this context was  a  synthetic view of education that combined theory and practice. The early proponents of institutionalized teacher education noticed this in the field of “pedagogy” developed in and imported from Europe and especially Germany. What pedagogy had to offer 19th-­century teachers were pre-­packaged educational philosophies articulated in the works of the so-­called “great educators” like Aristotle, Aquinas, Rousseau, Spencer, Fröbel, Pestalozzi, and Herbart. These historical figures also served as models for teachers to emulate in practice. The first publications directly aimed at a readership of teachers, collections of educational writings from these “pedagogues,” as they were called, were used as textbooks for teachers-­in-­training and mass published to supply the first normal schools. As the century progressed, the first research chairs in the “art and science of education” were established. One of these early chairs was awarded to Joseph Payne in 1873 at the newly formed College of Preceptors in the United Kingdom, the oldest surviving teacher association in the world. Transcripts of the lectures of early chairs like Payne also came to be published as textbooks. In addition to being used in pre-­service teacher education, these books, as well as the anthologies of great educational thought, could also be found on reading lists created by regional school boards and aimed at in-­service teachers. Known as “teacher libraries” (­Mackintosh & ­Marshall, 1886, p. 285), such lists served the purpose of professional development. Training certificates were even awarded to teachers who demonstrated a mastery of

Editors’ Introduction  3 this literature based on a successful oral examination given by a school inspector. Even though at this time a Bachelor of Arts degree awarded by a university was still considered sufficient preparation for grammar school teachers, particularly if it was attained in Europe, normal schools now overwhelmingly oversaw the education of common school teachers. Normal schools, which were generally not yet affiliated with universities, closely resembled colleges in terms of their institutional structure. This meant that the courses they offered were better organized and more accountable to systems of academic oversight than the frequently rather ad hoc teacher seminars or institutes that normal-­school-­based courses replaced. The increased formalization of teacher education also offered a wider variety of subjects to study. New subjects added to the curriculum tended to be specifically tailored to perceived educational needs of the incoming teacher candidates. For example, a programme of study in a normal school almost always included a course dealing with “the principles of education” that focused on the study of lecture series of influential chairs in education of the day as well as extracts from the canonical writings of the great educational thinkers of the past. The goal of this course was to uncover and extract the “principles” on which various pedagogical “systems” are based. One common textbook used in normal schools, the English philosopher Thomas Tate’s Philosophy of Education: The Principles and Practice of Teaching published in 1857, is emblematic of the synthetic approach to the study of education that characterized “principles of education” courses. The ubiquity of such courses demonstrates the abiding presence of “pedagogy”—­or what would now be recognized as philosophy of education—­in teacher education during this period. Despite institutional resistance from within universities, chairs of the “art and science of education” did manage to expand into small departments and schools of education or semi-­autonomous teachers’ colleges. In this way, teacher education was slowly brought under a semblance of university oversight. In terms of faculty make-­up, those holding DPaeds, or doctoral degrees in pedagogy, were gradually replaced by PhDs trained in traditional university disciplines. The understanding was that they would direct their expertise to issues of education and teaching. With this shift in the academic background and knowledge base of teaching faculty came an increased emphasis on research and, in particular, a drive amongst these new teacher educators to grow a new and rigorous field that would come to be known as the “study of education.” The emerging research areas associated with the study of education within universities soon began to have an impact on the curriculum of teacher education. By the time of the outbreak of the Second World War, institutionalized teacher education’s first iteration in pedagogy and the study of the “great educators” had largely been replaced by a tripartite

4  Andrew D. Colgan and Bruce Maxwell model of teacher education curriculum known as educational foundations which drew on academic disciplines such as philosophy, history of education, and educational science. According to this model, trained philosophers were to lecture on the “isms” of philosophy applied to education—­idealism, realism, pragmatism, and so on. Noticeably, its pluralism was in keeping with pedagogy but this new approach placed greater emphasis on philosophical systems rather than on the thought of particular great educators taken in isolation. To exemplify this educational model of “foundations” for teachers, Teachers College published  a  two-­volume set of textbooks (Rugg, 1941) that contained readings, still mostly drawn from the works of major philosophers (Plato, Aquinas, Rousseau, Dewey, and others), on topics connected to the field of education and the work of teaching: psychology, philosophy, curriculum, school management, etc. Nevertheless, and as John Dewey, also at Teachers College, famously claimed, in designing new teacher education programmes, philosophy of education was considered the “general theory” of its construction and placed, for a time, at the centre of teacher education curriculum (Dewey, 1916, p. 383). The prevalence of this tripartite foundations model would begin to decline after the Second World War. At the time, ideology in education, as it came to be called, faced criticism for straight jacketing educational thinking into certain metaphysical “absolutes” found in the classical philosophies of education.  A  new generation of teacher educators trained in philosophy departments brought with them  a  new set of “isms”—­existentialism, Marxism and critical theory, feminism, and, later, postmodernism—­that were felt to better reflect the ideological emphasis that the times called for. Meanwhile, compared with their counterparts a generation earlier, teachers working in large and increasingly closely regulated mass public-­school systems had significantly less freedom to experiment in their teaching with different “philosophies of education,” like idealism or pragmatism. As the working conditions of teachers became more and more standardized, so too did the training of teachers become increasingly aimed at providing future teachers with direct guidance on how to adhere to the regulatory standards of teaching that now applied to their work. Overall, these working conditions meant that teachers no longer saw much value in the kind of flexibility of thought and action that “philosophies of education” were originally intended to provide. In the main, teacher educators agreed with this assessment. So it was driven by changing working conditions in schools that the dominant conception of the kind of education that a teacher needed pivoted from a liberal arts model to a professional training model. The idea that teacher education could be based on instruction in the results of scientific research and field-­tested teaching methods also spurred on the movement to professionalize teaching. Educational research promised

Editors’ Introduction  5 the wherewithal to provide teaching with the scientific basis many thought necessary for teaching to attain true professional status. Grammar school teachers of the past may have declared educational philosophy to be the basis of their professional expertise, but teachers destined to work in large and highly regulated public schools were more likely to turn to educational psychology. By the 1960s, the archetype of the search for scientifically defensible teaching practices may be the behaviourism of B. F. Skinner and the “teaching machine.”. Significantly, however, philosophers of education, still  a  force to be reckoned with in teacher education at the height of the behaviourist movement, played a leading role in drawing critical attention to the limitations of behaviourism as applied to teaching and, in this way, ushering in cognitivism as the new dominant paradigm in educational psychology. In the UK at about the same time, facing similar pressure from the drive towards the standardization of teaching, British philosophy of education turned to analytic philosophy as a critical resource. R. S. ­Peters would emerge as the emblematic figure of analytical philosophy of education and his influence in Britain, both through his thought and leadership, can be likened to Dewey’s in the United States. But analytical philosophy of education had a different sort of impact on teacher education than Dewey’s progressivism. Tending to reject the “isms” approach to educational philosophy as so much “undifferentiated mush” as Peters famously said, analytic philosophy of education adopted what can be described as an “issues and problems” model. Emulating the scientific method, it made a clean break from the pluralism of educational ideologies by seeking clear answers to specific questions using an objective method—­in this case, linguistic analysis. As analytic philosophers of education saw it, the solution to the problems of education was not to be found in any particular educational world view but rather in the meanings of the language educators use to talk about education. Eventually, analytic philosophy’s contribution to teacher ­education—­ in particular, encouraging clarity about key educational ideas like teaching, learning, and indoctrination, not to mention the concept of education itself—­fell victim to exactly the same kinds of structural and organizational forces that weakened philosophy of education in teacher education in North America. The increased standardization of teaching led to an increased demand in teacher education for the kind of evidence-­based and practically oriented content that educational philosophy was poorly positioned to provide. In the face of stiff competition for curricular time from fields like educational psychology and instruction on specific instructional and class management techniques, as we near the 1980s, philosophy’s prominence in teacher education began to steeply wane and has never recovered. It is no coincidence that the 1980s was a watershed moment for the field of educational philosophy. This was a period of significant transformation for academic units offering teacher education as student enrolment

6  Andrew D. Colgan and Bruce Maxwell was expanding. In connection with the corresponding growth in the number of academic staff needed to serve this influx of students, a trend emerged for universities to upgrade schools and departments of education to larger faculties of education. A PhD was generally required of new academic staff, though it was not uncommon for existing staff to lack this credential. As  a  result,  a  new category of educational researchers were now working as teacher educators and the expectation that all faculty members engage in research increased. Furthermore, in the wake of concerns that the United States education system was falling below international standards, as articulated most poignantly in the report A Nation at Risk (1983), the 1980s was also  a  time when teaching faced growing pressure to professionalize. This meant, amongst other things, that teachers were increasingly held accountable for basing instructional choices on evidence drawn from scientific research—the new class of PhD-­trained teacher educators and researchers were well positioned to contribute to this ambitious project to make teaching “evidence-­based.” More and more space was accorded to empirically grounded content in programmes of study in teacher education at the expense of traditional content like philosophy, history, and sociology of education. These subjects struggled to demonstrate their educational value in the face of the new evidence-­based conception of the knowledge base of teaching and the number of instructional hours dedicated to them dropped. Illustrative of this trend, in Canada, the only country for which data on the question have been collected, by 2013, only 10% (12 out of 124) of teacher education programmes surveyed contained a required course in philosophy of education (Maxwell, Tremblay-­Laprise, & Filion, 2015). Conscious of the existential threats facing their field, philosophers of education can be found routinely engaging in diagnostic exercises about the decline of philosophy of education and reflection on its future prospects. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that since the 1990s, the decline of educational philosophy has become a central theme of inquiry in educational philosophy in its own right. In this “decline literature” (see Colgan, 2018), two broad interpretations of the disciplinary crisis facing educational philosophy are discernible. One interpretation suggests that the origins of the crisis are internal to the field. Proponents of this view argue that philosophy of education has failed to maintain the standards of scholarly excellence that were instrumental to securing its place in teacher education in the past. Such scholars express concerns about whether the field of theory and research in education has the intellectual wherewithal to reproduce and maintain philosophy of education as an academic discipline worthy of the name, raising doubts about the quality of peer-­reviewed journals and the capacity of graduate programmes to provide PhDs with rigorous, intellectually rich academic training. From this perspective, the solution to the impasse is for the educational philosophy community to

Editors’ Introduction  7 collectively set new, higher standards and work vigilantly to maintain them. The other broad interpretation of the decline of the field of educational philosophy points to external causes. Proponents of this view emphasize the evolving nature of educational research. Prior to the advent of applied social science, a relatively recent development in historical terms, the “study of education” necessarily drew on methods that dominated the study of humanities in universities at the time: history, philosophy, and the classics. In terms of providing the educational community with knowledge and insights thought valuable for teachers working in highly regulated systems of mass public schooling, philosophy of education has been slow to adapt. From this perspective, hope for educational philosophy’s renewal lies in bringing to bear philosophy’s characteristically flexible modes of inquiry— ­conceptual analysis, ethical reflection, argumentation, and the like—­to bear on contemporary educational problems and doing so in a way that resonates with decision makers and educators. Putting aside these competing interpretations of educational philosophy’s decline and their corresponding visions for the future of the field, there is no doubt that an accurate understanding of philosophy of education’s demise as a pillar of teacher education is impossible without taking into account the changing conditions of the occupation of teaching. Institutionalized teacher education, from its very beginnings with Mann, Bernard, and Ryerson, was a means to the end of securing a state-­funded education system worthy of public trust. Teacher education today continues to play  a  crucial role in mediating public confidence in public education systems. It is to be expected, therefore, that the curriculum of teacher education will shift and transform in response to the constantly changing social and regulatory contexts in which teachers work as teacher educators collectively strive to create forms of teacher preparation that are responsive to the current needs of teaching. Recent developments in education systems have benefitted some fields, most notably educational psychology and policy, but it has been detrimental to others, in particular philosophy of education and history of education. The fact remains, however, that as domains of academic inquiry, both educational psychology and philosophy of education were born of the same basic educational imperative and their continued vitality is at the mercy of their perceived relevance in the training of future teachers. This volume gathers together an international cast of dedicated teacher educators—­all of whom, in one way or another, self-­identify as educational philosophers—­to take stock of this radical transformation in teacher education and its impact not only on teachers’ professional development but also on the evolution of the teaching profession more broadly. Rather than dwelling on philosophy of education’s illustrious past or finger-­pointing about philosophy’s state of disrepute in teacher education, this volume turns resolutely to the future, asking: How do

8  Andrew D. Colgan and Bruce Maxwell philosophy of education and philosophical thinking feed into excellence in teaching today? How does a grounding in the theoretical and ethical dimensions of teaching, learning, and education systems contribute in meaningful ways to being a good teacher? What are the consequences for the quality of teacher preparation when it fails to ensure that future teachers are versed in philosophical thinking about educational issues? The thought-­provoking essays that make up this book tackle these consequential questions. The first section, Diagnosis and Prognosis, features chapters that provide a diagnosis and prognosis of the decline of philosophy of education. How does philosophy of education, from which educational research, including teacher education as a field of study essentially grew, now find itself faced with marginalization within educational studies? The three chapters in this section present different accounts of how this situation arose. Robin Barrow points to various sources of decline of philosophy within teacher education. While teacher education was once  a  formal study of four disciplines (philosophy, psychology, history, and sociology), today, many of these subjects have been made optional, leading to fragmented and unstandardized programmes. Barrow argues for  a return to analytical philosophy as championed by R. S. Peters and Paul Hirst in the United Kingdom, and Israel Scheffler in the United States. To support his case, he demonstrates the necessity of analytical philosophy as a tool to achieve clarity in understanding the concepts that are crucial to the study of education and the work of teachers. David Waddington’s chapter takes a different tack. Taking the decline of philosophy of education in North American schools of education as an established fact, he argues that even interest in John Dewey—a ­longstanding staple of these institutions—is likely to fade. Waddington begins his analysis with an account of the factors behind Dewey’s ascent within schools of education in the early 20th century, arguing that ­Dewey’s philosophy provided ideas which resonated with teacher educators and offered much-needed scholarly credibility. He then analyzes some of the current critiques of Dewey, arguing that they do not capture the key problem with Dewey’s philosophy, namely its strong commitment to modernity. Waddington asserts that in an “ed school” context increasingly critical of discourses of science, colonialism, and control, Dewey’s commitments in these regards, along with the progressive movement’s current difficulties, indicate an increasingly negative outlook for Dewey scholarship. In sum, Waddington argues that Dewey’s philosophy simply does not fit the spirit of the times anymore, particularly within some influential quarters of schools of education. Matthew Hayden examines the decline of philosophy of education from the angle of the increasing influence of technocratic and quantitative approaches to teaching and learning. Recovering humanistic and qualitative approaches to education would require a revival of philosophy in

Editors’ Introduction  9 educational studies and teacher preparation. Hayden finds  a  source for such change in the work of the philosopher Jürgen Habermas. According to Hayden, Habermas’s theory suggests a model of teacher education that would balance technique, practice, and emancipatory interests. The goal is to train the “whole teacher” and fully enlist teachers in the moral agency they are called upon to work as professionals and community leaders. The book’s second section, Philosophy and Teacher Development, contains four chapters that propose new ways of integrating philosophical content into teacher education and other forms of professional development. Such strategies are welcome, as a revival of philosophy will need to bring with it new methods of teaching its content and methods to students whose predecessors may have scarcely seen it. The waning interest in educational philosophy within teacher education, documented in the previous section of the book, can have a snowball effect that compounds revival efforts. The less faculty and students are exposed to philosophical content, the less likely it is that they will appreciate the importance of philosophical thinking in teacher education. The section opens with a chapter written by Leonard Waks who offers an appraisal of teacher expertise, the beliefs and values teacher candidates bring to their practice, and how these factors interface with the typical structure of teacher education programmes. After putting forward his view of the particular role that philosophy of education can play in teacher education, Waks offers an account of Philosophy for Teachers (P4T), an instructional approach building on insights from Philosophy for Children (P4C). In doing so he builds upon recent work by Orchard, Heilbronn and Winstanley (2016), in which those authors had brought philosophical forms of thinking to bear on ethical problems teachers encounter in their work. Waks concludes by providing a strategy to help prepare teachers to write quality personal philosophy of education statements. Deepening the discussion of P4T, the following chapter provides an in-­depth account of the approach. Written by two pioneers in the P4T movement in the United Kingdom, Janet Orchard and Carrie Winstanley, this chapter argues that teachers should be encouraged to develop “textured” forms of professional judgement that involve the ability to respond sensitively to complex ethical situations and think through and debate educational issues. According to the authors’ analysis, P4T can be helpful for putting philosophy to work in the curriculum of teacher education as an interdisciplinary subject that encourages teachers to hone their skills in using the tools of philosophy, including dialogue, to collectively seek solutions to recurrent workplace dilemmas. In the next chapter, Dianne Gereluk discusses the problems-­based approach to teaching and learning in educational foundations coursework. Often associated with the use of case studies, the problems-­based approach examines real-­world educational issues through a philosophical lens and, in doing so, helps students navigate the opposing forces that fuel what can seem like unsolvable problems. It is when educators are

10  Andrew D. Colgan and Bruce Maxwell faced with these intractable problems, Gereluk argues, that they most need philosophical thinking. The final chapter in this section by Michael Matthews narrows the focus to philosophy’s role in  a  specific area of teacher education, the preparation of science teachers. Science in today’s schools, Matthews says, must cover historical, philosophical, ethical, and cultural issues, all of which have a scientific dimension. From this starting point, the author builds a case for including the history and philosophy of science—­the origins and foundations of scientific knowledge, the idea of epistemological scepticism, and the methods and limitations of the scientific method—­­as a topic of study in science teacher education. The chapters that make up the book’s third and final section examine the historical roots of philosophy of education in teacher education programmes of the past. Why was philosophy once such an important and explicit part of the curriculum of teacher education, the authors ask, and how might we reinvigorate philosophy in teacher education? This section’s first chapter, by Douglas Yacek and Bruce Kimball, presents a historical account of the liberal arts in the education of teachers. It traces how the liberal arts were gradually displaced from teacher education to the point where now, and particularly in centres of teacher education that dispense what could be characterized as graduate-­level vocational training, the liberal arts could not be further removed from what is taught and learned in initial teacher training. Yacek and Kimball argue in favour of a return to a “liberal” teacher education which would reunify teacher education and the liberal arts and, in doing so, reconnect the formation of future teachers with philosophical modes of thought. In the next historical chapter, Lee Duemer examines the place of educational foundations in teacher education courses where, today, the last vestiges of philosophy of education content are most likely to be found. The author notes how foundations subjects in teacher education came to be minimized and then pleads for its revival. The chapter concludes by recounting the essential role of foundations in understanding the human condition, both as teacher qua teacher, and as a teacher educator. We close the book with David Hansen and Megan Laverty’s examination of the history of the graduate programme in philosophy and education at Teachers College of Columbia University. An American flagship for education research, Teachers College is the site of one of the longest running programmes offering graduate studies in education and can boast having had on staff such notable educationalists as John Dewey, George Counts, Jonas Soltis, and Maxine Greene. Authored by faculty members of Teachers College who are both deeply imbued in the philosophy and education programmes, the chapter gives voice to its graduate students in the form of an extensive narrative case study. A bastion for educational philosophy while the discipline has fallen in prominence

Editors’ Introduction  11 elsewhere, the philosophy and education programme at Teachers College can be regarded as a model for other faculties, schools, and departments of education around the world.

References Arcilla, R. V. (2002). Why aren’t philosophers and educators speaking to each other? Educational Theory, 52(1), 1–11. Barrow, R. (2008). Or what’s a heaven for? In L. J. Waks (Ed.), Leaders in philosophy of education: Intellectual self-­portraits (pp. 27–38). Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense. Barrow, R. (2014). Swansong: The price of everything. In J. Gingell (Ed.), Education and the common good: Essays in honor of Robin Barrow (pp. 128–150). New York, NY: Routledge. Carlson, D. (2011). Eyes of the education faculty: Derrida, philosophy, and teacher education in the postmodern university. In J. L. Kincheloe & R. Hewitt (Eds.), Regenerating the philosophy of education (pp. 11–24). New York, NY: Peter Lang. Colgan, A. D. (2017). The rise and fall of philosophy of education: An institutional analysis (Doctoral dissertation). Faculty of Education, Western University, London, ON, Canada. Colgan, A. D. (2018). Institutional theory and the literature on the decline of philosophy of education over the last three decades. Philosophical Inquiry in Education, 25(1), 66–87. Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education. New York, NY: Macmillan. Hare, W. (2007). Why philosophy for educators? International Journal of Applied Philosophy, 21(2), 149–159. Kennedy, D. (2011). After Socrates: Community of philosophical inquiry and the new world order. In J. L. Kincheloe & R. Hewitt (Eds.), Regenerating the philosophy of education (pp. 55–68). New York, NY: Peter Lang. Kline, K. (2012). Toward  a  post-­institutional philosophy of education. Ohio Valley Philosophy of Education Society, 37, 10–19. Mackintosh, W.,  &  Marshall, D. (1886, May 6). Teachers course of reading. Educational Weekly. Maxwell, B., Tremblay-­Laprise, A. A., & Filion, M. (2015). A survey of ethics curriculum in Canadian Initial Teacher Education. McGill Journal of Education, 50(1), 15–37. Rugg, H. (Ed.). (1941). Readings in the foundations of education (2 volumes). New York, NY: Teachers College, Columbia University. Wilson, J. (1993). Reflection and practice: Teacher education and the teaching profession. London, ON, Canada: Althouse Press. Winch, C. (2012). For philosophy of education in teacher education. Oxford Review of Education, 38(3), 305–322.

Part I

Diagnosis and Prognosis

1 The Decline of Philosophy in Educational Study and Why It Matters Robin Barrow

Flourish or Decline? One might claim that compared to 50 years ago, membership of societies such as the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain has increased considerably, there are more journals purporting to publish philosophical articles related to education than there used to be, and major publishing houses such as Routledge are republishing works 40 and more years old as well as many new works. In addition, there are a great many more students studying for a doctorate that they would classify as “philosophical,” and there are more lecturers or professors of education who see themselves as doing philosophically inclined work. However,  I  would suggest that though probably correct, these facts are misleading, and that in an important sense, philosophical inquiry is in decline in the study of education. Technological change has led to the emergence of many new online journals, but many of these, perhaps most, are of questionable quality. The reprinting of earlier works is predominantly aimed at new markets in Asia. The increase in the number of doctoral students doing philosophy is mainly due to an increase in the overall number of people doing doctoral work and  a  loosening of the meaning of the word “philosophical”; the latter point also to some extent explains the seeming increase in professionals who see themselves as doing philosophical work. The increase in membership of learned societies is largely accounted for by the increase in the number of graduate students in the field of education generally, and by the drive towards internationalism, which leads many students and professors to belong to societies in many other countries besides their own, which was not the case to the same extent in the past. If we therefore ignore such data and ask instead whether student teachers study philosophy to the extent that they used to, whether there is as much bona fide philosophizing about education as there once was, and whether its impact is as great as in the past, I would unhesitatingly answer “no” to all three questions. Such claims, of course, are not precisely quantified or easily backed by objective and systematic evidence, but it seems clear to me from long-­time and widespread familiarity with the field that in these important senses, study of philosophy in education today is in decline.

16  Robin Barrow

Decline In quantitative terms, philosophy has never been  a  major part of educational research compared to the reach of subjects such as psychology and sociology, or even curriculum studies or inquiry into teaching methods. But in its heyday, which I would place in the 1960s and 1970s and associate with figures such as Richard Peters, Paul Hirst, and Israel Scheffler, there is no denying either the widespread reach of the subject or its impact. In Britain, for example, all would-­be teachers, whether in university education departments or colleges of education, were exposed to and involved in debating such things as Peters’ analysis of the concept of education and Hirst’s “forms of knowledge” thesis. And in Canada, Australia, and the U.S., many notable figures such as John McPeck, Jim Gribble, John Kleinig, James Doyle, Ivan Snook, Vernon Howard, Denis Phillips, and Harvey Siegel either studied with or were indirectly influenced by one or more of those three philosophers or their colleagues. At that time, education departments, in whatever institutions and whatever their precise designations, all put emphasis on what were regarded as the four foundational disciplines of the subject: sociology (particularly to the fore in the UK), psychology (by contrast, particularly influential in the U.S.), history, and philosophy. And, commonly, all trainee teachers were expected to study all four subjects. On the face of it, this was for a good reason: psychology seeks to provide data pertaining to individual and group traits particularly in relation to learning theory, in principle invaluable to the teacher; sociology provides data on societal phenomena, pressures, and tendencies; history informs and enlarges our understanding of origins and possibilities, while reminding us of the law of unintended consequences; and philosophy aims to clarify our reasoning around these data. But even a cursory inquiry reveals that today the situation has changed significantly. Few teacher-­education programmes today demand the study of all four disciplines; some do not mandate study of any of the disciplines; and, generalizing, it is history and philosophy that are least often required or in fact studied. In the institution where I now work, for instance, where there used to be an assumption, if not a formal requirement, that all students would take an introductory course in each of the four disciplines, there is now merely the option of taking either psychology or philosophy. (Incidentally, psychology is by far the most popular option, while some 50% of those who do opt for a philosophy course turn out to be students from other departments or faculties, usually science students who are required to take a certain number of arts courses.) Similarly, for many years, there has been no professor of history of education, no sociologist of education, and, though there are a number of colleagues who see themselves as being philosophically inclined, for some time, nobody has been appointed specifically as a philosopher of education.

The Decline of Philosophy  17 However, as admitted, regardless of the formal situation, rather a lot of professors today claim an interest in and see themselves as engaged in philosophical research. A few of them may have academic qualifications in philosophy, but the vast majority have had little or no undergraduate study of the subject, and the case for them being regarded as philosophers rests not on a doctorate in philosophy, but on a Doctorate in Education. Of course, there is no a priori reason why a Doctorate in Education (EdD) should not be philosophical, but it is at least questionable how much of this work should be regarded as truly philosophical (see below), especially as, with the passing of time, the supervisors of these doctoral students, unlike somebody such as Peters who had impeccable credentials in philosophy itself, have themselves been education students and have not had a thorough grounding in the discipline of philosophy. Furthermore, a great many educational theses are not actually concerned with philosophical issues, but the treatment is described as philosophical essentially to denote the fact that it is not empirical. My concern, however, is not with the extent to which the word “philosophy” is often misleadingly bandied about, nor with the number of theses that may or may not legitimately be labelled as philosophical. My concern is with whether genuine philosophical inquiry is a force in our educational thinking. The appearance of widespread philosophical activity, when scrutinized carefully, seems deceptive to me. There is not a lot of serious philosophizing going on in educational theory, and what activity there is does not make much of a genuine impact on theory, let alone practice. As already noted, most of the work nominally in the field of philosophy takes place these days at the graduate level. But if philosophical thought and findings are truly to impact the schools, then the many doctoral theses that disappear into the mist are scarcely relevant. We need all those who go into the profession, in particular all trainee teachers, but also ideally administrators and even parents, to engage with, to come to understand the procedures and nature of, and to examine the findings of philosophy. The most important way in which philosophy needs to make an impact is in developing in every educator “a nose for” and an ability to pursue specifically philosophical questions, rather than simply to give them  a  set of answers generated by other philosophers. I have referred earlier to “true” philosophy, “genuine” philosophy, “bona fide” philosophy, “serious” philosophy, and “legitimate” philosophy, which obviously invites the question: what counts as bona fide philosophy? What precisely is it that I am arguing is in decline and yet is of extreme importance? It is certainly not simply non-­empirical theorizing about, say, good ways to maintain discipline, a programme of sex education, or arguments in favour of sporting activities, for there is no shortage of that kind of work.

18  Robin Barrow But, assuming for the moment that we can distinguish work that would be recognized as truly philosophical by professional academic philosophers from work that is simply ruminative and non-­empirical and would not be so recognized, and hence acknowledge  a  considerable diminution in the apparent interest in philosophy, we run into the further problem that philosophers of education by no means always agree on what they should be doing. Thus, we have those who think we should study the educational theories of notable philosophers (though this is only really possible in rare cases such as the work of Plato or Rousseau. Most philosophers’ specifically educational views, such as those of Locke and Russell, bear little or no relation to their general philosophy). Others believe that we should be studying the great philosophers of the past, such as Kant, Aristotle, or Hegel, and applying their philosophical insights into education. Yet, others think that we should focus on the theories of certain philosophers of education such as John Dewey. Some regard studying the written work of educators such as A.S. Neill or Paulo Freire as doing philosophy. There are rationalists, pragmatists, idealists, and others who think our job is to initiate students into one or other of these “isms,” ideologies, or schools of thought. And so on, and so forth. But all such approaches seem to me beside the point. One cannot seriously maintain that educational practice or policy would necessarily usefully be enhanced if everybody studied Plato, or any other “great philosophers,” or by the study of rationalism and idealism, or by reading Locke on education. So while some, if not all, of these approaches might reasonably be seen as involving genuine philosophy, I see no particular reason to lament any decline in their practice or popularity. By contrast, what is certainly less in evidence today than in the past, both at conferences and in journals devoted to the philosophy of education, and presumably in classes in teacher-­education establishments too, and the decline of which I shall argue does matter is, specifically, analytic philosophy. I should immediately make it clear that I do not maintain that analytic philosophy is the only “true” or “genuine” philosophy. As we shall see below, a prescriptive definition would run counter to the way in which analysis is conducted. Rather, I am putting forward the suggestion that the business of analysing key concepts in any field is always of paramount importance, and, conducted in  a  certain manner, is indubitably a philosophical activity. Furthermore, it is philosophy in this sense that is in decline in the study of education, and it is this kind of philosophy that is of importance in education. Therefore, at this point, I need to spell out what analytic philosophy, as I understand it, does and does not involve, since there is widespread confusion on this matter even amongst philosophers.

The Decline of Philosophy  19

Analytic Philosophy Explained When the philosopher sets about analysing a concept such as, let us say, giftedness, he or she is not ultimately or primarily asking for a dictionary definition such as “having natural talent or aptitude,” although that might well be  a  starting point. We may start there to mark the territory, so to speak, that we wish to explore. But despite the label “ordinary language philosophy,” which is sometimes equated with analytic philosophy, the philosopher’s interest is not simply in language use, but in analysing the idea or concept that the language signifies, whether referred to as “giftedness” or “having a natural talent or aptitude,” or by any other dictionary definition. And this is done by asking questions about the concept as thus defined, such as: what is meant by “natural” here? Does it mean that a person can only count as gifted if they are born with a certain talent, for example? Surely not. Surely, a gifted scientist is the one who has ability, however derived or developed. So “natural” here must either be jettisoned, despite the dictionary, or else interpreted as something like an ability that, though it may have been acquired or learned, has become ingrained or internalized. Then again, take the phrase “talent or aptitude”: are these synonyms, alternatives, or what? And shouldn’t we add something about quality, for surely a gifted musician is first and foremost a very good one. And, granted that quality comes into it, how do we assess quality? Whatever our answer to that, it is clear that the manner of assessing quality in one field (say, music) may differ from the appropriate manner in another (say, science). That gives rise to the question of whether a concept such as giftedness is generic. That is to say is a gifted person gifted without qualification and able to display this talent in any sphere (generic), or is it rather the case than an individual may be gifted in certain respects but not others? The answer is fairly obviously that it is not generic, yet many empirical studies of giftedness ignore this point entirely and proceed as if gifted people can be identified by general traits without reference to specific achievements in particular areas. There is no need to go further with the particular example of giftedness here. Enough has been said to make it clear that philosophical analysis goes way beyond defining terms. It is a matter rather of unpacking definitions, explicating them fully in an attempt to provide a coherent and extensive understanding of the idea in question. It follows that analytic philosophers are not what critics sometimes call “essentialists,” meaning people who believe that a given word refers to an essential, eternal, unchanging idea, lurking somewhere in  a  Platonic heaven. Something like that might conceivably be appropriately said of key concepts in the physical world: stone is stone, after all, and, whatever we call it and whatever we think about it, stone is not going to change its properties. But the concepts that philosophers are interested in are not those of

20  Robin Barrow concrete realities given in nature. They are interested in concepts that are abstract ideas relating to human constructs. So we are not seeking for the meaning of “well-­educated,” or a definitive correct answer; we are looking rather for a convincing and satisfactory analysis of the idea. But  a  view on the nature of education, for example, is not to be evaluated by reference to such things as how people tend to use the word, what the dominant view of education may be in society, or what actually currently goes on in schools. Rather, the appropriate criteria for judging the quality of an analysis may be summarized as the “Four Cs.” A good analysis is the one that is (i) Clear, (ii) ­Complete, (iii) Coherent, and (iv) Compatible. The value of clarity, one hopes, goes without saying. Yet, the fact is that many central terms thrown about in educational debate, as we have seen in the case of “giftedness,” are far from clearly articulated. In order to explicate  a  concept, one almost invariably brings in other concepts that require explication in their turn, as again we have seen in the case of giftedness, which introduces the notion of a “natural talent,” which then has itself to be explicated. The completeness criterion refers to ensuring that all the terms introduced to explicate a given concept are themselves fully explicated. The reference to coherence is to internal coherence, and is the requirement that by now, very likely lengthy and complex analysis does not involve any internal contradictions. Finally, if the concept is now clear, complete, and coherent, it needs to be checked against one’s other knowledge including one’s wider conceptual repertoire, but also including non-­conceptual matters such as matters of fact or value—­ and, of course, against relevant publicly warranted knowledge. There is something wrong with your understanding of “educated” if, for example, it does not allow us to discriminate between people as being better or worse educated, if it proves impossible to educate in this sense, or if it involves values that we find abhorrent, since it is generally assumed that education is both possible and desirable, and that some people are better educated than others. In undertaking analysis, we do not look into the opinions of others save as  a  potential source of ideas; likewise, the value of  a  historical awareness of the evolution of a term such as “indoctrination” provides useful food for thought, but it does not determine the contours of the concept. In the end, an analysis is an individual matter, and it is a further question whether its explication convinces others that a particular conception is important. But, though it is  a  personal matter, it is the one that is conducted in the public arena with supporting reasoning in the hope of either convincing others of its plausibility and value, or of it being improved upon, or, possibly, exposed as flawed or inadequate in some or all respects. In short, while there is no definitive answer to the question of what it is to be well-­educated, there may be one clearly superior answer in terms of its explication and appeal. For example, I believe

The Decline of Philosophy  21 that Richard Peters’ account of education, which suggests that it is a particular kind of understanding that characterizes the educated person, rather than, say, physical prowess or virtuous character, is superior to the view that “education is of the whole person”; this is because the latter is, as it stands, inadequate. It is not really clear what is meant by the “whole person” here, and it certainly needs further explication to arrive at a satisfactory completeness. Then, assuming that a fuller analysis is without internal incoherence or contradiction of any kind, there is the question of whether education defined in this way satisfies and squares with all our other views and assumptions about education: do we in fact judge how well-­educated people are by reference to the whole person? Do we, for instance, refuse to acknowledge that any ugly, emotionally unstable, or immoral people could possibly be well-­educated? Assuming that the answer to that is that, of course, we would not, it would seem that there is a glaring inconsistency between our insistence that education is of the “whole person” and our view that moral, physical, and mental states are not directly relevant to the question of one’s education.

The Importance of Analytic Philosophy But why does this business of hammering out what is necessarily one’s individual conception (even if it proves persuasive to others) important? If you can reasonably see education as being essentially  a  matter of developing understanding, while I see it rather as a matter of developing  a  moral sense and moral behaviour, and somebody else sees it as a matter of training in marketable skills, and if each of these is a personal conception, are there any criteria for determining who wins the argument, and if not what is the point of arguing about them? First, it is not clear that they are equally reasonable either in the sense of equally coherent, consistent, clear, and compatible, or in the sense of equally persuasive. So to consider and study these alternatives allows us to critically assess them in the hope of discerning the most convincing. Thinking about it allows us to improve or reject unconvincing claims. Had educators in Nazi Germany, for example, been free to explore the question of whether the schooling being provided was truly educational rather than indoctrination, history might have taken a different turn. Secondly, regardless of what specific concepts are examined, if those involved with education do not develop a philosophical nose and do not engage in analysis, they will inevitably rely uncritically on the claims of other disciplines, predominantly claims arising out of allegedly scientific research. But research claims about good teaching strategies, curriculum design, the psychology of students, and the environmental factors that drive them, generally speaking urgently need to be critically assessed and examined not merely from  a  technical point of view (e.g. are the statistics sound, was the sample studied truly representative, was it large

22  Robin Barrow enough?), but from a philosophical perspective: does the methodology used to arrive at  a  given claim make sense as the way to examine the matter in question? Is the research behind claims about best teaching practices, for example, coherent or otherwise acceptable? The answer is that very often, it is not (Barrow, 2013, 2015b). Assumptions are made that are hardly reasonable, key terms are not defined or inadequately conceptualized, and, in the absence of any independent analysis, success is effectively defined in terms of the instruments used. Furthermore, the excessive weight placed upon empirically demonstrable claims, and the associated tendency to treat questions that are not in fact amenable to empirical testing as if they were, leads to and perpetuates  a  scientific view of human relations. We see the world of human activity as if, like the world of material matter, it were governed by inexorable laws. We thus come to assume that every ability is a skill that can be developed by training and practice, despite the fact that the abilities such as the ability to understand, to empathize, and to imagine are not skills in this sense. Furthermore, not only is  a  quality such as imagination not something that is developed simply by repeated practice and exercise, as, for example, the skill of dribbling a soccer ball is, it is also not generic; that is to say, while the skill of dribbling a soccer ball can be displayed to a greater or lesser degree in any context, a person may very likely show imagination in one area, such as writing fiction, but not in another such as real-­life personal relations (Barrow, 2015a). The behaviour of human beings can, of course, be generalized about, but it is not explicable wholly or even very far in terms of scientific laws. We have  a  unique language capacity, which leads to  a  unique kind of thinking; we thus develop understanding or minds, as a result of which we have a degree of autonomy. We are capable of acting as well as being acted upon. It is imperative that we remember this, and therefore continue to question the scientism of the so-­called social sciences. This is not to say that the questions explored by social science are not important. It is to say that many of the most important sociological and psychological questions cannot be examined and answered empirically. Empirical study can tell us that boys do better on math tests than girls, perhaps. But it cannot tell us whether this matters. In addition, without philosophical input, besides there being no objective or independent critique of the empirical research and the resulting claims about education, there is seldom recognition of the interrelated nature of psychology and sociology. Too much research in either discipline proceeds without any reference to the other. But it is clear that many psychological traits are partially the outcome of social factors and that many social situations can be partly explained by psychological factors. As an illustration of all these problems, let us take Charles Murray’s Human Accomplishment (2003). The avowed aim of this research is to establish scientifically (and this is stressed by the author) the best

The Decline of Philosophy  23 talents in various spheres, such as philosophy, music, science, and literature, throughout history. The book, which is long, is littered throughout with graphs, statistics, and other forms of measurement and quantification, all of which makes its methodology appear scientific, and indeed there is genuine number-­crunching going on which we may presume is faultless in itself. The problem is that when one sets aside all this foreground in presentation, one finds that the real basis of the research and its conclusions has little to do with this presentation, nothing to do with science, and nothing to do with sense. For what Murray does is to select a number of reference books, such as, in the case of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy (1945), count the number of lines devoted to the various philosophers mentioned in the books, and adjudge those most written about to be the best. Quantification this may be; science it is not. On what grounds, by what criteria, were the reference books selected? We are not told, but the selection will inevitably have been a matter of judgement rather than science, unless they too were selected by some form of quantification, such as the highest sales figures or most library usage. But whatever method was used to select the books, the question of whether they are authoritative is once again  a  matter of judgement rather than empirical demonstration. Equally obviously, the number of pages devoted to an individual has got absolutely nothing to do with the quality of their work. Indeed, sometimes a figure is much written about because they are regarded as fraudulent, or in some other way execrable. This is scientism (that is to say a practice that pretends to be but is not science) at its worst. And, judging by the generally favourable reviews of the work in question from other social scientists, it apparently takes philosophy to see through it. If it is still questioned what the value of an indemonstrable, unprovable personal analysis and conclusion about, say, the meaning of education may be, the answer is that it is extremely important if the individual teacher or administrator or policymaker is going to be and feel responsible for himself and to be able to assess and evaluate his practice and progress. Certainly, he can look to certain “objective measures” such as gathering student feedback, but these will have no real value unless the students and the peers are themselves able to analyse and articulate their conception of educational success; in any case, the appearance of empiricism here can hardly disguise the fact that we are dealing with subjective opinion. To make an intelligent assessment of my teaching, I need to understand my own particular situation clearly. I need to know not psychological generalizations about students, but to know about my students; I need to know not general strategies for teaching, so much as to know my subject and strategies for teaching that subject to these students; I need to know not what works for others but what my strengths and weaknesses are: what does indeed work well for some might be something that I just can’t do successfully; I need not a pre-­packaged list

24  Robin Barrow of observable objectives but to know my objectives, some of which may only be monitorable in the long term (e.g. sustained pleasure in literature) and some of which many not be observable at all (e.g. a heightened aesthetic awareness), and at the apex of what I need is an understanding of my ultimate aim or goals. In other words, I need to have a clearly articulated concept of what counts as being well-­educated.

A Moral Dimension Finally, there is the moral dimension, for few will deny that teaching, if it is to count as educational, should proceed only in morally acceptable ways, that teachers should be moral exemplars, and that education should partly involve developing moral sense and understanding. To monitor one’s performance in respect of these aims requires moral understanding, and understanding morality just is an inherently philosophical undertaking. Psychology can tell you important things about temptation, selfishness, and the ages at which children are likely to be able to grasp certain moral concepts; sociology can tell you about problems of peer group pressure, generalizations about likelihood of particular values being held by children from different backgrounds, or the role of the family in developing various traits, and history can inform you about changes in values over time and place. But that leaves the all-­important task of trying to work out in a reasonable way what we ought to do. This is not a matter of examining something that is given in nature. It is  a  matter of analysing moral concepts. It is  a  matter of philosophy. I have acknowledged the superficial appearance of considerable interest in the philosophy of education but suggested that it is highly misleading. Certainly, analytic philosophy is not prevalent.  I  have tried to outline why this is damaging to serious reflection on education. To summarize succinctly: without a sound philosophical foundation to our thinking, we become little more than teaching machines programmed by questionable empirical claims and unexamined aims and goals.

References Barrow, R. (2013). Empirical research in education: Why philosophy matters. In W. Hare & J. P. Portelli (Eds.), Philosophy of education: Introductory readings (4th ed., pp. 16–34). Edmonton, AB, Canada: Brush Education. Barrow, R. (2015a). Understanding skills: Thinking, feeling and caring. ­Oxford, UK: Routledge. Barrow, R. (2015b). Giving teaching back to teachers: A critical introduction to curriculum theory. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Murray, C. (2003). Human accomplishment. New York, NY: HarperCollins. Russell, B. (1945).  A  history of western philosophy. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.

2 Schools of Education and John Dewey The End of the Romance? David I. Waddington

As for the individual, every one is a son of his time; so philosophy also is its time apprehended in thoughts. It is just as foolish to fancy that any philosophy can transcend its present world, as that an individual could leap out of his time or jump over Rhodes. —G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, 1820

Introduction The decline of philosophy of education has been at an advanced stage for some time. The field can be said, at this point, to have a robust “decline literature,” which began during the 1980s and grew as the institutional circumstances for philosophy of education, particularly in North ­A merica, became increasingly straitened during the 1990s and early 2000s. Many kinds of analyses have been offered and various factors analysed, including internal weaknesses in the field (Hayden, 2011), lack of engagement with the wider educational community (Arcilla, 2002), and institutional changes within schools of education (Burbules, 2002; ­Colgan, 2018). Currently, the decline is so striking and obvious that it really cannot be denied or positively recast in any way. From my own standpoint as someone who works in the field, the most indicative harbinger of doom was the disappearance, a few years ago, of the Philosophy of Education Society’s academic job board. Yet amidst this decline, there is a bright spot. Progressive education and its principal banner-­bearer John Dewey remain popular within schools of education and within the teaching profession more broadly. Progressive educational theories still hold significant appeal amongst a range of scholars within schools of education, from educational psychologists to teacher educators. While he is perhaps more widely cited than closely read, many education scholars have had some contact with the basic aspects of Dewey’s thinking. Thus, if there is one place where the stars still appear to align at least somewhat for philosophy of education, it might be in Dewey scholarship. My argument, however, which  I  make from my standpoint as both a Dewey scholar and a philosopher of education, is that this bright

26  David I. Waddington spot may also be doomed to fade. The roots of this future decline, I will argue, are found in both Dewey’s commitment to a particular version of modernity and the accelerating failure of the progressive movement’s social project. In order to advance this hypothesis, I will begin with an account of the factors behind Dewey’s ascent in North American schools of education—­this is critical, as it will allow us to eventually see whether these favourable factors are likely to remain in place. I will then proceed to review some of the existing critiques of Dewey, and I will explain how they do not capture the key problem with his philosophy, which is its strong commitment to modernity. Once this argument is laid out, I will explain how this commitment to modernity, along with the progressive movement’s current difficulties, bode ill for the future of Dewey scholarship in schools of education.

Why Did Dewey Become so Popular in the First Place? The question of why Dewey became so popular within schools of education in the first place is a critical one, and, in part, it can help explain his current decline in influence. In this section, I will rely on a set of arguments from David Labaree’s (2006) The Trouble with Ed Schools. In the course of explaining the education school’s low academic status, Labaree offers a convincing explanation for why North American schools of education embraced Dewey’s progressive ideas in the first place and why they have retained a strong commitment to progressivism. Labaree begins his story of “the education school’s romance with progressivism” with an account of how early 20th-­century schools of education moved decisively towards a strong professional training orientation. On the teaching side, there was a strong focus on preparing future teachers, and on the research side, the focus was on developing new educational testing schemes and building the administrative architecture of growing public-­school systems. In elaborating this picture, Labaree draws on David Tyack’s (1974) distinction between administrative progressives, who were concerned with efficiency and organizational improvement within the school system, and the pedagogical progressives, who were more interested in child-­centred pedagogy and social reconstruction. ­Labaree’s argument, following Tyack, is that the administrative progressives dominated both the school system itself (by training administrators and influencing them) and the teaching and research agendas of schools of education. This resulted in a kind of service orientation in which the schools of education served as handmaidens to the public school system: they trained teachers and administrators, as well as serving as high-­level consultants for the operation of the system. The problem with this administrative orientation, as Labaree points out, is that it is uninspiring. There is  a  gulf between administrative progressive Edward Thorndike’s (1927) dry texts on educational

Schools of Education and John Dewey  27 measurement and pedagogical progressive George Counts’ (1932) searing “Dare the School Build  a  New Social Order” or, for that matter, Dewey’s (1897/1972) comments in “My Pedagogic Creed” about the teacher as the “usherer in of the Kingdom of God” (p. 95). Many of the administrative progressives had little normative educational vision beyond the efficient allocation of students to social roles, and, as Labaree (2006) quips, “this was not the kind of cause that made [faculty] want to jump out of bed in the morning and race into work” (p. 157). Labaree argues that then, as now, there were a significant number of education school faculty who were committed to a social justice orientation in education, and this resulted in a strong commitment to thinkers like Dewey who offered an inspiring and intellectually rigorous vision of the educational and social futures. However, it is notable that some of the most influential administrative progressives saw themselves as Deweyans as well. For example, in An Elusive Science: The Troubling History of Education Research, Ellen Condliffe-­Lagemann (2002) tells the story of Paul Hanna, whose wildly successful but politically middle-­of-­the-­road social studies textbooks supplanted the more progressive (but controversial) social reconstructionist textbooks of Harold Rugg in the 1940s and 1950s. Condliffe-­ Lagemann correctly identifies this as an example of the watering down of the social reconstructionist movement, but what I find most interesting about Hanna (beyond the fact that he forced his graduate students to work for free on his Christmas tree plantation) is that he was a lifelong devotee of Dewey and, in fact, a founding member of the John Dewey Society (Stallones, 2002; Tanner, 1991). Dewey’s appeal for Hanna,  a  social conservative, illustrates the plasticity of Dewey’s philosophy very well. As Eamonn Callan (1990) has argued, Deweyan progressive education has two principal plausible interpretations:  a  more popular left-­wing social reconstructionist orientation, and a more small-­c conservative orientation that aims to produce the adaptable employee. Although the former interpretation is, I argue (Waddington, 2008), far more justified within Dewey’s frameworks, many of Dewey’s key principles are vague and open to interpretation. The conservative administrative progressives could get behind interpretations of these ideas that favoured their interests, as could the reformist pedagogical progressives. The progressive dream of building a better society was wide ranging in terms of both the specification of the society to come and the means for getting there—­one might, in fact, justifiably say that the only common ground that the various adherents of the movement shared was some degree of optimism about the future. In other words, Dewey’s philosophy offered some inspiration to all aspects of the progressive movement—­small-­c conservative, technocrat, and left-­wing social reconstructionist alike. In addition to providing something for everyone in the progressive movement, Labaree (2006) argues that Dewey and his followers had the

28  David I. Waddington advantage of being oriented more towards the reform of classroom processes, as opposed towards reforming the curriculum. This process orientation harmonized well with the interests of education school faculty, who, Labaree points out, were disenfranchised from a more curriculum-­ based approach in two ways. First, teacher educators had (at least theoretically) some level control over classroom processes, whereas they had relatively little control over curriculum, which usually rested with various levels of government. It was much easier then, as now, to attempt to reform how teachers teach, as opposed to reforming what to teach. Many of Dewey’s writings aligned well with this approach; although he emphasized, particularly in his later writings, that a robust curriculum was important, he did not really specify what the curriculum should be beyond broad generalities. Another reason for adherence to Dewey may be that schools of education are intellectually weak institutions that are seeking academic credibility. As Labaree points out, North American schools of education are generally low prestige institutions, and part of the reason for this is that some school of education faculty are not robust scholars. Labaree (2006) synopsizes Ducharme’s (1993) study of education school faculty: Ducharme tried to get  a  sense of the intellectual interests of his subjects by asking them to name three books they would “want their students to have read so as to “make them better teachers and better people.”” Their responses revealed  a  depressing lack of intellectual orientation in their work as education professors. One person mentioned Macbeth, but most of the titles were on the order of Up the Down Staircase, Future Shock, and Blackboard Jungle. One professor said, “I read about books more than I read books.” There were also several very vague answers containing references to an unnamed book; included in these answers were ‘something by Eric Erickson, ‘the Bloom book,’ a fantastic history book,’ and ‘the handbook…’ Five interviewees, after thinking for several minutes and talking about the question, named no books or authors. (pp. 113–114) Given an academic environment like this, schools of education need all the credibility they can get, and it didn’t hurt to have one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century having been seen to play for the sad-­ sack hometown team. Dewey was a pioneering educational thinker, an intensely active and effective public intellectual, and above all, a widely respected philosopher. Faculty in schools of education, who often had a narrow practical (teacher education) or narrow technical (educational psychology or administration) orientation, could thus associate themselves with one of the most prestigious liberal arts.

Schools of Education and John Dewey  29 A final possible reason for Dewey’s ascent in schools of education comes to us from the social studies of science and Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn (1962) argues that certain paradigmatic works can set the scene for more incremental research over a long period of time. Kuhn gives the example of The Origin of Species, which articulated a compelling theory that nevertheless left many smaller questions unanswered. Kuhn called this smaller-­scale research that dealt with these smaller questions and advanced the dominant paradigm “normal science,” and he called it this because he felt that it (and not revolutionary, paradigm-­articulating science) was the everyday form of scientific activity. Although Kuhn intended this concept to apply strictly to research in the natural sciences, it has frequently been applied elsewhere, and it can help explain the interest that Dewey’s work holds for ed school faculty. Dewey’s educational writings offer some bold propositions—­for example, the child as the centre of education, learning through direct experience, and education through occupations—­that leave a large number of problems unresolved. For example, one searches School and Society (1899/1990) mostly in vain for prescriptions about how one is supposed to enact the principles of Deweyan progressive education. Thus, there was, and still is, much work to be done in terms of figuring out how the various practical challenges that Dewey’s bold but vague prescriptions highlighted would be addressed. Beyond this core task of elaborating progressive education, Dewey is also fertile ground for other even more pedestrian “normal scientific” research activity. First, there is  a cottage industry in various kinds of repackaging of Dewey, which is useful since Dewey was, at his best, less-­than-­ideally organized and focussed. Second, there are also a lot of interesting (for Dewey scholars, at least) questions within Dewey’s work that remain to be cleared up. For example, a notable area of recent interest in this regard concerns Hegel’s influence on Dewey (Good, 2006; McClintock, 2018). However, this is just one outstanding question amongst many that have scholarly significance, and given Dewey’s 37 volumes of published work, there will be much work of this kind for years to come.

Falling Out of Love: Conservatism, Racism, Eurocentrism, and Modernity Given these compelling reasons for Dewey’s enduring popularity in schools of education, my hypothesis that Dewey’s decline is just around the corner may seem strange. So what is the problem with Dewey, then? One possibility might be some kind of “showstopper”-­t ype problem such as racism or crypto-­conservatism that would potentially undermine him within the left-­wing milieu of schools of education. Several critiques of this kind have been offered in the past 40 years. Most prominently,

30  David I. Waddington Clarence Karier (1972), Walter Feinberg (1972), and Eamonn Callan (1990) have suggested that Dewey is a kind of closet conservative, Frank Margonis (2009) has suggested that Dewey’s pedagogy has troubling racial assumptions underlying it, and Thomas Fallace (2009, 2010) has suggested that Dewey is less liberal than we tend to think, as well as being committed to a Eurocentric conception of historical progress. Space considerations prevent  a  full examination of the merits of these arguments, but as others, myself included, have argued at length (­Waddington, 2008; Zerby, 1975), most of these critiques are not that powerful. Karier’s (1972) and Feinberg’s (1972) cases for Dewey’s conservatism rely on a tenuous interpretation of an episode in which Dewey tried to help a liberal faction of Polish immigrants against a conservative faction. Callan’s (1990) critique of Dewey’s supposed conservatism is more compelling in that it points up a plausible conservative interpretation of Dewey, but Callan fails to muster the textual evidence necessary to establish that Dewey advanced this interpretation deliberately. Margonis (2009), meanwhile, fails almost completely to make his “racial assumptions” case: while he successfully argues the straightforward point that Deweyan progressive education has an association with privilege and middle-­class values, his efforts to trawl the Deweyan corpus for incriminating statements on race turn up very little. The strongest case against Dewey here comes from Thomas Fallace, who notes that Dewey is committed to what he calls  a  Eurocentric version of history. Fallace (2009), in analysing Dewey’s conception of history, notes, “Although Dewey offered a less ethnocentric form of social evolutionism than Herbert Spencer, his theory still relegated aboriginal, African, and American Indian civilizations to prior steps in the evolution of man” (p. 399). Fallace is right about this to an extent, but there are several mitigating factors. The first is that the Hegelian historical narrative to which Dewey is committed is more complex and not quite as straightforwardly Eurocentric as one might think. Hegel (1807/1977) does not simply segue from our “savage” beginnings to our glorious European civilization; he is far more enamoured of some of the earlier stages (e.g. Greek life) than he is of some of the later ones (the Romans). The second mitigating factor is that Dewey finds himself in broad company in holding this kind of view. American Hegelianism was still near its high-­water mark when the Dewey school was founded, and other liberal progressive intellectuals held similar Hegelian views about the path of historical progress. Notably, W.E.B. Dubois, arguably the leading African-­A merican intellectual of the early 20th century and  a  notable contemporary touchstone for progressive scholars in American schools of education, also held (unorthodox and non-­Eurocentric) Hegelian views about the progress of civilization. Although he attributed more value to non-­European

Schools of Education and John Dewey  31 cultures than Dewey did, Dubois endorsed a clear hierarchy of cultures. Kendhammer (2007) explains: While DuBois finds that there is no basis for ‘racial’ inferiority in either ‘physical or cultural causes,’ he also finds that on a grand scale of ‘progress,’ he is forced to admit that Africans are still in most cases at a ‘primitive’ level. His arguments of past achievements are tempered by his belief that ‘proper guidance’ is necessary to bring Africans into ‘modern civilization.’ (p. 66) Although Dubois’ view was more sophisticated than Dewey’s, the fact remains he, like Dewey, felt that many cultures would need to reconstruct their traditions to fit with modernity. In sum, while all of these critiques make some headway against Dewey, none of them deal him a significant blow. The crypto-­conservative line of critique highlights some less-­than-­desirable episodes and  a  few unduly vague statements, and the racism/Eurocentrism critique reveals that Dewey held some dated Eurocentric views. However, what I find most interesting about these critiques is that they miss what  I  will argue is most problematic about Dewey today: his strong commitment to various elements of modernity. In other words, what makes Dewey incompatible with the ethos of today’s school of education is not his alleged Eurocentrism or conservatism, but rather his commitments to progress, science, technology, colonialism, and control—­the elements of modernity. These elements of Dewey’s philosophy reflect profound commitments that are antagonistic to key power-­centres in contemporary schools of education, which tend to have more postmodern commitments. A good place to begin this analysis of Dewey’s modernity is with a definition of modernity that comes from neo-­Heideggerian philosopher ­A lbert Borgmann. Borgmann (1992) looks at modernity as a grand project of refoundation and control—­an attempt to build a new order in the face of resistance from medieval ideas and folkways. He locates three distinct elements in modern thinking: 1 The domination of nature—­the Baconian project to catalogue and control the natural world, as well as the colonial effort to dominate and control non-­Western peoples. 2 Methodological universalism—­the effort to refound  a  new order based on certain knowledge using a Cartesian scientific method that would reliably generate this knowledge and sweep away outdated ideas. 3 Ambiguous individualism—­the modern political order locates its basis in the individual, as per Locke’s political philosophy. Borgmann

32  David I. Waddington (1992) maintains that the current version of this concept has two aspects which provoke tension and ambiguity—­a rugged individualism oriented towards exploration and toughness, as well as a “commodious individualism” oriented towards personal freedom and comfort. (p. 43) Borgmann (1992) bolsters these elements with examples from ­American history, particularly the exploration and conquest of the West—­for ­Borgmann, as for some other philosophers (e.g. Baudrillard, 1989), ­America is where one finds modernity in its purest and most vigorous form. Before we apply this definition of modernity to Dewey, it is helpful to corroborate and expand it through an alternative definition. Here, we can turn to Jean-­Francois Lyotard, whose book, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1984), is an account of the fracture of the modern project in the late 20th century. Lyotard explains that postmodernity is characterized by an incredulity towards two metanarratives that are designed to legitimate the progress of scientific knowledge. The first of these—­“humanity as the hero of liberty”—­is very familiar to many people who work in schools of education (and to Dewey scholars, in particular). Lyotard (1984) summarizes this narrative as follows: “All peoples have  a  right to science. If the social subject is not already the subject of scientific knowledge, it is because that has been forbidden by priests and tyrants. The right to science must be reconquered” (p. 31). This, of course, places a significant emphasis on educational institutions, which much communicate the progress of science to everyone in order to build a new modern state. The second metanarrative, Lyotard explains, is a story about the progress of knowledge that comes from German idealism. Here, Lyotard suggests, the cast of the project is less overtly political and more oriented towards the construction of a grand unified system: Philosophy must restore unity to learning, which has been scattered into separate sciences … it can only achieve this in a language game that links the sciences together as moments in the becoming of spirit, in other words, which links them in a rational narrative, or rather meta-­narration. Hegel’s Encyclopedia attempts to realize this project of totalization, which was already present in Fichte and Schelling in the form of the idea of the System. (p. 33) Here, Lyotard notes, knowledge is not legitimated through its usefulness to the people or to the state at all, but rather is its own legitimating principle. This legitimation occurs as the system gradually elaborates and progresses itself through its own activity (in which the university

Schools of Education and John Dewey  33 plays a key part, of course) and determines what, in fact, the society and the state are. Now that we have assembled two descriptions of modernity, let us see how they apply to Dewey, starting with Borgmann’s three elements of modernity, and then looking briefly at Lyotard’s two grand legitimating narratives.  A  good place to begin looking at the various elements of Borgmann’s definition is Dewey’s discussion of geography in School and Society (1899/1990): The unity of all sciences is found in geography. The significance of geography is that it presents the earth as the enduring home of the occupations of man  …  The earth is the final source of all man’s food. It is his continual shelter and protection, the raw material of all his activities, and the home to whose humanizing and idealizing all his achievement returns. It is the great field, the great mine, the great source of the energies of heat, light, and electricity; the great scene of ocean, stream, mountain, and plain, of which all our agriculture and mining and lumbering, all our manufacturing and distributing agencies, are but the partial elements and factors. It is through occupations determined by this environment that mankind has made its historical and political progress … It is through what we do in and with the world that we read its meaning and measure its value. (pp. 18–19) In this example, what is geography supposed to teach? Nothing more and less than the story of the domination of nature. The value of nature is nothing in itself; its only value is “through what we do in and with it”—­it is simply a storehouse of resources that we can release if we are appropriately ingenious. This is not a stray remark, either; Dewey’s main educational innovation in School and Society (1899/1990), which he calls “education through occupations,” asks students to recapitulate the history of colonial and industrial development through occupations like weaving, cooking, and gardening.1 These occupations have often been understood as simply being a friendly, folksy programme for “learning by doing.” The learning by doing part is accurate, but what was being learned and done in the original Deweyan classroom was not just craft projects, but also, and much more importantly, the modern dominance project. By re-­enacting it, students get  a  sense of the importance and power of the project and become intelligent participants in it— ­Dewey (1899/1990) remarks: Step by step, [the student] may follow the processes by which man recognized the needs of his situation, thought out the weapons and

34  David I. Waddington instruments that enable him to cope with them; and may learn how these resources opened new horizons of growth…. The industrial history of man … is not a merely utilitarian affair…. Its record is the record of how man learned to think … to transform the conditions of life so that life itself became a different thing. (p. 152) Dewey’s (1899/1990) utopian version of the dominance project is much kinder and gentler than Bacon’s, of course, but the fact remains that it is exactly the same project: When history is conceived as dynamic, as moving, its economic and industrial aspects are emphasized. These are but technical terms which express the problem with which humanity is unceasingly engaged; how to live, how to master and use nature so as to make it tributary to the enrichment of human life. The great advances in civilization have come through those manifestations of intelligence which have lifted man from his precarious subjection to nature, and revealed to him how he may make its forces co-­operate with its own purposes. (p. 152) This Baconian enthusiasm is omnipresent in Dewey; while the later writings are less obvious in their exhortations towards dominance and control of the natural world, there is still a preoccupation with how to comprehend and control the powerful forces that will allow us to get control of the world. Borgmann’s second element of modernity— ­Cartesian methodological universalism—­also applies well to Dewey’s project. To do Dewey (1925) credit, he does not think that science defines reality in the sense that, say, the logical positivists do, and he feels that the modern turn away from the validity of everyday human experience was a major error. However, despite this return to experience, he still offers a scheme for the analysis of experience that is identical to our most conventional analyses of the scientific method. According to Dewey (1916), the general features of all reflective experiences are as follows: (1) some kind of doubt about  a  particular situation, (2)  a  tentative hypothesis about what the ways the situation might resolve, (3) a careful thinking through of the elements of the situation, (4) a resultant improvement of the tentative hypothesis, and (5) testing of the hypothesis through action. These features are both prescriptive and descriptive: in Democracy and Education (1916), he urges that we adopt this method of reflection consciously, but they apply to all true reflective experience anyway. The scheme is universal: whether we are talking about scientific or non-­scientific everyday knowledge, we will use the same process to improve our stock of tools for dealing with the challenges of life and building the modern project.

Schools of Education and John Dewey  35 Borgmann’s third element of modernity—­ambiguous individualism—­ does not apply to Dewey as clearly as the first two, and in some respects, it doesn’t really apply at all. Dewey (1929/1999) deliberately repudiates rugged individualism in Individualism: Old and New, and the turn-­of-­ the-­century American enthusiasm for the cowboy frontiersman and rags-­ to-­riches stories is not found in Dewey’s work. However, there is at least some degree of commodious individualism to be found in Dewey. Insofar as it is possible to read  a  distinct vision of the good life into Dewey, it might look a lot like a Star Trek version of 1950s middle-­class America. In Dewey’s hypothetical future America, everyone has personally meaningful work for which they are socially recognized, and everyone works in large cooperative enterprises that harness the benefits of science and technology. Within this fulfilling and pleasant environment, there is plenty of scope for travel, personal preferences, and the newest modern technological conveniences—­all of the elements of Borgmann’s commodious individ­ orgmann’s ualism. Still, at best, the ambiguous individualism element of B definition is an accessory to Dewey’s thinking, whereas the other two aspects of the scheme—­methodological universalism and (especially) the domination of nature—­capture critical elements of his thinking. Turning now to Lyotard’s two grand metanarratives of modernity—­ which we might call, respectively, “liberation through science” and “the impending unified system”—­we can say that Dewey subscribes strongly to the former and to some degree to the latter. “Liberation through science” is omnipresent in Dewey’s work from the early educational writings through to the later works. I have argued many times (­Waddington, 2010, 2015; Waddington  &  Weeth-­Feinstein, 2016) that one of the principal aims of education through occupations is the development of a kind of comprehensive scientific and technological competency on the part of citizens. It is clear that Dewey feels that the attainment of this competency is liberating and is also a central educational aim. In School and Society (1899/1990), for example, he remarks: It is not only that the occupations … give the opportunity for the introduction of science which illuminates them … instead of being mere devices of hand and eye; but that the scientific insight thus gained becomes an indispensable instrument of free and active participation in modern social life. Plato somewhere speaks of the slave as one who in his actions does not express his own ideas, but those of some other man. It is our social problem now, even more urgent than in the time of Plato, that method, purpose, understanding, shall exist in the consciousness of the one who does the work. (p. 23) One sees the same kind of reasoning more than 25 years later in The Public and Its Problems (1927/1979). At this point in his career, Dewey is much more concerned about the monopolization of science and

36  David I. Waddington technology by the ruling classes, but the underlying message about liberation through science is the same: At present, the application of physical science is rather to human concern than in them. That is, it is external, made in the interests of its consequences for a possessing and acquisitive class. Application in life would signify that science was absorbed and distributed; that it was the instrumentality of that common understanding and thorough communication which is the precondition of the existence of a genuine and effective public. (p. 344) Once again, we see clearly Dewey’s notion that if we could only have a more widespread grasp of science, we would set the stage for the emergence of a new, more democratic form of community. This idea may well have a lot of life in it yet, but if Lyotard is right, it is also a quintessentially modern idea. The idea of the unified system is also present to some degree in Dewey’s works, particularly in the early writings, in which he is still an orthodox American Hegelian. In the Psychology (1887/1972), Dewey directly states his belief in this idea, commenting that “growth in knowledge consists in discovering more and more fundamental unities and thus in reducing to ideal unity facts, events, and relations before separate. Knowledge can reach its goal only in a perfectly harmonious system of all truths” (p.  127). Dewey restates this in various ways many times throughout the Psychology, and in the years after this text was written, we see clear indications of a fusion of this “unified system” metanarrative with “liberation through science.” For example, in Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics (1891/1972), Dewey notes that although we do not yet quite have the unified system of theory, there is a clear need to build a corresponding unity of practice that corresponds to it. Dewey adds here: “The duty of the present is the socializing of intelligence—­the realizing of its bearing upon social practice,” and holds that once people come to know the power of this method, they will finally be able to cooperate to great effect, finally building the good society (p. 320). As many scholars have noted (Good, 2006; Westbrook, 1993), Dewey falls away from his early Hegelian commitments to the unified system, but he never wavers from his belief in the importance of “the socializing of intelligence.”

Why Would It Matter That Dewey Is Modern? At this point, we’ve established, by virtue of two analytical lenses, that Dewey is, in several important respects,  a  paradigmatically modern thinker. He is committed, in  a  deep way, to some of the most prominent elements of the modern project. His whole educational project is

Schools of Education and John Dewey  37 focussed on liberation through science, on teaching people to be effective modern thinkers and actors, getting them ready to build the better society to come. However, the central question of the essay remains to be addressed: why would this matter to his status in schools of education? There are a few reasons to think that it won’t matter at all. There is no shortage of positivistic educational psychologists in schools of education, and trends in educational research funding towards large-­scale randomized studies and educational neuroscience have been supporting more hires of this kind. These scholars, who are completely and (in most cases) naively committed to the modern project, would have little reason to object to Dewey’s modernity in the event that they were aware of it. Likewise, teacher educators are also unlikely to object to Dewey. As I mentioned earlier in my review of Labaree’s arguments, teacher educators find within Dewey both some serviceable concepts and a much-­ needed boost to their academic credibility. For the most part, insofar as they are aware of him, neither group really understands Dewey’s modernity; instead, they see Dewey as a progressive child-­centred educator, which is a correct but incomplete understanding. However, and much more importantly, there is one major group which would care about Dewey’s modernity, and that is the cadre of critical social justice-­oriented foundations and curriculum theory scholars which in most cases, still exists in North American schools of education. This group dominates the (diminishing) number of educational foundations hires in schools of education, and Dewey’s commitments to modernity are completely anathema to many of their core beliefs. The most prominent way in which this is visible in Dewey’s views on the domination of nature. One of the most urgent tasks of this group is rolling back the legacies of colonialism, and this obviously includes a critical examination of some of the thinking behind colonialism. As I have noted earlier, Dewey’s thinking reveals that, for him, nature is simply grist for modernity’s mill—­raw material for the utopia that the adherents of the progressive social project will build together. This, in itself, is damning enough, but a corollary of this proposition is that social groups that resist the needs of the modern project do not fare well. Dewey may not be a racist, but, as he points out many times in Democracy and Education (2016), he is fiercely opposed to the continued existence of groups he considers isolated. A representative remark is as follows: The isolation and exclusiveness of a gang or clique brings its antisocial spirit into relief. But this same spirit is found wherever one group has interests “of its own” which shut it out from full interaction with other groups, so that its prevailing purpose is the protection of what it has got, instead of reorganization and progress through wider relationships. (p. 99)

38  David I. Waddington Just in case the implications of this were not clear, Dewey (2016) continues in this vein, offering a further illustration of exactly what he means: The essential point is that isolation makes for rigidity and formal institutionalizing of life, for static and selfish ideals within the group. That savage tribes regard aliens and enemies as synonymous is not accidental. It springs from the fact that they have identified their experience with rigid adherence to their past customs. On such a basis it is wholly logical to fear intercourse with others, for such contact might dissolve custom. It would certainly occasion reconstruction. (p. 99) In other words, for Dewey, the modernity train is leaving the station, and everyone—­especially the recalcitrant unintegrated cultural groups—­ needs to get on board. To his credit, Dewey did not believe that isolated cultural groups should simply assimilate, but he was nonetheless adamant that they had to reconstruct their customs to connect to the larger social project. The commitment to the domination of nature is, in and of itself, a deal-­ killer, but Dewey’s commitment to methodological universalism and the grand metanarrative of liberation through science also poses two other serious problems for critical scholars in education. First, and most importantly, unlike most of their hyper-­modern psychologist colleagues, a significant proportion of social justice-­oriented scholars tend to be critical of the modern scientific and technological project. They are, to borrow Lyotard’s phrase, incredulous about the grand metanarrative of liberation through science, and they are aware of some of the critiques (e.g. Foucault, Heidegger) that have been offered of the progress of science and technology and the concomitant project of the domination of nature. Meanwhile, as we have established earlier, not only does Dewey believe in a general mode of thinking that closely resembles the scientific method, but he also has a tendency to lionize the progress made by science and technology. Second, these scholars are very far from being methodological universalists; even what Dewey would have considered moderate statements about the definition of scientific research in education (e.g. Feuer, Towne,  &  Shavelson, 2002) have occasioned sharp opposition from this quarter (cf. Erickson & Guttierez, 2002; St. Pierre & Elizabeth, 2002). In addition, critical scholars are much more concerned about promoting broader participation in research through methodologies like action research and narrative research, whereas Dewey (1925) feels that the role of science is to devise a series of tools that will allow for the more effective manipulation of reality. But maybe even this should not be enough to make us bearish on Dewey. After all, if Labaree’s gloss on Ducharme is right, there is not quite as much book reading going on in ed schools as one might hope,

Schools of Education and John Dewey  39 and one would have to actually read the “bad news” about Dewey somehow in order to be upset by it. Furthermore, even if we reject Labaree’s pessimism here and maintain that the social justice-­oriented scholars of today are a notable exception to this trend, one would actually have to believe this kind of gloomy analysis of Dewey after having read it, and there is a significant obstacle to this, which is that the pessimistic analyses of Dewey are dwarfed by the enormous quantity of much more friendly and positive “normal scientific” work on Dewey, a category in which most of my own work could be included. But there is one more factor that must be considered. The fact that we are now living amidst the wreckage of the modern project is, perhaps, the most damning aspect of Dewey’s commitments to modernity, and it is certainly the aspect of Dewey’s writing that I struggle with the most personally, especially these days. In the decades when Dewey did most of his work, there was a sense that the modern project was about to come to fruition somehow, and that, despite the current difficulties, things were on the brink of a revolutionary change for the better. This was particularly true during the Depression era, when it seemed to many, including Deweyan progressives, as though modern capitalism was about to fail. Daniel Tanner’s (1991) account of the formation of the John Dewey Society is illustrative in this regard; Tanner asked Sidney Hook and Ralph Tyler—­both founding members of the society—­to recall the early days of the society’s formation. Hook noted that “the general feeling was that the economic system was completely finished” and Tyler pointed to the group’s belief in the power of Deweyan ideas for the necessary social reconstruction to come (p. 38). There was a tremendous energy to come together and build something new, both as far as the school system was concerned and otherwise. Today, the opposite may be true—­some people, myself included, do not feel that there is much hope for renewal ahead. At the moment, there is  a  global migration crisis, and this is accompanied by  a  resurgence of Fascist political movements. Climate change strategies are moving from a phase of prevention to a phase of adaptation, as we accept the fact that we can no longer prevent these effects from coming to pass. Meanwhile, automation accelerates the decline of the middle class and the rise of the ultra-­rich. In The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame, David Blacker (2013) argues that this is all part of the same phenomenon: the triumph of neo-­liberal capitalism, and he argues that it has spurred a broad sense of hopelessness: People are beginning to understand that something is terribly wrong. Throughout the industrialized world, the younger generation especially is learning such lessons  …  From Quebec to Spain, Tahrir Square to Zucotti Park  …  their primary teacher has become the frightening experience of their personal contingency and

40  David I. Waddington precariousness … their placelessness in the economy that has been designed to exclude them. (p. 16) Blacker argues that technological advances which diminish the need for workers increasingly imply that the public school system is useless to neo-­liberal capitalism, and that in keeping with this, we can expect a period of austerity and decline for public education as it becomes reduced simply to its custodial function. Blacker (2013) writes: Educationally, it has been a long run for [the majority of the population], but it is finally over for them. They can now expect to revert to their traditional status as  a  kind of non-­waged and economically precarious peasantry  …  The future to which they can look forward is comprised of a carceral circuit of police-­state schooling, poverty-­level ad hoc jobs that are radically unsteady … and consequently a life shorn of all the basic cultural elements of what was once considered a “decent life.” (p. 62) The appropriate attitude amidst this decline, Blacker maintains, is not one of progressive optimism, but quite simply fatalism. The increasing power of neo-­liberal elites signifies that we cannot rebuild society through the school. The terminal phase of neo-­liberal capitalism is likely to be terminal for us both educationally and in several other senses. If Blacker is right, as I think he is, the grand modern Deweyan metanarrative of education as the liberator of humanity (which is, broadly speaking, the narrative of progressive education as a whole) now rings increasingly false, if only on an intuitive level. Economic and technological trends are arrayed against its success, and in any event, even if it were to be endorsed once more, the catastrophic elements of some aspects of the modern project and the failure of others lead us to have doubts about its overall value. Furthermore, even if one abstracted from these problems, Dewey’s relatively moderate prescriptions seem like rather weak medicine in the face of the problems that we are currently up against. Critical scholars in education, understandably, will turn to more radical remedies in the hopes of facing up to some of these difficulties.

Ideas for a Time Gone By One might well accept all my arguments here about Dewey’s modernity and its incompatibility with critical social-­justice-­oriented scholarship in education and still have doubts about my overall conclusion that Dewey’s decline in schools of education is imminent. After all, many of the reasons for his ascent that I’ve reviewed earlier still hold at least

Schools of Education and John Dewey  41 somewhat true. First, Dewey’s commitment to the child-­centred, constructivist educational vision still offers some normative inspiration for scholars in schools of education, who continue, for the most part, to work towards a kinder, gentler version of schooling. Second, schools of education remain process-­oriented places that have little control over curriculum and weak subject-­matter authority. Third, schools of education continue to lack credibility within the university, and despite the passage of time, Dewey retains some cachet that can be redeemed in other departments. Fourth, there’s  a  great deal of productive “normal scientific” scholarship that remains to be done on Dewey. All these reasons will ensure that over the years to come, many ritual invocations of Dewey will be made, more books and special issues of journals will be dedicated to Dewey, and there will be no shortage of citations to Democracy and Education. However, I have argued that Dewey’s commitment to the modern social project, which is omnipresent in his writing, still constitutes a serious problem, both substantively and, perhaps more significantly, intuitively. As a parting shot, let us think for a moment again about why two scholars as different as George Counts and Paul Hanna found something compelling in Dewey. Counts was  a  radical leftist who believed that  a  revolution was imminent, and Hanna was an entrepreneurial, conservative former school administrator who believed in incremental progress and was fiercely opposed to Communism. However, these two scholars nevertheless shared a belief in what we might call the “modern horizon”—­the modern project to build the future that was underway in America. Like Dewey, they had a belief in the grand metanarrative that the spread of scientific knowledge would, through education, help educate  a  better citizenry. It was an inspiring vision (especially if one ignores, as Counts and especially Hanna did, its less palatable aspects), and perhaps more than anything else, this inspiration fuelled the education school’s original romance with progressivism. Dewey provided these two educational thinkers with a modern optimism, expansionism, and flexibility that corresponded to the spirit of their time. Reading Counts in particular, one is impressed by his energy, hope, and commitment; to borrow a phrase from Donald Trump, we might say that his scholarship, like the progressive movement itself, was “high energy.” But today, the era of the modern reconstructionist scholar is over: the spirit of the time has changed definitively, and these days, particularly on the left, things are considerably more “low energy.” We cannot look with any kind of faith towards the modern horizon, and we’re reckoning with what may be a long period of decline ahead, educationally and otherwise. Dewey still offers some valuable ideas to scholars in schools of education, but it may not be the toolset that we need to deal with the situation that is evolving, the dominant characteristic of which is, at best, crisis, and at worst, per David Blacker, hopelessness.

42  David I. Waddington

Note 1 It should be noted that Dewey, despite being very modern overall, is not without ambivalence about modernity. This ambivalence is especially visible in the educational programme in School and Society (1899/1990), which is designed to capture some of the positive qualities of more pastoral, craft-­ oriented forms of production, while simultaneously introducing modern production techniques. In addition, at several junctures in School and Society and elsewhere, Dewey worries about the alienation and disenfranchisement of workers under conditions of modern industrial production.

References Arcilla, R. V. (2002). Why aren’t philosophers and educators speaking to each other? Educational Theory, 52(1), 1–11. Baudrillard, J. (1989). America (C. Turner, Trans.). New York, NY: Verso. Blacker, D. J. (2013). The falling rate of learning and the neoliberal endgame. Washington, DC: Zero Books. Borgmann, A. (1992). Crossing the postmodern divide. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Burbules, N. C. (2002). The dilemma of philosophy of education: “Relevance” or critique? Educational Theory, 52(3), 349–357. Callan, E. (1990). The two faces of progressive education. In E. Brian Titley (Ed.), Canadian education (pp. 83–94). Calgary, AB: Detselig Enterprises. Colgan, A. (2018). The examination of the decline of philosophy of education with institutional theory:  A  focus on the last three decades. Philosophical Inquiry in Education, 25(1), 66–87. Condliffe-­Lagemann, E. (2002). An elusive science: The troubling history of educational research. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Counts, G. (1932). Dare the school build a new social order?. New York, NY: John Day Co. Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education. New York, NY: Macmillan. Dewey, J. (1925). Experience and nature. Chicago, IL: Open Court. Dewey, J. (1887/1972). Psychology. In J. A. Boydston (Ed.), The early works of John Dewey, 1882–1898, Vol. 2. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, J. (1891/1972). Outlines of a critical theory of ethics. In J. A. ­Boydston (Ed.), The early works of John Dewey, 1882–1898, Vol. 3. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, J. (1897/1972). My pedagogic creed. In J. A. Boydston (Ed.), John Dewey: The early works (pp. 84–96). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, J. (1927/1979). The public and its problems. In J. A. Boydston (Ed.), The middle works of John Dewey, 1899–1924. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, J. (1990). The school and society and the child and the curriculum. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Dewey, J. (1929/1999). Individualism: Old and new. Amherst, NY: Prometheus. Ducharme, E. R. (1993). The lives of teacher educators. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Schools of Education and John Dewey  43 Erickson, F., & Gutierrez, K. (2002). Culture, rigor, and science in educational research. Educational Researcher, 8, 21–24. Fallace, T. D. (2009). Repeating the race experience: John Dewey and the history curriculum at the University of Chicago Laboratory School. Curriculum Inquiry, 39(3), 381–405. Fallace, T. D. (2010). Was John Dewey ethnocentric? Re-­evaluating the philosopher’s early views on culture and race. Educational Researcher, 39(6), 471–477. Feinberg, W. (1972). Progressive education and social planning. Teachers’ College Record, 73(4), 485–505. Feuer, M. J., Towne, L., & Shavelson, R. J. (2002). Scientific culture and educational research. Educational Researcher, 31(8), 4–14. Good, J. A. (2006). A search for unity in diversity: The “permanent Hegelian deposit” in the philosophy of John Dewey. Lanham, MD: Lexington Book. Hayden, M. J. (2011). What do philosophers of education do? An empirical study of philosophy of education journals. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 31(1), 1–27. Hegel, G. W. F. (1820/2012). Philosophy of right (S. W. Dyde, Trans.). Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. Hegel, G. W. F. (1977). Hegel’s phenomenology of spirit (A. V. Miller, Trans.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Karier, C. (1972). Liberalism and the quest for orderly change. History of Education Quarterly, 12(1), 57–80. Kendhammer, B. (2007). DuBois the pan-­A fricanist and the development of African nationalism. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30(1), 51–71. Kuhn, T. (1962). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Labaree, D. (2006). The trouble with ed schools. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Lyotard, J. (1984). The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Margonis, F. (2009). John Dewey’s racialized visions of the student and classroom community. Educational Theory, 59(1), 17–39. McClintock, R. (2018). Dewey in his skivvies: The trouble with reconstruction. Educational Theory, 67(5), 545–566. St. Pierre,  &  Elizabeth A. (2002). “Science” rejects postmodernism. Educational Researcher, 31(8), 25–27. Stallones, J. R. (2002). Paul Robert Hanna: A life of expanding communities. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. Tanner, D. (1991). Crusade for democracy: Progressive education at the crossroads. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Thorndike, E. L. (1927). The measurement of intelligence. New York: Teachers College. Tyack, D. (1974). The one best system: A history of American urban education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Waddington, D. I. (2008). John Dewey: Closet conservative? Paideusis, 17(2), 51–63. Waddington, D. I. (2010). Scientific self-­defence: Transforming Dewey’s idea of technological transparency. Educational Theory, 60(5), 621–638.

44  David I. Waddington Waddington, D. I. (2015). Dewey and video games: From education through occupations to education through simulations. Educational Theory, 65(1), 1–20. doi:10.1111/edth.12092 Waddington, D. I., & Weeth-­Feinstein, N. (2016). Beyond the search for truth: Dewey’s humble and humanistic vision of science education. Educational Theory, 66(1–2), 111–126. Westbrook, R. (1993). John Dewey and American democracy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Zerby, C. (1975). John Dewey and the polish question: A response to the revisionist historians. History of Education Quarterly, 15(1), 17–30.

3 Habermas’s Emancipatory Interest for Teachers A Critical Philosophical Approach to Teacher Education Matthew J. Hayden Introduction Does grounding in the philosophical dimensions of teaching, learning, and education systems contribute in meaningful ways to being a good teacher? This chapter will answer “Yes” to that question and assert that, indeed, philosophical dimensions contribute in meaningful ways, though they are being squeezed out for contributions that are more easily quantifiable and measurable. As a result, teaching is increasingly becoming less an art and more a technical process wherein pre-­service teachers simply need to be taught the strategies and techniques of “teaching” to be successful. It does not require much imagination to see how this can lead to schooling as  a mechanical operation attended to by teacher-­robots, who, if given appropriate coding and operating systems, can churn out student-­widgets that will satisfy the (positivist) metrics that determine educational success. That such a vision of schooling has become widespread during the decline of philosophical influence in teacher education is no accident. The robot-­teacher analogy may seem hyperbolic, but the technocratization of teaching has transformed the teacher’s role from that of a transformative guide to that of another bureaucrat applying a subset of trained skills and methodologies to produce a predefined outcome. One merely needs to read that sentence to recognize the absurdity, but it is an absurdity that has been revised, regurgitated, and reimagined for well over a century. Most contemporary examinations of reform in the U.S. start with the 1983 A Nation at Risk report, which, with its statistical errors and undisguised political and ideological tones and purposes (Huelskamp, 1993), can trace  a  direct line to No Child Left Behind (NCLB), Race to the Top, and the current “good schools/bad schools” dynamic that emerged as a cover for the previous century of social reproduction and racialized schooling (Freeman, 2005; Wun, 2014). However, in a series of lectures in 1931, Albert Nock (1931) itemized the list of technocratic crimes committed by 35 years of “incessant tinkering” (p. 12) with the machinery of schooling in order to improve educational outcomes, thus locating an emergence of reforms as early as the 1890s. Nock suggests

46  Matthew J. Hayden that those reforms not only failed in their objectives, but resulted in the denigration of the quality of education. He takes care to note the difference between the “educated” person and the one who has been merely “instructed,” offering arguments that the latter was the result of reforms, and the former was on the verge of extinction.1 Fifty years before A ­Nation at Risk, and 70 years before NCLB, the U.S. was struggling with what schooling was supposed to produce and how to produce it better. However, that angst, that existential questioning of schooling and its efficacy, is also the result of  a  failure to understand why we school and who determines what the reasons are. But much like the Faustian bargain struck with schooling and reform, the problems with schooling and teacher education explain our confusion. We have focused too long on what schooling is supposed to produce and how to produce it, and not enough on why we do it or why those products matter. In short, we have lost the meaning of schooling and cannot find a way to free ourselves from its ambiguously determined clutches. That confusion manifests in the classroom, where constant reform efforts have increasingly redefined curriculum down to what, teacher education to how, and little to no why in either. What we need and need to seek is emancipation from these prevailing conceptions of schooling and education. To describe and offer  a  solution to this problem,  I  revisit the work of Jürgen Habermas and his conception of knowledge constitutive interests (KCIs). Deeply influenced by Kant and Marx as well as his mid-­ 20th-­century colleagues at Frankfurt University, Habermas attempted to bring philosophy and science together to articulate a theory of critical thought that bridges values and facts and theory and practice (widely applied). Habermas combines emancipatory social projects with a rigorous analysis of methodological issues and epistemological assumptions in social research more broadly. Though Habermas is not an empirical researcher in the traditional sense, he attempts to make clear his methodology as a philosopher in the social sciences. His work can help guide those of us conducting philosophical work in a field dominated by empirical and positivist research. Habermas’s theory of KCIs embodies a robust critique of positivism. He was concerned that technical and practical interests would dominate and that they would no longer serve as the base from which social emancipatory development could spring. He wanted to shift the paradigm of social development from production, which was implicitly positivist, to communication which was explicitly critical of positivism but supportive of emancipation and democracy (Honneth, 1991). Since schooling in the U.S. has been the target of constant critique for more than a century—­and the result has been the increasing dominance  of empirical, quantitative science and the concurrent diminishment of philosophical and humanistic approaches—­his work in this area is of considerable service. In particular, his emphases on the development

Habermas’s Emancipatory Interest  47 of the critique of ideology and its manifestation through philosophical critique in the emancipatory interests will be used to argue that philosophy can not only contribute to teaching and learning, but is essential if we intend that schooling also provide an education for more than mere intellectual and social reproduction. Habermas developed the KCI constructs early in his career and then seemingly abandoned them when he developed his communicative action theory. However, his communicative action theory was developed out of concern for practical interest from which the possibilities of a constructive social emancipatory development might be sought. In his later works, he combined practical and emancipatory interests as praxis. Nevertheless, the combination of the two does not eliminate the distinctions that can be drawn from the triune construction, and for present purposes, the three interests as originally constructed are more instructive and offer more clarity in thinking of the critical philosophical approach involved in engaging the emancipatory interest. Second, since my goal is not to show how Habermas’s final or most mature theory can inform teacher education, but rather to show how an intellectual construct developed by Habermas can guide and inform our thinking about and development of teacher education, it does not require that Habermas carried this construct forward to the “end.” It is enough that his construct can provide a way to recognize the value that philosophy can bring. In this case, if philosophy is to make a contribution to teaching and learning, it is through the emancipatory interest that one may see how. Readers are cautioned not to conflate the Habermasian emancipatory construct with common and quotidian conceptions of “emancipation” and particularly the large body of work in “multicultural education.” Those efforts, while necessary, are largely about inclusion and representation of under-­represented groups in textbooks and curriculum, and providing safe, equitable spaces for those populations to engage educationally and academically. Many of those initial programmes have spawned the more recent emergence of “social justice” programmes in education that are designed specifically for teachers. Often, these are couched in controversial terms such as “teaching for social change,” but go beyond multicultural educational efforts of recognition and inclusion, and instead aim to change the ways schools treat and teach students and often target structural and institutional impediments to doing so. The latter gets closer to what will be described here; one must be able to see the methods of oppression through the reality distorting lens of hegemonic schooling if one hopes to change its processes, and that takes significant critical work. Both of these efforts engage valuable and important work, but they do not necessarily address the fundamental social, political, and institutional cognitive frameworks that sustain oppression even when laws or policies are advanced to ostensibly

48  Matthew J. Hayden “emancipate” oppressed groups. Habermas’s emancipatory interest requires a deeply philosophical and critical engagement that destabilizes and erodes the comforting structures and mechanisms that sustain unreflective life, life distorted by ideology. And make no mistake, schooling is an ideology. To genuinely achieve an education worthy of the name, teachers must be able to engage students in philosophical inquiry about the fundamental philosophical concepts and frameworks that guide the transmission of knowledge in schooling, from the good to the bad and to the hidden. And that requires specific critical philosophical inquiry and reflection.

Critical Theory and Human Cognitive Interests Habermas is most closely associated with the Frankfurt School and Critical Theory, and his work attempted to bridge the gap between materialist and transcendentalist methods. His focus was to develop normative theory safe from ideological social interests. According to Critical Theory, all history is a collection of distorted visions of an ideal society that are articulated through ideologies that shape and define reality, with dominant forms becoming normative. Empirical and social sciences can help describe those visions, but they cannot adequately explain why society is the way it is at a given time. On the one hand, measurement is not understanding, and on the other, understanding is not automatically intelligible to an “other.” Critical Theory attempts to communicate empirical and transcendental understandings by providing  a  language of theory (and hence possibility) to explain why society is the way it is and to help individuals see, systematically, ways to contribute to a society’s evolution and change. This requires self-­awareness, both in theory and practice—­what Marx calls praxis—­and an understanding of underlying social structures, norms, values, ideologies, and systems that collaborate to perpetuate society’s status quo, all of which are socially constructed and historically situated. A key component of this process is for individuals to understand their human potential (as subjects of history), a realization of which can then be transformed into action for social change and ultimately to emancipation from the oppressive forces in society. The application of this concept to schooling is rooted in the conception of schools as instruments of social reproduction or change. Schools are the foremost institution by and through which members of society are prepared for their social roles and functions. From progressives like Dewey, structuralists like Bourdieu, and poststructuralists like Foucault, schools have been consistently seen as both a means of oppression and a mechanism of emancipation. Habermas’s KCIs were an approach to hermeneutical understanding that are also known as human cognitive interests. It is useful, especially in the context of schooling and education, to also think of the cognitive

Habermas’s Emancipatory Interest  49 interests as embodying cognitive processes. Habermas (1971) defined interest as “the basic orientations rooted in specific fundamental conditions of the possible reproduction and self-­constitution of the human species” (p. 287). In other words, these are fundamental interests for humans which are rooted in cognitive processes and human actions. Engaging these cognitive interests in the way in which their domains indicate requires cognitive processes by and through which to apprehend the objects of the domains. These interests are technical, practical, and emancipatory.

Interests, Knowledge, and the Critical Sciences Carr and Kemmis (1986) summarized the relationships between KCI, types of knowledge, and types of sciences, from which Ewert (1991) constructed a table delineating them, adapted in Table 3.1. In Table 3.1, each of Habermas’s KCIs is represented by the columns. The rows represent the ways in which the KCIs are guided or used in human activity (as embodied interests). More details follow later, but technical interest manifests in the search for knowledge of causes, is empirical and analytic, and the medium by and through which it finds expression is work. Practical interest manifests in attempts to understand the social world of humans, is hermeneutic and interpretive in practice, and is primarily expressed through language. The emancipatory interest reflects critically and philosophically on the expressions of power that result from the first two. Technical Interest Technical interests are those for which objective knowledge is derived, primarily empirically. Through technical interests, we attempt to objectively measure, describe, and quantify the objects of study and interest. This is the domain of the positivist, and in regard to contemporary schooling reform, the dominant lens used to define schooling needs and successes. Technical interest is the result of instrumental motivations that seek to know what something is, to determine patterns and relationships that function as “natural” laws, and to improve efficiency. Table 3.1  E  wert’s (1991) Human Cognitive Interest Linkages Technical Knowledge Science Medium

Practical

Instrumental (causal) Practical (understanding) Empirical-­analytic Hermeneutic-­ interpretive Work Language

Emancipatory Emancipatory (reflection) Critical/social philosophy Power

50  Matthew J. Hayden The explanations of that knowledge tend to be causal, often mediated through work or labour activities, and are the domains of empirical, analytic, and natural sciences (Carr & Kemmis, 1986; Ewert, 1991). Mathematics, physics, geometry, chemistry, and the other natural sciences are the academic disciplines in which technical interest is dominant. Ewert (1991) links technical interest, philosophically, to positivism, and it is reliant upon “reference to external reality as experienced by the senses” (p. 349). Positivist theory traditionally claims to be value-­neutral, and thus reliably free of the research-­distorting biases of other theories and qualitative empiricism. However, Habermas shows that technical interests and positivism are not value-­neutral because they inherently value efficiency and economy (Thomassen, 2010, p.  25), which are also the values of  a  specifically capitalist order. As guided by positivism, technical interests in education aim for explanation, prediction, and control (Baynes, 2004); schooling is primarily a means to an end; and such approaches are usually positivist and quantitative. The teacher-­student relationship is quite clear: teachers transmit knowledge and skills to the student who, in turn, attempts to acquire them, and the desired outcomes are known prior to engaging in the task (Streibel, in Butler, 1997). In this context, teaching in schooling involves adopting specific research-­ based strategies and techniques in order to achieve the predetermined end. If teaching actions do not result in the desired end, then the teacher either requires more professional development training in order to appropriately apply the “research-­approved techniques” or more research is conducted in order to revise the techniques. In any case, the technical/ positivist interest attempts to tweak and adjust the mechanics in order to increase the likelihood of achieving the desired ends. Habermas, in his critique of positivism, acknowledges that positivist tools do indeed produce knowledge, and this knowledge is beneficial. However, it is not the only knowledge obtainable and certainly not the only kind of knowledge that has value.  A  focus on technical interests “explains the course of nature but can never give commands … What man lives and experiences he must interpret, and thus evaluate, on some basis” (Nietzsche in Habermas, 1971, 19). The problem with such predictive efforts is that they are focused on behaviours and fail to account for human actions. Behaviours are merely repetitions or imitations of activities that have been learned, and are often the result of habit, not deliberate thought. Action, however, is the result of conscious deliberation and thought. For Habermas, communicative action is the latter, and the focus of his work. Education guided by technical interest and positivism fails to recognize that the same behaviours in multiple individuals could have different causes or meaning. Technical interest is not sufficient, on its own, to provide adequate knowledge about the world, and is therefore not sufficient grounding for teacher education, either.

Habermas’s Emancipatory Interest  51 Practical Interest Practical interest is centred around human interactions’ norms, values, laws, and social relations. Unlike technical interest’s goal of control and prediction, practical interest is oriented towards understanding relationships between subjects, is engaged primarily through language, and involves hermeneutic, interpretive activities that find  a  home in the social sciences because they involve social relationships, human behaviour, and other empirical—­but usually not quantitative and therefore interpretive—­domains. This interest is necessary and unavoidable because humans “not only want to exist within their society, they must exist with that society” (Streibel, in Butler, 1997, p. 19). The unavoidable social nature of human life is replicated in schools, where human interaction is also unavoidable, and so is pluralism. That pluralism drives the necessity of communication in the interpretative activities of practical interest (and is vital to preserve in emancipatory interest). In practical interest, there is less of a distinction between the teacher and the student in schooling compared to technical interest (Streibel, in Butler, 1997). Knowledge is not transmitted, but instead co-­constructed using student inputs and contexts. Meanings are co-­developed in a community of learners, and not always identically, and thus outcomes are less predictable, and not conducive to quantitative analyses. Instead, qualitative methods are more compatible with practical interests, but like technical/ quantitative interests, reliability and validity of research are grounded in empiricism.  A  great deal of educational/schooling research is qualitative, though it is hampered by its limited intelligibility to technical interest and the limits of extrapolation to universal contexts. Sociology, political science, psychology, history, and anthropology are some of the academic disciplines responsible for this work, and they are employed to understand the world through the development of “a consensual interpretation of meaning” (Grundy, 1987, p. 14). Practical interest involves generating intersubjective meaning through norms and attempts to understand the meaning of those norms. For this interest, schooling is not necessarily aimed at  a  specific end so much as an embodied social activity. Ewert pairs practical interest with the philosophical orientation of phenomenology. Genealogically, hermeneutics are derived from phenomenology, and attempt to render everyday social reality intelligible. Because there is no specific, concrete, quantifiable end and because the process is social, it is also fluid and recursive. For  a  teacher, teaching involves the use of professional judgement to determine the best strategies and techniques to achieve this nebulous social end. The so-­called “best practices” are seen as a menu of options rather than  a  list of steps, and the teacher applies the one she deems most appropriate given a specific context. For Habermas, the practical, interpretive approach is no more sufficient on its own for learning about

52  Matthew J. Hayden the world than the technical/positivist approach. Practical/interpretivist approaches become too subjective, too embedded in their own social realities, leading to  a  clash of competing realities that ultimately ends in attempts to reconcile existing realities, not to transform them. Furthermore, even when the social realities are held in common by those involved in the inquiry, the self-­reiterative nature of that consensus is distorted as well. Subjective meanings are therefore likely distorted by ideology and insufficient grounding for knowledge about the world, and equally insufficient for grounding teacher education. Emancipatory Interest Emancipatory interest is served through reflection on experience, which leads to knowledge of how our (past) experiences inform our current existence. Much of that experience is informed by technical and practical interests, but those experiences cannot be explained wholly by them because current contexts are also products of power. Put another way, emancipatory interest motivates attempts to understand why our lives and our world are the way they are. This is not a metaphysical reflection, but a pragmatic attempt to understand the context (social, political, historical, etc.) of our lives. Ewert’s table indicates that this work is the domain of the “critical sciences,” which Car and Kemmis break down further into several main features that collectively form what they call “critical educational science.”2 The philosophical orientation aligned with this orientation is Critical Theory, a critically oriented science that attempts to explain why things are the way they are, not merely describe them as they are as technical interest does, or as they have been agreed to be, as the normative functions of practical interest do. There is more difficulty in apprehending the knowledge and understandings of this interest, and even though the self-­reflection responsible for it is individually located, the teacher still has a role to play. The teacher is responsible for creating the conditions under which individual self-­reflection can occur, and then the products of that reflection can be engaged with others. This means accepting and treating with respect student ideas and views and carefully and deftly facilitating deliberation of them. Emancipatory interest is served by the “critically oriented sciences” (Habermas, 1971, p.  208) and addresses the oppressive consequences and uses of the other two interests. It is the arbiter between technical knowledge and practical life. Norms, for instance, might be adopted via practical interest in reaction to knowledge gained through technical interest. The norms, however, may become oppressive, regardless of their intended use or original purpose. Grundy (1987) defines emancipatory interest as “a fundamental interest in emancipation and empowerment to engage in autonomous action arising out of authentic, critical insights into the social construction of human society” (p.  19). Emancipatory

Habermas’s Emancipatory Interest  53 interest is inherently critical in understanding and observation of technical and practical interests, and may serve as “a necessary emancipation in both social and psychological forms and thus an interest in a critical understanding of society” (Blake  &  Masschelein, 2003, p.  41). It attempts to rein in the problems that arise from narrowly constructed and ostensibly objective results of technical interests, such as technologies that cause harm like standardized testing, or the injustices that might result from practical or socially normative interests such as safety from criminals (i.e. racial profiling in policing) or legal policies such as “separate but equal” schools. Unfortunately for this interest, there is very little that empiricism can do to support it, and this has left it vulnerable to exclusion from policymakers who have become increasingly reliant on concrete and quantifiable empirical knowledge, most trendily in the form of “big data.” The Interests Matter Because technical and practical interests are either uninterested or incapable of the kind of clear-­eyed gaze required of the philosophical self-­ reflection required of their products, the empirical/quantitative/positivist dominance in educational research, reforms, curriculum and assessment, and educational outcomes undermines the potentialities of schooling practice and annihilates the most salient quality of education because they are not substantively reflexively self-­critical. At best, they are critically reflective of their processes or methods, but not of their conclusions or interpreted meanings. More importantly, however, they are relatively indifferent to the social, political, economic, and legal structures that emerge from their conclusions. Technical and practical interests are the domain of what Horkheimer called “traditional” theory as distinct from “critical” theory (Honneth, 1991). In traditional theory, according to Horkheimer—­and upon which Habermas grounds his KCI—­knowledge consists of technical and practical forms of knowledge about nature and society, respectively, but the search for this knowledge is impelled by pre-­scientific interests. When situated in a philosophical–historical context, all science—­and for Habermas, technical interest—­is grounded, formed, guided, and constrained by the embedded interests of history and products of that work. It cannot be separated from the history, or interests, of its technical/scientific forbearers. For both Horkheimer and Habermas, this undermines claims of “pure theory” that come from the sciences. They are enveloped by and situated in instrumentality because the social world is the object of the subject (the science/scientists), and thusly objectified. This isolates technical and practical sciences from the social contexts that made the sciences possible. As a result, according to Horkheimer, traditional theory is not self-­reflective. Thomassen (2010) summarizes Horkheimer’s conclusion that “it [traditional theory]

54  Matthew J. Hayden cannot reflect on its genesis or on how it is applied and on how its genesis and application are embedded within particular social contexts” (p. 29). Habermas’s goal is to show that “human interests are at once empirical and transcendental” (p.  28), and through self-­reflection, one can free oneself from the seductive pressure of particular interests.

(Self)-­Reflection for Emancipation Education as schooling is focused on the transmission of knowledge, but knowledge, according to Dewey (1916), is created when we connect what we do (to things or others) and what happens as a result, and the connection is the one that we perceive and understand through reflection. Dewey also warned that “as long as we worship science and are afraid of philosophy we shall have no great science; we shall have a lagging and a halting continuation of what is thought and said elsewhere” (1931, p.  12). Without reflection, experience is nothing, or at best, merely a suggestion for a way to repeat or retrace the same steps without recognizing why the steps are being taken or what meaning is to be found in them. For Critical Theory, philosophical reflection is necessary for the scientific process because it is grounded in philosophy whether or not it admits this (Thomassen, 2010, p. 18), a fact that gestures to the unacknowledged influences and philosophical through lines (and ideologies) in which everyday life utterances are based and ensnared. It is to these invisible-­but-­present frameworks that the emancipatory interest guides the gaze, and for Habermas, its method is critical philosophy through discursive self-­reflection. Horkheimer attempted to develop  a  “social philosophy” that could eliminate the deficits of both empirical sciences—­mired in disaggregated, hyper-­subjective, disconnected data that lead to “a thousand partial questions, culminating in a chaos of fruitless enterprise” (1995, pp.  8–9)—­and of philosophical inquiry—­free from the constraints of “real problems” but trapped in the isolation of its sweeping conclusions. He saw that philosophy makes it possible for empirical sciences to recognize and examine questions they would not otherwise recognize or consider, but what kind of philosophy is this “social philosophy”? Horkheimer knew that it had to be “critical,” but it needed to be more than merely descriptive of problems or shortcomings. It also needed to be active insofar as it was not only a motivation for change, thus avoiding the classic perception of philosophy as disconnected from human life and activity. As a response to this problem, the field of Critical Theory and Habermas’s emancipatory interest both borrow from Kant, who thought that critique was inherently self-­critique and that freedom from rational illusion (i.e. reality distortion) required self-­regulation (Baynes, 2004). Habermas picked up Horkheimer’s conception of “social philosophy,” conceived it as critical philosophy, and eventually reconceived it

Habermas’s Emancipatory Interest  55 as a “reconstructive science.” The middle move is tied more closely to the emancipatory interest and the latter move contributed to his communicative action theory and discourse ethics. Habermas conceives of reconstructive science as philosophy and sciences working together to avoid both the subjective and privileged insight of a strong transcendentalism and an empiricism that is not critically distanced from ourselves (Thomassen, 2010). Building on Horkheimer’s grounding in Kant’s conception of critique, Habermas conceived a self-­reflective critique that was reflexive of the self and of the context in which the self was embedded. Thus, self-­reflection required in the emancipatory interest needs to incorporate the social, historical, and political contexts in which one exists and evaluate the products of technical and practical interests that form a contemporary context. Emancipatory interest should be the aim of educational and schooling efforts, and it requires a specific kind of self-­reflection. In self-­reflection knowledge for the sake of knowledge attains congruence with the interest in autonomy and responsibility. The emancipatory cognitive interest aims at the pursuit of reflection as such […] in the power of self-­reflection, knowledge and interest are one. (Habermas, 1986, p. 314) In specific reference to Habermas’s cognitive interests, Honneth (1991) shows that the cognitive activity of the emancipatory interest is “reflexively related to the ego’s own self” (p. 234) wherein the ego is able to procure insights into unintended constraints, and thusly enables its emancipation from them. This cognitive activity is a self-­ reflection as identity formation, connected to each other in the same way that “social labor is to technical knowledge [interest] and as the intersubjective act of coming to an understanding is to hermeneutic understanding [practical interest]” (p.  234; bracketed concepts added). This form of self-­reflection is an attempt to attain autonomy to “free consciousness from its dependence on hypostatized powers” (p.  236). What prevents self-­reflection in the emancipatory interest from falling victim to the same problems of objectification of the subject that the cognitive processes in the other interests do is that emancipatory processes possess the “theoretical certainty” of the human interest in autonomy and responsibility, which, for Habermas, can be apprehended a priori. He anchors autonomy and responsibility in the structure of language, a universal medium by and through which humans are distinguished from the animal world. Language is ours, and through it, we communicate, act, and think. It is a place where, at bottom, a person has freedom (specific language grammar rules notwithstanding), and it is through language that self-­reflection becomes publicly discursive.

56  Matthew J. Hayden The necessity of such publicly discursive practice becomes clearer in light of Habermas’s conceptualization of modernity as a disruption of norms. As modernity decoupled ethics, norms, politics, and even morality, from formal, hierarchical, and paternalistic structures and institutions, the roots of norms become more abstract and universal, leading to “an increasing distinction between form and content of norms as well as increasing levels of reflexivity” (Thomassen, 2010, 73). Without the authority of received justification based in received knowledge and understandings, the justifications had to become publicly sourced and critiqued. Modernity requires autonomous, reflective approaches because the loss of concrete roles creates opportunity and ambiguity. Conversely, it results in more concrete normative expectations. This combination results in what Habermas calls a “postconventional” world, wherein subjects cannot rely on concrete roles and must negotiate their way through multiple roles. Such negotiation requires adaptive critical reflection, one that is constantly influenced by its public location. For educators, the most immediate public location is the school, and schools provide options for this work. In order to prepare students for this “postconventional” world, the goal is to help “the learner identify real problems involving reified power relationships rooted in institutionalized ideologies which one has internalized in one’s psychological history” (­Mezirow, 1981, p. 18), and it is the responsibility of the teacher to provide the conditions in which this can occur.

Emancipatory Interest and Teachers The self-­reflection required here is not some quotidian attempt to review activities or processes to see if they “worked” or not, a very common form of “reflection” in teacher education and schooling. In pre-­service teacher training, students are constantly asked to “reflect on their learning” or on their activities, ostensibly to learn from their experience in order to improve the quality and effectiveness of their teaching. That kind of reflection is actually attending to technical interest; it is a mechanical and instrumental process that analyses inputs and outputs in order to achieve the desired end, one that has likely been determined by someone other than the students and therefore non-­discursively derived for them. Given the technocratization of schooling due to the dominance of technical interest, positivism, and quantitative empiricism, it makes sense why so much of teacher education reflection is oriented this way. This technocratic reflection does not, however, analyse its own circumstances, or interrogate whether or not some students are harmed by the practice that might, for instance, raise test scores in aggregate while depressing scores of some students. Instead, the kind of self-­reflection required by emancipatory interest would, for example, critically examine why the “mechanical reflection” is undertaken in the first place, or

Habermas’s Emancipatory Interest  57 interrogate the veracity and ethical value of “best practices” in order to eliminate the harm such practices might cause some students. For example,  a  teacher may have the students work on an exercise to help them prepare for a standardized test such as the ACT or SAT. 3 Instead of doing that work and moving on, a teacher acting with emancipatory interest might choose to engage the students in  a  discussion about why they take such tests, why they were developed, and in what ways they serve or do not serve society. Who wins? Who loses? How are the tests constructed, and to what end? One could also help them understand how such tests are used and the data understood. For instance, the statistical analysis of discrimination is an interesting one for these purposes. In norm-­referenced testing, discrimination is used to determine if an item (question) on the test is good at differentiating the high-­ scoring students on the test from the low-­scoring students. Test-­makers use discrimination to determine which questions to keep, rewrite, or discard. A good discriminator item will remain, while a poor discriminator will be revised or discarded because the purpose of the test is to sort students into easily distributable groups, groupings that determine college admission opportunities. Students have a general understanding that these tests are used to rank them, but they do not ­understand the lengths to which these tests are engineered to do so, nor do they question why we need sorting-­tests at all. Additionally, other stakeholders (teachers, parents, society) know that similar tests are used to determine the quality of schooling, teaching, or policies that govern both. However, they are rarely cognizant that some of these technologies (e.g.  the statistical method of discrimination) are even employed and thus become invisible, determining knowledge for technical purposes, imposing constraints and oppression invisibly. Stakeholders are trapped in a distorted reality of schooling and college prep and schooling reform that takes technical mechanisms as given, natural, and essential to their educational ecosystem. Emancipatory interest can help them recognize the distortion and the structures and institutions that maintain it, and more importantly, potentially activate students (or themselves) to make revisions to those processes. The point of critical philosophical self-­reflection for Habermas is the emancipation of the subject—­treated as objects by traditional theory, which includes technical and practical interests—­which can only be achieved by the subjects themselves. Subjects need to “transcend their own ignorance and alienation, without the philosopher … handing down their emancipation to them in  a  paternalistic manner” (Thomassen, 2010, p. 29). Habermas does not see emancipatory interest as a motivation to discover truth (validity) detached from self-­reflection, but through it, one can find legitimation (developed more completely in his communicative action theory and discourse ethics). Through self-­reflection, the subject and the subject’s social context become transparent, enabling

58  Matthew J. Hayden them to see beyond their normative, socialized, ideologically distorted understandings. An example of this on many U.S. university campuses are the courses centred around race, ethnicity, and gender, particularly those that address the concept of “whiteness,” an ideologically distorted perception that being a “white” person in the U.S. conveys no advantages or privileges that are denied to persons of colour. For many white students, the recognition of these privileges and advantages, and an accounting of the accumulation of their benefits, is both shocking and eye-­ opening. Through this lens, they can begin to comprehend a reality that was invisible to them before. Seeing is only  a  first step, however, and true social change requires action beyond mere recognition, but it is an essential step. Without it, no emancipation is possible and emancipatory interest is unfulfilled. This is, of course, an oversimplification. Students do not simply take a class or read a book, engage in self-­reflection, and find that the scales fall from their eyes. This process is long, complex, and recursive, and it is not enough for one teacher to do it. For Habermas, it is centred around the public, discursive testing of claims, a collaborative reflection. Similar to Habermas’s discourse ethics or deliberative democracy, a community of learners (and persons in the world) work together to examine, question, debate, and analyse the normative systems and structures that govern social life developed through technical and practical interests. The “why” questions are asked, putting assumptions and norms to a test of value in a way that the “what” and “how” questions of technical and practical interests cannot. When “why” questions are not asked, social structures that govern and influence our lives remain and the status quo is maintained. This is what makes education, as a truly genuine education, dangerous. What will come of the discussions of “why”? What changes will inquirers want to make once they have concluded their inquiries? What Habermas seeks to demonstrate about emancipatory interest is what Arendt hoped to preserve in a genuine educational endeavour: to retain the natality, an actualized “explosion of action and social activity, all of which is unpredictable and unstable, and is particularly dangerous to the status quo” (Hayden, 2013, p. 249).

Emancipatory Interest and Schooling Empirically minded schooling reformers often state that corporate and business leaders complain that high school and college graduates lack critical thinking, problem-­solving, and creative skills (Payscale.com, 2016). However, those same critics often support the efforts of reformers who attempt remedies (e.g. prescriptive standards) that are driven by positivist empirical and quantifiable measures (e.g. standardized testing) of schooling and learning (Ravitch, 2016; Saltman, 2012). These kinds of measures can only be useful in assessing technical knowledge

Habermas’s Emancipatory Interest  59 (quantifiable) and practical knowledge (quantifiable and qualitative), but cannot adequately or accurately assess emancipatory knowledge, which is where critical thinking, problem-­solving, and creativity find their legs and purpose. It is also where meaning is made through reflection, meaning that cannot be predetermined or measured for accuracy. Schooling that focuses only on technical and practical interests of knowledge is unlikely to produce critical and creative thinkers, since technical and practical interests exist in a pre-­reflective instructional state. When reflection is brought to bear, it is done so in purely interested and concrete ways, for instance, as an answer to such questions as how can I use this ­knowledge to improve manufacturing efficiency?, or how can I use this knowledge to motivate my employees to work more?, etc. Unfortunately, most educational research draws its questions from problems of practice (McClintock, 2005) and is narrowly constrained to focus only on technical and practical interests of schooling. Emancipatory interest will not find subjects of practice unless they are deliberately included and utilize the perspective of critical/social philosophy in teacher education. Ignoring emancipatory interest results in schooling that is organized and defined around the concrete and quantifiable (i.e. high test scores, job skills). Technical interest, as mediated by practical interest, shapes the realities of schooling’s participants (teachers and students), and reifies the natural fallacy of the primacy of technical and practical interests for society. The emancipatory interest that students possess—­to engage in undistorted communication (learning, inquiry, discourse)—­is constrained by the dominant practical and technical interests imposed through empirically driven educational research and schooling practices that that body of research spawns (Habermas, 1988). The imperatives of this system are posited as self-­evident, and as such create the distortion necessary to exclude emancipatory interest (Blake & Masschelein, 2003). Furthermore, the concept of learning itself is defined not by robust and comprehensive understanding of human knowledge and possibility, but by what can be measured, and the measurements themselves come to define what learning and knowledge is (Biesta; 2007; Hayden, 2011). By removing or distorting the ambiguity and uncertainty of knowledge and processes in the interests of empirical certainty, the inherent potential of the diversity and natality of students to produce truly new, creative, and globally beneficial forms of life is undermined. The challenge for education and schooling to include emancipatory interest as its purpose is to do the very thing that Arendt (1961) says is vital, that educators typically pay lip service to, and that all politicians pretend to want: to critically analyse the status quo and make determinations about its validity and value in light of non-­technical and partially practical understandings of justice, values, and morality. Furthermore, and as Habermas states in response to criticisms of the

60  Matthew J. Hayden alleged idealist conceptualization of emancipatory interest, it is vital to be politically explicit when defining and pursuing an emancipatory interest. Given the possibly overwhelming subjectivity of any social construct such as emancipatory interest, it is absolutely necessary for educational practices to be explicit and transparent about the frameworks guiding them. In this context, critical reflection is an essential component of any interdisciplinary pursuit, such as general education through schooling and across multiple disciplines, though most frequently in the humanities. As a result, it is vital to be honest about the role of the teacher as an emancipatory change agent, or more simply, as an agent of critical reflection. It is just as important for teacher education programmes to teach teachers how to question—­via emancipatory self-­reflection and discourse—­the practices they have just been taught as it is to teach them how to make a lesson plan or motivate students to engage in academic activity. Teacher education programmes need to develop the skills of emancipatory self-­reflection in their pre-­service teachers in order for those teachers to teach their future students to do the same. In a challenge to the university for teachers, educational policymakers, and school leaders, Habermas’s (1996) wrote that universities ought to “understand themselves as the mandatary of an enlightened public whose willingness to learn and capacity for criticism they at once presuppose, demand, and reinforce” (p. 378). We cannot only attend to the two cognitive interests that are easy to serve; we must also attend to the difficult one. As our schools have become more conscious of the diversity of their stakeholders and students, this political consciousness is both ever-­ present and deliberately avoided. Teachers are taught to be politically neutral, or even worse, apolitical, with their students. Such practices send the message to students that politics is dangerous and scary, and that political discourse is to be avoided and shunned. It concurrently sends a message to socially and politically marginalized students that the status quo is legitimate and just. This will leave us, on the one hand, with a populace that does not know how to engage in politics or political discourse (or do we already have that?), and on the other, a subset of the population to whom the most accessible public institution for social change says “but not for you.” Such a programme is the exact opposite of what is needed. Schools need to be a place for students to practise, as Arendt (1961) says, safe from the real world and the real-­ world consequences of such practice. Eventually, children will need to step into that world and if they do not know what to do, how to do it, or why they should, they will not be able to insert themselves into it, will not actually be of and in the world. Put in a more Habermasian way, they will not be able to engage in emancipating themselves from constructs of oppression and will be forever blind to the mechanisms that constrain them.

Habermas’s Emancipatory Interest  61

Notes 1 I use Nock’s observations as evidence that the U.S. has always felt that public schooling was inadequate and not  a  new state of affairs. His thoughts about the destructive force of reform movements are similar to mine, though conclusions he draws later in his lectures are not. For example,  a  general conclusion Nock draws in these lectures is that we should focus our time and energies on the “educable” and not on the “ineducable,”  a  relatively odious idea especially since he provides no means by which to make this determination. As for an “educated” person, his criteria are those that we would recognize today:  a  person who is erudite, well read (of the “right” books, of course: white, male, Western/Global North authors), liberal arts and humanities education, cosmopolitan in thought if not experience, and in possession of appropriate interpersonal skills (what was once called “manners”). The limitations and oppressive nature of those conclusions are obvious and can be seen described and adroitly delineated in the bulk of Critical Theorist works examining U.S. education. 2 See Carr and Kemmis (1986) for the full explanation or Ewert (1991) for a concise summary of characteristics. 3 These are norm-­referenced college readiness exams. Originally, ACT stood for “American College Test,” but now it no longer has that meaning. Similarly, the SAT originally stood for “Scholastic Aptitude Test” and then “Scholastic Assessment Test,” but not means nothing and is simply referred to as “SAT.”

References Arendt, H. (1961). Between the past and the future: Six exercises in political thought. New York, NY: The Viking Press, Inc. Baynes, K. (2004). The transcendental turn: Habermas’s “Kantian pragmatism.” In F. Rush (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to critical theory (pp. 194–218). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Biesta, G. (2007). Why “what works” won’t work: Evidence-­based practice and the democratic deficit in educational research. Educational Theory, 57(1), 1–22. Blake, N., & Masschelein, J. (2003). Critical theory and critical pedagogy. In N. Blake, P. Smeyers, R. Smith, & P. Standish (Eds.), The blackwell guide to the philosophy of education (pp. 38–56). Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Butler, S. L. (1997). Habermas’ cognitive interests: Teacher and student interests and their relationship in an adult education setting. D. Ed. Thesis. Auburn University. Carr, W., & Kemmis, S. (1986). Becoming critical—­E ducation, knowledge and action research. Philadelphia, PA: Falmer. Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education. New York, NY: The Free Press. Dewey, J. (1931). Philosophy and civilization. New York, NY: Minton, Balch & Company. Ewert, G. D. (1991). Habermas and education:  A  comprehensive overview of the influence of Habermas in educational literature. Review of Educational Research, 61(3), 345–378. Freeman, E. (2005). No Child Left Behind and the denigration of race. Equity & Excellence in Education, 38(3), 190–199.

62  Matthew J. Hayden Grundy, S. (1987). Curriculum: Product or praxis. New York, NY: Falmer. Habermas, J. (1971/1986). Knowledge and human interests. (J. Shapiro, Trans.). Boston, MA: Beacon. Habermas, J. (1988). Theory and practice. (J. Viertel, Ed., Trans.). Boston, MA: Beacon. Habermas, J. (1996). Between facts and norms: Contributions to a discourse theory of law and democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hayden, M. (2011). Standardized quantitative learning assessments and high stakes testing: Throwing learning down the assessment drain. In R. Kunzman (Ed.), Philosophy of Education Society 2011 (pp. 177–185). Urbana, IL: Philosophy of Education Society. Hayden, M. (2013). Arendt and cosmopolitanism: The human conditions of cosmopolitan teacher education. Ethics & Global Politics, 5(4), 239–258. Honneth, A. (1991). The Critique of power: Reflective stages in a critical social theory. (T. Kenneth Baynes, Ed.). Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Horkheimer, M. (1995). Between philosophy and social science: Selected early writings. (G. F. Hunter, M. Kramer,  &  J. Torpey, Eds.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Huelskamp, R. M. (1993). Perspectives on education in America. The Phi Delta Kappan, 74(9), 718–721. Leveling up: How to win in the skills economy. Payscale.com (2016). Retrieved from https://www.payscale.com/data-­packages/job-­skills McClintock, R. (2005). Homeless in the house of intellect. New York, NY: Laboratory for Liberal Learning. Mezirow, J. (1981).  A  critical theory of adult learning and education. Adult Education, 32(1), 3–24. Nock, A. J. (1931). The theory of education in the United States. New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace & Co. Ravitch, D. (2016). The death and life of the great American schools system. New York, NY: Basic Books. Saltman, K. J. (2012). Failure of corporate school reform. New York, NY: Routledge. Thomassen, L. (2010). Habermas: A guide for the perplexed. New York, NY: Continuum. Wun, C. (2014). The anti-­black order of No Child Left Behind: Using Lacanian psychoanalysis and critical race theory to examine NCLB. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 46(5), 462–474.

Part II

Philosophy and Teacher Development

4 Philosophy in Teacher Education Leonard Waks

How can philosophers contribute to the preparation of school teachers? Can courses in philosophy of education or social foundations of for pre-­service teachers contribute significantly to this end? If not, then in what other ways might philosophers be useful in teacher education? To make a start on these questions, I first construct a working conception of teacher education and its aims. I consider teacher education as practical training aimed to prepare teacher education candidates to cope with the challenges of classroom teaching in their early professional years. I characterize this challenge in terms of assisting candidates in reconstructing “theories-­in-­use” about teaching—­acquired during their years as school and college students—­into more effective pedagogical habits through reflection, dialogue, and acquisition of the knowledge base for teaching grounded in research. As I progress, I indicate pegs for possible philosophical interventions, which I address explicitly in the final section.

Teaching and the Aim of Teacher Education Teacher Education as Practical Training School teaching is a practical work undertaken in a complex, institutionalized setting that shapes, limits, and gives meaning to action (Schon, 1983, p. 17). Teachers work in isolated classrooms, but nonetheless act, and learn to act effectively, within communities of practice—­groups of people who share a craft or a profession. Through sharing information and experiences within these communities, they acquire practical knowledge and develop both personally and professionally (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Teacher Education is itself  a  community of practice, with its own local, national, and global organizations, professional journals, and (contested) norms. The teacher education community overlaps significantly with the schoolteacher community as many roles (e.g. supervising teacher; adjunct professor) are filled by schoolteachers. Teacher education, like medical and legal education, is professional training. While the term “professional” carries considerable weight

66  Leonard Waks as a metaphor (Maxwell, 2015), I will use the term here simply to designate that school teaching is organized, like medicine and law, with professional licences granted by government agencies on the basis of formal education, supervised practice, and a licence examination. The term “teacher education” came into favour when the preparation of school teachers came under the dominance of universities after 1960, but remains a field of professional training. Ball and Forzini (2009) note: No one balks at “medical training” or blinks when disciplinary scholars … refer to the skills, habits of mind, and ways of asking and answering questions that they developed through their “training.” (Ball & Forzini, 2009) The primary aim of teacher education is to develop such skills and habits of mind—­to prepare teacher candidates for practical efficacy as novice teachers prior to or concomitant with their induction into the teaching profession. Other aims may also be operating, such as preparing teachers as social change agents (Fullan, 1993) or transformative public intellectuals (Giroux, 1985), but all of these presuppose successful induction, which comes first for both the candidates and the school leaders who are their future employers. Novices and Experts The literature on teacher education makes frequent use of the distinction between novice practitioners and experts. Novices are early inductees—­ still learning the ropes. They are significantly less effective than experienced teachers, but continue to grow throughout their early professional years.  A  recent review concluded that teaching experience contributes positively to student achievement gains throughout  a  teacher’s career, and while the contribution is steepest in teachers’ first five years, further experience continues to improve teaching effectiveness even after several decades of teaching. The students of more experienced teachers not only learn more, as measured by standardized tests, but are also more likely to achieve more on other measures of success such as school attendance (Kini & Podolsky, 2016). Initial teacher education aims at novice-­level efficacy; only years of practical experience within the teacher community of practice results in expertise. What have experts acquired through experience that novices lack? Early research on the novice-­expert continuum investigated the thinking of chess players, revealing that experts see and interpret patterns on the board that novices miss (deGroot, 1965). Analyses of teaching (Carter et  al., 1988) suggested that master teachers, like expert chess players, depend on nuanced observational and interpretative skills—­seeing and making sense of classroom patterns.

Philosophy in Teacher Education  67 Experts have large stocks of tacit knowledge built up from observation and reflection and filtered down into habit. They respond to unpredicted situations intuitively—­with little deliberative thought. In the terms of Donald Schon (1983), they keep situations moving while they reflect-­ in-­action (see also Dreyfus  &  Dreyfus, 1980; Gobet, 2017; L ­ eonard, 1992). Novices, by contrast, rely more on explicit knowledge and explicit rules—­acquired during their candidacies and in their supervised practice. This reliance renders them more deliberative, less nimble, and more prone to failure. From Candidate to Novice While teacher training programmes cannot aim at mastery, good programmes can affect successful transitions from candidate to novice, that is, they can improve the practical efficacy of candidates so that by the time they are inducted, they can cope acceptably with professional demands and not succumb to frustration and leave the profession. These programmes support these transitions by combining formal learning, observation, and supervised practice so that candidates acquire the vocabularies of teaching in association with practical operations. They learn, for example, about different kinds of questions, or wait time, or inquiry teaching or cooperative learning or independent projects. They learn rules of thumb—­often supported by research—­for applying these ideas in classroom situations. They learn how to use these terms in describing and critiquing lessons they observe, and later rely on these explicit knowledge formulations and rules in their novice efforts. These languages become the pegs upon which they can hang subsequent experiences and reflections, the starting points in experiential on-­the-­job learning towards expertise.

The Tasks of Teaching So, what then is teacher efficacy? What tasks do novice teachers have to accomplish based on this knowledge acquired in teacher education programmes? The tasks may conveniently be divided into three interactive groups: structuring, teaching, and managing. Teachers plan lessons and create structures for activities; they deliver subject matter instruction within those structures, and they manage the behaviours of learners to achieve instructional goals. Structuring Structuring is establishing the designs and architectures in which teaching and learning are accomplished. It includes the design of lesson plans and the organization of learning areas where learning and teaching

68  Leonard Waks practices are enacted. Teachers select and sequence activities; they provide resources including worksheets, books, and digital devices. They set up the computer area and the class library; they decorate classrooms to provide attractive prompts for learning—­e.g. about holidays. They arrange seats for small group discussions. They develop behavioural rules and hang them on classroom walls. Such actions establish structures within which “students engage in assigned activities, and within which the teacher will enact his or her teaching practice of interacting with individual students…” (Sanders & McCutcheon, 1986). The structures establish flows of activity over determinate periods of classroom time, and entail specific teaching practices: i.e. the mini-­lecture, the short video clip, the 10-­minute discussion, the break out into small cooperative learning groups. Teaching Effective teachers spend the bulk of their classroom time in teaching acts. If structuring is akin to architecture or musical composition, teaching itself is akin to improvisational performance art. Komisar (1968) distinguishes three types of teaching acts: (1) intellectual acts, (2) learning enhancement acts, and (3) learner support acts. The intellectual acts are conceptually central to teaching; the other two are peripheral to and supportive of the intellectual acts. (1) Intellectual acts include proving, explaining, describing, justifying, demonstrating, and narrating.  A  math teacher, for example, is teaching geometry when she is proving a theorem or explaining how the proof works. Komisar clarifies that teaching acts are not normal intellectual acts. Teachers do not merely prove, explain, nor demonstrate; they prove, explain, or demonstrate to this or that individual student or group of students. The acts must be “logically lucid.” They engender awareness by providing clear reasons, and the learners must come to understand awareness as being supported by the given reasons. For example, the geometry student must not only learn theorem 23, but learn it as following from axioms. In this way, teaching opens the rational component of the acts to learner observation and emulation. By teachers in this way showing how, students are able to take awareness on board and reason similarly. For example, in leading  a  discussion of  a  short story, the teacher points to one complication in the plot and asks the students to identify others—­attending to student intellectual acts and responding to help them make their reasoning more lucid. Such teaching engagements are improvisational—­fluid and interactive—­requiring nimble intellectual responses to rapidly shifting classroom situations (­Sanders & ­McCutcheon, 1986).

Philosophy in Teacher Education  69 Komisar also recognizes two other types of teaching acts: (2) Learning enhancement acts enhance learners’ ability to engage in intellectual acts in the classroom—­with hints or prompts, and (3) Learner support acts address socio-­emotional conditions blocking intellectual engagement. For example, if a student is disengaged, a teacher may intervene to spark or console or in some other way re-­engage them. Managing Teachers cannot achieve the goals of instruction unless they can create an orderly situation, with participants, however reluctantly, focused on the tasks of learning. This requires—­as Komisar makes clear—­managing emotional relationships with students. The techniques used to maintain order and attention are referred to as “classroom management.” Expert teachers show strong management skills; novice teachers have poor management skills leading to disorderly classrooms where students pay little attention to assigned activities. Although candidates must learn structuring, teaching, and managing moves as distinct elements in the language of teaching, these three sets of tasks are woven together by expert professionals (Kagan, 1992). Their repertoires consist not merely in isolated structuring and teaching moves, but in just such moves as sustain order. Learning to coordinate structuring, teaching, and managing requires practical experience and the support of congenial colleagues. Mere “experience” in isolation is not sufficient.

The Initial Situation in Teacher Education Candidates Not a Blank Slate Teacher candidates do not enter training programmes as a blank slate. They have had 13 years and thousands of hours of primary, secondary, and collegiate experiences. Sociologist Dan Lortie (1975) refers to this as an “apprenticeship of observation.” Experiences as pupils give teachers ideas about school subject matter, proper pupil behaviour, and good teaching. Traditional teaching persists because teachers generally teach in the manner they were taught, and that is by and large in traditional ways. When candidates enter teacher education, they thus already have well-­developed though largely non-­conscious beliefs and values—­ often traditional—­about both teaching practices and about themselves as teachers (Kennedy, 1999; Wall, 2010). These beliefs and values are grounded in their own emotion-­laden experiences as pupils: they centre themselves as the learners; their observations are not distanced or “objective.” Their own success at school sets them apart from the students

70  Leonard Waks they have to teach in attitude and school aptitude. They are often unprepared, and even dismayed, when as novices they first encounter students with poor attitudes and school aptitudes. After studying the changes in candidates’ thinking about teaching during their training periods, Wall concluded that: Not only did preservice teachers initially assume students were similar to themselves, but they viewed teaching as simple, straightforward, and autonomous. Furthermore, they initially believed that students at the same grade level perform uniformly, that teaching ensures learning, and that their personal pedagogical preferences are shared by their students. This preservice teacher egocentrism remained intact until they faced the complexities of classroom life and were forced to juxtapose their conceptions about teaching formed from their student point of view with their newly emerging conceptions from their teacher point of view. (Wall, 2010) Candidate Philosophical Beliefs and Values Candidate beliefs and values often conflict with the habits acquired during their apprenticeships of observation. Ryan (2008) measured the philosophical orientations of candidates based on philosophical systems—­progressivism, existential, realism, and essentialism. The instrument indicates whether candidates are more likely to embrace the philosophy of learning from experience (progressivism) or conveying conventional school subject matters (essentialism). Edlin (2013), using Ryan’s philosophical orientation instrument, found that more than 78% of the teacher candidates in her sample selected progressivism as identified by their responses, while only 12% identified with the essentialism. Given that most novices tend to rely on traditional, subject-­matter conveying, methods, how can we make sense of Edlin’s conclusion? Argyris and Schon (1974) offer the concept of “theories of action” as tools for linking thoughts with actions. Actors have two types of action theories, espoused theories and theories-­in-­use: Espoused theories are explicit beliefs; we know that we have them, and we espouse them explicitly. Edlin’s study taps into the espoused philosophical orientations of teacher candidates. Theories-­in-­use are the theories implied by our behaviour. A third-­party observer can construct our theories-­in-­use by observing us as we act in and react to situations. They can work back from our actions to our tacit beliefs. These theories-­in-­use are likely to be unknown to us, and often contradict our espoused theories. The theories espoused in teacher education tend to have a progressive cast. They go down easily, because candidates already espouse similar

Philosophy in Teacher Education  71 theories. By contrast, novices’ theories-­in-­action are more traditional, and they fall back upon even more traditional strategies of subject matter delivery when encountering classroom setbacks to regain classroom control.

From Candidates to Practitioners How, then, do candidates and novices confront and correct their ineffective theories-­in-­use? We can say that they “learn from experience,” but what actually happens in experience that makes candidates and novices revise their theories-­in-­use? Theories-­in-­use are habits that function spontaneously because they have settled in our lived bodies. Once habits have settled, the body-­self acts spontaneously and with confidence. Habitual responses feel “natural”; alternatives feel unnatural, even though the theories-­in-­use, restated as espoused theories, may be repudiated when stated explicitly. Discourse is a different arena than action, with its own norms. This is what lies behind the theory/practice gap. Fortunately, candidates and novices are not enclosed within their habits or theories-­in-­use. Three ways in which teachers can gain distance from their tacit habitual practices and gain vantage points for reconstructing them are self-reflection, dialogue, and research.1 Reflection Self-­reflection is not natural for human beings. We might substantiate this claim by considering the unreflective, even gullible, responses of broad masses of citizens to recent political propaganda such as the Brexit campaign. We all want to feel confident and natural; we build sustained ways of acting and being which work for us. Self-­criticism undermines these by introducing doubt and hesitation. We avoid it when we can. Candidates and novices can hardly avoid reflection, however, when their habitual modes of teaching fail and break down. Zeichner (2008) notes that “all teachers are reflective,” but adds that as teacher educators, we must concern ourselves about how they reflect and what they reflect about. “How” is important because self-­reflection itself is  a  practice governed by its own norms. Religious and secular traditions offer specific methods of self-­reflection for adherents. Philosophers can bring their own distinct methods to bear. The “what” is also important. Van Manen (1977) introduced distinctions amongst technical, practical, and critical reflection in the teacher education literature. Technical reflection is concerned narrowly with efficiency in the adjustment of means and ends, where the ends are given and not open to criticism or modification. Practical reflection considers not only of means but also ends. For example, teachers may reflect on the

72  Leonard Waks educational value of  a  curriculum that “covers” so much material in such a shallow manner. Critical reflection goes beyond merely practical concerns and addresses moral and ethical issues. For example, teachers may question not merely their educational value of high stakes tests but also their compatibility with standards of justice or respect for persons (Maxwell & Schwimmer, 2016). Teacher candidates have technical, practical, and critical concerns. Often—­as we will see later—­these get all mixed together in concrete situations in the “swamp” of practice. Philosophical interventions in some form can usefully address all of them. But interventions will be most beneficial when concerns are pressing—­it’s always best to “strike while the iron is hot.” Dialogue Unlike self-­reflection, conversation is natural. Our lives are shared with others, and most of us enjoy conversation and seek others with whom to share our experiences. Colleagues love to share around the proverbial “water cooler” about concerns at work. But dialogue—­that is, serious, sustained, and respectful face-­to-­face discussion directed to some purpose—­is no more natural than self-­ reflection. Like reflection, dialogue is a distinct practice governed by its own norms, and the dialogical mode of conversation must be learned. Philosophers have obvious contributions to make in this process. Philosophy for children (P4C) has been introduced into many schools as a means to learn how to dialogue with others within “communities of inquiry.” Similar approaches may be useful in teacher education, and I will have more to say about them below. Dialogue goes beyond reflection as a factor in habit reconstruction because it requires putting tacit thoughts into public language—­i nto explicit words understood by others, who can then challenge them and push us to reconsider them. Dialogue is thus a bridge between habitual practice and discourse, between theories-­i n-­use and espoused theories. Once tacit theories-­in-­use become explicit, the tensions between them and espoused theories can be observed and confronted. Dialogue gives practitioners greater distance from their habitual practice. Candidates and novices can open up to more experienced colleagues, including their supervising teachers and mentors. They are, in a sense, all in the same boat— ­dealing with the same kinds of learners under the same circumstances. When early career teachers are floundering, they see that more experienced colleagues are succeeding. They can sense that these elders wish to assist, and they wish to learn from them. Through dialogue, novices join the community of practice and learn its success “secrets.”

Philosophy in Teacher Education  73 Research Research proceeds at  a  much further remove from practice than self-­ reflection or dialogue. As Bengtsson (1993) puts this point, researchers are always “strangers” (p. 209) to practice; they are there to obtain data for their own uses, from which they abstract and formulate assertions in terms practitioners may not even understand. Further distance is created when research is published and comes to be regarded as the authoritative knowledge about practice. Published research is far removed from novices’ practical situations, and the lessons to be gained from research are difficult for practicing teachers to understand much less use. How then can research contribute to practice, or to be more specific, how can educational research contribute to teaching effectiveness? What conditions must research meet to be accessible to, and useful for, teacher candidates and novice teachers? First, teachers must be able to recognize themselves in the selected research texts. They have to see the research settings as in some way related to their classroom settings, and the research treatments as in some way related to their own possible behaviours. Lessons from research can be particularly valuable precisely because of their distance from practice. If teachers can open their minds to research results, they can see their situations with new eyes—­seeing patterns they would otherwise miss. Learning how to do research through action research projects is amongst the best ways of promoting this openness to published research. The research studies selected for inclusion in teacher education should be those that candidates and novices find more accessible and useful. Educational researchers, moreover, should think hard about both how to write up and publish their findings for teacher access, and how to conceive of and set an agenda for research accessible and useful for teachers. Second, it is of no use for teachers to understand research results they don’t take on board and actually use. Just as school pupils learn to reason in the disciplines by acting from the awareness generated through logically lucid reasoning in intellectual teaching acts, teacher candidates and novices learn research-­based practices only by practising them. Awareness is insufficient. As Bengtsson (1993) puts it, the teacher has to: try from his understanding. To start with his or her actions will perhaps be clumsy, but with exercise the theoretical knowledge will be integrated into practice in such a way that it is going to be settled in his or her own lived body. (p. 210)

74  Leonard Waks

Traditional and Alternative Programmes Teacher education programmes all work with the same basic elements: the candidates, individually and as a peer cohort group, faculty members and formal academic courses, field observations, and supervised practice. These programme elements have been combined in different ways, giving different weight to academic courses and practical experiences. What is now called the “traditional” teacher education programme consists of a year or more of academic courses followed by a period of practical classroom teaching experience under supervision. Such programmes are often justified by the claim that teaching is a “profession” with a “professional knowledge base” grounded in academic research. Recently, policymakers have sought to end the university monopoly in teacher preparation (Eurydice, 2004; Furlong, 2005; Lai & ­Grossman, 2008), asserting that the key element in teaching effectiveness is subject matter content knowledge. Under the banner of deregulation, they promoted a diverse array of non-­traditional “alternative” routes to teaching. These alternative programmes have been designed to allow those from outside the education field rapidly to acquire teaching qualifications. Advocates of alternative programmes have condemned traditional programmes, blasting their academic courses as trivial and practically useless. But university-­based teacher educators have hardly folded their tents. In response to arguments for deregulation, they have intensified the demand for teacher professionalism, placing increased weight on the professional knowledge base for teaching, however that may be conveyed to candidates and novices. Lee Shulman’s (1986) article on the role of “pedagogical content knowledge” in expert teaching opened up new lines of research on professional knowledge in teaching—­and has been cited an astonishing 21,146 times. The idea that there is a distinct professional knowledge base that teachers must acquire is alive and well (see also Berliner, 2006; for a review of the political context of alternative approaches, see Cochran-­Smith & Fries, 2005). Residency Programmes Residency programmes now offer  a  promising synthesis of traditional and alternative approaches. In partnerships between universities and education agencies including schools and school districts, these “residency programmes” have provided graduate-­level academic courses simultaneously with year-­long classroom internships. Typically, residents spend four days a week in their assigned schools, and one day a week in university classes. In their schools, the residents serve as apprentices under the supervision of experienced teachers who remain teachers-­of-­record in their classrooms. 2

Philosophy in Teacher Education  75 Residency programmes open up new possibilities for structuring academic coursework in teacher education. While traditional academic courses have contributed little to early career teaching effectiveness because they occur prior to practice and thus cannot address concerns arising in practice, residency-­based courses occur during the period of initial practice, when concerns are acute. New kinds of academic courses can address these concerns through guided reflection, dialogue, and the right kind of research content.

Novice Teacher Concerns What concerns do arise in practice? Teacher concerns have been actively researched since the 1960s. The studies of Fuller (1969) and her colleagues remain applicable today. The concerns of pre-­service and new teachers develop in three broad stages, from self and professional survival, to teaching tasks, and finally to impact on individual students. Delgado (1999) confirmed that new teachers work in survival mode, with concerns about “How can I get my students to the cafeteria quietly?” or “Should I put these questions on the overhead or the chalkboard?” These fit nicely into van Manan’s category of “technical reflection.” Delgado emphasizes the value of brief dialogues with experienced peers. In line with the research on pattern recognition in expertise, Kagan (1992) concurs that early career teachers undergo a progression in attention: from classroom management to subject matter and pedagogy, and finally to student learning. Meanwhile, the novices grow in pedagogical understanding from rote knowledge of classroom strategies (which they can talk about but not enact), to novice practical knowledge (where they apply strategies with much effort, and talk with greater nuance about them) to comprehensive knowledge (where they speak intelligently about the strategies and yet apply them across contexts automatically, freeing their minds to attend to pupils) (Kagan, 1992). The first “rote” stage characterizes the candidates in the practicum. They are learning new languages of practice but have not yet learned to apply them. The second, or novice stage parallels Bengtsson’s (1993) “clumsy” stage, where teachers open to dialogue and knowledge from research and “try from [their] understanding” (p.  210) slowly incorporating new knowledge-­ based practices into their behavioural repertoires. In the third, the “expert” stage, knowledge, as Bengtsson (1993) puts it, becomes fully “integrated into practice in such a way that it is going to be settled in his or her own lived body” (p. 210). Kagan (1992) takes these findings about the development of concerns to suggest that “the abstract and theoretical content of most university courses” is not needed by teacher candidates and novices during their training programmes. Even during supervised practice, Kagan finds, education professors neglect the candidate needs for practical procedural

76  Leonard Waks routines, leaving these to supervising teachers. This explains why candidates and novices overwhelmingly think that supervising teachers are the primary factor in building teaching effectiveness, and why, unlike teacher educators, they think that faculty and their academic courses contribute little. The findings, however, also point to features that experiences—­including philosophy experiences—­must possess in order to be useful in teacher education. To these, we now turn.

How Philosophers Can Contribute to Teacher Effectiveness Philosophers and Philosophy I now turn explicitly to philosophers and their contribution. By philosophers,  I  here mean professional philosophers trained in graduate programmes in philosophy or philosophy of education. This training provides broad knowledge of the history of philosophy as well as skill in philosophical thinking. While philosophers have highly specialized knowledge, most also are familiar with the range of sub-­disciplines including logic, ethics, epistemology, social philosophy, and aesthetics. Because philosophical issues in educational cut across all of these sub-­ disciplines, it is especially important for philosophers in education colleges, regardless of their specialist research areas, to be strong generalists. Courses in Philosophy of Education Pre-­service courses in philosophy of education don’t contribute directly to novice teaching effectiveness. They were introduced when, after teacher education became  a  university course after 1960, leaders demanded a proper academic knowledge base for university degrees in education. Scholars from “parent” academic disciplines were recruited to education faculties to assure that this knowledge base met contemporary academic standards. Right from the start, some teacher educators questioned the value of these courses. One highly regarded critic, in  a  1970 article, expressed “dismay at students’ ‘unconscious misunderstandings and misinterpretations; the huge unqualified generalizations; the repeated presentation of undigested and inert ideas; and the sloppy and uncritical use of language’” (cited in Crook, 2002, p.  65). Candidates’ inattention to the fine points of discipline-­based research could perhaps be explained by its near-­total lack of contact with their concerns. As one candidate put it in a 1970 interview, No, I’ve never been interested in history, not even at school. Philosophy?  I  hardly know what it is. It’s an awful thing to admit

Philosophy in Teacher Education  77 I know  .  .  .  but  I  just don’t understand it.  .  .  .  I’ve no interest. . . . Well, I just sit there in psychology lectures and it just goes over my head.  I  don’t know what anybody is talking about at all . . . no interest. (Cited in Crook, 2002, p. 66) If we are to be honest, we have all had students like this in our courses, and have winced as we read their term papers and exams. If philosophers are to contribute to teacher effectiveness, they need to find better vehicles than conventional academic courses loaded with philosophy texts to be read and digested for their own sake. Philosophers need to devise new interventions—­especially for the period of supervised practice—­that attend to both the concerns of novice teachers and the processes by which they move from candidates to effective novice teachers. Pegs for Philosophical Interventions Upon what pegs can these interventions be hung? Let’s review the lessons we have already gathered. Candidates bring from their prior educational experiences both espoused theories of teaching and theories-­in-­use. The espoused theories often have a progressive, learner-­centred slant, but the theories-­in-­use are more traditional. Candidate ideas about learning are grounded in their own learning experiences; they know little about the kinds of actual learners they will encounter and are often dismayed by them. Candidates and novices have to learn how to structure classroom settings, activities, and lessons, and how to engage in fluid intellectual exchanges as teachers—­in a manner that maintains order for learning. Their initial attempts tend to be ineffective. They grow by gaining distance from their habitual patterns of behaviour through reflection, dialogue, and research knowledge, and then trying new behaviours “from their understanding.” Philosophy provides endless resources. Reflection, dialogical thinking, and knowledge acquisition from research for practical use are not natural—­they are distinct practices, with their own norms. They all must be learned, and from whom better than philosophers? Educational structuring makes use of design thinking and practical aesthetics. Reflection and dialogical thinking draw upon informal logic and critical thinking, critical reflection on ethics, and social philosophy. Epistemology and the philosophy of science, mathematics, literature, and history—­all attend closely and explicitly to patterns of valid reasoning in knowledge disciplines, contributing directly to self-­conscious logical lucidity of reasoning in school subject matters. The philosophical literature is jam-­packed with pertinent research articles and books, though these might not be in a form readily digested and taken on board by early career teachers.

78  Leonard Waks Philosophical interventions have the greatest impact during the period of supervised teaching, especially once novices turn attention from survival to practical concerns—­when their questions shift from “how can I get my students to the cafeteria” to “when and how can I include learner-­centered activities?” or “how can I explain this or that concept more clearly?” But placing philosophical interventions in the practice period does not assure that they will be useful. To contribute to practice, the interventions must help the novices gain distance from their habits—­ the theories-­in-­use they are operating with in their classrooms—­through reflection, dialogue, and research pertaining to their living school and classroom situations. Philosophical texts will be particularly useful when candidates recognize themselves in them and gain practical lessons they “try from their understanding.”

Two Philosophical Interventions My argument points to two kinds of philosophical interventions: (1)  a  practice of “philosophy for teachers” modelled on P4C, and (2) a reimagined personal philosophy statement as a capstone of teacher education. Philosophy for Teachers By “philosophy for teachers,”  I  mean forms of philosophical practice designed explicitly to address the concerns of teachers. The first explicit development of a “philosophy for teachers” (P4T) practice I am aware of was made by Garcia-­Padilla (1993), in a Harvard doctoral dissertation directed by Israel Scheffler. She argued that doing philosophy, in relation to education, involves questioning and problematizing concepts, beliefs, and assumptions in a manner that opens up new possibilities of thinking and acting, a kind of philosophical activity that, in her view, avoided the familiar theory/practice gap. P4T has recently been taken up again by Orchard, Heilbron, and Winstanley (2016). They led a 2011 workshop with the Centre for Research Ethics and Ethical Deliberation (CREED) to provide training for teachers in ethical thinking (see also Maxwell & Schwimmer, 2016), using a role-­ play experience as a prompt for discussion. When that did not pan out, they built subsequent discussions on pressing concerns of their teacher participants. In a subsequent 2013 residential seminar at a Quaker retreat, they borrowed some elements from the P4C approach to dialogical teaching. They started sessions with a stimulus prompt, and participants raised questions. Some questions were selected for close examination, building an inclusive and democratic “community of inquiry” facilitated by a trained leader.

Philosophy in Teacher Education  79 The aims of the P4T workshop were to create space and time for critical reflection away from the busyness of schools; to build a “community of practice” for sharing, where confidential concerns could be aired; to develop independence and confidence amongst student teachers on how to manage ethically complex and potentially challenging classroom situations; to address existential concerns which arise typically amongst beginning teachers when dealing with challenging behaviour by their pupils; and offer professional development in the methods of dialogic teaching and learning. Participants in the P4T workshop reported that experiences of inquiry and deliberation were very uncommon in their pre-­service courses because time was scarce. P4T enabled them to share concerns about their work, especially focused on having too many time-­consuming duties. The authors state that “time was spent drawing connections, clarifying meanings and going deeper into the issues raised. Values were explored allowing insights and thoughts to be shared, leading to new perspectives, disparate directions and a deepening of understanding” (Orchard et al., 2016, p. 49). Note how a concern which is initially presented as technical—­“How can we do so many things in so little time?”—­expands into the practical—­“Do all of these time consuming demands make any sense?” and finally the ethical—­“Should we just say “no” when demands are unreasonable?” The authors add: A sustained engagement with philosophical theory differentiates our workshop from school-­based P4C work. This was substantiated by the involvement of political and moral philosophers, as well as philosophers of education in each workshop who engaged philosophically with the discussion, probing, clarifying and helping participants to develop argued positions. (p. 51) A drawback the authors note to P4T residential seminars is the high cost and need for external funding. But why must P4T depend on either residential seminars or special funding? P4T is unlikely to become a sustained practice unless it gets incorporated in regular teacher education programmes, as P4C is now incorporated in K-­12 schools. A weekly P4T seminar during the period of supervised practice is likely to contribute far more to teacher effectiveness than any pre-­service philosophy of education course or one-­shot residential seminar. Creating administrative and bureaucratic support for P4T in teacher education will no doubt be a daunting task. But consider what the P4C founders were up against in the 1970s, when the very idea of philosophy sessions for young children struck almost everyone as ludicrous.

80  Leonard Waks One worry I had was about the authors’ narrow focus on ethical thinking. For novices, technical and practical concerns are likely to be more pressing than ethical concerns. And philosophy has plenty of resources to offer from other sub-­disciplines: aesthetics, logic, and epistemology amongst others. The authors got started on their P4T journey through their interest in ethical thinking, though it is now clear that they do not restrict P4T to ethics (see the chapter by Orchard and Winstanley in this volume). A second worry I had about their P4T workshop is the lack of explicit movement from theory to practice—to assisting teachers as they applied new philosophical insights in their own schools and classrooms. Teachers gain new and clarified ideas and “develop argued positions,” but the P4T workshop does not appear to provide participants with opportunities to try new behaviours “from their understanding.” Though P4T in this form is directed to novice teachers’ pressing concerns—­certainly an advantage over standard philosophy of education courses—­it does not aim to displace prior theories-­in-­use with alternatives that address the concerns. For P4T to be effective, philosophers may need to team up not just with other philosophers, but with teacher educators and supervising teachers who can provide support and feedback as teachers try out new ideas. Finally, the philosophical literature in scholarly books and journals may not be accessible to, or useful for, novice teachers. A new genre of philosophical work may be required, parallel to the special publications designed for P4C. The Personal Philosophy Statement Schools often require applicants for positions and new hires to submit statements expressing their “personal philosophies of teaching.” Subsequently, teachers may be obliged to revise their personal philosophy statements when considered for tenure or promotion. Like college application essays, personal philosophy statements matter! Candidates, however, rarely understand how to prepare these statements. Nothing in their training programmes prepares them to write them. Often, they cobble together items from their CVs and wrap them in trivialities. Philosophers wince at the very term “personal philosophy of teaching,” knowing that writing philosophical essays about teaching is about the last thing new graduates of teacher education programmes can do. Putting the Philosophy Back in the Teaching Philosophy Statement It is, however, worth rethinking the personal philosophical statement. Mary Bowne (2017) provides a useful definition: A teaching philosophy is a narrative essay which reflects an individual’s beliefs and values about teaching and learning, often including

Philosophy in Teacher Education  81 concrete examples of the ways in which that individual enacts those beliefs. A philosophy derives from reflections on experiences, thus forming specific core beliefs related to teaching and learning. (p. 59, emphasis added) The key terms in Bowne’s definition are “concrete examples” of how the teachers “enact” beliefs and values as “derived from reflections on experiences.” Beginning candidates have no teaching experience. They have formed  a  theory-­in-­use from their apprenticeship of observation, but have not yet “enacted” it. They have no such “concrete examples.” They have nothing—­as Tom Russell (2013) insists—­to reflect on. They can prepare “personal philosophical statements”: based on their espoused theories, but they remain blind to their theories-­in-­use as latent habits. Their personal philosophical teaching statements at that stage might be eloquent but would not provide an iota of evidence about how they are likely to teach. But the situation at the end of the period of supervised practice—­ especially if augmented by P4T during the practice teaching period—­is vastly different. The novices at the point of professional induction have had many hours of practical experience: many concrete examples of things not going according to plan, of ineffective responses, of self-­ reflections and lessons from dialogue and research—­including philosophical research—­which they have carried back however awkwardly into practice. Gathered into a journal, these experiences provide more than enough suitable material for a philosophical essay as a capstone to their P4T course. We might include the personal teaching philosophy statement in a course of P4T seminars during the period of practice in this way. 1 The candidates are told right up front that by the end of the course, they will be expected to prepare a philosophy statement for use with potential employers as the final course project. 2 Each is asked at the very start to prepare a written statement of his or her teaching philosophy, addressing beliefs and values about structuring, instructing, managing, assessing student learning, relating to students and colleagues, etc., in the form of answers to a questionnaire or as a series of “I believe” statements (Caukin & Brinthaupt, 2017). These statements can be referred to and revised periodically during supervised teaching. Kagan (1992) suggests that these naive statements can be useful in creating dissonance to motivate growth during the practice period. 3 Each week in P4T, the novices discuss their concerns, “probing, clarifying and developing argued positions,” and forming new ideas to try out. The P4T tutors can augment the discussions with readings selected from the philosophy literature or from specially prepared P4T materials. P4T can draw insight from action research,

82  Leonard Waks structuring such “tryouts” as mini-­experiments to gather information and make inferences. Action research is now used throughout teacher education rather than as  a  separate course (Vaughan  & Burnaford, 2016), and new forms of philosophical action research might be developed. 4 As the novice teachers “try from their understanding,” they make notes in  a  reflection journal. Each week’s P4T seminar begins with  a  follow-­up discussion about the prior week’s efforts as reflected in the notes, before turning to new concerns arising during the week. 5 At the end of the P4T course, the candidates prepare a new statement of teaching philosophy in the form of a narrative essay. They draw on concrete experiences from their reflection notes, dialogues with supervising teachers and in P4T, and assigned philosophy texts. Based on these essays, they then prepare concise two-­ or three-­page “executive summaries” for professional use, and also prepare posters based for a final poster session (perhaps open to the public), including school leaders seeking to recruit new teachers (Caukin  & Brinthaupt, 2017). The statements can subsequently serve as a basis for professional growth in the form of articles for teaching magazines and professional development workshops. One can hardly imagine a better way to bring the teacher training period to a close than by having the novices gather their experiences together in such a comprehensive statement. And what better document for them to have in hand as they meet with school leaders looking to bring them into their schools and the teacher community of practice?

Notes 1 Throughout this section,  I  am indebted to the insightful discussion in Bengtsson (1993). 2 While some residency programmes have been operating for decades, the great majority of them in the United States were established after the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 (US Congress, 2008) provided a grants programme to support them; this programme has since provided more than 64 grants to residency programmes in the United States, and in 2014, the National Education Association formally recommended that traditional teacher preparation for undergraduates pursuing  a  bachelor’s degree incorporates many resident teacher programme principles (NYU Steinhardt, 2018). Residencies may become the standard form of teacher preparation, and there is much to be said in favour of this.

Works Cited Argyris, C.,  &  Schön, D. (1974). Theory in practice: Increasing professional effectiveness. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-­Bass.

Philosophy in Teacher Education  83 Ball, D. L., & Forzani, F. M. (2009). The work of teaching and the challenge for teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 60(5), 497–451. Bengtsson, J. (1993). Theory and practice: Two fundamental categories in the philosophy of teacher education. Educational Review, 45(3), 205–211. Berliner, D. (2006). The dangers of some new pathways to teacher certification. In F. K. Oser, F. Achtenhagen,  &  U. Renold (Eds.), Competence oriented teacher training: Old research demands and new pathways (pp.  117–129). Rotterdam, Netherlands: Sense. Bowne, M. (2017). Developing  a  teaching philosophy. Journal of Effective Teaching, 17(3), 59–63. Retrieved from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1175767 Carter, K., Cushing, K., Sabers, D., Stein, P.,  &  Berliner, D. (1988). Expert-­ novice differences in perceiving and processing visual classroom information. Journal of Teacher Education, 39(3), 25–31. Caukin, N. G., & Brinthaupt, T. M. (2017). Using a teaching philosophy statement as a professional development tool for teacher candidates. International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 11(2), 1–9. Cochran-­Smith, M.,  &  Fries, K. (2005). Researching teacher education in changing times: Politics and paradigms. In M. Cochran-­Smith & K. ­Z eichner (Eds.), Studying teacher education: The report of the AERA panel on research and teacher education (pp. 69–107). Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association. Crook, D. (2002). Educational studies and teacher education. British Journal of Educational Studies, 50(1), 57–75. de Groot, A. D. (1965). Thought and choice in chess. The Hague, Netherlands: Mouton. Delgado, M. (1999). Lifesaving 101: How a veteran teacher can help a beginner. Educational Leadership, 56(8), 27–29. Dreyfus, S. E., & Dreyfus, H. L. (1980). A five-­stage model of the mental activities involved in directed skill acquisition. Washington, DC: Storming Media. Edlin, M. L. (2013). Determining the philosophical orientation of pre-­service teachers: A causal-­comparative study. Tennessee State University, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, Eurydice (2004). Key topics in education in Europe, Vol. 3. The teaching profession in Europe: Profile, trends and concerns. Retrieved from http://www.indire.it/lucabas/lkmw_file/eurydice/Key_topics_3_keeping_ teaching_attractive_EN.pdf Fullan, M. G. (1993). Why teachers must become change agents. Educational Leadership, 50, 6. Fuller, F. F. (1969). Concerns of teachers: A developmental conceptualization. American Educational Research Journal, 6(2), 207–226. Furlong, J. (2005). New labour and teacher education: The end of an era. ­Oxford Review of Education, 31(1), 119–134. Garcia-­Padilla, M. C. (1993). Doing philosophy and the education of teachers. Harvard University, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing. Giroux, H. A. (1985). Teachers as transformative intellectuals. Social Education, 49(5), 376–379. Gobet, F. (2017). Three views on expertise: Philosophical implications for rationality, knowledge, intuition and education. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 51, 605–619.

84  Leonard Waks Kagan, D. M. (1992). Professional growth among preservice and beginning teachers. Review of Educational Research, 62(2), 129–169. Kennedy, M. M. (1999). The role of preservice teacher education. In L. Darling-­ Hammond  &  G. Sykes (Eds.), Teaching as the learning profession: Handbook of teaching and policy (pp. 54–86). San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass. Kini, T., & Podolsky, A. (2016). Does teaching experience increase teacher effectiveness? A review of the research. Palo Alto, CA: Learning Policy Institute. Retrieved from https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/our-­work/publications-­ resources/does-­teaching-­experience-­i ncrease-­teacher-­effectiveness-­review­research Komisar, B. P. (1968). Teaching: Act and enterprise. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 6, 168–193. Lai, K. C., & Grossman, D. (2008). Alternate routes in initial teacher education: A critical review of the research and policy implications for Hong Kong. Journal of Education for Teaching, 34(4), 261–275. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Leonard, G. (1992). Mastery: The keys to success and long-­term fulfillment. New York, NY: Plume. Lortie, D. C. (1975). Schoolteacher: A sociological study. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Maxwell, B. (2015). ‘Teacher as professional’ as metaphor: What it highlights and what it hides. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 49(1), 86–106. Maxwell, B., & Schwimmer, M. (2016). Professional ethics education for future teachers: A narrative review of the scholarly writings. Journal of Moral Education, 45(3), 354–371. NYU Steinhardt. (2018). Teacher residency programs:  A  clinical way to prepare educators. Retrieved from https://teachereducation.steinhardt.nyu.edu/ teacher-­residency-­programs/ Orchard, J., Heilbronn, R.,  &  Winstanley, C. (2016) Philosophy for teachers (P4T) – developing new teachers’ applied ethical decision-­making. Ethics and Education, 11(1), 42–54. Russell, T. (2013). Has reflective practice done more harm than good in teacher education? Phronesis, 2(1), 80–88. Retrieved from https://www.erudit.org/fr/ revues/phro/2013-­v2-­n1-­phro0576/1015641ar/ Ryan T. G. (2008). Philosophical orientation in pre-­service. Journal of Educational Thought, 42(3), 247–260. Sanders, D. P., & McCutcheon, G. (1986). The development of practical theories of teaching. Journal of Curriculum and Supervision, 2(1), 50–67. Schon, D. (1983). The reflective practitioner. How professionals think in action. New York, NY: Basic Books. Shulman, L. S. (1986). Those who understand: Knowledge growth in teaching. Educational Researcher, 15(2), 4–31. U. S. Congress. (2008). H.R.4137-­H igher Education Opportunity Act. Retrieved from https://www.congress.gov/bill/110th-­congress/house-­bill/4137? q=%7B%22search%22%3A%5B%22tax+2015%22%5D%7D&r=372 Van Manen, M. (1977). Linking ways of knowing with ways of being practical. Curriculum Inquiry, 6, 205–228.

Philosophy in Teacher Education  85 Vaughan, M., & Burnaford, G. (2016). Action research in graduate teacher education: A review of the literature 2000–2015. Educational Action Research, 24(2), 280–299. Wall, C. G. (2010). Exploring changes in preservice teachers’ beliefs about education throughout their learning-­to-­teach journey (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED522554 Zeichner, K. (2008, May/Aug).  A  critical analysis of reflection as  a  goal for teacher education. Educ. Soc., 29(103). http://www.scielo.br/scielo. php?pid=S0101-­73302008000200012&script=sci_arttext&tlng=en last accessed 2019/7/06

5 Philosophy for (Thinking) Teachers Janet Orchard and Carrie Winstanley

A pre-­service teacher recounts an experience of being lenient with a child who had broken a school rule because, she explained, she was sympathetic to the pupil’s circumstances which she knew about, but the other children did not. She reported some pupils complaining vociferously that overlooking the rule-­breaking was unfair, and she realized that they had interpreted this as an instance of the teacher failing to apply rules consistently. It was difficult for her to regain the confidence of the class as a result. She still believed that her actions were the right ones in the circumstances and yet she could also understand the children’s point of view. She was left feeling troubled, concerned that she could have handled the situation better, and perplexed about what she could have done otherwise. This example of  a  personal classroom story is taken from  a  Philosophy for Teachers (P4T) workshop (see Orchard, Heilbronn,  &  Winstanley, 2016) in which, in the context of  a  philosophically informed Community of Enquiry (CoE), the pre-­service teacher was willing to share her disquiet with others so that all might learn from it. The process was long, ­drawn-­out and complex as well as compelling. The story itself provoked  a  philosophically vigorous series of sessions, engaging participants in substantive dialogue through which concepts of fairness, equitable treatment, and equality were discussed and examined in some depth. Questions were posed about what might be done in similar circumstances. Participants went on to explore concerns such as “How can we treat people equally when different responses would be helpful?”, “What does it mean to be fair?”, “How can compassion be squared with equity?”. In  a  follow-­up discussion, key words and concepts arose from the questions that the group raised and were further interrogated. Highlighting these complex and principal ideas is a practice borrowed from Philosophy for Children (P4C), an established and well-­regarded pedagogical approach to introducing philosophy in schools, and on which P4T is based. Using a P4C strategy known as “concept stretching,” a hierarchy of the concepts was generated by the group and explored. Since some concepts are more generalized and generalizable than others, it

Philosophy for (Thinking) Teachers  87 was useful to drill down into the differences between apparently similar ideas in order to try to establish one overarching theme that was underpinning the discussion. For example, on the discussion of rules, fairness, and differential treatment, an overarching theme was “justice.” Following the discussion, participants were able to identify other specific issues and questions from their own practice relating to “justice” as an umbrella concept. Through further explorations of concepts and of related practical concerns, clarificatory and specific questions of substantive importance arose and were organized. This technique helped participants to think about possible ways forward in other similar situations when reflection would be needed in order to articulate reasons for actions. The resulting discussions were thoughtful, sustained, engaged, and stimulating, and the contributions clearly demonstrated some key elements of dialogic work (Alexander, 2017), and also the power of working together in a Community of Practice (CoP). In this chapter, we consider the wider potential of “Philosophy for Teachers” (P4T), a “Community of Practice” (CoP)/“Community of Enquiry” (CoE) style approach to pre-­service teacher education (TE) which promotes teachers’ capacities for ethical deliberation through philosophically informed dialogue between philosophers and practitioners. The model blends theory and practice in a way that is relatively unusual in pre-­service TE in England and should be extended, through an entitlement to carefully facilitated CoEs, ideally away from the regular pressures of the school or university classroom. This distinctive pedagogical approach (together with a change of teaching space) provides a distinctive kind of pre-­service experience which all teachers need if they are to develop the disposition to become “thinking teachers” in their classrooms, schools, and working lives. It could be offered flexibly, whether through overnight residential workshops, shorter sessions preferably in interesting settings, or through online platforms.

The Absence of Theory in Teacher Education in England The practice outlined earlier is experimental and sits on the margins of pre-­service TE in England. Since time for reflection may not be formally timetabled within the densely packed curriculum, opportunity for P4T may only be found in “leaky spaces” (Orchard et al., 2016), by which we mean pockets of relatively unstructured time that can be appropriated for the exploration of interesting and potentially challenging ideas. Even in these peripheral moments of time, in-­depth reflection can begin to illuminate tricky aspects of practice, although squeezing such discussions into leaky, liminal spaces in a non-­systematic way renders it impossible to ensure that complex issues, including ethical ones, are explored sufficiently and robustly. However, as there are long-­standing prejudices against theory in TE in England, as we go on to show next, we have

88  Janet Orchard and Carrie Winstanley made a virtue out of necessity in including any philosophical dimension at all to pre-­service TE in this context. In England, the absence of philosophy in TE should not be seen as a new phenomenon but a long-­standing one, further undermined by recent policy changes. As Richard Peters once observed, Very often in human life somebody starts something. It catches on and becomes an established practice. No further, more recondite type of explanation is necessary. (1976, p. 1) TE in England started in schools and for the most part, learning to teach on the job, and from experience, has continued as the preferred modus operandi. Moreover, the notion of “the teacher” and the professional formation required to become  a  “teacher” has varied considerably. In England, it has mirrored the class system (see, e.g., Aldrich, 1982; Roach, 1986; Simon, 1960), with the kind of teacher required to instruct poor children to read and write, being very different to the teacher initiating more affluent children into classical culture, and different again from the personal tutors of gentlemen (and, less often, governesses for wealthy girls). Take the educational experiences of children from poor working or lower middle classes in the 19th century, up until the 1870 Education Act. Children who received any education at all might attend a “dame school” which tended to be little more than a basic child-­minding service managed by an unqualified person, usually an older woman, hence the name. Structured academic learning was unusual in dame schools, although sometimes rudimentary reading might be taught. Other school opportunities included privately run unregulated institutions often managed and staffed by unqualified former soldiers or other workers unable to continue in their preferred career. Few children received much education over time, as they would often enter work at around the age of 12. If very motivated to self-­educate, possibilities might exist for 16-­year-­olds to act as assistants to local teachers at common day schools (see e.g. ­A ldrich, 1982 for more detail). Private schools, often aimed at wealthier middle-­class families, tended to be run by untrained “teachers” using their own homes, personal education, and initiative to teach reading and writing in order to make a living. Some schools even employed graduates to pass on the fruits of their university education, as was often the case in philanthropically established grammar schools. A good supply of (male) graduates was available following the expansion of higher education. Although equipped with subject knowledge, these graduates lacked any pedagogic knowledge and had little or no formal understanding of ideas about learning beyond their own experience of being educated.

Philosophy for (Thinking) Teachers  89 Following the 1870 Education Act, some theoretical and university-­ based approaches to pre-­service teacher formation did start to develop in dedicated training colleges. These courses focussed on child development and ideas about learning, in preparation for elementary school teaching, and philosophy enjoyed  a  limited, but established place. Some grew into undergraduate Bachelors in Education degrees (BEd, later with honours), inspired by liberal arts models of higher education, and closely linked to the development of access to higher education for women (Healey, 1984). Their aim was to educate fully rounded teachers who would be able to build and design curricula, and develop pedagogies based on real understanding of the purpose of education as well as how children develop. Balancing the education sub-­disciplines of psychology, history, philosophy, and later sociology, along with subject knowledge and pedagogical studies, formal teaching qualifications through accredited BEd routes flourished. BA Education Studies degrees also developed as a different, but related option during the 1960s and 1970s, precisely because of their potential as a liberal arts style interdisciplinary degree. Detached from TE, these courses promoted education as an academic discipline or field of study and harnessed the wider employment potential of education, encompassing roles in a range of learning institutions such as museums, galleries, and heritage centres, as well as entrepreneurial opportunities, and also jobs in local government and private companies. The BA Education Studies degree has offered another popular route into the Post-­ Graduate Certificate in Education (PGCE); the route by which most teachers now gain certified status and are formally prepared for service in England (Orchard & Winch, 2015). However, as PG accreditation programme offers only 12 weeks in university, it represents a highly condensed introduction to the formal study of education compared with the fuller provision enjoyed by BEd students. Many pre-­service teachers in England, particularly in secondary schools, enter the profession without a significant academic background in Education as a field with preparation for classroom practice by “doing education” (for 24 weeks in school) prioritized on the compressed PGCE courses, over “thinking about education.” Unsurprisingly, it is a tall order to do justice to structured knowledge and understanding of education, while simultaneously managing the complexities of applying such theory in ways that are clearly and immediately relevant to practice. Theory can easily fall by the wayside. University-­based training for secondary school teachers was not made mandatory in England until the 1970s. It is simply not—­and has never been—­an established, agreed premise system-­wide that teachers need rich and informed academic understanding of education in order to teach well. For example, when the National Curriculum was introduced via the Education Reform Act (1988), the job of designing learning tasks

90  Janet Orchard and Carrie Winstanley was removed from classroom teachers and transferred to national teams of curriculum experts who, in effect, told teachers what to do, and sometimes also told them how to do it. As centrally controlled national strategies for literacy and mathematics emerged, teachers became increasingly charged with delivery of preset curricula and with the administration of standardized tests. This shift removed some of the more complex requirements of their role that demanded theoretical understanding, in effect, a systematic deskilling of the profession (Phillips & Furlong, 2001) and reduction in teachers’ status. To counteract these concerns, periodically there have been attempts to professionalize teachers and raise the status of teaching to something equivalent to the practice of law, accountancy, or medicine. Masters’ level accreditation was introduced to the PGCE in England (in 2007) and teachers were expected to engage more fully with theory though not necessarily systematically with the educational foundations. However, this approach was swiftly challenged by a policy drive back towards  a  more traditional, school-­based approach to TE along with a change of government (DfE, 2010). The Carter Review of ITE in 2015 offered  a  more conciliatory tone; nonetheless, the review focussed more on the need to promote teachers’ engagement with (empirical) research evidence than theory, as part of the “what works” agenda (­Orchard & Winch, 2015). Thus, in England, the value of theory continues largely to be downplayed, betraying the dichotomous way in which notions of theory and practice are understood. Relegated to liminal spaces and times snatched in between more formal parts of TE programmes, interested people may snatch at opportune moments to introduce them, as we have, rather than systematically addressing the deficient engagement with theory. Such a model (or “non-­model” perhaps) has not been accepted so readily in other parts of the UK. Take Scotland, by contrast, where formal training and accreditation have long been mandatory for teachers, the importance of career-­long TE stressed, and recommendations accepted by policymakers and the teaching community alike that TE should be “striking the right balance and connections between university experience and school experience” (Donaldson, 2011, p.  7). This picture is currently similar in Wales (GTCW, 2011) and Northern Ireland (­Oancea & Orchard, 2012). Beyond the UK, patterns of pre-­service TE vary considerably; in some other contexts such as in many parts of the United States of America, there is a focus on employment-­based learning of the kind being pursued by successive governments in England. For example, in Hong Kong, the employment of unqualified teachers is commonplace in the local school system and pre-­service teachers undertake  a  Postgraduate Diploma in Education (PGDE) with a practicum of 16 weeks, a third less teaching practice than their English counterparts (Orchard & Wan, 2019).

Philosophy for (Thinking) Teachers  91 By contrast, in Finland, teachers are generally required to study to Master’s level and to engage in mandatory programmes of pedagogical learning, as well as annual in-­service training. In many parts of South Africa, initial TE is biased heavily towards theory and university-­led interaction with students (Orchard  &  Davids, 2019). In this context, pre-­service teachers may complete as little as one six-­week practicum (i.e. 30 days) in only one school, compared with a minimum of 120 days in two contrasting schools in England. When privileged to meet at first-­hand pre-­service teachers in South Africa, one may be struck by the many positive qualities of deep reflection developed through this kind of system at the level of principle (see Orchard  &  Davids, 2019). We recognize that too much concern with theory in the early stages of a teachers’ pre-­service formation could be an issue; if the novice practitioner is so divorced from practice, they remain unclear or under-­confident in how they might apply their principles wisely within the complex classroom environment. The theory-­rich provision exemplified by the South African system has much to teach other systems: however, it is about striking a theory–practice synthesis and balance. We do not regard the university as the exclusive intellectual domain or physical environment for critical reflection on teaching and classroom practice, understanding that this can happen in other places too, including staffrooms and online teachers’ fora. Moreover, we are anxious to avoid  a  straightforward binary in our account between the technical aspects of teaching practice and the thoughtful. Nevertheless, we maintain that the academic input of university-­based tutors able to provide structured and systematic teaching in educational theory related to practice, or their equivalent, has a crucial role to play in critically reflective teaching.

Theory, Philosophy, and Teaching Conceiving of theory and practice in binary opposition is unhelpful; both are necessary to good teaching, and they are integrated and interrelated. Having suggested that structured knowledge of education is necessary to teaching, we consider what this might entail and why. This is tricky, not least because of the lack of agreement about the nature of education, whether indeed it is a discipline in itself, a field of study, or, instead, an interdisciplinary field (as suggested by Tibble (1966), for example). Education is often defined by its major sub-­disciplines, which are primarily theoretical foundations, i.e. sociology of education, history of education, psychology of education, and philosophy of education. Other important concerns such as comparative education, technology, environmental issues, policy studies, inclusion, and the demands of other special interest groups are also part of the study of education, but the questions

92  Janet Orchard and Carrie Winstanley they seek to investigate can often be grouped within or across the major four theoretical disciplines. Since education questions can be addressed through sub-­disciplines, different knowledge bases, research approaches, and paradigms can be employed for education enquiry. Important questions in education require the tools, ideas, and methods of different disciplines; it is clear that they are all essential for different purposes. For those learning to be teachers, there is also the need to learn the pedagogy of the knowledge, subject(s), and skills that they are hoping to make the content or focus of their teaching, depending on the age and type of pupils they plan to work with once their “training” is completed. It is therefore vital to present robust arguments for promoting P4T, since there is competition for space on crowded TE curricula. Fortunately, philosophy may be argued for forcefully, due to the very nature of philosophy itself. While some aspects of philosophy can also be occupations of other disciplines, such as epistemology, which can become the focus of  a  curriculum subject, philosophy is the only one of the subjects that has ethics as a key element, a central consideration in teaching, albeit one that is under-­represented in current ITE provision (Maxwell et al., 2016). Ethics tell us how we should act, and ethical deliberation allows us to learn the skills of thinking this through and provides opportunities for us to exercise our understanding of ethical issues. Similarly, the entire endeavour of education, the explication of its very aims, is significant to all disciplines and across educational questions; and this central concern also falls under the remit of philosophy. These two aspects—­ethical concerns and discussions of the aims of education—­are, together, persuasive reasons for engaging student teachers in philosophical activities as part of their pre-­service formation. In the UK for example, the Professional Standards for assessing teachers (DfE, 2012) are divided into two sections, the second of which is devoted entirely to ethics, entitled “Personal and Professional Conduct.” However, this whole section of the standards is sidelined in general reviews and evaluation of students’ performance during their training, a “box to be ticked” as a formality except in overt and extreme cases of unprofessional behaviour. One can (we believe should) conceptualize education differently and understand it, from a more practical perspective, as an applied discipline (Lagemann, 2000) in which practice is central. Evidence about what practice is optimal would be taken from extant and developing research bases and educators could then apply this evidence to find the best way to deal with practical concerns in learning and teaching. In this conception, knowledge and principles are built from the ground up, based on generalizations from practice. Even here, on this (de-­theorized?) technical approach, philosophy continues to add something distinct as the underpinning of sound thinking.

Philosophy for (Thinking) Teachers  93 Faced with “evidence” of “what works” in education, teachers are required to weigh up what they are presented with and find ways to navigate through the continual stream of new scholarly publications and opinion pieces vying for their attention. Developing philosophical strategies for assessing arguments during their education helps teachers to build and adopt a philosophical and critical cast of mind. This disposition to apply sound reasoning, as a “thinking teacher,” is a protection against the unthinking adoption of potentially harmful fashionable practices and fads. Such fashions inevitably arise from the regurgitation of semi-­digested ideas such as those presented in the ubiquitous and multifarious round-­ups of research in myriad blogs and articles scattered across cyberspace and other platforms. The thinking teacher will not only be questioning new ideas, which may indeed have value, such as the latest research studies into wearing slippers in the classroom, or the current use of mindfulness activities, the newest ideas about ability grouping, or even questions about ability itself. Of course, these ideas will be debated as they crop up. However, the thinking teacher will also take time to reappraise and reconsider basic commonly used concepts in education like “engagement,” “potential,” and “learning.” It is reductive to think of philosophy simply in terms of providing teachers with practice in developing faculties of critical thinking. This may be part of what philosophy can offer; however, the CoE, in particular, is much more about helping to make good reasoning habitual, rather than  a transferable “tool” or “skill.” As Bailin, Case, Coombs, and Daniels note, what characterizes thinking […] as critical is the quality of the reasoning. Thus, in order to become a (more) critical thinker one must understand what constitutes quality reasoning, and have the commitments relevant to employing and seeking quality reasoning. (1999, p. 281) As this way of considering the value of philosophy shows, a false dichotomy is created by polarizing technical approaches to teaching on the one hand and philosophical reflection on teaching on the other. Using philosophy to find the best of the technical shows how the two can be happily interconnected, with philosophy lending itself to inter-­ or transdisciplinary thinking about the practical. It is a legitimate criticism of some philosophy of education which has not always been sufficiently attentive to such possibilities; and for genuine progress in theorizing about practice, there needs to be positive engagement with other related fields. In this critical cast of mind, the thinking teacher can develop and grow as a professional, continually renewing and reflecting on their practice, also serving as a defence against faddish shifts in educational ideas.

94  Janet Orchard and Carrie Winstanley

“Philosophy for Teachers”: A New Approach We turn finally to report in more detail on the new pedagogical development with which we have been involved, together with others also committed to developing teachers’ philosophical thinking. In England, given the ambivalent relationship with theory in pre-­service TE already outlined, we have found it helpful to explore the potential of “Philosophy for Teachers” (P4T), an alternative “community of practice” (CoP) pedagogical approach established between practitioners and philosophers (see Orchard, Heilbronn,  &  Winstanley, 2016, 2019). In its idealized form, workshops took place in England supported by the Higher Education Academy (HEA) and the Philosophy of Education Society of Great ­Britain (PESGB), and in South Africa, funded by the PESGB and the South ­African National Research Foundation (NRF) (Orchard & Davids, 2019, accepted for publication). Shorter, potentially more sustainable versions of P4T are also being explored (see Orchard, 2018). We maintain that these, or other methods for encouraging reflective and theoretically informed practice, are beneficial for teachers and teacher educators. We consider it feasible to facilitate these practices through training teacher educators to make use of P4T practices in various settings and at different junctures in their programmes. Here, though, we explain more about how we came to use P4T and how it works in practice. P4T, as the name suggests, has been influenced by the well-­known and highly regarded dialogical pedagogical model of “P4C” or “Philosophy for Children” (Orchard et al., 2016). The generous contribution of established practitioners of P4C/PwC in developing “P4T” workshops has been a significant element in its success; they have long argued for the integration of P4C within TE, so as to introduce student teachers to its theory and practice, and pioneered its practice (see Murris, 2012, 2014, 2016). The impetus for P4T arose out of the recognition that teachers needed “space” and a particular quality of time during their professional education in which to reflect on ethical matters as these arose from their practice. As Campbell (2003) has identified, the lone teacher in the classroom struggles frequently to cope “without much guidance with the dilemmas and tensions that unavoidably surface when one is engaged in the moral domain” (pp.  138–139). Scant information can be found on learning about ethics in TE (Walters et  al., 2017), nor is there any formal requirement for teacher educators in England to teach ethics to pre-­service teachers (Maxwell et  al., 2016). We used the external mandate of the need for pre-­service teachers to meet Part B of the Teachers’ Standards (DfE, 2012) to make participation in P4T during  a  hectic PGCE programme possible. The explicit aims of P4T have been detailed elsewhere (see Orchard et al., 2016, p. 48), but in sum, they include:

Philosophy for (Thinking) Teachers  95 • • • • •

creating space and time for critical reflection away from the ‘busy-­ ness’ of schools; creating  a  community of practice in  a  “safe-­space” conducive to work where potentially confidential concerns can be aired; developing independence and confidence amongst student teachers for managing examples of ethically complex and potentially challenging classroom situations; addressing existential concerns typically arising amongst beginning teachers when dealing with challenging pupil behaviour, including burnout, and sustaining motivation and a sense of “moral purpose”; offering teacher educators professional development in dialogic teaching and learning, and sharing the value and possibilities of such engagement.

After various iterations of P4T, we found that meaningful and productive reflection on ethical dilemmas arises readily when participants identify incidents from their own experience and use these to launch the dialogues. This has become a P4T cornerstone. Four residential workshops have taken place, each steered by an experienced Society for the Advancement of Philosophical Enquiry (SAPERE) trainer, who was also a philosopher of education, and other invited applied philosophers were included within the CoE. The coordinator acted as a co-­enquirer, helping the group in ways, such as building a collaborative, reflective ethos, and fostering a cooperative, caring culture grounded in mutual respect. This functioned as a “safe space” in which ideas could be expressed by group members committed to searching for understanding, meaning, and values, always supported by reasons. As Murris notes (2008, p. 671), a CoE has to be able to respond to the thoughts of its members in ways that are “genuinely open-­ended, critical and self-­reflective.” The facilitator must be “actively seeking opportunities to be perplexed, numbed and open to change through reflection and self-­reflection” (ibid.), that is enabling and attentive to the needs of others. The ethical dilemmas explored in the workshop were based on participants’ own direct classroom experience. The example at the top of this chapter offers an illustration, taken from one of the P4T seminars. In order to generate ideas, participants were invited to think of an experience from practicum or classroom experience in which they felt a sense of unease or discomfort and which they felt able to share with one other participant. Once told, these stories were then shared in small groups, allowing the dilemmas to unfold, along with accounts of how people had worked through their difficulties. From each small group, one story was chosen to go forward to the whole group, affording a degree of anonymization to all participants. Once these stories had been shared, a vote was taken culminating in agreement to focus on one of the narratives (Orchard et al., 2016).

96  Janet Orchard and Carrie Winstanley

Explicit and Implicit Philosophical Thinking in Teacher Education As already established, few pre-­service teachers in England have time to engage formally in philosophical reflection, or in activities that support sustained and significant reflection on teaching. P4T offers the possibility of this through what we have come to regard as “implicitly” philosophical thinking (Orchard, 2019), i.e. reflection on matters inherent to educational practice which might be characterized as philosophical, but not identified overtly as such. It speaks to the principle which we have just promoted; that philosophy can help to make good reasoning in teaching habitual, to find the best of the technical, happily interconnecting theory and practice, the philosophical and technical, as part of inter-­ or transdisciplinary thinking. Furthermore, the P4T initiative has been introduced in England where there might not otherwise have been any philosophical input at all, through the provision of space, expertise, and  a  quality of pedagogic experience involving learning through genuine dialogue within a CoE. Dialogue, Wolfe and Alexander (2008) maintain, may be distinguished from discussion, as the exchange of ideas with a view to sharing information and solving problems, to  a  process which goes much further, seeking common understanding through structured, cumulative questioning. Discussion, however, guides and prompts, but reduces choices, minimizes risks, and expedites the “handover” of extant concepts and principles (Wolfe  &  Alexander, 2008, p.  3). They continue, arguing that “dialogue is not simply a precondition for learning but essential for knowledge construction and human development” (ibid., p. 4). Alexander (2017) identifies the following elements as essential for dialogic teaching, which help to imagine the nature of exchanges which take place in P4T sessions (Orchard et al., 2019): • • • • • • • • •

interactions which encourage students to think, and to think in different ways; questions which invite much more than simple recall; answers which are justified, followed up, and built upon rather than merely received; feedback which informs and leads thinking forward as well as encourages students; contributions which are extended rather than fragmented; exchanges which chain together into coherent and deepening lines of enquiry; discussion and argumentation which probes and challenges rather than leading to unquestioningly acceptance; professional engagement with subject matter which liberates classroom discourse from the safe and conventional; classroom organization, climate, and relationships, which make all this possible.

Philosophy for (Thinking) Teachers  97 As Freire (1972) maintained, dialogue in education offers a basis from which people (in this case new teachers) might be motivated to engage in praxis, understood as taking action that is informed by values, i.e. implicitly, if not explicitly philosophical. Dialogue places reflected-­on-­ action as central for learners, offering the possibility of identifying and publicly voicing practical ways forward likely to make positive change to learners’ situations. SAPERE, one of many advocates of P4C, draws attention to the importance of “4 Cs” in its conception of dialogue: critical, creative, caring, and collaborative. This is something beneficial in P4T too, as it has come to be practised. Elsewhere, we have argued that it can be helpful to see P4T as an example of a professional CoP in terms of its functions and achievement (Orchard et al., 2019). “Professional Learning Communities” (PLCs) are one specific kind of CoP whose benefits for in-­service teachers are widely recognized (Bolam et al., 2005) in which people can share and critically interrogate their practice in an “ongoing, reflective, collaborative, inclusive, learning-­oriented, growth-­promoting way” (Toole & Louis, 2002). We can see ways in which P4T might also develop into ongoing collaborative work undertaken with in-­service teachers, not simply focussed on creating a temporary CoE. More broadly, Jimenez-­Silva and Olson (2012) have found that where pre-­service teachers have successfully engaged in a CoP with teachers in schools, they have a better understanding of the relationship of theory in practice (2012, p. 343) than when a dialogue of this kind is absent. Similarly, Sutherland et al. (2005) found that CoPs that involve experience of practical issues in schools and the opportunity for reflection better enable participating pre-­service teachers to “relate the theory taught at the university to their practical needs” so that “the theory became more meaningful for them” (ibid., p. 90). Once again, we see the value of philosophical skills and experiences in breaking down the false dichotomy of theory versus practice and replacing it with a healthier model in which theory and practice inform one another. Reflecting philosophically through  a  CoE approach avoids the difficulties inherent to the traditional mode of delivering the educational foundations, whereby theory can be perceived as divorced and separate from practice. Time is an issue on Education Studies degrees as well as PGCE programmes, with pressures that require juggling ranging from the competing demands of multiple education sub-­disciplines, changing contemporary priorities, and for those on BEd programmes, extensive school experience. We have organized the P4T workshops deliberately to take place towards the end of programmes during the summer months, when formally assessed work has been completed. Moreover, at this point, participants have a reasonable amount of practical experience in the classroom on which to reflect and to relate better to the shared experiences of their peers.

98  Janet Orchard and Carrie Winstanley The opportunities created are mostly for implicit philosophy; however, P4T may also offer limited exposure to more explicitly structured philosophical thinking during pre-­service TE. Associated more readily with formal courses in philosophy of education, this might happen in the context of P4T, through the introduction of explicitly philosophical and well-­argued cases developed by philosophers and philosophers of education within the context of the CoE. Skilled and knowledgeable teacher educators may bring specialization in philosophy of education explicitly into their work by encouraging their students to make sense of established debates from which they can position their own beliefs and ideas about schooling, specifically, and about education more broadly. “Explicitly” philosophical issues which teachers face in educational settings include issues of justice and fairness, like those raised in the opening vignette. These are matters on which a clear grasp of an abstract principle might helpfully be brought to bear on practice with the potential to illuminate well-­justified ways of acting (see Levinson  &  Fay, 2016 for a good example of an explicitly philosophical approach). It is important to note that within the CoE, due to the collectivist, non-­hierarchical approach to learning in this context, the “philosophers” need not be the tutors/ teacher educators but could equally be the beginning teachers themselves. For example, one participant, who had both a first degree and a doctorate in moral philosophy, made a significant positive philosophical contribution to the first P4T workshop. Other philosophers of education proved helpful in guiding clarification, demonstrating how P4T operates typically as philosophical enquiry in the community. The more formalized contribution of philosophers to P4T can whet teachers’ appetites for further engagement, including attendance at dedicated philosophy of education events.1 Working with funders and scholarly organizations has afforded opportunities for follow-­­up activities whereby novice teachers and other practitioners attend Summer Schools, seminars, and even national and international conferences, supported by scholarships, subsidies, and grants.

Developing Philosophy for Teachers So far,  a  good case has been established through the pedagogical initiatives already undertaken for promoting teachers’ capacity for ethical deliberation through philosophically informed dialogue of the kind we have described. Going forward, a number of initiatives are being developed by us, as well as other teacher educators whose own practice and scholarship have led them to formulate complementary strategies motivated by similar concerns. We have argued for the importance of developing teachers’ habitual good reasoning. One line of development has been to extend the P4T model to apply philosophical reasoning to weighing educational

Philosophy for (Thinking) Teachers  99 research claims, for example in the case of applying neuroscientific ideas to teachers’ understanding of the teenage brain (Orchard, Howard-­ Jones, & Ioannou, 2018). Two successful workshops took place on an English Secondary PGCE programme; these ran for a few hours each, i.e. were much shorter than the 24-­hour residential iteration of P4T, but retained the CoE approach. Other teacher educators have established similar practices (Haynes, 2011; Murris, 2014), supporting our view that this distinctive pedagogical approach within TE is much needed if thinking teachers are to be cultivated. So what distinguishes our notion of P4T from using P4C in TE, given the two initiatives are so closely related? As a “rule of thumb,” we have identified three features that mark out our particular interpretation (­Orchard et al., 2019). First, the Deweyan notion of democratic practice as a “form of associated living” has been taken to another level by residential P4T workshops. Here, a temporary community is formed, acting as an adjunct to conventional pre-­service TE provision, with  a  focus on collaboration. By bringing together specific expertise, this arrangement affords access to expert facilitation which is more practical in the short term than ensuring that all or many teacher educators are to be trained in P4C/P4T methods. In the longer term, we would argue for more widespread training for teacher educators. If residential experiences cannot be organized, an alternative may be simply to find a different location for a session, as this brings a change to how people communicate (Winstanley, 2014) or to explore virtual opportunities for alternative pedagogical interactions. Secondly, P4T is conceived more broadly than P4C. It continues to evolve as a means of promoting collaborative, philosophically engaged professional learning through dialogic pedagogy. Hence, experimental initiatives described as P4T have been undertaken with groups of teachers and are designed deliberately to move away from the P4C model specifically to reflect other dialogical pedagogies (elaborated in Orchard, 2018). It could be argued that this leaves P4T under-­theorized in the short term; however, it remains freer in the longer term, allowing flexible and adaptive development. We have stopped short of providing a “how to” guide, preferring to outline the principles here, since they are widely applicable, which others can then adapt and develop. The notion of  a  virtual international CoE comprising philosophers, teacher educators, and teachers is currently being explored, for example, using an online platform which promotes dialogic enquiry based on similar but distinctive principles to those promoted by P4C (Orchard, Wan, Davids, & Beard, 2019). This presents certain advantages, not least the removal of the need to fund participants’ travel and accommodation while still bringing very different groups of people together within the CoE. One potential disadvantage is the way in which virtual opportunities to form CoEs can potentially exclude those who have trouble

100  Janet Orchard and Carrie Winstanley acquiring regular and reliable Internet access and for whom a face-­to-­ face gathering might be more practical and sustainable. Nevertheless, online CoEs could provide democratic and open access to reflection on teaching, including direct interaction with philosophers, across communities created outside formal TE contexts. There are no obvious reasons to us why virtual groups could not flourish (we have found 12 to 18 participants to be the optimum number in face-­to-­face groups) adapted to suit by the people involved and according to the needs of a range of differing contexts. Thirdly, P4T blends theory and practice together in  a  characteristic way, addressing our concerns as teacher educators in England that the structure and content of courses where philosophy of education is presented tend to fail to engage. Through P4T, it is easier, in our context, to demonstrate the relevance of theory in general (and philosophy in particular) to novice teachers who, we have argued, can struggle to grasp easily the relevance of philosophy to their practice. At least one tradition of teaching philosophy is modelled by P4T, as well as opening up discussions about more general core issues in TE. One issue with P4T as an activity situated within the leaky, liminal spaces in TE, working at its peripheries, is that it remains optional and so subject to chance. Theory matters in TE; we need thinking teachers. So, while our work and similar work by others offer a glimpse of what can be achieved, we must continue to advocate for P4T as an entitlement. We see benefits for practice across the spectrum of provision we have described, but should be more central. We address the current disconnect between theory and practice in TE. P4T enlivens the teaching of educational teaching by showing its relevance and inextricable connection to reflective and principled practice, thus promoting the formation of teachers who can think. The creation of CoEs, whether virtual or actual, encourages reflective teachers to engage in professional learning through dialogue. We understand that modern universities with large numbers of students and approaches to teaching focussed on knowledge transfer make it hard to engage in complex work requiring careful interaction. However, even in this context, it is feasible to identify dedicated spaces and places for learning of this nature as  a  basic entitlement. We have found that the intensity of the residential experience served as a significant part of the process, but where this is unfeasible, recognize that there are other options, such as taking a group to a different setting or promoting online discussion.

Concluding Remarks These experiments and explorations have established open-­ended, critical, and self-­reflective CoEs, focussed on shared ethical and more

Philosophy for (Thinking) Teachers  101 broadly philosophical concerns, albeit for a relatively intense brief period of shared time. The factors contributing to the success of the sessions have included: time dedicated to  a  form of ethical deliberation based on real experiences, making use of an established pedagogical model, being led by an experienced facilitator, creating an appropriate space for deliberation, incorporating structured knowledge and understanding of philosophy and characteristically philosophical method through the contribution of participants with philosophy specialisms applied to education, and taking time to build the skills necessary for a genuine collaborative enquiry. As Bailin et al. (1999, p. 282) have concluded: The kinds of habits of mind, commitments or sensitivities necessary for being a critical thinker include such things as open-­mindedness, fair-­mindedness, the desire for truth, an inquiring attitude and a respect for high-­quality products and performances. Thus, fostering critical thinking would involve the development of such knowledge and commitments. To date, ethical deliberation on matters arising in practice for teachers has proved an important focus of this work and the model we have built up has worked well in this regard. However, we are now working to extend the reach of P4T in terms of the sustainability and scaling-­up of the initiative, using other possible dialogical pedagogies and in relation to other philosophical issues in education which teachers might think about. We are confident of future success in principle on the basis of what we have experienced. However, time and conducive space are resource-­ intensive, and access to independent facilitators with specific knowledge, understanding, and pedagogical competencies is also challenging. There is  a  clear need for some kind of philosophical dimension in TE, and we are convinced that it should be an entitlement to all beginning teachers during initial education. For now, P4T has offered provision that is adjunct to the TE core, identifying opportunities in “leaky spaces” (Orchard et al., 2016) through relevant, immersive workshops. Nonetheless, it is clear that the programme made a considerable, potentially transformative difference for many of the participants; and that regardless of context, teachers will always be confronted by philosophical challenges for which they may otherwise remain unprepared. The P4T format presents an invaluable opportunity for navigation of these challenges.

Acknowledgements We are deeply indebted to our friend and collaborator Ruth Heilbronn with whom many of the key ideas and guiding principles on which we

102  Janet Orchard and Carrie Winstanley have built here have been developed. Any infelicities it contains are our responsibility and should in no way be attributed to her.

Note 1 See PESGB website http://www.philosophy-­of-­education.org/news/teacher-­ scholarship-­awards-­1 accessed 24.04.2019 for details of a Teachers’ Scholarships scheme to attend the Annual PESGB Conference.

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Philosophy for (Thinking) Teachers  103 Murris, K. (2012). Student teachers investigating the morality of corporal punishment in South Africa. Ethics and Education, 7(1), 45–59. Murris, K. (2014). Corporal punishment and the pain provoked by the community of enquiry pedagogy in the university classroom. Africa Education Review, 11(2), 219–235. Murris, K. S. (2008). Philosophy with children, the stingray and the educative value of disequilibrium. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 42(3–4), 667–685. Murris, K. (2016). School ethics with student teachers in South Africa: An innovative educational intervention. In H. E. Lees & N. Noddings (Eds.), The Palgrave international handbook on alternative education (pp.  195–210). London, UK: Palgrave MacMillan. Oancea, A., & Orchard, J. (2012). The future of teacher education. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 46(4), 574–588. Orchard, J. (2018, August). Practical judgement, religious education research and the professional formation of RE teachers. Paper presented at Session XXI of the International Seminar on Religious Education and Values, Nuremberg 29th July – 3rd. Orchard, J. (2019). Philosophy for teachers in teacher education. In M. P ­ eters (Ed.), Encyclopaedia of teacher education. Singapore: Springer Nature. [OnlineFirst] Orchard, J.,  &  Davids, N. (2019). Philosophy for teachers (P4T) in South Africa  –  Re-­imagining provision to support new teachers’ applied ethical decision-­making. Ethics and Education, 14(3), 333–350. DOI: 10.1080/17449642.2019.1617392. Orchard, J., Heilbronn, R., & Winstanley, C. (2016). Philosophy for Teachers (P4T): Developing new teachers’ applied ethical-­decision making. Ethics and Education, 11(1), 42–54. Orchard, J., Heilbronn, R.,  &  Winstanley, C. (2019). In philosophical conversation with new and beginning teachers. In A. Fulford, G. Robinson, & R. Smith (Eds.), Philosophy in, and with, the community: Theories, practices, and possibilities. London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic. Orchard, J., Howard-­Jones, P., & Ioannou, K. (2018, September). Philosophy for Teachers (P4T), neuroscience, morality and initial teacher education. Paper presentation at the British Education Research Association Annual Conference, University of Northumbria. Orchard, J., & Wan, S. (2019). East meets West: Philosophy, critical reflection and the development of teacher leadership in teacher education. In M. ­Peters (Ed.), Encyclopaedia of teacher education. Singapore: Springer Nature. Orchard, J., Wan, S., Davids, N.,  &  Beard, S. (2019, June). Re-­humanising Teacher Education: Exploring the potential of online international intercultural dialogue. Paper Presented at the British Education Research Association SIG Event, Global perspectives: Re-imagining education. University of Worcester. Orchard, J., & Winch, C. (2015). What training do teachers need? Why theory is necessary to good teaching. IMPACT 22, PESGB. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.

104  Janet Orchard and Carrie Winstanley Peters, R. S. (1976). Introduction: The contemporary problem. In R. S. Peters (Ed.), The Role of the Head (pp.  1–10). London, UK: Routledge  &  Kegan Paul Ltd. Phillips, R.,  &  Furlong, J. (Eds.). (2001). Education, reform and the state: Twenty five years of politics, policy and practice. London, UK: Routledge. Roach, J. (1986).  A  history of secondary education in England 1800–1870. London, UK and New York, NY: Longman. Simon, B. (1960). The two nations and the educational structure, 1780–1870. Chadwell Heath: Lawrence & Wishart Ltd. Sutherland, L., Scanlon, L., & Sperring, A. (2005). New directions in preparing professionals: Examining issues in engaging students in communities of practice through a school-­university partnership. Teaching and Teacher Education, 21(1), 79–92. Tibble, J. W. (Ed.). (1966). The study of education. London, UK: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Toole, J. C., & Louis, K. S. (2002). The role of professional learning communities in international education. In K. Leithwood & P. Hallinger (Eds.), Second International Handbook of Educational Leadership and Administration (pp. 245–279). Dordrecht: Kluwer. Walters, S., Heilbronn, R., & Daly, C. (2017). ‘Ethics education in initial teacher education: pre-­service provision in England’. Professional Development in Education. Retrieved 4 April, 2018 from https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/ abs/10.1080/19415257.2017.1318773 Winstanley, C. (2014). Spaced out: The impact of museum spaces on teaching and learning. Education Sciences and Society (Special Edition: Arts and Museum Education), 5(2), 65–82. Wolfe, S.,  &  Alexander, R. J. (2008). Argumentation and dialogic teaching: Alternative pedagogies for  a  changing world. DCSF/Futurelab. Retrieved May 22, 2018 from http://www.robinalexander.org.uk/wp-­content/uploads/2012/05/wolfealexander.pdf

6 A Problems-­Based Approach in Philosophy of Education Dianne Gereluk

A general observation amongst students who enter a teacher education programme is that they dwell on two key questions: Will I know enough about teaching my particular subject area (Mallihai, 2008; Neil & Moore, 2005)? What are some effective classroom management strategies to ensure that I do not lose control of my class (Ersozlu & Cayci, 2016; Said, 2017)? Rare is the pre-­service teacher who starts with the assumption that teaching is necessarily a philosophical endeavour. More often than not, there is a reluctance, ambivalence, and sometimes hostility towards having to take  a  class of this nature as part of becoming  a  certified teacher. As such, student teachers do not see the weight or relevancy of such courses; similarly, philosophy of education classes may be vulnerable to being removed from teacher education if the perception is that the subject material lacks direct relevance or applicability. Given that unease exists amongst students in having to be enrolled in a philosophy of education class, I argue that the task of those who teach this course is to make explicit the relevance of philosophy of education with a particular emphasis on how philosophy will inform their teaching practices. Starting from a problems-­based approach, I suggest that essential questions and issues may make immediately relevant the contested and negotiated sites of education. In this way, students come to see the moments of disruption and interruption to their preconceived notions about teaching and learning, and how their personal world views necessarily affect their perceptions about the nature of teaching. By shifting the emphasis towards a problems-­based approach in philosophy, I contend that the shift from a canonical approach to learning about the key theorists to that of an applied problems-­based approach may better address the substantive problems of modern educational discourses through a philosophical lens.

A Case for Shifting How We Teach Philosophy of Education In posing the shift in how faculty members consider the approach of teaching philosophy of education to undergraduate students, there is

106  Dianne Gereluk a potential perceived threat for the long and established tradition of philosophy of education (Chinnery, Hare, Kerr,  &  Okshevsky, 2007; ­Colgan, 2018; Winch, 2012).  I  do not wish to belabour the merits of the various thrusts within canonical approaches to philosophy of education. The assumed starting premise is that by reading the great works of philosophers, students cultivate the capacities to read, understand, analyse, and critique the forms of arguments. The aim was for students to draw upon philosophical reasoning, dispositions, and skills in how they view and prepare for their role as teachers. First, the canonical approach assumed that the foundations or philosophy of education course would provide the level of depth necessary to understand deeply the philosophical arguments of the theorists studied. For instance, it would not be uncommon for foundations classes to study Plato’s Republic or Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics to highlight and show the progression of theoretical thought and the underpinning principles before moving on to the selected great thinkers that the lecturer would think are pivotal to the development of educational thought. Yet, the brevity of these discussions within the limited amount of devoted time in an entry-­level philosophy of education class leaves me to wonder whether students are able to grasp in any detail or depth the relevance or significance of the theorists. There is a relative brevity in what is highlighted, and yet, the lecturer may assume that it is sufficient for students to go away with both the understanding and the ability to apply it in how they proceed in their work. Furthermore, the canonical approach assumes that the language in the texts of the great thinkers could be accessible to students given their relative lack of training in philosophy. Given that education students do not reside primarily in  a  humanities department, but come from multiple disciplines, there may be an unfair expectation that students will naturally be able to navigate the philosophical texts. To be clear, I do not advocate for a “dumbing down” approach, but there must be an attentiveness to the level of expectation of what we hope students will gain from being introduced to philosophy of education, particularly those who may be apprehensive, resistant, or apathetic about the nature of philosophy and its influence on education. The challenge, arguably, is to make philosophy come to life in the classes, with students energized and engaged with the fundamental enduring philosophical questions that linger implicitly in the structures, discourses, and practices in schools and education more broadly. Finally, the canonical approach assumed that students would be able to see the applicability and relevance to contemporary educational discourses by virtue of the ideal philosophical analysis that was to be made explicit in the classes. For instance, a lecturer may assume that by studying Rousseau’s Emile, this would help students not only to understand the foundations of progressive education but make explicit how these

A Problems-Based Approach  107 principles may inform their own assumptions about teaching. While I do think that there is value in studying the great theorists, the centrality of these theorists as the foundation of how to teach philosophy of education classes may unintentionally undermine the broader philosophical project to elevate the ways in which future teachers see the centrality of teaching as both an ethical and moral endeavour. The disconnect between the high-­level philosophical theories may be lost in translation for students who find it difficult to translate and apply how those principles may inform their judgements on a daily basis. I do not believe that philosophy of education will become more prominent in teacher education programmes. The increasing complexity of the profession and its multiple demands on teachers to have foundational knowledgeable in a range of issues such as neuroscience, mental health, disciplinary expertise, pedagogy, and assessment suggests that more in-­depth study in philosophy of education at the undergraduate level is unlikely. Given the scarcity of resources and time, philosophy of education tends to be taught as an introductory survey course, integrated within the broader disciplinary areas as an interdisciplinary theme, or as part of an ethics and law course. Given the limited scope that philosophy of education has in undergraduate programmes, combined with the general anxiety and reluctance of students to prioritize other aspects of teacher preparation beyond the philosophical educational debates of our time, this chapter offers an alternative pedagogical approach to teaching philosophy of education. Specifically, I argue that educators need to reconsider how to approach philosophy of education that draws explicitly from educational problems of the past and present. As such, let me move on to the case for considering a problems-­based approach.

Problems-­Based Learning Problems-­based learning has been  a  common method of learning and teaching in professional programmes, first emerging in medicine (Barrows, 2000), but moving into other disciplinary areas such as social work, engineering, and education (Duch, Groh, & Allen, 2001; Evenson & Hmelo, 2000). The increasing use of problems-­based learning is noteworthy, but it also conjures up concerns and limitations about this approach.  I  will first outline some of the key principles of problems-­ based learning. Following that,  I  will outline the criticisms. Despite these concerns, I argue that the application of problems-­based learning may prove to be an effective alternative pedagogical approach in which to engage students with philosophical material in  a  teacher education programme. Given its ambiguous and rhetorical nature, let me first articulate the principles of problems-­based learning. Problems-­based learning draws upon constructivism, specifically how individuals construct knowledge and sense-­making by drawing upon

108  Dianne Gereluk their current and past experiences. In this way, there is an active participatory aspect to learning that helps individuals to make judgements about the information that they use to construct and organize their ideas, the development of hypotheses, reflecting on their experiences, and the ability to apply and transfer that learning to other settings (Coombs & Elden, 2004). Broadly speaking, constructivism is particularly attentive to the way in which learners think about their own learning, and it is necessarily interdependent upon the experiences of those learners and others (Phillips, 2000). Specifically, Phillips notes two distinctions about constructivism. The first places constructivism as: disciplines (or public knowledge), are human constructs, and that the form that knowledge has taken in these fields has been determined by such things as politics, ideologies, values, the exertion of power and the preservation of status, religious beliefs, and economic, self-­interest. This thesis denies that the disciplines are objective reflections of an ‘external world.’ (p. 6) The second perspective of constructivism gives particular weight to the way in which individuals learn. This second type of constructive view is that learners actively construct their own (“internal” some would say) sets of meanings or understandings; knowledge is not a mere copy of the external world, nor is knowledge acquired by passive absorption or by simple transference from one person (a teacher) to another (a learner or knower). In sum, knowledge is made, not acquired. (Phillips, 2000, p. 7) While both aspects of constructivism are relevant, problems-­based learning more fully is positioned within the latter camp. I do not wish to debate the merits of constructivism here. It is commonly used and applied in teacher education programmes in how we think, design, and create learning environments for students in the classroom, and is one of the dominant learning theories that underpin teacher education programmes (Phillips, 2000). At a fundamental level, problems-­based learning places the problem at the centre of a learning activity. The aim is to create “real-­world problems to motivate students to identity and apply concepts and information, work collaboratively and communicate effectively” (Duch et  al., 2001, p.  6). This further helps students develop  a  sense of ownership and agency in the outcomes of the learning process. Arguably, this will help not only in the retention and memory of the learning objective, but the intent is for students to see the value in how philosophy may actively

A Problems-Based Approach  109 support how to navigate and make discernments about their teaching practices. The real-­world problems help make explicit the philosophical debates that are at the centre of many contested issues in education. Letting students practise philosophy through problems-­based learning helps students to learn the ways in which philosophy may help guide and make explicit biases, assumptions, and competing values that are often at play. Broadly speaking, problems-­based learning is commonly differentiated from more traditional teacher-­directed forms of pedagogy, which include: 1 Curricular organization: around problems rather than disciplines, integrated, emphasis on cognitive skills as well as knowledge. 2 Learning environment: use of small groups, tutorial instruction, active learning, student-­centred, independent study, use of relevant “problems.” 3 Outcomes: focus on skills development and motivation, abilities for lifelong learning. (Newman et al., 2003, p. 4) The nature of the classroom becomes one of students working through  a  series of problems, vignettes, or scenarios. And similarly, rather than the faculty member directing the lecture and the key principles, the role is shifted where the interactions amongst students help to formulate the principles and judgements that guide how they reason through  a  particular case. The overarching aim is for students to be able to not only understand, interpret, and navigate both the processes about how to proceed in a given problem, but to apply and transfer those skills and knowledge to other real-­l ife experiences. This does not mean that the faculty member is  a  passive participant or simply non-­present. Arguably, the teacher has a pivotal role in pulling out the key philosophical principles that have guided the problems. The teacher may pause to help support students to draw upon the theories, evidence, and values to highlight how drawing upon a range of evidence supports the strength of an argument, and teases out the complexities and nuances of what is central to the contested issue; those interruptions and guidance are vital lest it becomes reduced to an activity for the sake of arguing, and what can be reduced to what I refer to as “pub talk.”1 It is in this way that the act of doing philosophy may help to make explicit the complexity of the argument and the nature of the problem itself. The role of the teacher is to be purposeful in how the problems are structured, what principles and learning outcomes will become explicit in the course of the activity, and how philosophy may help inform and navigate the kinds of judgements a teacher necessarily makes on a daily basis. If done well, the aim is for students to enhance the ways in which they can attend to

110  Dianne Gereluk the complexity of such problems, drawing upon a range of informed perspectives. The philosophical task has a parallel role, although positioned differently. The analytic philosophical traditions sought to clarify and analyse concepts and rhetoric that inform and position educational policy and practice (Hirst & Peters, 1971; Scheffler, 1966). Central to this approach was that the analysis of the concepts was essential in understanding the substantive educational issues of the day. The ambiguity of the rhetoric used often obscured the complexity of the debates, and the analytic task was to help provide clarity and context in how language positioned particular values and assumptions. Peters noted that: The analysis of the concept must be viewed against a background of policy. Concepts cannot be dealt with in an abstract and isolated way. They have a social and historical context which must be taken into account and analysis of them must have a point related to some educational problem. (Peters, 1980, cited in Aspin, 2013, p. 227) The analytic task was not an abstract notion, but was necessarily central to addressing, interpreting, and interrupting the ways in which language positioned educational problems. In this way, the role of philosophy of education hoped to make explicit the ways in which language emphasized or silenced particular positions, or in other cases, obscured or conflated complex ideas or phenomena. Arguably, education is necessarily  a  philosophical endeavour, particularly when there is an explicit and purposeful awareness and engagement of the ethical and moral discernments that occur both in the formal and informal curriculums. The act of “doing philosophy” involves students being able to engage, debate, and consider the range of perspectives (Chinnery et  al., 2007). The shift is not “in introducing people to completed thoughts about problems, but as helping students to think about problems, think about and through possible solutions, and this is a messy, often incomplete, sometimes stillborn endeavour” (p. 105). As a parallel example, Chinnery et al. illustrate how this may occur in other contexts. One might liken it to  a  student who is trying to understand  a  foundational mathematical problem. The lecturer may teach a difficult complex problem, and the student may have some foundational understanding of the mathematical principle, and generally may be able to make some sense of the concept. However, the student may have  a  rough understanding of the principles that underpin the actual mathematical formula and may feel as if the mathematical problem is over one’s head. The concept simply escapes the student at  a  nuanced level. Similarly, “philosophy can see, to the uninitiated,

A Problems-Based Approach  111 fairly impenetrable. Students understand the language, and most of the words, while also knowing that they do not understanding all that is being said” (p.  106). The task is to make explicit how to unpack the conflicting and weighted values, assumptions, and principles that make many ethical and moral dilemmas simply seen as lacking any resolve to  a  student who only sees the intractable contestation and wishes to refrain from the issue. Philosophy of education offers the potential to make explicit the taken-­ for-­granted ways that teachers continue to replicate and reinforce practices that may be unjustified and unarticulated. Problems-­based learning allows students the opportunity to practise thinking and negotiate the problems that occur as part of the teaching profession, rather than just thinking at an abstract ideal level about the nature of claims and arguments.

Criticisms of Problems-­Based Learning to Philosophy of Education The shift in endorsing problems-­based learning in philosophy of education, however, has come with significant critique. Three key criticisms arise in drawing upon a problems-­based learning to philosophy of education. First, philosophy applied to problems presumes that those problems are solvable. Second, problems-­based approaches may narrow students’ conceptions of phenomena in preset questions. Finally,  a  problems-­ based approach waters down the philosophical training and rigour in the broader foundations in education. Let me begin by turning to the first concern. The nature of problems-­based learning commonly applies key themes within  a  set of cases that highlight the ethical dilemmas that teachers may typically face. In this spirit, the intent is to bridge theory with practice in order that students see the direct relevance of how philosophy informs our actions as teachers. Yet, arguably the very nature of philosophy is to tease out the nuances and ethical dilemmas that are inherently insolvable. For instance, it would be odd and jarring to pose a question of “What ought to be the primary aims of education?” with the expressed intent of being able to solve the question. It is the central educational question that has stood the test of time, and arguably the very thought of placing it as  a  problem—­something that is to be solved—­ suggests  a  very problematic stance in approaching philosophy more broadly (Fenwick & Parsons, 1997). Drawing upon Lacan (1977), Fenwick and Parsons (1997) contend that the very nature of problems-­based learning creates an: illusion of ‘normalcy’ as a problem-­free condition characterized by equilibrium, order, and control, humans must repress their won

112  Dianne Gereluk contradiction and multiplicity, including their desire, which will continually be manifested in problems splitting them away from the satisfaction of their demand for order. (p. 7) On this view, there is a problematic stance towards seeking notions of “truth” as an ideal and implicitly implying that such truth can be garnered by the teaching professional. The concern posed here suggests that philosophy can solve problems, when the ethical and contested educational issues at play are not something where there is a “right” answer. Rather,  I  contend that the purpose of the exercise is to improve how to approach  a  particular issue in improving the way one thinks and problem-­solves that is grounded in philosophical understanding. The criticism is posed that applying problems-­based learning to philosophical endeavours aims to seek “truth” or to be viewed as more “solvable” is unwarranted. The purpose of such philosophical discussion is not necessarily to solve a problem, but to help students in more thoughtful ways to look at a problem, understand it in its context, and how remedies shift based on time and place. Some solutions are better than others, and the process of thinking about these issues improves our intellect. Rather, the intended aim of drawing upon problems-­based learning may help to foster students’ capacities to discern between better and worse (or more and less desirable) answers to the question, or inferior ways of going about deliberating on it. I contend that many critical theorists tend to agree that there are no answers; they still launch criticisms, which requires some notion of why the present system is wrong or problematic,  a  kind of unacknowledged “solution-­fi nding” process. Arguably, the idea of improving something presumes knowledge of a more “right” or “just” path forward, which can always be challenged, amended, or improved upon. The second concern overlaps in some respects to that of the first concern. While the first critique against applying problem-­solving to the methods may provide answers, the second concern is that problems-­ based approaches narrow students’ preconceptions of philosophy within set defined cases. The challenge in this regard is that while students may be able to draw upon the principles, values, and philosophical arguments to negotiate a particular case, it is less clear whether students will have the aptitude to apply and transfer those philosophical dispositions in their broader understanding about the interrelated role between philosophy and education. The potential for students to reduce philosophy to the role of just arguing sides and coming to some resolution about a particular issue could potentially undermine the very nature of philosophy. In specifying a particular case or problem to consider and examine, students may not understand how to apply or translate the process of examining the issue to other issues not addressed in class. The danger is

A Problems-Based Approach  113 that students may simply look to the specificity of the particular problem and miss the overarching philosophical undertaking that occurs as part of the deliberation that occurs in the problem. The potential is that students will become tantalized by the contested case, be invigorated potentially about the debate itself, and lose sight of the broader philosophical practice that can inform issues not yet discussed in class. The final concern culminates in the potential shortcomings of the first two concerns. One of the primary tasks of the role of philosophy of education is to cultivate in individuals their own self-­awareness that is larger than the individuals’ ideological assumptions and experiences, which implicitly inform how they approach learning and teaching (­Feinberg & Soltis, 2004). In so doing, the intent is that the individual will have better clarity in how they approach teaching, and how they conduct themselves as teachers (Colgan, 2018; Pryor, Sloan, & Amobi, 2007). The foundational principles and knowledge that inform and shape education necessarily help students’ greater understanding of the ethically and politically contested educational landscape that arises in teachers’ day-­to-­day practices. Yet, if the first two problems reduce philosophy to simply a solving of cases that does not elevate the awareness or understanding of how these principles inform teachers’ work, it is less compelling for teacher education programmes to ensure that philosophy is taught given the multiple demands in Bachelor of Education programmes. The threat faced by educational foundation courses is well noted both in North America and Europe that minimize the nuanced thinking for which philosophy of education often advocates (Arcilla, 2002; Chinnery et  al., 2007; Clark, 2006; Clifford  &  Guthrie, 1988; Colgan, 2018). Taken together, the concerns give philosophers of education pause in whether problems-­based approaches may be taking us down a dangerous rabbit hole. It is a delicate balance of upholding the values that underpin the very basis for why philosophy of education has a rightful and central place in teacher education programmes, but that is current, relevant, and viable (Bredo, 2002; Burbules, 2002; ­Chinnery et al., 2007). These three concerns are not to be underestimated and if taught poorly can very well undermine the central purposes of philosophy of education. Yet,  I  argue that problems-­based learning need not lead to the demise of philosophy of education. The rationale for this approach is to make explicit to students how the principles and arguments that have been made may assist in their own ethical discernments and judgements about how to reconcile “insolvable” problems. The relevance of philosophy to that of education is to ensure that students have an awareness and some foundational philosophical skills to address the substantive educational dilemma (Carr, 2004), without feeling ill-­prepared to address it with purposefulness or intentionality. To illustrate how problems-­ based approach may assist in compelling student teachers to draw upon

114  Dianne Gereluk philosophy in their teaching practices, let me now turn to the application of this approach in a philosophy of education class in teacher education programmes.

Applying Problems-­Based Approaches in Philosophy of Education The way in which philosophers have organized introductory philosophy of education classes will overlap in some respects with problems-­based approaches. One approach might invite students into conversations based around the following questions: • • • • •

What does it mean to say someone is educated? Is there a difference between education and schooling? What is knowledge? How do we decide what knowledge is of most worth? (And who is this “we” who gets to decide?) What is meant by the term “hidden curriculum”? What role do education and schooling play in the development of personal and moral identity and global citizenship? (Chinnery et al., 2007, p. 101)

I am somewhat sympathetic with these questions as  a  starting place into  a  conversation and suggest that in many respects, it might be an entry into a problems-­based approach. The struggle that I perceive for students is that the nature of these questions may require further understanding and philosophical depth to even enter into the conversation. The overarching and broad nature of the questions assumes that students may already acquire a foundational philosophical knowledge base; given that there is  a  minimized place of philosophy in undergraduate education, I am less optimistic that students are able to engage in these questions, and as such may create further anxieties and barriers into seeing the relevance of how philosophy necessarily informs their teaching. Instead, the questions posed earlier might arise once a conservation has begun, but they are not a starting point for me. Rather, I start from more tangible, contextual questions that do not necessarily require prior philosophical knowledge. For instance, the structure of the questions that I pose may draw upon their prior experience and anecdote. From there, the intent is to enrich and broaden students’ understanding and elevate the ethical nuances by later drawing upon philosophers and the key theoretical debates to help inform how they may adjust or amend their stance beyond mere experience or anecdote. To illustrate, the very first class that  I  teach to first-­year education students starts with a provocative (and yet very common philosophical question): What should the aims of education be? At first, students may

A Problems-Based Approach  115 struggle with the concept of what is an aim, and whether aims can be implicit or explicit. To help students navigate with this very question, I note that schools are one of the few public institutions where it is compulsory and mandatory for children to attend (in some form) for approximately 10–12 years. Given this compulsory and mandatory requirement, ought teachers need to know what we want students to achieve given the number of years that they are required to attend? There is usually unease with this initial discussion, and general confusion, as rarely have students taken the time to actually pause for a moment to consider what the overarching purposes of schools are. To help with the activity, and to make it less risky, students are given three post-­it notes, and are asked to write down what they think one main aim of education was in the past, present, and future. They are then asked to post it anonymously in different parts of the lecture hall. In this exercise, there is comfort that they will not be exposed with their thoughts or judgements, and there is also comfort that most of the varying aims will be noted amongst a number of students in a large lecture. The question thus becomes a problem, as students begin to see that there may be overlapping aims, and at others, there will be competing aims altogether. The question thus turns into a problem in terms of how teachers will reconcile the competing aims and the values that underpin the varying overarching purposes. It is at this point that the lecture can then expand the problem of simply something that requires “solving,” and rather introduce and broaden the discussion about the very nature of this problem that has been one of the long-­standing central educational debates over the centuries. Yet, in starting with the problem, students become agents of their learning and realize that the philosophical problem will necessarily have real and tangible effects about how they will approach their own teaching in schools. In following through with this question, the introductory philosophy of education class will always build upon this initial problem, as depending on your aims of education, one must reflect on whether other questions cohere with their initial views on the primary purposes of education. For instance, once a full explication and critical look at the first question is considered, the lecturer can easily move to more tangible problems that have real effects of the daily lived experiences of teachers. For example, once students have an initial sense of what they believe to be the primary purposes of education, whether that be a notion of well-­ being, flourishing, autonomy, citizenship, or economic prosperity (to name but a few), then it must necessarily follow that further questions and problems arise such as: • •

How should we teach? What should be taught on the curriculum (and whether there should be a curriculum at all)?

116  Dianne Gereluk • • •

Who gets to decide, or who has the authority to make such decisions? Should parents get to decide how children are educated? What is the role of teachers? Do teachers have professional autonomy?

The philosophy class can come to life particularly when examples, case studies, and ethical dilemmas highlight these broader philosophical questions. For instance, “what should be taught in the curriculum?” might illicit the common responses that mirror the current state of affairs, which was noted by historian Richard Aldrich (2002) in his analysis between the formal curriculum in England between 1905 and 1988. Yet, troubling the privileging of certain forms of knowledge and disciplines may create some interesting interruptions and disruptions of the dominant norms and discourses within the schooling system. Just by posing the relative comparison of curricula from the beginning to the end of the 20th century elicits pause for interruption about whether the relative status quo is appropriate. Arguably, this activity is helpful to highlight the philosophical issues that underpin this question in understanding the broader macro system of how disciplines are positioned, and at times, pitted against each other for greater time and emphasis in the curriculum. While the student may appreciate this broader philosophical argument, they may feel like they have little agency to affect change at this level, particularly as a beginning teacher. Arguably, philosophers of education suggest that this may be intentional and part of the broader political climate where the emphasis of becoming a teacher has increasingly entailed complying with set standards and policies with a more prescriptive and technocratic emphasis. Yet, I contend that beginning teachers can and do make judgements about how they wish to create supportive learning environments within the larger political constraints that occur. This may occur in how they consider the learning intentions of a class, the choices they make in teaching  a  particular concept, the ways in which students are encouraged to engage in class, and how they will consider how they will assess. To help provide more context and perhaps more tangible relevance to this broader philosophical issue, different problems, cases, or scenarios may assist in understanding how this affects teachers’ daily decisions. For instance, it is not uncommon for many students to believe that the notion of flourishing or well-­being ought to be a primary aim of education, particularly given the increasingly public discourse on mental health and wellness. Building from that broader concept, I often build upon the argument of what should be taught in the curriculum, within the broader backdrop of the key aims of education. Drawing upon the broader concept of flourishing, a common problem that I pose to facilitate in large lectures is whether physical education teachers should conduct  a  beep test to assess one’s level of fitness. 2 To begin the scenario,  I  ask two willing students whether they will

A Problems-Based Approach  117 assist in demonstrating a common lesson performed in schools. Given that the vast majority of philosophy of education classes are large introductory lecture classes,  I  tend to choose  a  student who is part of the collegiate football team, and someone who is not. The beep test is carried out, and then after that,  a  conversation ensues to unpack and problematize this very “normal” teaching activity as part of the broader “What should be taught in the curriculum?” lesson. The purpose of the activity and the forthcoming problem highlights the choices and decisions that teachers may take for granted in their daily judgements about what should be taught in the curriculum. With purposeful questions and group work, I ask students to reflect on what the rationale for the activity is—­specifically the indicators of one’s fitness and VO2max recovery—­a nd whether this lesson is in alignment with the broader notions of flourishing and well-­being. If flourishing and well-­being are not the overarching aims that govern this lesson, I pose what overarching aim the lesson is trying to support. While there may not be resolution or  a  “solution” that occurs, the group discussions around this problem highlight how teachers make judgements about what should be taught in the curriculum, and how those decisions (whether implicitly or explicitly) may fundamentally be in direct conflict with their broader views on the aims of education. This seemingly fleeting activity has the potential to expand more broadly the positioning of knowledge in the curriculum. It also highlights how philosophy can and ought to be integrated more across the curriculum. The nature of our judgements in how we structure our learning environments, supports that teachers provide to students, the decisions about the choices we make in our lessons and the way, are all philosophical issues. The activity itself rarely is considered a contested component of the curriculum, but highlights what is implicit and what is valued to the neglect of other values that may be equally as important. From there, broader issues may become more apparent for the student who may see better connections between the specific issue at hand, and that of larger philosophical issues. The nature of highlighting the problem within the context of philosophy is akin to a notion that Burbules identifies as “situated philosophy” (2002, p. 354). Situated philosophy bridges philosophical thinking with that of the problem itself and in this way makes “the activity of philosophy of education itself and educational relation, for all parties involved” (p. 354). The positional authority of the lecturer, or the particular theorist, is thus repositioned as part of a collaborative endeavour to invite others “where a conversation begins with the problems of the educator, these are not taken as givens beyond question” (p. 354). The shift in how educators approach philosophy thus allows for the possibility of revision in light of new or different perspectives and theoretical arguments. It is through these tangible problems that arise in teaching practices that

118  Dianne Gereluk students come to see how philosophy necessarily is part of the excitement, wonderment, and complexity of the teaching profession.

Conclusion Philosophy of education classes aims to provide students with an awareness, understanding, and ability for students to better negotiate the broader philosophical debates that underpin education. Ideally, philosophy of education can make explicit the complexity of many contested educational debates, which have real consequences in the daily life as a teacher. The hope is that teachers will be able to engage in difficult issues with a purposeful and intentional thought process for the principles that will guide their actions in their interactions with students, parents, staff, and the broader community. The intent is not to overwhelm the student in examining these ethical and moral issues that occur in the context of their teaching practice, but rather to feel that they can negotiate those spaces and discussions by applying how philosophical reasoning and judgement may assist in how they discern and create an articulated rationale for how they will proceed in any given situation. Philosophy of education calls on students to keep an open mind and for a call to thinking well. This requires students to consider and locate the issues within a particular context and perspective. It requires testing out and considering alternative hypotheses and evidence. It further requires students to challenge conventional rhetoric and buzzwords to recognize what lies unsaid, hidden, or implicit in the particular use of certain concepts over others. Finally, philosophy of education pushes students to realize that personal experience is not enough to guide them as they enter the teaching profession. In this way, it calls out that one’s assumptions are privileged and commonly unchallenged and asks that they consider what they take for granted. In this way, philosophy of education calls upon a deeper understanding and open-­mindedness to the complexities and wonders of the teaching profession. In this way, problems-­based approaches to philosophy of education may provide a pedagogical approach that makes students active learners and become part of the conversation and deliberation, rather than passive recipients of understanding the theoretical perspectives from the past and present. Problems-­based approaches in philosophy of education may make the induction into the discipline more accessible, relevant, and engaging for a student teacher who is struggling to negotiate the complexities of becoming a teaching professional. The intent is that students can see how philosophy of education is present and alive in education and schooling. Ultimately, the philosophical endeavour is to cultivate students’ capacities to seriously consider such debates through multiple lens, and not simply from their perspective. It is in this way that teachers

A Problems-Based Approach  119 ought to be attentive to their positions and those who disagree with them and consider what some of the values and judgements might be at play. In this way, one hopes that students can approach and navigate the various positions with an attentiveness and care that teaching so often is called upon to do.

Notes 1 I use this short-­handed phrase of “pub talk” to acknowledge the ability for individuals to have a lively discussion or argument, but does not necessarily draw upon evidence, principles or values, but rather simply argues a point for the sake of arguing without any intent on changing one’s position. Having said this, I do not wish to slight the nature of pub-­style discussions and arguments, which are lively and public in nature. I use it as a quick-­handed way to highlight to students how to elevate an argument beyond one’s own assumptions, and from stopping to wait until they simply talk, to actually listening to the weight of the claims and conflicting values at play. 2 A beep test is a multistage fitness test where individuals are asked to perform 20-­metre shuttle runs in time with the sound of the beep. The individual must run faster to the 20-­metre mark prior to the beep sounding. The test continues with successfully shorter beeps until the individual cannot run the distance within the shortened allotted time. This continues after each successful minute until the individual fails to reach the line within 2 metres. The rationale for this fitness test is to provide norms of the individuals’ fitness scores at designated periods throughout the year. More specifically, the use of the beep test tests elite athletes to get a more accurate VO2max score in terms of recovery after each successive run. The purpose of the beep test has been used not only for elite athletes but is increasingly becoming applied in K-­12 school contexts.

References Aldrich, R. (2002). A century of education. London, UK and New York, NY: Routledge-­Falmer. Arcilla, R. V. (2002). Why aren’t philosophers and educators speaking to each other? Educational Theory, 52(1), 1–11. Barrows, H. S. (2000). Problem-­based learning applied to medical education. Springfield: Southern Illinois University Press. Bredo, E. (2002). How can philosophy of education be both viable and good? Educational Theory, 52(3), 263–271. Burbules, N. C. (2002). The dilemma of philosophy of education: “Relevance” or “critique”? Part two. Educational Theory, 52(3), 349–357. Carr, W. (2004). Philosophy and education. Journal of Philosophy of education, 38(1), 55–73. Clark, J. (2006). Philosophy of education in today’s world and tomorrow’s: A view from “down under”. Paideusis, 15(1), 21–30. Clifford, G. J. & Guthrie, J. W. (1988). Ed school: A brief for professional education. Chicago, IL: UCP.

120  Dianne Gereluk Chinnery, A., Hare, W., Kerr, D., & Okshevsky, W. (2007). Teaching philosophy of education: The value of questions. Interchange, 38(2), 99–118. Colgan, A. (2018). The examination of the decline of philosophy of education with institutional theory:  A  focus on the last three decades. Philosophical Inquiry in Education, 25(1), 66–87. Coomb, G.,  &  Elden, M. (2004). Introduction to the special issue: Problem-­ based learning as social inquiry – BPL and management education. Journal of Management Education, 28(5), 523–535. doi:10.1177/1052562904267540 Duch, B., Groh, S.,  &  Allen, D. (Eds.). (2001). The power of problem-­based learning. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing LLC. Ersozlu, A., & Cayci, D. (2016). The changes in experienced teachers’ understanding towards classroom management. Universal Journal of Educational Research, 4(1), 144–150. Feinberg, W., & Soltis, J. (2004). School and society. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Fenwick, T., & Parsons, J. (1997). A critical investigation of the problems with problem-­based learning. Research Report. Retrieved from https://files.eric. ed.gov/fulltext/ED409272.pdf Hirst, P. H.,  &  Peters, R. S. (1971). The logic of education. New York, NY: Humanities Press. Lacan, J. (1977). Ecrits:  A  selection (A. Sheridan, Trans.). London, UK: Tavistock. Mallihai, T. (2008). Will they know enough?: Pre-­service primary teachers’ knowledge base for teaching integrated social sciences. Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 33(6), 44–60. Neil, H.,  &  Moore, R. (2005). Changing perceptions of knowledge: Evaluation of an innovative program for pre-­service secondary teachers. Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 30(2) 34–45. doi:10.14221/ajte.2005v30n2.4 Newman, M., Ambrose, K., Corner, T., Evans, J., Morris-­Vincent, P., Quinn, S.,  …  Vernon, L. (2003). Evaluating educational impact: The approach followed by the project on the effectiveness of problem-­based learning. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational research Council. Chicago, IL, April 21–25, 2003. Retrieved from https:// files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED475836.pdf Peters, R. S. (1980). The philosophy of education 1960–1980. Unpublished lecture delivered in Centenary Series, Cambridge University, Department of Education. Phillips, D. C. (Ed.). (2000). Constructivism in education: Opinions and second opinions on controversial issues. Ninety-­ninth Yearbook of the National Society of the Study of Education. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ISBN-­0 -226-­60170-­6 Pryor, C., Sloan, K., & Amobi, F. (2007). Three professors’ teaching philosophy of education: Strategies and considerations for undergraduate courses. The Journal of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 7(1), 77–101. Said, T. (2017). According to candidate teachers’ views classroom management problems of teachers in traditional and technology-­support classrooms. Universal Journal of Educational Research, 5(11), 2005–2015. Scheffler, I. (1966). Philosophy and education, and Education. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon. Winch, C. (2012). For philosophy of education in teacher education. Oxford Review of Education, 38(3), 305–322.

7 The Contribution of Philosophy to Science Teacher Education Michael R. Matthews

There are many reasons why philosophy, and more specifically the history and philosophy of science (HPS), should be part of science teacher education programmes. Increasingly, school science courses address historical, philosophical, ethical, and cultural issues occasioned by science. Teachers of such curricula obviously need knowledge of HPS. Without such knowledge, they either present truncated and partial versions of the curricula, or repeat shallow academic hearsay about the topics mentioned. Either way, their students are done a disservice. But even where curricula do not include such “nature of science” sections, HPS can contribute to more interesting and critical teaching of standard curricula content.

Philosophical and Curricular Arguments for HPS in Science Education Nearly 50 years ago, Israel Scheffler argued for the inclusion of philosophy of science in the preparation of science teachers. It was part of his wider argument for the inclusion of courses in the philosophy of the discipline in programmes that are preparing people to teach that discipline. His suggestion was that: “philosophies-­of constitute  a  desirable additional input in teacher preparation beyond subject-­matter competence, practice in teaching, and educational methodology” (Scheffler, 1973, p. 40). He summarized his argument as follows: I have outlined four main efforts through which philosophies-­of might contribute to education: (1) the analytic description of forms of thought represented by teaching subjects; (2) the evaluation and criticism of such forms of thought; (3) the analysis of specific materials so as to systematize and exhibit them as exemplifications of forms of thought; and (4) the interpretation of particular exemplifications in terms accessible to the novice. (Scheffler, 1973, p. 40)

122  Michael R. Matthews In 1979, Robert Ennis wrote a comprehensive review of the extant literature on philosophy of science and science teaching (Ennis, 1979). His review listed six questions that science teachers constantly encounter in their classrooms and staffrooms, questions that the deliberations and researches of philosophers and historians of science could illuminate. These questions were: • • • • • •

What characterizes the scientific method? What constitutes critical thinking about empirical statements? What is the structure of scientific disciplines? What is a scientific explanation? What role do value judgements play in the work of scientists? What constitutes good tests of scientific understanding?

These questions are of perennial concern to science teachers, and science teacher education programmes. How can  a  science course, much less  a  science education, course progress without attending to these core questions? Nevertheless, Ennis was moved to make the melancholy observation that: “With some exceptions philosophers of science have not shown much explicit interest in the problems of science education” (­Ennis, 1979, p. 138). This sombre conclusion is witnessed to in the title of Richard Duschl’s 1985 paper: “Science Education and Philosophy of Science: Twenty-­Five Years of Mutually Exclusive Development” (­Duschl, 1985). Ennis did not use the expression “nature of science” (NOS), but his list is essentially a philosopher’s view of the contents of NOS. That topic is now found in the science curriculum of most countries in the world (Olson, 2018). It is universally stated in those documents that science teachers, and students graduating from  a  school science programme, need to have some appreciation of NOS. Some national and provincial curricula go further stating that such students should develop a scientific “habit of mind.” Clearly, these NOS aspirations require teachers to value and have a degree of competence in HPS. Contemporary concern with teaching NOS is most clearly seen in affirmations of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, especially its landmark 1989 publication Science for All Americans (AAAS, 1989) and its 1990 The Liberal Art of Science (AAAS, 1990). The latter stated that: The teaching of science must explore the interplay between science and the intellectual and cultural traditions in which it is firmly embedded. Science has a history that can demonstrate the relationship between science and the wider world of ideas and can illuminate contemporary issues. (AAAS, 1990, p. xiv)

Philosophy and Science Teacher Education  123 This was elaborated in their Benchmarks for Science Literacy document (AAAS, 1993). The AAAS believes that learning about science—­its history and methodology—­will have a positive impact on the thinking of individuals and will consequently enrich society and culture. That is, NOS learning will have a flow-­on effect outside the science classroom. This was an essential belief of Enlightenment philosophers and educators (Matthews, 2015a, chap. 2). The expectations of the AAAS found their way through to the US National Science Education Standards (NRC, 1996). The Standards have a separate content strand devoted to “History and Nature of Science Standards.” The UK offers an example of taking these NOS aspirations very seriously. There, a new optional Upper-­L evel (post-­compulsory, age 16–18) Perspectives on Science course was introduced into the school programme in 2007 (Swinbank & Taylor, 2007). The course has four parts: Pt.1 Researching the history of science Pt.2 Discussing ethical issues in science Pt.3 Thinking philosophically about science Pt.4 Carrying out a research project The textbook for this course, on its opening page, says: Perspectives on Science is designed to help you address historical, ethical and philosophical questions relating to science. It won’t provide easy answers, but it will help you to develop skills of research and argument, to analyse what other people say and write, to clarify your own thinking and to make a case for your own point of view. (Swinbank & Taylor, 2007, p. vii) The Philosophy section begins with about 16 pages outlining standard matters in philosophy of science—­NOS, induction, falsifiability, paradigms, revolutions, truth, realism, relativism, etc. Importantly, the book then introduces the subject of “Growing your own philosophy of science” by saying: Having learned something about some of the central ideas and questions within the philosophy of science, you are now in a position to evaluate the viewpoints of some scientists who were asked to describe how they viewed science. The aim here is to use these ideas as a springboard to develop and support your own thinking. (Swinbank & Taylor, 2007, p. 149) Ennis’s six questions are perennial, but NOS does not exhaust the field of HPS and science teaching (HPS&ST) concern. Historians and

124  Michael R. Matthews philosophers have usefully contributed to the improvement of classroom pedagogy, to curriculum development, and to better-­grounded resolution of theoretical issues impinging on science education. The latter includes: feminist critiques of science, appraisal of multiculturalism and indigenous knowledge claims, evaluation of constructivist theory, environmental ethics, teaching about worldviews in science classes, teaching evolution in cultures where it is rejected, common issues concerning science and religion, and so on. Teachers and administrators routinely face such theoretical issues, and they cannot be intelligently discussed without some explicit or implicit reference to HPS. Liberal Science Education Current arguments for emphasizing in classrooms the HPS dimension of science, and current curricular developments in this direction, represent in part  a  renaissance of the long-­marginalized liberal, or contextual, tradition of science education, a tradition contributed to in the last 100 years by scientists and educators such as Ernst Mach, Pierre Duhem, Alfred North Whitehead, Frederick W. Westaway, E. J. Holmyard, Percy Nunn, James Conant, Joseph Schwab, Martin Wagenschein, Walter Jung, and Gerald Holton. For liberal educationalists, education is more than the preparation for work; education is valued because it contributes to the cognitive and moral development of both the individual and their culture (Bantock, 1981, chap. 4; Peters, 1966, chaps. 1, 2). The liberal tradition maintains that science education should not just be an education or training in science, although, of course, it must be this, but also an education about science. Students educated in science should have an appreciation of scientific methods, their diversity, and their limitations. They should have a feeling for methodological issues, such as how scientific theories are evaluated and how competing theories are appraised; how common controversy is in science and how scientific argument and debate is engaged in the resolution of these controversies; and an appreciation of the interrelated role of experiment, mathematics, and religious, philosophical, and ideological commitment in the development of science. The liberal argument is that all students, whether science majors or others, should have some knowledge of the great episodes in the development of science and consequently of culture: the ancient demythologizing of the world picture, the Copernican relocation of the earth from the centre of the solar system, the development of experimental and mathematical science associated with Galileo and Newton, Newton’s demonstration that the terrestrial laws of attraction operated in the celestial realms, Darwin’s epochal theory of evolution and his claims for a naturalistic understanding of life, Pasteur’s discovery of the microbial basis of infection, Einstein’s theories of gravitation and relativity, the discovery

Philosophy and Science Teacher Education  125 of the DNA code, and research on the genetic basis of life. They should, depending upon their age, have an appreciation of the intellectual, technical, social, and personal factors that contributed to these monumental achievements. The rapprochement between HPS and science education is not only dependent on having  a  liberal view of science education:  a  good technical science education also requires some integration of history and philosophy into the programme. Knowledge of science entails knowledge of scientific facts, laws, and theories—­the products of science; it also entails knowledge of the processes of science—­the social, technical, and intellectual ways in which science develops and tests its knowledge claims. HPS is important for the understanding of these process skills. ­Technical—­or “professional” or “disciplinary” as it is sometimes called—­science education is enhanced if students know the meaning of terms that they are using; if they can think critically about texts, reports, and their own scientific activity; if they know how certain evidence relates or does not relate to hypotheses being tested; if they can intelligently and carefully represent data and argue from data to phenomena; and if they can discuss, argue, and advance thinking amongst their colleagues. These scientific abilities are enhanced if students have read examples of sustained inquiry, clever experimentation, insightful hypotheses, and exemplary debates about hypothesis evaluation and testing. Alfred North Whitehead expressed this view of good technical education when, just after World War II, he said: The antithesis between a technical and a liberal education is fallacious. There can be no adequate technical education which is not liberal, and no liberal education which is not technical: that is, no education which does not impart both technique and intellectual vision. (Whitehead, 1947, p. 73) To teach Boyle’s Law without reflection on what “law” means in science, without considering what constitutes evidence for a law in science, and without attention of who Boyle was, when he lived, and what he did, is to teach in  a  disappointingly truncated way. More can be made of the educational moment than merely teaching or assisting students to discover that for a given gas at a constant temperature, pressure multiplied by volume is a constant. This is something, but it is minimal. Similarly, to teach Darwinian evolutionary theory without considerations concerning theory and evidence, the roles of inductive, deductive, and abductive reasoning, Darwin’s life and times and the religious, literary and philosophical controversies his theory occasioned, is also limited. Students doing and interpreting experiments need to know something of how descriptions of data relies upon theory, how evidence relates to the

126  Michael R. Matthews inductive support or deductive falsification of hypotheses, how real cases relate to ideal cases in science, how messy “lived experience” connects with abstracted and idealized scientific theories, and how a host of other matters involve philosophical or methodological concerns. Clearly, all of these goals for general education, and for science education, require the integration of history and philosophy into the science curriculum of schools and teacher education programmes.

Research in History, Philosophy, and Science Teaching Connected with these curricular affirmations of HPS, there has, pleasingly, been some rapprochement between the research fields and communities of HPS and science education (Matthews, 2015a, 2018). The journal Science  &  Education was founded in 1992 having  a  subtitle “Contributions from History, Philosophy and Sociology of Science,” with ten numbers being published per year (Matthews, 2015b). Scores of very high-­profile philosophers and historians of science have contributed to the journal. The high volume and quality of research connecting HPS to theoretical, curricular, and pedagogical issues in science teaching (HPS&ST) research is evidenced in the three-­volume 76-­chapter handbook on the subject which has over 10,000 references (Matthews, 2014).

Constructivism in Science Education Amongst numerous pedagogical, curricular, and theoretical issues in science education to which HPS has contributed, just one—­the appraisal of constructivism—­will be further developed here in order to demonstrate the importance of HPS for the theory and practice of science education. The selection is made because constructivism as a theory of knowledge and learning has been the major influence in contemporary science and mathematics education; and in its postmodernist and deconstructionist forms, it is a significant influence in literary, artistic, social studies, and religious education. Its impact is evident in theoretical debates, curriculum writing, and pedagogical practice in all of these subjects. One does not have to venture far into the Reading Wars, the Maths Wars, or the Science Wars to hear constructivist arguments, or “explosions” as one might say. Peter Fensham claimed that “The most conspicuous psychological influence on curriculum thinking in science since 1980 has been the constructivist view of learning” (Fensham, 1992, p. 801). A former president of the US National Association for Research in Science Teaching (NARST) said that “A unification of thinking, research, curriculum development, and teacher education appears to now be occurring under the theme of constructivism … there is a lack of polarised debate” (Yeany, 1991, p. 1). Constructivism underwrites US national teaching standards:

Philosophy and Science Teacher Education  127 Hence, the current teaching standards in the USA call for teachers to embrace a social constructivist view of learning and teaching in which science is described as  a  way of knowing about natural phenomena and science teaching as facilitation of student learning through science inquiry  …  In particular, the reform emphasizes teacher education by promoting social constructivist teaching approaches…. These sophisticated epistemological perspectives are promoted in the US science education reform documents as both learning goals and teaching approaches. (Kang, 2008, pp. 478, 480) For many, constructivism was more than just a learning theory, or even an educational theory, but rather, it constituted a worldview or Weltanschauung, as suggested in remarks such as: Constructivism offers a viable alternative view of knowledge, reality, science and education. …The constructivist view of education provides us with  a  hope for the future as individuals value their own and others’ understandings, take responsibility for their own destinies, and lead us forward into a changing but promising world. (Davis, McCarty, Shaw, & Sidani-­Tabbaa, 1993, pp. 628, 635) And: To become a constructivist is to use constructivism as a referent for thoughts and actions. That is to say when thinking or acting, beliefs associated with constructivism assume a higher value than other beliefs. For a variety of reasons the process is not easy. (Tobin, 1991, p. 1) The constructivist family is certainly a “broad Church.” One early review of constructivist research identified the following varieties: contextual, dialectical, empirical, information processing, methodological, moderate, Piagetian, post-­epistemological, pragmatic, radical, realist, social and socio-­historical (Good, Wandersee, & St Julien, 1993). To this list could be added humanistic constructivism (Cheung & Taylor, 1991), didactic constructivism (Brink, 1991), socio-­transformative constructivism (Rodriguez, 1998), and situative constructivism (Lave  &  Wenger, 1991). It is a difficult theory to pin down, as recognized by its one-­time major champion in science education: As we have thought about constructivism, we have come to realize that it is not a unitary construct. Every day we learn something new

128  Michael R. Matthews about constructivism. Like the bird in flight it has an elusive elegance that remains just beyond our grasp. (Tobin & Tippins, 1993, p. 20) Just how anything that remains permanently “beyond our grasp” can be a theory of learning, or any guide for teachers or curriculum writers, is not explained. Constructivism is both a theory of learning (a psychological theory) and a theory of knowledge (a philosophical, and specifically epistemological, theory).  A  typical account of the theory is given by Catherine Fosnot in a much-­cited constructivist anthology: Constructivism is  a  theory about knowledge and learning; it describes both what ‘knowing’ is and how one ‘comes to know.’ Based on work in psychology, philosophy, science and biology, the theory describes knowledge not as truths to be transmitted or discovered, but as emergent, developmental, non-­objective, viable constructed explanations by humans engaged in meaning-­making in cultural and social communities of discourse. (Fosnot, 2005, p. ix) This should not be a surprise as epistemology and psychology were conjoined in the writings of the founders of educational constructivism—­ Piaget, Vygotsky, and Bruner. Piaget called his own theory “Genetic Epistemology,” and this philosophical concern is reflected in his book title—­Psychology and Epistemology (Piaget, 1972). Jerome Bruner speaking of his famous Process of Education book (Bruner, 1960) that presented  a  constructivist alternative to didactic, transmissionist, behaviourist-­informed “banking” pedagogy wrote that: Its ideas sprang from epistemology and the sciences of knowing … all of us were, I think, responding to the same “epistemic” malaise, the doubts about the nature of knowing that had come first out of the revolution in physics and then been formalized and amplified by philosophy. (Bruner, 1983, p. 186) The major question for researchers, teachers, and philosophers embracing this theory was: What constitutes rational change? This, obviously, is not an empirical question, it is an epistemological question; and typically education researchers were not well prepared to answer it. This is because philosophy of education, and more generally philosophical analysis, has been stripped out of teacher education programmes everywhere. And philosophy rarely features in education graduate programmes.

Philosophy and Science Teacher Education  129 This is unfortunate as basic epistemological questioning and reflection is the bedrock for the intelligent learning of any discipline: What is the difference between belief, opinion, and knowledge? How do we know a claim is true? What kinds of material constitute ­evidence for beliefs? Can sensory evidence be ignored? Is empirical evidence determinate in evaluating beliefs? Does the strength of a belief constitute evidence for it? What is the difference between a claim being probably true and true? Can it be rational to affirm less probable beliefs? The lack of philosophy, specifically epistemology, in teacher education programmes is doubly unfortunate as “Philosophy for Children” (P4C) programmes in primary or elementary schools, with their emphasis on “How do you know?”, have long been shown to be engaging for students and teachers, and successful in raising logical, analytic, and critical thinking competences (Lipman, 1988). Bristol University’s widely utilized “Thinking in Science” programmes that derive from collaboration between philosophers of science and primary and secondary school teachers also show how welcome is philosophical reflection in schools. The contrast with lack of philosophical reflection in teacher education is dramatic. Thomas Kuhn’s Imprint on Constructivism Educational constructivism was born at the same time as the Kuhnian revolution in philosophy of science and was powerfully influenced by the latter. Joseph Novak, as with so many educators and scholars from all disciplines, was awed by Kuhn and the “new wave” in historical-­ relativist philosophy of science that Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn, 1970) launched: In philosophy, a consensus emerges that positivism is neither a valid nor a productive view of epistemology … What is emerging is a constructivist view of epistemology, building on ideas of Kuhn (1962), Toulmin (1972) and others. (Novak, 1977, pp. 5–6) Jon Magoon, who arguably introduced the term “constructivism” to education, shared Novak’s enthusiasm for Kuhn: Kuhn’s account of scientific progress and change from one approach to another has lessons for social and behavioral scientists as well as a likely parallel with regard to constructivism and traditional behaviorism and associationism today. (Magoon, 1977, p. 653)

130  Michael R. Matthews Thomas Kuhn has arguably been the most influential historian of science in the 20th century. His impact has been felt in all academic fields, and even beyond the academy. The first edition (1962) of his Structure of Scientific Revolutions sat largely unexamined on the publisher’s display table, read only by a minority of historians and philosophers of science; the second edition (1970) exploded over the philosophical, and more generally scholarly, and indeed, cultural landscape. It turned the heads of educators who rushed lemming-­like over the Kuhnian cliff. They constituted a “Kuhnian cheer squad” in the words of two researchers (Loving & Cobern, 2000). Largely on account of the unfortunate separation of Education Departments from Philosophy Departments, and the stripping of philosophy from teacher education and graduate education programmes, educators did not see the detailed criticisms of Kuhn that were advanced in the HPS community. These began with Dudley Shapere who acknowledged the “vast amount of positive value in Kuhn”s book’ (Shapere, 1964, p. 393), but went on to argue that his truly revolutionary account of theory change in the history of science: …is made to appear convincing only by inflating the definition of “paradigm” until that term becomes so vague and ambiguous that it cannot easily be withheld, so general that it cannot easily be applied, so mysterious that it cannot help explain, and so misleading that it is a positive hindrance to the understanding of some central aspects of science; and then, finally, these excesses must be counterbalanced by qualifications that simply contradict them. (Shapere, 1964, p. 393) Israel Scheffler advanced an 11-­point critique of Kuhn’s arguments, one of which dealt with Kuhn’s charge of irrationality in paradigm choice. Scheffler wrote, [it] fails utterly, for it rests on a confusion. It fails to make the critical distinction between those standards or criteria which are internal to a paradigm, and those by which the paradigm is itself judged. (Scheffler, 1966, p. 84) David Stove (1982) argued: Kuhn’s entire philosophy of science is actually an engine for the mass-­destruction of all logical expressions … [he] is willing to dissolve even the strongest logical expressions into sociology about what scientists regard as decisive arguments. (p. 33)

Philosophy and Science Teacher Education  131 Alexander Bird (2000) provided  a  sympathetic appraisal of Thomas Kuhn but correctly maintained that: Kuhn’s treatment of philosophical ideas is neither systematic nor rigorous. He rarely engaged in the stock-­in-­trade of modern philosophers, the careful and precise analysis of the details of other philosopher’s views, and when he did so the results were not encouraging. (p. ix) The historian Jan Golinski (2012) wrote: I see Kuhn as having little positive influence on philosophers and almost none (directly) on historians. His most significant influence within science studies was mediated by sociologists, whose reading of his work he specifically repudiated. (p. 15) Abner Shimony (1976), a physicist and philosopher, said of the key Kuhnian move of deriving methodological lessons from scientific practice that: His work deserves censure on this point whatever the answer might turn out to be, just because it treats central problems of methodology elliptically, ambiguously, and without the attention to details that is essential for controlled analysis. (p. 582) Mario Bunge (2016) recounts in his autobiography that he attended an influential 1966 colloquium on causality convened in Geneva by Piaget in which Kuhn participated. Bunge observed: Kuhn’s presentation impressed no one at the meeting, and it confirmed my impression that his history of science was second-­hand, his philosophy confused and backward, and his sociology of science non-­existent. (p. 181) Not only did educators miss the initial criticisms, they missed Kuhn’s recanting of his positions. In his Robert and Maurine Rothschild lecture at Harvard University in 1991, he appraised the sociological turn in the HPS, acknowledging that it was “emphasized and developed by people who often called themselves Kuhnians” (Kuhn, 1991/2000, p.  3), but added that “I think their viewpoints damagingly mistaken, have been pained to be associated with it, and have for years attributed that association to misunderstanding” (Kuhn, 1991/2000, p. 3). In reviewing his

132  Michael R. Matthews achievements, he regretted writing the “purple passages” in Structures. Unfortunately, it was often these passages that were taken up in the education community. By the time Kuhn regretted them and tried to close the stable door, they had bolted out into the text of thousands of theses, articles, and books. The Kuhnian revolution had disastrous effects in education. Two generations of educators and their students were left wandering around in a Kuhnian fog of “paradigm,” “incommensurability,” “conversion,” “different worlds,” and so on. This confused discussion, hampered research, and dimmed whatever light might be shed on real educational and social problems (Matthews, 2004). Problems with Constructivist Epistemology Constructivism emphasizes that science is a creative human endeavour which is historically and culturally conditioned, and that its knowledge claims are not absolute. This is certainly worth saying, but it is a truism shared by all philosophers and historians of science. Beyond this widely agreed truism, constructivism is committed to very disputed epistemological positions. At its core, social constructivism has  a  subjectivist and empiricist understanding of human knowledge, and consequently of ­scientific knowledge. As one of the most influential constructivists in science and mathematics education has put it: Knowledge is the result of an individual subject’s constructive activity, not  a  commodity that somehow resides outside the knower and can be conveyed or instilled by diligent perception or linguistic communication. (Glasersfeld, 1990a, p. 37) Constructivists are epistemological relativists. Consider, for example: The constructivist epistemology asserts that the only tools available to a knower are the senses. It is only through seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting that an individual interacts with the environment. With these messages from the senses the individual builds a picture of the world. Therefore, constructivism asserts that knowledge resides in individuals. (Lorsbach & Tobin, 1992, p. 5) And: The theory of constructivism rests on two main principles. […] Principle one states that knowledge is not passively received, but is actively built up by the cognizing subject. […] Principle two states that

Philosophy and Science Teacher Education  133 the function of cognition is adaptive and serves the organisation of the experiential world, not the discovery of ontological reality […]. Thus we do not find truth but construct viable explanations of our experiences. (Wheatley, 1991, p. 10) Epistemological relativism has its philosophical problems, and these have been pointed out by many (Nola, 1988; Norris, 1997; Siegel, 1987). The problems include, but are not limited to, self-­refutation, inconsistency with the reasoned settlement of scientific controversy, inconsistency with the growth of scientific knowledge, and undermining the rationale for critical thinking. For the last, respect for “facts of the matter” that are independent of individuals is crucial. Recognizing the obvious point that there is dispute about the facts does not entail that there are multiple facts of the matter. Problems with Constructivist Ontology Constructivists often embrace an idealist ontology, or idealist theory about the existential status of scientific and everyday objects; that is, they variously maintain that the world is created by and dependent upon human thought. Various Kuhn-­inspired sociologists of science repeatedly state that different observers “live in different worlds” and that they create those worlds. These astounding claims pass over the major ambiguity: on the one hand, the complete truism that different observers and different groups have different experiences; on the other, that the natural world in which they live varies from observer to observer and group to group. The latter is not a truism and requires some argument; as does the more advanced claim that these various worlds are created by the observer. Kenneth Gergen (1994), an influential social constructivist, expresses this position, saying there is “a multiplicity of ways in which “the world” is, and can be, constructed” (p. 82). The social and cultural worlds do vary, that is an undisputed statement about social and cultural realities, but it has no bearing on the realist and universalist claim of a common natural world. Ernst von Glasersfeld’s (1987) radical constructivism is the best-­ known idealist variant in educational circles. He says: The realist believes his constructs to be  a  replica or reflection of independently existing structures, while the constructivist remains aware of the experiencer’s role as originator of all structures … for the constructivist there are no structures other than those which the knower constitutes by his very own activity of coordination of experiential particles. (p. 104)

134  Michael R. Matthews Realists need not make any such claims about “replication” and “reflection,” they indeed make claims about the world, but recognize that “there is more to seeing than meets the eyeball” and the claims are the outcome of social, personal, and cultural circumstances. Elsewhere, von Glasersfeld (1990b) writes: I can no more walk through the desk in front of me than I can argue that black is white at one and the same time. What constrains me, however, is not quite the same thing in the two cases. That the desk constitutes an obstacle to my physical movement is due to the particular distinctions my sensor system enables me to make and to the particular way in which I have come to coordinate them. Indeed, if I now could walk through the desk, it would no longer fit the abstraction I have made in prior experience. (p. 24) This argument has problems. For the realist, the inability of our body to “walk through” another body has nothing to do with our sensory powers, but everything to do with the composition and structures of the bodies. Changing our sensory powers will no more allow us to walk through  a  hitherto impenetrable table, than changing our shirt would allow us to do so. Upon dying, we lose all sensory powers, but this does not mean that our body can then penetrate a table. Our having or not having sensory powers makes no difference to the penetrability of the table; to think that it does is just philosophical idealism. Again, this is a flawed position. Observations and theory clearly depend upon us, but not the objects observed or their structures. Philosophical alarm bells should ring when an author runs together “observations” with “events” and “objects.” For a realist, and for any serious scientist, there are categorical differences between these classes. Only  a  philosophical idealist can run them together without alarm bells ringing; and when they do ring, the idealist case has to be argued, not just assumed. Rosalind Driver frequently in her influential works affirmed the idealism. For instance: science as public knowledge is not so much a “discovery” as a carefully checked “construction” … and that scientists construct theoretical entities (magnetic fields, genes, electron orbitals…) which in turn take on a “reality”. (Driver, 1988, p. 137) Here, it is being said that the earth does not have a structure until geophysicists impose it; there is not an evolutionary structure in the animal world till biologists impose such structure; atoms have no structure

Philosophy and Science Teacher Education  135 until such is imposed by physicists; and so on. One might ask: If gravity waves are our creation, why spend so much time and money looking for them? Despite the form of Driver’s basic argument being fallacious, it is nevertheless widespread. The argument has the form: Premise: Some concept is a human construction Conclusion: Therefore the referent of the concept does not exist One only has to state this argument to see that it is an invalid inference, and its validity depends upon making explicit a suppressed premise of the form: Suppressed premise: All concepts that are human constructions can have no existential reference But this suppressed premise is simply dogma for which no evidence is provided. Not only are “electron orbitals” and “magnetic fields” human constructions, but so also are “my house,” “mountain,” “table,” and all the other observational terms we use. If the foregoing widespread constructivist arguments, utilized by Rosalind Driver, were valid, then not only would electron orbitals not exist, neither would our house, the tables in it, nor mountains that we might live near. Indeed, given that the personal pronoun “I” is a human construction, individual cognizing subjects might not exist. But such considerations are frequently dismissed as “philosophical quibbles.” Constructivism is fraught with grave educational and cultural implications that are seldom recognized much less engaged with. The relativism, and subjectivism, of constructivism is particularly ill-­suited to deal with the complex, trans-­social problems facing the contemporary world. There is a need for the sustained application of Enlightenment-­ inspired reason and the rejection of self-­interest in the attempt to deal with pressing environmental, political, and social questions. Karl Popper recognized this socially corrosive aspect of constructivism, when he said: The belief of a liberal—the belief in the possibility of a rule of law, of equal justice, of fundamental rights, and a free society—can easily survive the recognition that judges are not omniscient and may make mistakes about facts … But the belief in the possibility of a rule of law, of justice, and of freedom, can hardly survive the acceptance of an epistemology which teaches that there are no objective facts; not merely in this particular case, but in any other case. (Popper, 1963, p. 5)

136  Michael R. Matthews The Waning of Constructivism After sustained philosophical criticism, and more recently refutation of its claims to be a guide for successful pedagogy (Kirschner, Sweller, & Clark, 2006), there are signs that constructivist influence in education is waning. Thirty-­years ago, there were hundreds of constructivist presentations at the US annual NARST and AERA conferences; to mention, “constructivism” was almost a condition of getting on the programme; in recent years, only a handful of papers with “constructivism” in their title could be found on the programmes. The Constructivist SIG at AERA had just four papers in 2015. The most energetic figure in the field has “Moved On” (Tobin, 2000), while another enthusiast abandoned constructivism because “it turned out to be plagued with considerable contradictions” (Roth, 2006, p. 326). This small problem had been pointed out decades earlier by philosophers but without discernible impact on the constructivist bandwagon that rolled through Education Schools worldwide, and more particularly through science education programmes (Suchting, 1992). Most constructivists have moved on to Critical Studies or Cultural Studies but have taken constructivism with them (McCarthy, 2018). Ken Tobin (2015), who supposedly has “moved on” from constructivism, writes: In contrast to the mainstream of research in science education, I advocate a multilogical methodology that embraces incommensurability, polysemia, subjectivity, and polyphonia as a means of preserving the integrity and potential of knowledge systems to generate and maintain disparate perspectives, outcomes, and implications for practice. In such  a  multilogical model, power discourses such as Western medicine carry no greater weight than complementary knowledge systems that may have been marginalized in  a  social world in which monosemia is dominant. (p. 3) In as much as these two sentences can be understood, it is clear that each phrase and clause is redolent of constructivism. Although Tobin, and so many other constructivists, have “moved on,” they have not left constructivist philosophy, specifically epistemology and ontology, behind. Thus, the HPS-­informed arguments outlined earlier need to be replayed on new stages.

History and Philosophy of Science in Professorial and Teacher Formation The paucity of serious HPS input into science teacher, and professorial, education is depressingly well documented in Peter Fensham’s book Defining an Identity: The Evolution of Science Education as  a  Field of

Philosophy and Science Teacher Education  137 Research (Fensham, 2004). The book opens  a  representative and authoritative window onto international science teacher education and the ethos of science education graduate schools. Fensham is one of the most respected and influential science educators of the past 50 years (Cross, 2003). The Identity book is built around his interviews with 79 leading science educators from 16 countries; they include at least 16 past Presidents of the NARST, and 10-­15 current or past editors of major international science education research journals. The interviewees have authored or edited hundreds of books, a thousand or more research articles, and have overseen the same number, or more, of doctoral students. So although the book provides a numerically small sample of the profession, nevertheless, it is a good sample of leading science education academics, and provides some reasonable warrant for extrapolation to the wider science education academic community. What it lacks in quantity, it makes up for in quality. The interviewees were asked by Fensham (2004) to respond to two questions (p. xiv): # Tell me about two of your publications in the field that you regard as significant. # Tell me about up to three publications by others that have had a major influence on your research work in the field. The two philosophers most mentioned as influencing the intellectual formation of these leading researchers were the leading constructivists Thomas Kuhn and Ernst von Glasersfeld. Kuhn is more cited than read; the mere citation of Kuhn is considered to constitute an argument or to provide evidence for some philosophical view. One interviewee in a publication writes that: “In recent years, the rational foundations of Western science and the self-­perpetuating belief in the scientific method have come into question…. The notion of finding a truth for reality is highly questionable” (Fleer, 1999, p. 119). No evidence is adduced for this sweeping claim except an unpaginated reference to Kuhn. This practice of having a Kuhn citation substitute for evidence or argument is widespread. Merely putting “Kuhn” in brackets after some outrageous claim is regarded as sufficient warrant for the claim. As documented in Fensham’s book, as evidenced in any random sample of science education publications, and as indicated in the earlier sections of this chapter, the philosophical competence of science education faculty needs to be raised. The following are some steps that might be taken: 1 Instead of science teachers doing higher degrees in education (with a view to university appointment), encourage them first to do an undergraduate degree in an appropriate foundation discipline; after

138  Michael R. Matthews that do a PhD in Education. This is good for their personal growth or education, and it is ultimately beneficial to whatever research programme they might engage in. 2 Ensure that PhD committees in science education have Foundations faculty on them. The participation of a psychology, philosophy, history, or linguistics researcher on thesis committees would contribute to raising candidate and supervisor awareness of past and current literatures in the relevant disciplines. 3 Try as much as possible to ease publication pressure so that scholarship can be engaged in. Far better for science educators to spend a semester attending a philosophy, psychology, linguistics, or history course, and reading substantial books, than conducting yet another study of misconceptions or the impact of talking on classroom learning. Better that a few things be done well than a hundred things be done poorly. 4 Encourage a system of joint appointments between Education and foundation disciplines. Encouragingly, this happens to  a  small extent between Education and science disciplines, if other faculty could be cross-­appointed to philosophy or HPS or psychology, this would assuredly lift the quality of scholarship and research in the field.

SCIENCE

HISTORY & PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

SCIENCE TEACHER DEVELOPMENT

PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION

PEDAGOGY

EDUCATION FOUNDATION SUBJECTS

Figure 7.1  S cience Teacher Development. Adapted from Roland Schulz (2014). science: undergraduate and/or postgraduate science degree, etc. history and philosophy of science: internal curriculum-­based HPS and external education-­related HPS studies, etc. pedagogy: practice teaching, educational technology, instructional theory, local curricular, assessment theory and practice, administrative matters, special-­needs education, etc. philosophy of education: aims of education, personal and social goals of education, ethical standards for classroom teaching and teacher-­student interactions, and for school systems, conceptual analysis of teaching and learning, etc. education foundation subjects: sociology of education, history of science education, psychology and cognitive science, developmental psychology, curriculum theory, etc.

Philosophy and Science Teacher Education  139 Aside from preparing professors, the inclusion of some education-­related HPS course in the preparation of science teachers is a necessity. Ideally, it means the creation of specific courses that pick up tangible theoretical, curricular, and pedagogical topics in science teaching that teachers can identify and recognize as genuine problems; then elaborate how HPS considerations can contribute to the better understanding and resolution of the issue. The following diagram—­which is an elaboration of an informative comparable diagram in Roland Schulz (2014)—­captures the components discussed earlier which support the formation of well-­ prepared science teachers (Figure 7.1).

Conclusion Many of the issues in the HPS are complex and contentious. The jury is still out on important matters, including constructivism as discussed earlier. The art of the teacher is to judge the sophistication of his or her students and present a picture of science that is intelligible to them without being overwhelming. Students need to get their feet, to become familiar with  a  tradition, before they are confronted with the “cutting edge” questions. The teacher may have strong opinions on various HPS issues, but the point of education is to develop the students’ minds, which means giving students the knowledge and wherewithal to develop informed HPS opinions. If HPS in science teaching becomes a catechism, then it defeats one of its major purposes. HPS in teacher training programmes can do something towards broadening the vision of teachers, and having their students not only arrive at destinations (scientific competence), but arrive with broader horizons, having travelled with a different view. In the long run, this contributes to the health of science.

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140  Michael R. Matthews Bunge, M. (2016). Between two worlds: Memoirs of  a  philosopher-­scientist. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer. Cheung, K. C., & Taylor, R. (1991). Towards a humanistic constructivist model of science learning: Changing perspectives and research implications. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 23(1), 21–40. Cross, R. T. (Ed.). (2003). A vision for science education: Responding to the work of Peter Fensham. London, UK: RoutledgeFalmer. Davis, N. T. B., McCarty, J., Shaw, K. L., & Sidani-­Tabbaa, A. (1993). Transitions from objectivism to constructivism in science education. International Journal of Science Education, 15, 627–636. Driver, R. (1988).  A  constructivist approach to curriculum development. In P.  Fensham (Ed.), Development and dilemmas in science education (pp. 133–149). New York, NY: Falmer Press. Duschl, R. A. (1985). Science education and philosophy of science twenty-­five, years of mutually exclusive development. School Science and Mathematics, 87(7), 541–555. Ennis, R. H. (1979). Research in philosophy of science bearing on science education. In P. D. Asquith & H. E. Kyburg (Eds.), Current research in philosophy of science (pp. 138–170). East Lansing, MI: PSA. Fensham, P. J. (1992). Science and technology. In P. W. Jackson (Ed.), Handbook of research on curriculum (pp. 789–829). New York, NY: Macmillan. Fensham, P. J. (2004). Defining an identity: The evolution of science education as  a  field of research. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Fleer, M. (1999). Children’s alternative views: Alternative to What?. International Journal of Science Education, 21(2), 119–135. Fosnot, C. T. (Ed.). (2005). Constructivism: Theory, perspectives, and practice (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Gergen, K. (1994). Realities and relations: Soundings in social construction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Golinski, J. (2012). Thomas Kuhn and interdisciplinary conversation: Why historians and philosophers of science stopped talking to one another. In S.  Mauskopf  &  T. Schmaltz (Eds.), Integrating history and philosophy of science (pp. 13–28). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer. Good, R., Wandersee, J., & St. Julien, J. (1993). Cautionary notes on the appeal of the new “ism” (constructivism) in science education. In K. Tobin (Ed.), Constructivism in science and mathematics education (pp.  71–90). ­Washington, DC: AAAS. Kang, N. H. (2008). Learning to teach science: Personal epistemologies, teaching goals, and practices of teaching. Teaching and Teacher Education, 24, 478–498. Kirschner, P. A., Sweller, J.,  &  Clark, R. E. (2006). Why minimally guided learning does not work: An analysis of the failure of discovery learning, problem-­based learning, experiential learning and inquiry-­based learning. Educational Psychologist, 41(2), 75–96. Kuhn, T. S. (1970). The structure of scientific revolutions (2nd ed.), Chicago: Chicago University Press. (First edition, 1962). Kuhn, T. S. (1991/2000). The trouble with historical philosophy of science. The Robert and Maurine Rothschild Lecture, Department of History of

Philosophy and Science Teacher Education  141 Science, Harvard University. In J. Conant & J. Haugeland (Eds.), The road since structure: Thomas S. Kuhn (pp. 105–120). Chicago, IL: University of ­Chicago Press. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lipman, M. (1988). Philosophy goes to school. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Lorsbach, A.,  &  Tobin, K. (1992). Constructivism as  a  referent for science teaching. NARST Newsletter, 30, 5–7. Loving, C. C., & Cobern, W. A. (2000). Invoking Thomas Kuhn: What citation analysis reveals for science education. Science & Education, 9(1–2), 187–206. Magoon, A. J. (1977). Constructivist approaches in educational research. Review of Educational Research, 47(4), 651–693. Matthews, M. R. (2004). Thomas Kuhn and science education: What lessons can be learnt? Science Education, 88(1), 90–118. Matthews, M. R. (Ed.). (2014). International handbook of research in history, philosophy and science teaching,  3  volumes. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer. Matthews, M. R. (2015a). Science teaching: The contribution of history and philosophy of science (2nd ed). New York, NY: Routledge. Matthews, M. R. (2015b). Reflections on 25-­years of journal editorship. Science & Education, 24(5–6), 749–805. Matthews, M. R. (Ed.). (2018). History, philosophy and science teaching: New perspectives. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer. McCarthy, C. L. (2018). Cultural studies of science education: An appraisal. In M. R. Matthews (Ed.), History, philosophy and science teaching: New perspectives (pp. 99–136). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer. National Research Council (NRC). (1996). National science education standards. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. Nola, R. (Ed.). (1988). Relativism and realism in science. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Reidel Academic Publishers. Norris, C. (1997). Against relativism: Philosophy of science, deconstruction and critical theory. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Novak, J. D. (1977).  A  theory of education. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Paperback edition, 1986. Olson, J. K. (2018). The inclusion of the nature of science in nine recent international science education standards documents. Science & Education, 1–24. doi:10.1007/s11191-­018-­9993-­8 online first Peters, R. S. (1966). Ethics and education. London, UK: George Allen and Unwin. Piaget, J. (1972). Psychology and epistemology: Towards  a  theory of knowledge. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Popper, K. R. (1963). Conjectures and refutations: The growth of scientific knowledge. London, UK: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Rodriguez, A. J. (1998). Strategies for counterresistance: Toward sociotransformative constructivism and learning to teach science for diversity and for understanding. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 35(6), 589–622. Roth, W.-­M. (2006). Learning science:  A  singular plural perspective. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishers.

142  Michael R. Matthews Scheffler, I. (1966). Science and subjectivity (1st ed.). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Scheffler, I. (1973). Philosophy and the curriculum. In I. Scheffler (Ed.), Reason and teaching (pp. 31–41). Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-­Merrill. Schulz, R. M. (2014). Philosophy of education and science education:  A  vital but underdeveloped relationship. In M. R. Matthews (Ed.), International handbook of research in history, philosophy and science teaching (pp. 1259– 1315). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer. Shapere, D. (1964). The structure of scientific revolutions. Philosophical Review, 73, 383–394. Shimony, A. (1976). Comments on two epistemological theses of Thomas Kuhn. In R. S. Cohen, P. K. Feyerabend, & M. W. Wartofsky (Eds.), Essays in Memory of Imre Lakatos (pp. 569–588). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Reidel. Siegel, H. (1987). Relativism refuted. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Reidel. Stove, D. C. (1982). Popper and after: Four modern irrationalists. Oxford, UK: Pergamon Press. Suchting, W. A. (1992). Constructivism deconstructed. Science & Education, 1(3), 223–254. Reprinted in M. R. Matthews (Ed.). (1998). Constructivism in science education: A philosophical examination (pp. 61–92). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Swinbank, E., & Taylor, J. (Eds.). (2007). Perspectives on science: The history, philosophy and ethics of science. Harlow, Essex, UK: Heinemann. Tobin, K. (1991). Constructivist perspectives on research in science education. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching, Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Tobin, K. (2000). Constructivism in science education: Moving on. In D. C. Phillips (Ed.), Constructivism in education (pp. 227–253). Chicago, IL: National Society for the Study of Education. Tobin, K. (2015). Connecting science education to a world in crisis. Asia-­Pacific Science Education, 1(2). doi:10.1186/s41029-­015- ­0 003-­z Tobin, K., & Tippins, D. (1993). Constructivism as a referent for teaching and learning. In K. Tobin (Ed.), The practice of constructivism in science and mathematics education (pp. 3–21). Washington, DC: AAAS Press. van den Brink, J. (1991). Didactic constructivism. In E. von Glasersfeld (Ed.), Radical constructivism in mathematics education (pp. 195–227). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer. von Glasersfeld, E. (1987). Construction of knowledge. Salinas, CA: Intersystems Publications. von Glasersfeld, E. (1990a). Environment and communication. In L. P. Steffe & T. Wood (Ed.), Transforming children’s mathematics education: International perspectives (pp. 30–38). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawerence Erlbaum. von Glasersfeld, E. (1990b). An exposition of constructivism: Why some like it hot. In R. Davis, C. Maher, & N. Noddings (Eds.), Constructivist views on the teaching and learning of mathematics (pp. 19–30). Reston, VA: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. Wheatley, G. H. (1991). Constructivist perspectives on science and mathematics learning. Science Education, 75(1), 9–22. Whitehead, A. N. (1947). Technical education and its relation to science and literature. In A. N. Whitehead (Ed.), The aims of education and other essays (pp. 66–92). London, UK: Williams & Norgate. Yeany, R. H. (1991). A  unifying theme in science education?. NARST News, 33(2), 1–3.

Part III

Historical Perspectives

8 Philosophy, the Liberal Arts, and Teacher Education Douglas W. Yacek and Bruce Kimball

Introduction Teacher education and the liberal arts are forms of education that go hand in hand. It has often been argued that teachers require knowledge and skills beyond the content of their chosen subject disciplines. Teachers need special skills for communicating these forms of thought to those who have had little exposure to the discipline. In a now classic essay in the Harvard Educational Review, Lee Schulman (1987) refers to these skills under the heading “pedagogical content knowledge,” and more recent models of teacher professionalism have adopted terms such as “instructional expertise” (e.g. Sun, Penuel, Frank, Gallagher,  &  Youngs, 2013) and “pedagogical competence” (e.g. Toom, 2017). Although pedagogical acumen is  a  central aspect of good teaching, expertise in teaching goes beyond the knowledge and skills marked out by these categories. Expert teachers require psychological insight, social understanding, historical background, ethical sensitivity, and, generally, a degree of practical wisdom if they are to orient their teaching to the flourishing of their students, not just their academic success. The broad spectrum of human experience embedded in the liberal arts is frequently seen as an intellectual wellspring capable of providing the aspiring teacher this supplemental understanding. In placing humanistic, philosophical, and scientific forms of knowledge in conversation with one another, the liberal arts offer teachers crucial resources for appreciating the full meaning of their relationships with students in schools. Consequently, some have argued that aspiring teachers should first complete a degree in the liberal arts before embarking upon a teacher education programme in graduate studies (e.g. Adler, 1982). While we are sympathetic with this view, this chapter will take  a  slightly different angle in defending the import of the liberal arts for teacher education. Instead, we suggest that teacher education and liberal arts ought to be pursued simultaneously in the undergraduate years. If teacher expertise, in fact, requires the liberal sensibility described earlier, then the study of the liberal arts should be closely interweaved into the curricular fabric of undergraduate teacher education. Lacking opportunities to develop this

146  Douglas W. Yacek and Bruce Kimball sensibility in direct interaction with the subject matter of teaching, aspiring teachers may struggle to fuse the breadth of ideas covered in their liberal studies with the everyday realities of being a teacher. Of course, there are important curricular and conceptual barriers facing such  a  proposal.  A  robust preparation for the contemporary challenges of teaching must invariably cover profession-­specific concerns such as school law, educational policy, classroom management, evaluation, and school administration, not to mention child psychology, learning theory, and other “clientele-­specific” concerns. These subjects would vie for ample treatment in a teacher education curriculum that incorporates the liberal arts. The basic problem seems to be that the professional components of the teacher education curriculum unavoidably compete with the subject matter of liberal studies. Can teacher education balance the seeming opposition between liberal education and professional preparation? Amongst the liberal arts, philosophy has long been seen as a synthesizing discipline helping students to integrate the various epistemic contributions of the liberal arts into a coherent worldview (e.g. ­Newman, 1982). If this synthetic capacity extends beyond philosophy’s contribution to the liberal arts curriculum, it may be able to provide an important bridge between the professional concerns of teacher education and the general subject matter of the liberal arts. In other words, the presence of philosophy in teacher preparation could make liberal teacher education—­i.e.  a  teacher education programme that draws on both professional and liberal concerns to cultivate the broad perspective that expert teachers require—­a real educational possibility. The purpose of this chapter is thus to explore the idea of a liberal teacher education and to determine the proper role of philosophy in such  a  programme. By showing that the conceptual resources for wedding teacher education and the liberal arts are already embedded in the Western educational tradition, we hope to demonstrate that such a combination is an achievable ideal. This chapter is organized in four sections. The first provides  a  historical analysis of three different roles that have been ascribed to philosophy in the history of the liberal arts. These three roles constitute competing understandings of the significance of philosophy for liberal education. While the philosophers of Greek Antiquity suggest an “existential” role for philosophy in liberal education, the Scholastics argue for a “disciplinary” role in the medieval universities, and the Enlightenment philosophers  a  “pedagogical” role. Together, these various roles provide  a  conceptual framework for understanding how philosophy might give shape to a programme of liberal teacher education. The idea of a liberal teacher education is addressed in the next section. Here, we show that two approaches to formal teacher education that emerged in North America in the 19th century—­the teacher preparation

Philosophy and the Liberal Arts  147 programmes at female seminaries and the state normal schools—­ together point to a model of teacher education that balanced some of the competing concerns of liberal and professional studies via the influence of philosophy. They were able to do so by incorporating, at least partially, the disciplinary, pedagogical, and existential roles of philosophy into the teacher education curriculum. After outlining this historical model, we then turn in the third section to some of the factors that led teacher education in the 20th century to distance itself from liberal teacher education. We determine three main factors in this separation: the rise of the scientific ethos in research-­ focused colleges of education, the removals of teacher education programmes from selective liberal arts colleges, and the dramatic shift of disciplinary identity that philosophy underwent in the 1950s and 1960s. In the fourth and final section, we suggest how the trend towards separation might be addressed in the future.

Philosophy as a Liberal Arts Discipline This section examines the three primary roles that philosophy has historically played in the liberal arts course of study. The role and meaning of philosophy in the liberal arts have been sharply contested from the very beginning. As  a  part of the larger controversies about how (and whether) virtue could be taught, what the nature of wisdom was, and what subject matter was necessary for its acquisition, Greek intellectuals in Ancient Athens seriously disputed the proper contribution of philosophy to the encyclios paideia, the general course of study for free individuals. For Plato and Aristotle, philosophy holds a special status in the educational career of the individual. Philosophy constitutes the final stage of intellectual culture, a subject whose goal is wisdom and whose study requires  a  preparatory curriculum of subjects like mathematics, astronomy, music, and dialectic. This curriculum, found in Book VII of the Republic, would later become the quadrivium of the seven liberal arts. On this view, the study of philosophy concerns itself with the ways of the universe, with the ideas, forms, elements, and structures that underlie everyday perception, and with the mysteries of the human soul. It was precisely this speculative and seemingly aloof educational ideal that incited Isocrates’ famous critique of the Socratic tradition in his Antidosis (not to mention Aristophanes’ spoof of Socrates in The Clouds). For Isocrates (2010), it was not “fitting to dignify with the name ‘philosophy’ a study which now is of use neither for speaking nor for acting”; such could only be “preparation for philosophy” (p. 27), which he ultimately equates with “speaking well and thinking rightly” (p. 28). Civic service was the final fruit of a worthy liberal education, according to Isocrates, and thus the subject of rhetoric should stand atop the liberal educational programme. “[I]nvestigating the things under the earth and the

148  Douglas W. Yacek and Bruce Kimball heavenly things,” as Socrates’ behaviour is characterized in the Apology (Plato, 1998, p. 66), were idle and “empty” arts (Isocrates, 2010, p. 27). With this argument, two camps of an enduring debate in the Western educational tradition would be clearly delineated.1 On the one side, thinkers of philosophical disposition would argue for  a  more speculative orientation of the liberal arts, while those disposed to rhetoric and oratory would argue for the civic value of a liberal arts education. As a result, it was not until the end of the fourth and beginning of the fifth centuries CE that consensus could be found on what constituted an appropriate course of study for free citizens: the septem artes liberales (seven liberal arts). This curriculum comprised the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy as well as the trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. These seven subjects constituted the disciplines that any teaching master of a school was henceforth expected to know, and they underwent remarkably little modification until the rise of Scholasticism in the 12th and 13th centuries. Although the seven liberal arts combined disciplines dear to both ideological camps, it was the Isocratic view, further developed by Cicero, Quintillian, Augustine, Martianus Capella, and Cassiodorus, that would come to dominate the general understanding of liberal education for the almost millennium-­long period from its consolidation to the rise of Scholasticism. The liberal arts thus fixated on the Roman ideal of the civically engaged bonus orator and those subjects best fit to cultivate his abilities. Quintillian’s view is typical: the “man who is a true citizen and fit to assume the guidance of affairs both public and private … would not  …  be anyone other than the orator,” and thus the highest art is that which teaches “eloquence” (Quintillian, 2010, p.  42). In spite of Boethius’ (2010) sixth century appeals to “Wisdom our captain,” who calls us to flee the uncertainties of political life to “her citadel” of philosophical learning, in which we are “protected by such a wall as may not be scaled by raging stupidity” (p. 70), the orientation of the liberal arts would be remain firmly oratorical. Philosophy would not regain a special place in the liberal arts curriculum until Anselm, Peter Abelard, and Thomas Aquinas take the stage in the High Middle Ages. In the Medieval university, the Scholastics placed three philosophies—­natural philosophy, moral philosophy, and metaphysics—­at the pinnacle of the course of study. These were subjects to be taken up after the seven liberal arts had already been mastered and before specialized professional study in law, medicine, or theology could commence. In addition to this curricular innovation, the Scholastics would come to focus study of the trivium almost exclusively on logic. For Aquinas (2010), “the proper order of education is that the young first be instructed in topics pertaining to logic, because logic teaches the method of the whole of philosophy” and then make their way through “natural,” “moral,” “sapiential,” and “metaphysical” studies (p. 129).

Philosophy and the Liberal Arts  149 In other words, the proper liberal course of study must begin and end in philosophy. In spite of the Scholastic enthusiasm for philosophy, the discipline would not quite recapture the significance it had once enjoyed amongst Ancient Greek philosophers. Under Scholastic stewardship, philosophy is still a “helping” discipline, famously a handmaiden to theology, and thus a kind of mental training for the heights of theological reflection and revelation. Thus, we come to the first important result of the historical account so far. The Scholastic understanding of philosophy embodies  a  particular interpretation of the Ancient Greek philosophical tradition and  a  particular view of philosophy’s significance for liberal education. Remarking on the history of ancient philosophy, Pierre Hadot (1995) points out that “[f]or the ancients  …  [p]hilosophy took on the form of an exercise of the thought, will, and totality of one’s being, the goal of which was to achieve a state practically inaccessible to mankind: wisdom” (p. 265). According to Hadot, philosophy was, in its original form, “a way of life,” while the Scholastic understanding had reduced it to a “purely theoretical and abstract activity” (p. 270). Hadot argues that the link established between philosophy and the course of study in the Medieval university would be an unhappy one for philosophy, since the academic environment would make room only for “discourse about philosophy” rather than “philosophy itself” (p. 266). Leaving aside Hadot’s clear normative preference for the latter, we might say that the Scholastics advanced  a  disciplinary role for philosophy in the liberal arts course of study, and this in a double sense. On the one hand, the Scholastics embraced philosophy because the subject “disciplines” the mind in a certain desired way—­here: for the purposes of theological reflection. On the other hand, the discipline of philosophy becomes a liberal arts subject to be studied in its own right, to be undertaken both within and at the culmination of the traditional liberal arts curriculum, in preparation for specialized professional studies and theological insight. The Ancients, on the other hand, embodied a different view, in which philosophy is a mode of reflecting on one’s choices and purposes from the standpoint of the “totality of one’s being.” This implies an existential role for philosophy in liberal education. Here, philosophy is not  a  discipline in  a  traditional sense, but rather the reflective practice of placing one’s educational and life goals in line with human flourishing and the pursuit of wisdom. In other words, philosophy is a special way of engaging with the curriculum rather than being (merely) a subject of study. Scholastic influence gradually waned in the European university. Reacting to the excesses of Scholastic speculation, Renaissance humanists from Petrarch to Melanchton refocused liberal learning towards the study of more worldly affairs such as poetry, history, and rhetoric, which they found embodied in the classical literature of the Romans,

150  Douglas W. Yacek and Bruce Kimball and argued forcefully for the expulsion of Scholastic rigidity from the university. The vacillation between the speculative-­philosophical and civic-­rhetorical orientations of liberal education would continue into the European Enlightenment, when the rise in the importance of experimental science and philosophy at the hands of Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, and others shifted emphasis back again to the philosophical side of the spectrum. Although they shared a philosophical disposition, the Enlightenment’s elevation of philosophy was no return to Scholasticism, however. For Enlightenment thinkers, the philosophical enterprise could no longer remain a servant to theology. Enlightenment philosophy was a pursuit with revolutionary personal, political, and economic consequences. In reinterpreting the contribution of philosophy to liberal education, Enlightenment thinkers subtly shifted the role it was to have in this course of study. Famously, the study of philosophy was necessary for awakening the mind from its “dogmatic slumbers” (Kant, 2004, p. 10), 2 for supporting the exercise of private reason, and thus for defending the integrity of the individual in the face of the power of government.3 This conception of philosophy constitutes a third view of philosophy’s significance for liberal education. Here, philosophy is understood, not as an exercise for mental discipline, nor as a mode of existential reflection, but as  a  method of self-­examination. Unlike the other two, this view was heavily influenced by the image of Socrates as the gadfly of Athens. Enlightenment thinkers since Descartes had thought of themselves as applying Socrates’ method of critical reasoning to the problems of ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology, which would thereby be liberated from prejudice and partiality. The examination of “prejudices imbibed from education, party, reverence, fashion, interest, etc.” was, for Locke (2007), “one of the first things everyone should set about, and be scrupulous in, who would rightly conduct his understanding in the search of truth and knowledge” (pp. 204–205). Unsurprisingly, Enlightenment philosophers thus emphasized an understanding of the liberal arts as liberating arts, i.e. subjects that have the capacity to free the mind. To quote Locke again, “[t]he business of education … is not … to make [pupils] perfect in any one of the sciences,” but solely to cultivate “a variety and freedom of thinking” (p. 216). Taken to its extreme, the Enlightenment equation of liberal and liberatory studies implies that the new experimental and mathematical sciences emerging in the 19th century are just as deserving of a spot in the liberal arts curriculum as the traditional curricular subjects of liberal education so long as they can be shown to assist the freethinking mind.4 Likewise, the classical subjects deserve no special status if they do not do so. Yet even more interesting is the pedagogical import of this Enlightenment reappraisal of the liberal arts. The ideal of liberal education depends now much less upon the subjects themselves than how their

Philosophy and the Liberal Arts  151 subject matter is delivered—­namely, whether it has a liberating effect on the student or not. It is no accident, then, that some of the most important works of pedagogical method are developed during this era, Basedow’s Elementarwerk, Campe’s Robinson the Younger, and, of course, Rousseau’s (1889) Emile are some important examples. In advancing  a  conception of liberal education as liberating education, the Enlightenment thinkers thus represent yet another understanding of the role of philosophy in the liberal arts. Namely, we see here the emergence of a pedagogical role for philosophy, according to which philosophy is practised as a method of disburdening the student of his or her unexamined prejudices and liberating the mind. In other words, philosophy in this understanding is a descriptor of teaching rather than the subject to be taught. A subject is taught “philosophically,” insofar as it contributes to awakening and freeing the mind. Again, we see the image of Socrates and his prying examinations of his fellow Athenians arise here, and Enlightenment pedagogical theory was deeply influenced by the supposed method that he practised. In the introduction to a 19th-­ century translation of Rousseau’s Emile, Jules Steeg articulates this connection clearly. Truly Rousseauian teachers, Steeg writes, will not copy the form; they will not imitate the awkward clap-­ trap; but, yielding to the inspiration of the dominant idea, they will, in  a  way more in accordance with nature, manage to thrill with life the teaching of facts, and will aid the mind in giving birth to its ideas. This is the old method of Socrates, the eternal method of reason, the only method which really educates. (p. 3) If the Enlightenment thinkers were able to counteract the weakening of philosophy by the oratorically disposed humanists before them, the pendulum was nevertheless to swing again towards yet another humanistic reaction in Europe in the 19th century—­the Neuhumanismus of Wilhelm von Humboldt, Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer, and other followers of German classicism. This neohumanism, as the pedagogical theory of the German classicist movement in the late 18th and early 19th centuries (Blankertz, 1982), was just as much a reaction to Enlightenment rationalism as it was to the “school humanism” (Schulhumanismus) that had overtaken the Latin preparatory schools of the time. In the neohumanists’ minds, the humanistic programme had been transformed into  a  vapid and rigid rote memorization of supposedly classic texts and divorced from the original humanistic spirit which was precisely  a  reaction to these problems in the Scholastic universitas. 5 Unfortunately, the humanism adopted in the 17th-­century American colonial colleges was much closer to this “school humanism” than it was to the neohumanistic revival of Renaissance learning, and this would

152  Douglas W. Yacek and Bruce Kimball have an important impact on the later development of teacher education. As staunch (school-­)humanist outposts, the American colonial colleges emphasized classical letters, while the three philosophies were often relegated to  a  Masters-­level “phantom course,” and logic was subsumed under the philological courses (Kimball, 1995, p. 107). Philosophy did eventually regain some of its lost prestige and curricular importance, but change was not to occur until the Revolution, which established the Enlightenment ethos in American intellectual life. The most common form philosophy was to take in the colleges of this period was “Mental” or “Intellectual” Philosophy—­a hybrid discipline of Enlightenment philosophy of mind, common-­sense realism, and faculty psychology (Fuchs, 2012). Mental and intellectual philosophies are subjects that can be continually found in the teacher education curricula of this time, and it constitutes one of the most important modes through which aspiring teachers encountered the discipline of philosophy in roughly the first three quarters of the 19th century. Before delving further into the consequences of the foregoing analysis for teacher education, however, the results of this historical examination should be briefly summed up. Although “Mental Philosophy” may be an essential curricular element of 19th-­century teacher education, the mere fact that we can find a course with “philosophy” in the name does not offer a decisive answer as to whether philosophy was present in the course of study. From a historical perspective, the question whether philosophy is “present” in  a  course of study may be construed in three different ways: (1) whether the special range of questions and intellectual concerns unique to the discipline of philosophy exists in the course of study, typically as a subject to be studied in its own right, which the Scholastics found important; (2) whether the curriculum encourages a way of life directed towards wisdom, which Boethius and Hadot considered to be the unique contribution of ancient Greek philosophy; or (3) whether the subjects are taught in a “philosophical” way, i.e. whether they contribute to the “freeing of the mind” that the Enlightenment philosophers so valued. These are the disciplinary, existential, and pedagogical roles that have been ascribed to philosophy in the history of the liberal arts. As we shall see, these categories will be especially important for understanding what we can learn from the early history of teacher education in North America.

The Emergence of Liberal Teacher Education in North America In this section, we shall see that the three roles of philosophy, far from being merely  a  conceptual framework for understanding the history of philosophy in the liberal arts, find a home in two exemplary forms of formal teacher education in the 19th century in North America.6

Philosophy and the Liberal Arts  153 It is tempting to begin the history of formal teacher education with the rise of the common school movement and its enthusiastic call for the founding “normal schools” for teacher preparation. American educational reformers like Horace Mann were in thrall to the Prussian model of teacher education established in the previous century— ­so in thrall that Mann’s colleagues apparently referred to him as “the Prussian.” The 1839 opening of the normal school at Lexington was to be a first attempt to apply the Prussian system of teacher education on American soil and is often seen as an inaugural event of professional teacher education. However, since the beginning of the 19th century, female seminaries across the country had taken up the task of educating teachers. These seminaries were modelled, not after the Prussian example, but after the existing American colleges.7 As Fraser (2007) reports, at least until the 1850s, these institutions “prepared more teachers and had a greater impact on the nature of the teaching profession than the normal schools” (p. 41). At these seminaries, a liberal arts curriculum very similar to the college course of study was offered, with “Mental and Moral Philosophy” often taught as a capstone course. Rather than merely mimic their male counterparts in the colleges, however, the seminaries made important innovations and improvements on the collegiate educational offering by “experiment[ing] with more engaging student discussions, in contrast to the lectures and recitations that characterized the early-­19th- ­century college” (Fraser, 2007, p.  31). This difference was important, since it meant that the male colleges “prepared teachers accidently,” while the female seminaries “prepared them intentionally” (p. 32). Although the seminaries saw one of their central missions in preparing women to be teachers, they did not offer any courses specifically on pedagogy. This did not mean that pedagogy was ignored. Emma W ­ illard, founder and head teacher of the female seminary at Troy, consistently “modeled pedagogy and told her students what forms of pedagogy she was modeling even as she taught them not pedagogy but literature, science, and mathematics” (p.  32). As  a  result of this pedagogical focus, as well as Willard’s innovative programmes to subsidize the tuition of aspiring teachers, the Troy seminary “came to be suffused with a sense of commitment to teaching as  a  calling that offered opportunities for self-­fulfilment and for service” (p. 33). Importantly, the seminaries that would be founded after the Troy model saw this mission as completely in line with both the liberal arts and the study of philosophy. In fact, 90% of the curricula of the seminaries would feature natural philosophy, 82% mental philosophy, and 80% moral philosophy (p. 35). The synthesis of the liberal arts, philosophy, and teacher education achieved in the seminaries would be carried forward by the founding of normal schools. Yet, the normal school movement simultaneously marks a crucial turning point in the history of the relationship between

154  Douglas W. Yacek and Bruce Kimball the liberal arts and the teacher education. The establishment of normal schools grew out of a conviction amongst prominent normal school proponents that teacher education would be best carried out, not in the existing liberal arts colleges or similar institutions (like the seminaries), but in specialized institutions in which specific pedagogical know-­how could be developed in trainee teachers. In the words of Horace Mann, “the course of instruction, proper to qualify teachers, must be essentially different from a common academical course” (quoted in Fraser, 2007, p. 51). In other words, normal school advocates seemed to be saying that the liberal arts curriculum could not provide an adequate preparatory programme for schoolteachers. In its place, they envisioned four core elements necessary for the preparation of teachers. First enumerated by Governor Everett at the opening of the first normal school in Massachusetts, these core elements were (1) content knowledge, (2) the art of teaching, (3) government of the school, and (4) observation and practical apprenticeship. These four elements would remain at the heart of the normal school programme for the next several decades (Ogren, 2005, p. 29). Although neither the liberal arts nor the philosophy is explicitly mentioned in this summary statement, and although the establishment of “competitor” institutions for teacher training would seem to make the normal school a rival of the liberal arts, the normal schools incorporated the liberal arts and philosophy in several respects. The first way that these were incorporated was somewhat accidental. The academic qualifications of the normal school students were often quite poor, mostly due to the spotty elementary education they received in the common schools. This meant that, for most of the 19th century, the normal school would have to offer remedial courses in many of the standard branches of elementary education. As a result, the normal school offering remained in effect quite close to a liberal arts model, at least in the sense that it provided a breadth of learning in various subject disciplines (Herbst, 1991). Moreover, almost all of the normal schools offered courses in the “art of teaching,” and this was an important context in which teacher candidates were exposed to the necessity of philosophy, if not philosophy itself. As an example, one of the most popular textbooks at the time that was read in this context was David Page’s (1847) Theory and Practice of Teaching. In the book, Page places “Intellectual Philosophy” and “Moral Philosophy” amongst the necessary “Literary qualifications of the Teacher” for grasping this difficult art (p. 59). On intellectual philosophy, Page writes, “This is necessary for the teacher. His business is with the mind. He, of all men, should know of its laws and its nature” (p. 59), and on moral philosophy, Page continues, “It is so important the moral nature of the child be rightly dealt with, that he is presumptuous man who attempts the work without the most careful attention to this subject” (p. 59). Following Page’s exhortations, many of the early normal

Philosophy and the Liberal Arts  155 schools offered courses in “natural, intellectual, and moral philosophy” alongside those in “compositition, geometry, algebra, physiology … natural history, botany, political economy, booking, vocal music and the art of teaching” (Fraser, 2007, p. 52). Christine Ogren’s (2005) comprehensive study of the history of normal schools confirms that, although normal schools did strive to be places of professional education, they nonetheless resisted reduction to mere vocational training even early into the 20th century, when they were well on their way to cornering the market of formal teacher education in the United States. William Wilson, principal of the State Normal School at Ellensburg, Washington, whom Ogren’s cites, captures this spirit well: The education of the teacher must not be narrowed down to mere training in the work of school teaching. The Normal School must cultivate a lively interest in study, it must promote the spirit of investigation, it must beget enthusiasm for learning. To accomplish this it must provide for the vigorous pursuit under able instructors of substantial branches of learning. (p. 121) This narrowing was staved off in part by the presence of philosophy and the liberal arts in the normal school curriculum. Ogren demonstrates that “most state normal offered instruction in history and philosophy of education”—­sometimes in a course called “History and Philosophy of Education” but most often, the course was called just “History of Education” (pp. 132–133). In these courses, students engaged in a comparative “inquiry into the lives and educational theories of all the great writers and teachers” (p.  133). According to Ogren, courses like this ensured that “[c]lass discussion would be a continuation of ongoing debates about broad questions in education” (p. 134). The justification for these courses was twofold. First, normal school leaders hoped to cultivate a liberal habit of mind in their teacher trainees: “These institutions recognized that the potential practical results of classes that encouraged students to think broadly about their future vocation” (p. 134). Thinking broadly in this way was considered important because it made teacher candidates less susceptible to educational fads. In the words of the normal school course catalogue at Florence: “Some of the so called new methods are as old as Plato and Socrates and ­A ristotle” (p.  134). Second, the normal schools hoped to advance, in Ogren’s words, a “spirit of consecration” in which the normal school, by engaging students in the grand tradition of educational thought, “could encourage and inspire the young teacher to a more devoted effort in behalf of children” (p. 134). That is, they could bring their aspiring teachers to see education as a “calling” (p. 135).

156  Douglas W. Yacek and Bruce Kimball Female seminaries and normal schools were not the only two routes into the teaching profession in the 19th century. Dame schools, teaching institutes, missionary colleges, county training schools, high school normal courses, and liberal arts colleges all offered varying degrees of academic training for the profession of teaching. The female seminaries and normal schools stand out in this group, however, in the ways they negotiated a balance between the liberal arts, philosophical reflection, and the professional demands of teacher education. Their model of teacher education stood in contrast both to the other much less rigorous and educationally expansive teacher training programmes in, for example, high school normal courses and teaching institutes, as well as to the “accidental” education of teachers which occurred at the existing male liberal arts colleges. As we have seen, the latter colleges adhered for much of the 19th century to a school-­humanistic model of teaching and learning (cf. Rudolph, 1977), and thus lagged behind the important pedagogical and professional strides made in female institutions for teacher training. Not only this, the normals and the seminaries surpassed their collegiate competitors in their “suffusion” of philosophy in the life of the institutions. The three roles of philosophy in liberal education which were identified in the previous section all find a place in the teacher education model of the normals and the seminaries, at least in some form. First, the seminaries and normal schools provided a broad base of coursework which included work in mental and moral philosophies. In this, they realized the disciplinary notion of philosophy. Second, these institutions encouraged their students to see the theory and practice of teaching in a broad historical perspective and themselves as individuals continuing the storied tradition of educating the youth. This meant engaging with the many “philosophies of education” that had been defended in the history of educational thought so that they would not be as susceptible to educational fads. This combines both the disciplinary and the pedagogical notions of philosophy. Third, these institutions encouraged their students to see their choice of profession as the pursuit of a “calling.” To see one’s profession as a calling is part of what it means to realize the existential notion of philosophy—­that is, to ply one’s trade not merely to sustain oneself, but to pursue individual and social flourishing. Of course, we can think of many ways that the female seminaries and normal schools might have more fully embodied these various philosophical dimensions and more successfully bridged the professional and liberal elements of teacher education. These institutions had their problems, often failing to achieve a high level of academic achievement amongst graduates and experiencing very high attrition rates. Nonetheless, the female seminaries and normal schools of the 19th century show at the very least that teacher education can incorporate philosophy and the liberal arts in a vocationally meaningful way, and offer some ideas

Philosophy and the Liberal Arts  157 about what such a synthesis could look like. These ideas will be more fully fleshed out in the next section.

Contemporary Barriers to Liberal Teacher Education As normal schools evolved into teachers’ colleges and then into multipurpose regional colleges and universities during the first two quarters of the 20th century, the influence of the liberal arts and philosophy declined in teacher education.8 One of the major factors in this decline was the simultaneous rise of “administrative progressivism” and the emergence of empirical psychology as a discipline separate from mental and intellectual philosophy. As enthusiasm for this burgeoning science continued to grow amongst the increasingly powerful administrative progressives, who saw in it the promise of developing  a  science of instruction and educational governance, the philosophical components of teacher education shrunk into the background. Although the influence of John Dewey and other “pedagogical progressives” ultimately allowed philosophy to preserve a role for itself in university teacher education in the form of “educational foundations,” its role would continually dwindle in importance and perceived justification as the 20th century wore on (cf. Cremin, 1961). The New Empiricism of the 20th and 21st centuries would leave no university discipline unaffected. Yet, it is only  a  contingent fact that teacher education would abandon the philosophical and liberal character it had achieved in the seminaries and normal schools of the 19th century. Philosophy is not inherently averse to an empirical and scientific ethos. As we have seen, it had previously survived  a  wave of empirical enthusiasm—­during the Enlightenment, for example—­and in fact grew in importance during the time. Additionally, understanding the historical progress of educational thinking, achieving a certain critical distance from potentially counterproductive educational trends, and being able to see teaching as  a  calling—­three tasks the seminaries and normals thought could be supported by philosophy—­remain relevant to the contemporary teacher. What is it, then, about the culture of contemporary education that prevents us from seeing the internal harmony of teacher education, philosophy, and the liberal arts? When we think about teacher education today, we easily see the importance of methods’ courses, literacy education, psychology, and social issues relating to multiculturalism, diversity, and equality. But why do we struggle to find a justification for philosophy, history, and other liberal arts subjects? In our view, there are three sources for the struggle. One place to look is in schools and colleges and schools of education at major research universities. As Lagemann (2000) observes, the field of educational research has, since its formation, sought to establish its academic legitimacy by appealing to its status as  a  technical science. The field of educational

158  Douglas W. Yacek and Bruce Kimball psychology was the most influential contributor to the scientific identity of educational research, and this discipline continues to drive the culture of research-­focused colleges of education (Labaree, 2004). For these reasons, teacher education in such institutions encourages forms of reasoning and understanding most at home in the sciences and emphasizes the adoption of “evidence-­based teaching methods.” This means that deriving “best-­practices” from high impact research articles—­often in simplified form—­and appropriating the state of the art from summary textbooks take the place of reading primary literature, critical thinking, and, generally, the open-­ended inquiry which is the mark of  a  liberal education. The progressivist ethos of these institutions can also serve to marginalize liberal arts disciplines, since it tends to be sceptical of traditional knowledge and to emphasize the methods of teaching over its content (ibid.). Insofar as colleges of education at major research universities set an example for teacher education conducted elsewhere, programmes throughout North America are pressured to abandon the liberal sensibility. Another source of the struggle seems to be, ironically, selective liberal arts colleges. These institutions have consistently submitted their teacher education programmes to criticism and scrutiny, and several prominent liberal arts colleges have ceased educating teachers in the last 50 years. According to university administrators, decreases in teacher demand render teacher education  a  costly endeavour, and research in other disciplines seems superior to educational research in both scientific legitimacy and intrinsic interest (in spite of the latter’s attempts to embrace the mantle of science) (Travers, 1980). Public rationales for excluding teacher education from liberal education typically revolve around the seemingly “practical” or “professional” identity of teacher education. The locus classicus for this exclusion argument can be found in Book VIII of Aristotle’s (1984) Politics. There, Aristotle argues that a liberal education is composed of “only such kinds of knowledge as will be useful to [students] without making mechanics of them,” and adds that “those arts [are] mechanical which tend to deform the body, and likewise all paid employments, for they absorb and degrade the mind” (Aristotle, 1984, p. 2122 [1337b3]). Because teaching is, of course, paid employment, it must be illiberal, on Aristotle’s definition, and thus has no right to be included in the course of study at liberal arts colleges. John Henry Newman, Robert M. Hutchins, Mortimer Adler, and other important figures in the history of liberal education have indeed invoked this Aristotelian argument to defend excluding professional studies like teaching from liberal education.9 Other exclusionary rationales that have been advanced include references to the disciplinary “impurity” of educational research—­i.e. its admixing of academic content from sociology, psychology, history, anthropology, and so forth—­as well as invocations of its absence from

Philosophy and the Liberal Arts  159 the traditional liberal arts curriculum.10 Because of the prominence of such institutions as well as the figures that have argued for excluding teacher education from them, the case for liberal teacher education is further weakened. Yet, it is not only these two influences in the current educational landscape that work against efforts to defend a liberal teacher education. The disciplinary evolution of philosophy is an equally formidable barrier. For the normal school leaders and seminarians of the 19th and early 20th centuries, philosophy appeared to be  a  useful, even indispensable aspect of the teacher education curriculum. Yet, philosophy was to undergo profound changes in the 20th century. Compared to the transformations occurring in other major humanities’ disciplines in the 1950s and 1960s, philosophy’s change of heart was particularly thoroughgoing. Its “rupture with its past,” according to Carl Schorske’s (1997) account, was “radical” (p. 291). For Schorske, philosophy earns the “double distinction” of having completely “recast its intellectual foundations” and, within  a  remarkably short amount of time, “successfully unified itself as a professional discipline on the basis of that achievement” (p.  299). The nature of this recasting is well known. The discipline was overcome with enthusiasm for logical positivism and began to redraw the boundaries of legitimate philosophical reflection around the concerns of philosophy of science and the methods of ordinary-­language philosophy. The results of this disciplinary rupture were dramatic. Philosophy “in its analytic incarnation … most systematically distanced itself from the problems of culture” (p. 307), which had previously constituted one of the central concerns of philosophical reflection. Philosophy’s “preoccupation with epistemological and conceptual problems,” Schorske continues, “had led it to abandon the synoptic position … for a place with science at the “hard” end of the spectrum of the disciplines” (ibid.). Not only would philosophy, like education, never quite be accepted by the technical disciplines it attempted to court, its abandonment of the “problems of culture” would be duly noted by those without the arcane intellectual preoccupations it now required of its patrons. Philosophy in its Continental guise would fare better than its analytic counterpart in post-­1960s teacher education, but not by much. The sustained interest of Continental philosophers with common human concerns would render their ideas somewhat more palatable for the teacher education curriculum, not least via Paulo Freire’s engagement with the Frankfurt School neo-­Marxists and multicultural education’s courting of the French poststructuralists. Yet, the frequent inscrutability of Continental philosophy would ultimately prevent it from ever playing a central role in the curriculum. Against this background, it is hard to blame teachers and teacher educators for finding the concerns of philosophy alien to their own.

160  Douglas W. Yacek and Bruce Kimball

Prospects for Philosophy and Liberal Teacher Education Two important movements back towards an accessible engagement with the “problems of culture” within philosophy are worth mentioning here in closing. The first movement stems from the revival of the tradition of liberal political philosophy by means of John Rawls’  A  Theory of Justice, whereas the second takes its point of departure from the renaissance of the virtue ethics tradition as  a  result of the work of Philippa Foot and Elizabeth Anscombe. Although these movements have run largely in parallel to one another in philosophy of education, they have both brought the discipline much closer to and much more serviceable for the education of teachers. While the Rawlsian tradition has made important progress in developing the subfields of democratic educational theory and educational ethics—­including topics in the ethics of teaching, educational policy, and civic education (e.g. Brighouse, 2006; Levinson & Fay, 2016)—­the neo-­A ristotelians have contributed significant correctives to positive psychology and supported the growth of the interdisciplinary field of moral education (e.g. Kristjánsson, 2013, 2015). Clearly, educational ethics, psychology, and moral education constitute important areas of study for aspiring teachers, and thus these two movements are indeed promising for reuniting philosophy and the liberal arts in teacher education. Yet, these movements alone are unlikely to convince those outside of the discipline that philosophy is an essential element of teacher education. Liberal political theory and virtue ethics, as important as they are to thinking about education, are intellectual currents within a discipline that has come to be defined by a remarkably esoteric mode of communication and argumentation. Philosophy in its current state simply does not seem  a  compelling resource for the education of teachers. What, then, is to be done? Ironically perhaps, we think that even the current curriculum—­with its conglomeration of courses on professional concerns, teaching methods, psychology, and educational foundations—­can offer space for meaningful philosophical reflection and for cultivating a liberal understanding of the teaching profession. This is not a call to simply resign ourselves to the status quo, but to widen our understanding of what it means to embody a philosophical spirit and to teach for liberal sensibility. The further encroachment of the scientific ethos and the cult of professionalism in teacher education, the uncritical appropriation of supposed “best practices,” and the reduction of the teaching profession to acquiring subject area licences and fulfilling  a  professional code of conduct are all worrying developments, but they can be resisted in myriad ways even within the institutions of teacher education in which many of us are employed. The normal schools and female seminaries suggest some strategies for doing so. Although the disciplines of philosophy and

Philosophy and the Liberal Arts  161 history of education are included in the teacher education curriculum more seldom than they once were and we would want them to be, we can try to fulfil the pedagogical and existential roles of philosophy in the courses that are offered. That is, we can teach so as to “free the mind” for further inquiry into the significance and depth of the educational encounter and we can encourage teacher candidates to see their profession as a “calling” towards social and individual flourishing. That these were once part of the everyday business of institutions of teacher education in North America is hopefully motivation to that end.11

Notes 1 For an extended defence of this historical interpretation, see Kimball (1995). 2 Consider the passage from Kant’s (2002) Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, in which he argues that common human reason is impelled, not through any need of speculation (which never assaults it as long as it is satisfied with being mere healthy reason), but rather from practical grounds themselves, to go outside its sphere and to take a step into the field of practical philosophy, … so that it may … not run the risk of being deprived, through the ambiguity into which it easily falls, of all genuine ethical principles. (p. 21) Reason, thus, requires philosophy, not as speculation but as reflection on the ethical principles that guide action. 3 Yet, this philosophical shift was felt mostly outside the universities, which firmly clung to the humanistic tradition throughout the 18th century. Failing to make many inroads in the collegiate curriculum, renewed fervour for philosophy was incubated in the academies and societies formed by the leading intellectuals of the time. 4 For an extended analysis of the Enlightenment equation of liberal and liberatory studies, see Kimball (1995, pp. 114–123). The idea that the liberal arts should be liberating was not in itself a new one. In an important passage, Seneca the Younger (1988) states already in 63 AD, “You can see why liberal studies are so called: they are worthy of a free man. But only one study is truly liberal in making a man free, and that is the study of wisdom” (p. 71), and the humanist Vergerio (2010) would even claim that “the other liberal arts  …  are called so because they befit free men, but philosophy is really liberal because the study of it makes us free” (p. 165). Yet, Enlightenment enthusiasm for the idea represents a radical departure in both the history of the liberal arts and the history of education more broadly. 5 The neohumanists occupy a middle ground between the philosophers and the orators. Unlike their humanist predecessors, they celebrated Greek rather than Roman antiquity and were therefore much more sympathetic to the philosophical turn of mind, and many were philosophers themselves. 6 Although the 19th century would be an epochal era in the history of teacher education, one of the most important moments in this history occurred much earlier, in the 13th and 14th centuries in Europe. In addition to revolutionizing the traditional liberal arts curriculum in the Medieval university, the Scholastics made another crucial educational innovation. Students who completed the Master of Arts degree were awarded a teaching licence, the

162  Douglas W. Yacek and Bruce Kimball licentia docendi, along with their admission into the professional faculties of law, medicine, or theology. The Scholastics thereby forged a lasting institutional bond between the teacher education and the liberal arts in the Medieval university, one that would continue into the American colonial colleges and well into the 19th century. This close institutional relationship between the teacher education and the liberal arts would come under close scrutiny in the 19th century, however, when institutions specifically designed for formal teacher education were first established in the United States. 7 The naming of these two institutions is somewhat ironic, given that term “normal school” stems from the French ecole normale rather than the ­G erman equivalent, and the term “seminary” is much closer to what the Prussians called their teacher education institutions –Seminare. 8 For more on this institutional development, see Altenbaugh and Underwood (1990). 9 However, it should be noted in passing that Aristotle is not as friendly to these reformers’ positions as they seem to think. Several lines later, Aristotle introduces another, and quite different, criterion for determining the liberality of a domain of knowledge: The object also which a man sets before him makes a great difference; if he does or learns anything for his own sake or for the sake of his friends, or with a view to excellence, the action will not appear illiberal. (ibid.) Clearly, studying to become a teacher could be pursued for one’s own sake in hopes of achieving excellence. If so, teacher education, even on Aristotle’s view, could be a liberal study. 10 For refutations of each of these rationales, see Yacek and Kimball (2017) and Kimball (2013). 11 Simultaneously, our notion of teacher education should not be confined to pre-­service preparation. It may be that the audience most convinced of the need for ethical and philosophical reflection are practising teachers in professional development settings. A good policy, it seems, is to develop philosophically and intellectually rich resources for these important educational opportunities and to invite practising teachers into our academic communities as much as we can.

References Adler, M. J. (1982). Paideia proposal: An educational manifesto. New York, NY: Macmillan. Altenbaugh, R. J., & Underwood, K. (1990). The evolution of normal schools. In J. I. Goodlad, R. Soder, & K. A. Sirotnik (Eds.), Places where teachers are taught (pp. 136–186). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-­Bass. Aquinas (2010). Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics. In B. A. Kimball (Ed.), The liberal arts tradition:  A  documentary history (pp.  128–129). ­Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Aristotle. (1984). Politics. In J. Barnes (Ed.) & B. Jowett (Trans.), The complete works of Aristotle, v. 2 (pp. 1986–2129). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Blankertz, H. (1982). Die Geschichte der Pädagogik von der Aufklärung bis zur Gegenwart. Wetzlar, DE: Büchse der Pandora.

Philosophy and the Liberal Arts  163 Boethius. (2010). Consolation of philosophy. In B. A. Kimball (Ed.), S. J. ­Tester (Trans.), The liberal arts tradition:  A  documentary history (pp.  64–70). ­Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Brighouse, H. (2006). On education. New York, NY: Routledge. Cremin, L. (1961). The transformation of the school: Progressivism in American education. New York, NY: Knopf. Fraser, J. W. (2007). Preparing America’s teachers: A history. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Fuchs, A. H. (2012). American mental philosophy (1820–1860), History of. In R. W. Rieber (Ed.), Encyclopedia of the history of psychological theories (pp. 47–63). New York, NY: Springer. Hadot, P. (1995). Philosophy as a way of life. A. I. Davidson (Ed.). London, UK: Blackwell. Herbst, J. (1991). And sadly teach: Teacher education and professionalization in American culture. Madison, WA: University of Wisconsin Press. Isocrates. (2010). Antidosis. In B. A. Kimball (Ed.), A. Dragstedt (Trans.), The liberal arts tradition:  A  documentary history (pp.  25–28). Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Kant, I. (2002). Groundwork for the metaphysics of morals. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Kant, I. (2004). Prolegomena to any future metaphysics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Kimball, B. A. (1995). Orators & philosophers. A history of the idea of liberal education. New York, NY: College Entrance Examination Board. Kimball, B. A. (2013). Do the study of education and teacher education belong at a liberal arts college? Educational Theory, 63(2), 171–184. Kristjánsson, K. (2013). Virtues and vices in positive psychology: A philosophical critique. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kristjánsson, K. (2015). Aristotelian character education. London, UK: Routledge. Labaree, D. F. (2004). The trouble with ed schools. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Lagemann, E. C. (2000). An elusive science: The troubling history of education research. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Levinson, M.,  &  Fay, J. (2016). Dilemmas of educational ethics: Cases and commentaries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Locke, J. (2007). Some thoughts concerning education. Mineola, NY: Dover. Newman, J. H. (1982). The idea of a university. South Bend, IN: Notre Dame University Press. Ogren, C. A. (2005). The American state normal school: “An instrument of great good”. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Page, D. (1847). Theory and practice of teaching: The motives and methods of good school-­keeping. New York, NY: A. S. Barnes and Company. Plato. (1998). Apology. In T. G. West (Trans.), Texts on Socrates: Plato and Aristophanes. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Quintillian. (2010). Education of the orator. In B. A. Kimball (Ed.), & A. Dragstedt (Trans.), The liberal arts tradition: A documentary history (pp. 42–44). Lanham, MD: University Press of America.

164  Douglas W. Yacek and Bruce Kimball Rousseau, J. J. (1889). Emile; Or concerning education. Boston, MA: D. C. Heath and Company. Rudolph, F. (1977). Curriculum:  A  history of the American undergraduate course of study since 1636. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-­Bass. Schorske, C. (1997). The new rigorism in the human sciences, 1940–1960. Daedalus, 126(1), 289–309. Schulman, L. S. (1987). Knowledge and teaching: Foundations of the new reform. Harvard Educational Review, 57(1): 1–22. Seneca. (1988). Seneca 17 Letters. C. D. N. Costa (Trans.). Warminster, UK: Arts and Phillips. Sun, M., Penuel, W. R., Frank, K. A., Gallagher, H. A., & Youngs, P. (2013). Shaping professional development to promote the diffusion of instructional expertise among teachers. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 35(3), 344–369. Toom, A. (2017). Teachers’ professional and pedagogical competencies: A complex divide between teacher work, teacher knowledge and teacher education. In D. J. Clandinin & J. Husu (Eds.), The Sage handbook on research on teacher education (pp. 803–819). London, UK: Sage Publishers. Travers, E. F. (1980). The case for teacher education at selective liberal arts colleges. Phi Delta Kappan, 62(2), 127–131. Vergerio, P. P. (2010). On noble character and liberal studies of youth. In B. A. Kimball (Ed.), A. Dragstedt (Trans.), The liberal arts tradition: A documentary history (pp. 159–167). Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Yacek, D. W.,  &  Kimball, B. A. (2017). Liberal arts and teacher education. In M. Peters (Ed.), Encyclopedia of educational philosophy and theory (pp. 1–7). Singapore: Springer.

9 The Value of Educational Foundations in Teacher Education Lee S. Duemer

Introduction Educational foundations have had an awkward place in teacher education programmes. Foundations began as something of a curricular afterthought and have historically been considered as essential to some while foreign to others. Educational foundations are composed of the various disciplines that compose the liberal arts.1 The purpose of Social Foundations of Education is to bring these disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary re-­sources to bear in developing interpretive, normative, and critical perspectives on education as explained in the following, both inside and outside of schools. (Tutwiler et al., 2013, p. 110) Foundations courses use theories grounded in the liberal arts to help prospective teachers understand education in contexts of time and place. The Council for Social Foundations of Education (CSFE) identifies those fields of study as from the disciplines that constitute educational foundations (Tutwiler et al., 2013). “Philosophy, psychology, history and the social sciences play a vital role in what may be called a liberal education” (Peters, 1977, p. 137). For the purpose of this paper, they are represented by history, philosophy, and sociology in terms of how they help understand the relationship between education and society.2 Educational foundations emerged as a field of study in 1934 at Teachers College, Columbia University (Rugg, 1947). The combination of the School of Education with the School of Practical Arts resulted in five departments. Because of their common curricular roots in the liberal arts, courses in history, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and economics were grouped together (Jacobs, 2014; Russell, 1935). Harold Rugg’s 1941 Readings in the Foundations of Education detailed how data and theory from the social sciences were used to improve the function of education in shaping a democratic society. Teacher education programmes faced considerable challenges in establishing themselves within colleges

166  Lee S. Duemer and universities. From the beginning of the reorganization, there was a clear tension between what former Dean James Russell referred to as the academic faculty and the professional faculty (Russell, 1937, pp. 88–89). These differences remain in contemporaneous perceptions of foundations faculty being more oriented to a liberal and theoretical education of students. National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) was unambiguous in its emphasis on the importance of educational foundations (1997). However, support from professional organizations has had little effect in stopping the erosion of educational foundations in teacher education programmes (Thayer-­Bacon, 2011). Professional organizations have clearly stated their support for the role of foundations in teacher education programmes without preventing the shrinkage of foundations in the curriculum (Christou, 2010). Since the 1970s, there has been a steady decline of foundations and concerns about the precarious nature of its future (Oancea, 2012). This paper examines why educational foundations are essential in teacher education. It begins with an examination of how educational foundations have been minimized. Next,  I  detail how historical and philosophical ideas are essential for teachers to understand how education as a profession and as an institution evolved into its current form. This historical evolution represents our historical/philosophical origins, current identity, and how educational foundations will be debated in the future. The final section focuses on how foundations are vital to understanding the timeless questions education continues to address including cultural relevancy, a core curriculum, making meaning of life, and civic education.

Decline of Educational Foundations in Teacher Education Programmes The reasons for the decline of educational foundations in teacher education programmes are varied and complex (Colgan, 2018; Simpson & Duemer, 2011). Explanations range from an increase in accountability, failure to adequately connect foundations with practice, and disagreements amongst academics about the how much of the curriculum should be devoted to foundations and what they should emphasize. Because of its ties to the liberal arts, educational foundations have had an unusual place in teacher education programmes. Faculty closely tied to the liberal arts have often been perceived by their colleagues as theoretically oriented yet unable to contribute to practice. The roots of such identities are in  a  historical tension between research and practice in teacher education (Bredo, 1993). As such, professional education programmes have traditionally placed more emphasis on practice rather than theory. Theory has usually been considered less important than

The Value of Educational Foundations  167 application and practice. The purpose of theory is more often than not seen as the handmaid of practice. In other words, theory has to justify itself, in the minds of many if not most, by showing how it is relevant in terms of explaining and suggesting ideas regarding practice. The weight of this tradition is still felt today although it is more common to hear discussions of theory in particular realms of teacher and administrator preparation programmes, e.g., reading, learning, and leadership theories. But theories of education, including the contributions of philosophy, have been seriously neglected. Consequently, we may often feel like we live on an island of unsolved and unsolvable questions, surrounded by a sea of practitioners who seem to need only answers, not more questions (Simpson & Duemer, 2011). A shift from process to outcomes in teacher education over the past 50 years has contributed to minimization of foundations in teacher education curricula. Process-­oriented preparation focused on “how prospective teachers learned to teach, how their beliefs and attitudes changed over time, what contexts supported their learning, and what kinds of content, pedagogical, and other knowledge they needed” (Cochran-­ Smith, 2005, p.  411). While these questions have been vigorously debated within educational foundations, they often raised meta-­questions that were rarely of interest to large numbers of practising teachers, principals, and superintendents or to legislators, policymakers, and school board members (Simpson & Duemer, 2011). There has been  a  perception that the rise in accountability over the past two decades has set the stage for questioning the need for foundations in teacher education. However, the trend towards accountability has long historical origins. The first purpose of any government is to maintain its hold on power. One of the best ways for a government to accomplish this is to promote social stability to ensure that change is evolutionary rather than revolutionary by ensuring that each generation approximates as closely as possible those before and after. Education has proven to be one of the most effective social institutions to accomplish this task by providing the state’s youth with a knowledge base of similar values and behaviours. It should be noted that there are a variety of values and behaviours, some distinctly better than others. In the early Middle Ages, education was largely originated towards spiritual well-­ being and advancing occupations that met the needs of the church or state (Chafy, 1997). As European nations developed increasingly distinct national identities and expanded their power into the Western Hemisphere, education shifted towards citizenship and more secular knowledge (Chafy, 1997). The historical shift of using education to meet the needs of the state reflects a centuries-­long appropriation of education. There has been considerable criticism of increased accountability over the past 50 years; however, Cuban (2004) rightly points out that the origins go back much

168  Lee S. Duemer further and are linked to  a  history of legislation. The 20th century has a long record of the federal government increasingly using education as a means to exercise its policy needs. From the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, National Defense Education Act of 1958, Civil Rights Act of 1964, Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, and No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, federal legislation attached financial support or financial penalties to compliance. Most states followed the federal trend with new student performance expectations, higher graduation requirements, curricular changes (Fuhrman, 2001), and alternative paths for teacher certification that minimize or bypass higher education institutions (Zeichner, 2006). Federal, state, and local authorities have developed educational policies, some of which are contradictory (Anyon, 2010). Nevertheless, the idea of education playing a role in improving society is entirely logical. If education is paid for by citizens, it makes sense that it should be expected to respond to society’s needs and work to improve conditions. The problem is an overemphasis to the point that education is blamed for problems not of its making or outside its scope of control. Kitchen (2014) observed that public education has been increasingly considered as a cure for societal problems, but also as a target for blame. Teacher education programmes have been charged with fixing a multitude of societal issues resulting in increased scepticism of knowledge perceived to be responsible, particularly knowledge that is culturally grounded (Furedi, 2009). Communities, traditions, practices and customs, as well as the authorities who act on behalf of these things, are cast aside in this view of education, giving way to the rational-­thinking individual, whose atomistic supremacy overhauls the role of any authority figure. Nothing is to be taken as  a  foundation; everything must be questioned and justified. (Kitchen, 2014, p. 30) Part of the problem has been the shift towards outcomes-­based measures which reflect  a  market-­driven approach to education (Giroux, 2011; Walsh, 2013). The emphasis on standards-­based measurements has done much to threaten the place of foundations in teacher education programmes. Standards-­based expectations put an emphasis on the outcomes of the educational process, particularly in ways that can be quantitatively assessed. Inputs, or course requirements, are less important than measurable outcomes (Tozer & Miretzky, 2000). The shift from outcomes to standards has threatened the existence of foundations courses directly because of the accompanying emphasis on quantitative measures (Graham, Lyman, & Trow, 1995). There are several means to quantitatively assess the knowledge of prospective teachers; however, it

The Value of Educational Foundations  169 is much more difficult to similarly demonstrate the benefit of educational foundations. Justification for the continuation and importance of foundations has had to rely on philosophical arguments perceived as more vulnerable than tests, measurements, or data-­driven studies. The emphasis on outcomes compelled an expansion of the content knowledge component of teacher education curricula, while reducing the foundations component (Zeichner, 2006). In addition to minimizing the benefits of educational foundations, such a perspective minimizes the requirements to be an effective teacher to merely knowing the content one should teach (Darling-­Hammond & Baratz-­Snowden, 2005, p. 2). To effectively transmit the values foundational studies are intended to foster requires actively engaging students in complex and challenging dialectical processes. It is much more involved than merely adding content to the curriculum (Sleeter, 2008). Criticism of teacher education programmes also came from academe. Internal criticism from some in academe has pushed for more emphasis on teaching methods and content area at the expense of educational foundations in an attempt to appease external pressures, rather than justifying the more complex role teachers have in educating citizens for  a  democratic republic and how  a  broader curriculum meets that need. Debate about the content of teacher education programmes, including the respective proportions of content, methods, and foundations courses, is nothing new, and goes back for decades (Lucas, 1999). These focused on low admission and academic standards in teacher education programmes, as well as perceived lack of content knowledge (Conant, 1963; Koerner, 1963). Amongst their recommendations was increased curricular content on the subject matter candidates would teach. Some of this criticism originates from the idea that teaching is a fairly rudimentary process of transmitting knowledge from one person to another, and the techniques to be successful can be learned from a curriculum focused on teaching methods (Darling-­Hammond & Baratz-­Snowden, 2005, p.  2). Resistance to the study of foundations has also, unfortunately, come from some of our students in teacher education programmes. Many initially resist coursework that they perceive to be of little use with respect to teaching methods. Persuading them of the larger and long-­term benefits of foundational studies requires considerable effort on the part of faculty, and a level of cooperation, communication, and mutual support between faculty who teach methods, content, and foundations courses. In addition to the core differences between philosophy and education, there exists another factor that creates tension between practitioners and theorists. Scholars refer to this as the provincialism of time. This term refers to the idea that newer scholarship and ideas are generally considered better or more valuable than what preceded it, for no other reason than the fact that it is new. While we do not impugn the credibility of

170  Lee S. Duemer recent scholarship, the idea that it may be better because of its newness is problematic. Those who advance new thinking also reject previous ideas and any benefit they may retain (Prus, 2012). That provincialism of time is accepted by so many people is partly our own fault. Like much of the academy, we have regularly placed too much emphasis on writing for each other rather than for  a  more general audience in education. Many of our most prestigious journals are published primarily for specialist in educational foundations rather than for a broader audience, and emerging scholars in our field are encouraged to read and publish in them because they carry the most weight in the tenure and promotion process. Journals that appeal to the broad spectrum of educational researchers are often devalued. A second problem concerns the claim that we have allowed philosophy and education to focus on topics of little relevance to educational studies. The growth in the attention that is given to epistemological controversies as an area of study within educational philosophy is an example of this problem. Many topics may be worthy of study and have important implications for evaluating knowledge claims in classrooms, yet do not generate much support for its inclusion in many colleges of education (Simpson & ­Duemer, 2011). Unfortunately, an emphasis on “the latest thinking” reinforces the notion that the present need only be known with current knowledge that lacks antecedents. The study of educational foundations connects students to the development and form of Western thought by drawing from a collectively nature of human knowing spanning back to classical Greek scholarship (Prus, 2012). A multidisciplinary study of the past is necessary to understand how the present shape of education evolved, but also to understand how current challenges may influence a continually unfolding future (Prus, 2012). The challenge for those who teach educational foundations is to take this subject matter from an isolated historical content and develop meaningful connections to the contemporary human experience and educational practice. In case one may question  a  connection between this trend of minimization of educational foundations and any implications for teachers, recent scholarship suggests a disconnect between teachers perceived and ­ ollins’ actual skills related to exposure to foundations. Knight and C (2014) study of teachers found that while 89% stated that critical thinking was  a  principal goal of their teaching; however, only 19% were able to define it. A 2001 study of teachers revealed that 41% of teachers surveyed concluded that knowledge, truth, and sound judgement were largely due to nothing more than personal preference or subjectivity (Paul, Elder,  &  Bartell, 2001). The collective implication from these studies is that many faculty lack a basic understanding of critical thinking and are therefore not in a position to foster those skills in their students.

The Value of Educational Foundations  171 Foundations have an unusual identity in that while they are connected to the disciplines, they are not considered one of the disciplines and are instead a form of professional studies. They therefore have a dual identity as derived from the disciplines, yet are not one of them. Their varied origins across the disciplines lead to differing opinions about their meaning and role in teacher education. There are equally conflicting interpretations about the future of educational foundations.

The Continued Importance of Educational Foundations in Teacher Education The 2006 American Educational Research Association report, Studying Teacher Education, provided  a  detailed examination of the state of research in teacher education. Amongst its findings, the study recommended the involvement of researchers in the arts and sciences in interdisciplinary studies (Cochran-­Smith  &  Zeichner, 2005) to develop a clear justification for the role of foundations in teacher education (Walsh, 2013).3 There are many roles to public education, amongst them are providing social stability through ensuring that each generation approximates those before and after it through the transmission of core values and identities. The idea of “generational transaction” is based on the inheritance of an intellectual and cultural heritage that has been created and preserved by previous generations (Kitchen, 2014, p. 26). While the term “generational transaction” may be recent, the concept is consistent with education’s primary goal of fostering an educated people and society (Furedi, 2009, p. 20). The central idea of this paper is that there may be differing definitions of what educated people should be characterized by; however, any definition would be incomplete without the inclusion of a core identity of values transmitted through the educational process. Educational foundations in teacher education provide educators with an understanding of those values and why they are essential. The maintenance of a common identity is not incompatible with change if that change is transitional in nature. In the roughly 2,400 years since Socrates, many of the important questions we ask ourselves have not changed much. What is the purpose of education? How should we best educate our young people to be effective citizens? What are the best ways to educate? All of these questions are permeated by philosophy and cannot be adequately answered without turning to educational foundations (Pring, 2010). We continue to revisit, write about, and discuss these questions because they can never be perfectly answered. The nature of these questions is in their interwoven connection to the fluid nature of social existence. Aristotle’s discussion of how we develop virtue through habit, experience, and reason are as

172  Lee S. Duemer true today as they were when first written (Winch, 2012). The study of educational foundations helps prospective teachers understand how education fits into the larger narratives of the disciplines (Gosselin, 2007). It is impossible, for example, to understand Socrates without examining his views on the aims of education. Rather than having an objective nature separate from human life, these questions are based on socially constructed meaning that changes under different circumstances. Solutions (even the best efforts will be somehow flawed) that seem promising may later be discarded as ineffective or downright harmful. Practices that yield results in one context may demonstrate no recognizable differences in another place. These facts inevitably lead to frustration with studying educational foundations. It is common to hear students and teachers reject their study because they consider the questions asked to be unanswerable, or as likely that one answer is no better than another (Knight & Collins, 2014). An individual’s conclusions about what is ethical or productive change over time with the assimilation of new information, reflection, and personal growth (King & Kitchener, 1994). To some, educational foundations can be best understood as the intersection between education as  a  professional programme, and the liberal arts. Foundations can also represent how the various disciplines composing the liberal arts contribute to education. Teacher education programmes find their origins in varying degrees of psychology, sociology, economics, political science, history, and philosophy, amongst others. Either perspective acknowledges the essential role of foundations in understanding the profession. Without them, teacher education can arguably be reduced to nothing more than how to effectively transmit knowledge in a classroom setting. The role of foundations in fostering critical perspectives can be likened to the role of educating for “citizenship” in teacher education. Educating people to participate in a democratic society required teachers who are able to impart to their students values consistent with being lifelong learners, fostering a sense of collective responsibility for preserving democratic institutions while maintaining the rights and abilities to change them for the better. Foundations can also assist pre-­ and in-­service educators to develop inquiry skills, to question educational assumptions and arrangements, and to identify contradictions and inconsistencies among social and educational values, policies, and practices. In particular, the critical perspectives engage educators in employing democratic values to assess educational beliefs, policies, and practices in light of their origins, influences, and consequences. (Tutwiler et al., 2013, p. 212)

The Value of Educational Foundations  173 Teachers must be able to connect their instructional aims to larger social, historical, and philosophical contexts. Educational foundations help students examine their instructional goals and how to connect them to teaching methods within  a  larger framework (Mucci  &  Cranston-­ Gingras, 2011). The absence of educational foundations from the curriculum disconnects teaching goals and methods from the larger context of education in society. The separation removes the “public” from public education in that it does not reflect societal values and cannot fulfil its purpose to prepare citizens for life in a democratic republic. John Dewey (1916) understood the need for teaching to be situated in a foundational context where teachers can use it to understand “philosophic problems where they arise and thrive, where they are at home, and where acceptance or rejection makes a difference in practice” (p. 383).

Conclusions The minimization of educational foundations can be best understood in terms of what had been an academic debate over the justification of teacher education gradually shifting to a public policy argument over the performance of American students. An additional troubling outcome of this shift has been questioning whether colleges of education continue to serve a purpose and should even be allowed to exist (Walsh, 2013). Educational foundations can be a vehicle through which prospective students can develop critical and reflective skills to inform their teaching. Heidegger reminds us that practice does not exist independently, but rather is grounded in theory (Heidegger, 1927/1996). The challenge is to separate practice from personal experience and anecdotal influence towards a larger epistemological and theoretical framework. The lack of a philosophical understanding of education discourages one from considering No Child Left Behind in sense of any theoretical framework, evidential base for practices, and how it serves to educate a citizenry. It also discourages teachers from critically considering ideas that lack evidence or rational support, and instead encourages them to simply defer to authority. History is full of examples of the dangers that result from blindly complying with behavioural codes or expectations. There is  a  particular emphasis on the bidirectional relationship between education and society, and analysis must include both intended and unintended consequences. The study of educational foundations should encourage students to understand how values shape policy as well as helping students develop a sense of where they stand in policy debates. Analysis must also be multidimensional in nature so as to understand how competing explanations for events can develop based on different perspectives. Educational foundations use both normative and critical perspectives to analyse education in society. Normative perspectives outline roles and

174  Lee S. Duemer policies that are desirable or positive, as well as outcomes that should be avoided. Of course, such a general statement leaves open to interpretation what should be considered desirable. Ideally, students should be presented with several competing explanations and allowed to develop their own positions on the issues as long as they can articulately and intelligently justify them (Winch, 2012). This not only helps students evaluate education, but it also helps them develop and refine their own values. Critical perspectives are intended to develop in students the ability to question assumptions and identify weaknesses, limitations, and inconsistencies in educational policy and practice. The development of critical perspectives helps make comparisons between competing normative views (Schjetne, Wågsås Afdala, Ankerb, Johannesena,  &  Afdalb, 2016). Foundational studies are an essential means for understanding and examining different normative perspectives about educational policy (Winch, 2012). This process is essential in pushing students’ thinking from “what is” to “what should be.” It also pushes students’ thinking to uncover what is taken for granted or previously unquestioningly assumed (Pols, 2008). Critical perspectives emphasize the application of democratic values to assess policies and practices (Tutwiler et al., 2013, p. 112). In 1996, the American Council of Learned Societies in Education (ACLSE) issued its Standards for Academic and Professional Instruction in Foundations of Education, Educational Studies, and Educational Policy Studies (ASCLE, 1996). Amongst the recommendations for prospective teachers was the study in philosophical, historical, and cultural foundations of education. The goal of foundations studies was to shape teachers to “exercise sensitive judgements amidst competing cultural and educational values and beliefs” (p. 5). Given that over the last hundred years teacher education programmes have shifted from “training” to “preparation,” it is entirely counterintuitive that the place of foundations has been minimized. Training implies the transmission of information, something that is pedagogically and philosophically much more simplistic than to “prepare” one for a lifetime of learning and professional adaptation. The focus on outcomes and the more technical aspects of instruction have diminished our attention from the larger issues such as citizenship education and the broader cultural role of education (Johnson, Johnson, Farenga, & Ness, 2005). It also treats teachers as technical professionals who only need to follow scripted or proscribed curricula with the main purpose of raising the test scores of their pupils (Darling-­Hammond & Bransford, 2005; Sleeter, 2008). In 1920, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching published Bulletin #14, The Professional Preparation of Teachers for American Public Schools. The report later came to be known as the

The Value of Educational Foundations  175 Learned Report, after its primary author William S. Learned. Amongst the report’s recommendations was that teacher education curriculum should not be conceptualized as a collection of courses which built upon each other, but rather as  a  body aimed towards preparing teachers to actively participate in forming and preserving  a  democratic republic. The essence of this idea is that a curriculum should be aimed towards what Learned referred to as “a unitary purpose” (1920, p. 3). The fact that we are still in the position of trying to justify this mission suggests that we have been unable to successfully communicate its importance to American society. Educational foundations can be understood as embodying the democratic education purpose of such a cohesive curriculum. Zeichner (2006) has addressed this problem by advocating teacher education being an “all-­university” effort. This approach encourages the involvement of faculty in the arts and sciences in teacher education and strengthens the role of foundations. The all-­university approach has been supported by American Association of Universities (1999) and American Council on Education (1999). While foundations should have a central place in teacher preparation curricula, it would be irresponsible to argue that philosophy of education, for example, should only be taught in courses devoted solely to that content. Situating foundational studies as inseparable from the entire span of teacher education curricula will make critical thinking and democratic education  a  common element to prospective teachers and immerse them in foundational studies rather than limit it as an isolated experience (Theobald & Tanabe, 2011). Foundational studies need not be limited to a set of courses where the content is isolated from the rest of the curriculum. Doing so draws connections between foundations as theory and the study of methods and content areas. We need to be cautious against isolating educational foundations from the rest of the curriculum because doing so would suggest that they were unconnected to educational practice and therefore of lesser importance (Beyer, 1989). Educational foundations, including the study of ethics, the goals of education, and critical reflection about teaching methods serve to connect theory and practice throughout choices educators will make on  a  daily basis (Peters, 1977). Foundational studies will need to span the curriculum if teachers are to be expected to make critical and thoughtful choices about pedagogical models as well as applying those in  a  culturally responsive way in increasingly diverse environments (­Z eichner, 2012). The need for preserving educational foundations and communicating their importance is especially timely considering the utilitarian trend to prepare future teachers using alternative certification programmes. Such programmes sometimes take place outside academe run against the benefits of foundational studies. Thinking philosophically and critically about education helps develop a more profound understanding of

176  Lee S. Duemer educational practice. Clark (2013) rightly compares the removal of educational foundations to “removing an essential tool from a teacher’s tool box, so to speak” (p. 140). Some school districts (Houston, Los Angeles, and New York, for example) have developed their own pre-­service teacher education programmes. At risk of sounding cynical, we cannot reasonably expect district-­based teacher education programmes to place much value on educational foundations to prepare professionals for very specific and narrow purposes. One may ask why it’s so important that teachers enter the profession with a sense of educational foundations and understanding of the role of education in preserving our society. If teachers do not have a professional identity grounded in educational foundations, they are very likely to be led to make decisions or adopt practices that are in variance to their values and counter to the learning process. An understanding of educational foundations will help prepare teachers to critically examine external pressures, understand the agendas behind them, and make informed decisions as professionals. For example, No Child Left Behind can be interpreted as a common-­sense way to evaluate whether teachers effectively transmit important knowledge to students through assessing the students’ recall. Divorced from any philosophical framework, it can be interpreted as a measure of nothing more than “pedagogical knowledge and performance outcomes” (Carlson, 2011, p.  21). If education is viewed only in terms of teaching methods and content knowledge, it is akin to looking at an iceberg. Focusing on the visible part ignores the unseen submerged component that may be even larger than what is visible (Trouter, 1966). A foundational educational framework will give teachers the knowledge base needed to be thoughtful and discriminating consumers of research on educational practice. With the necessary skills, they can make informed decisions through critically examining and questioning what practices will meet their teaching goals and successfully integrate theory and practice (Caukin & Brinthaupt, 2017). Rejection of educational foundations is the equivalent of suggesting that teachers do not encounter philosophical questions in their work. If we want our students to leave school equipped with critical thinking skills and the ability to be contributing citizens, it is only logical that teachers have those same abilities. One will become more adept in the use of reasoning skills if they are adopted early and used frequently (Kuhn, 1992). Dewey understood the formation of these behaviours as the development of habits which would be stable over time (Dewey, 1985). Doing so requires placing an emphasis on curriculum and experiences that shape the development of habits (­Nelson, 2015).  A  common theme therefore must be an emphasis on imparting the necessary skills to carefully reason and develop a valid case for one’s position rather than simply the acquisition of information (University of

The Value of Educational Foundations  177 London Institute of Education, 1977, p. 34). It would be unreasonable to expect that teachers who have not been exposed to foundational studies and the benefits to be accrued from them will spontaneously adopt them at a later time. Like preparing one to be a responsible citizen, these are complex skills and values that must be carefully cultured over a long period of time. This is possibly the most compelling reason for foundational studies to be preserved and strengthened across the curriculum.

Notes 1 The liberal arts have their origins with the Greeks, who considered them essential for a citizen to fully participate in social and civic life. The original liberal arts consisted of seven disciplines (music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, later expanded to include grammar, logic, and rhetoric). A modern definition is composed of philosophy, theology, economics, history, geography, political science, art, literature, modern languages, ancient languages, sociology, psychology, mathematics, chemistry, biology, and physics. There is no single list of disciplines that are recognized throughout academe. Some institutions do not include certain disciplines in their curricula, while others have an even more expansive list. For the purpose of this chapter, I will use the most common disciplines of philosophy, history and sociology as constituting educational foundations (2011). It should be noted; the Council for Social Foundations of Education goes beyond disciplines listed earlier to include: cultural studies, gender studies, LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) studies, comparative and international education, educational studies, educational policy studies, as well as transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches. (Tutwiler et al., 2013, p. 110) 2 Consistent with this broad definition, the Council for Social Foundation of Education (CSFE) do not require  a  doctorate in any specific area, but rather recommend foundations faculty have  a  doctoral degree or “extensive preparation in the disciplines and methodologies of the social sciences and humanities as applied to the examination of education and schooling” (Tutwiler et al., 2013, p. 110). This means that a person with a doctorate in educational leadership or curriculum studies would qualify for teaching a foundations course (Watras, 2007). 3 One such example of interdisciplinary research involvement is Ohio Teacher Evaluation System developed in 2011. It involved researchers from a variety of disciplines, as well as qualitative and quantitative means to evaluate individual teacher preparation and can be applied to different teaching contexts (Ohio Teacher Evaluation System, 2011).

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10 Philosophy, Teaching, and Teacher Education at Teachers College, Columbia University A Program Story David T. Hansen and Megan Jane Laverty Where shall we find a good charmer for these fears, Socrates, now that you are leaving us? Greece is  a  large country, Cebes, and there are good men in it; the tribes of foreigners are also numerous … You must also search among yourselves, for you might not easily find people who could do this better than yourselves. Plato, Phaedo 78a

Introduction This chapter characterizes how the Program in Philosophy and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, has addressed what program faculty take to be organic relations between philosophy, teaching, and teacher education. We will discuss the overall aims of the program, its history, its current teaching and advising structure, and the questions it faces regarding (a) the future of philosophy of education as a field of study, including in relation to teacher education, and (b) the future of philosophical inquiry in the practice of teaching, encompassing teacher education as a form of pedagogy in its own right. We will suggest that while the field—­like the humanities writ large—­does face threats to its integrity, programs such as ours should stay the course precisely by retaining the philosophical and historical core of the discipline in juxtaposition with a focus on teaching and teacher education. Our account comes at  a  historical moment when the practices of teaching and teacher education are under pressure, the world over, to narrow their remit. This pressure has existed since the expansion of schooling began in the 19th century, which gave rise to tensions between the institutional imperatives of schooling as a state-­run project and the practice of teaching as a deeply personal affair marked by close ethical and intellectual relations between teachers, students, and subject matter. The pressure has intensified in recent years due to the comprehensive reach of a globalized economy, with its relentless competition that, while

Philosophy and Teacher Education at Teachers College  183 promoting material prosperity for many more people than in the past, breeds anxiety, fear, and a corresponding lack of commitment to collective well-­being. Politicians, business leaders, and policymakers fixate on education’s perceived economic pay-­off, sidelining holistic purposes such as the cultivation of flourishing human beings who are at the same time ethically minded citizens. In the wake of widespread standardized testing and narrow, by-­the-­numbers assessment of teachers, many teacher educators feel that they are being stiff-­armed to prepare technicians rather than teachers in the full aesthetic, moral, and intellectual sense of the term. In short, the times call out for the best response philosophy can offer the teacher and teacher educator. The response will not take the form of  a  blueprint,  a  move that would contradict the values in philosophy and education themselves. Instead, philosophy’s best offering, in our view, is a picture of the educator’s life marked by realistic attention to policy, but in a context of a steady commitment to rich notions of education and teaching. We respect but do not travel the same road as several other approaches towards philosophy’s presence in teacher education. For example, we view normative and conceptual inquiry as broader than the view of it being encapsulated in analytic philosophy. We regard inquiry as something other than  a  “method” as such. In addition, we refrain from reducing philosophy to a plurality of schools of thought—­ phenomenology, hermeneutics, critical theory—­and of isms such as pragmatism and feminism. Finally, our manner of working differs from applied philosophy, understood as deploying philosophical methods and theories to solve contemporary problems in educational policy and practice. Our orienting goal is to put philosophy in the hands of teachers and teacher educators by illuminating the philosophical dimensions of pedagogical experience, and by highlighting the long historical tradition of philosophical thought about education that they have inherited by virtue of having decided to enter the profession of teaching.

History of the Program: John Dewey and Responsiveness to the World Although Teachers College is a graduate professional school for education and health sciences, it has always sought to include “general culture” as a curricular goal. Under the auspices of Grace Dodge and Dean James Russell, the College was founded in 1887 on the conviction that successful health and service professionals require more than technical training. All students at the college—­current and aspiring teachers, principals, nurses, counsellors, and nutritionists—­u ndertook  a  program in liberal studies that was designed to foster an appreciation for the interconnectedness of scientific and humanistic inquiry (Cremin, Shannon, & Townsend, 1954, p. 36). At one point, all master’s students

184  David T. Hansen and Megan Jane Laverty were required to register in a year-­long foundations course, Education 200F. In the first year that it was offered (1934–1935), nearly 1,000 students registered. Under the tutelage of their professors, students in Education 200F would consider the impact of social, political, and economic forces on education and the health sciences using foundational disciplines such as history and philosophy as points of reference. Moreover, they considered how to position themselves, and their professions, to play a role in creating a more inclusive and socially just democracy (McCarthy, 2006). When this eight-­credit, college-­wide requirement no longer proved viable, master’s students at the college were required to select one of numerous foundations’ courses offered by the Department of Philosophical and Social Foundations of Education. This Department included such philosophers of education as William Heard Kilpatrick (1871– 1965), Robert Bruce Raup (1888–1976), George Counts (1889–1974), John Childs (1889–1985), and Jesse Newlon (1882–1941). According to Cremin, “[a]ll were close students of Dewey’s thought, and they sought constantly—­both individually and cooperatively—­to develop further the philosophical ideas themselves and their implications for education” (Cremin et al., 1954, p. 248). Several decades later, after the elimination of the college-­wide foundations’ requirement (due, in part, to increasing specialization of fields), the Department of Philosophical and Social Foundations was partitioned into a range of programs, one of which is the Program in Philosophy and Education that we have today. Over the years, its faculty have included Philip H. Phenix, Maxine Greene, Jonas Soltis, René Arcilla, and Christopher Higgins. Three salient features characterize the program’s history: intellectual leadership, collegial collaboration, and  a  steadfast commitment to humanist education (not to be confused with an anthropocentric bias). Here is not the place to provide  a  comprehensive overview of faculty scholarship. We wish only to highlight that Kilpatrick and Greene bookend the many pioneering efforts of program faculty in the area of teacher education. Kilpatrick is known for “The Project Method,” which became highly influential in progressive-­minded teacher education programs. He adopted the term “project” to suggest “something projected” (Kilpatrick, 1918, p. 320). He was convinced that present activities have a tendency “to suggest and prepare for succeeding activities” (p. 330), which bring us into wider interests. In short, any well-­chosen and wholehearted activity contains within itself a method for moving into the future. Less than a generation later, Greene’s focus on the arts would have an equally profound impact on teacher education. Like Kilpatrick, she conceived of the human person as projected forward into an unknown future, but while Kilpatrick stressed purposeful activity, Greene stressed creative imagination. She argued that freedom consists in envisaging new possibilities: to look inquiringly at one’s surroundings as if they could be

Philosophy and Teacher Education at Teachers College  185 otherwise. It is, to use Greene’s language (inspired partly by her intensive study of Dewey), to be wide-­awake. Program faculty also came together to collaborate on projects of common concern. Most notably, in 1928, Kilpatrick, Harold Rugg (1886– 1960), Counts, Childs, Raup, and Newlon inaugurated an informal discussion group that would meet bimonthly for the next decade. Dewey, Harrison Elliott, and Russell were also occasional participants. The founding of this group led to a series of influential initiatives, including Education 200F and the periodical, The Social Frontier (1934–1939). Pairs of individuals would also collaborate on projects. On Dewey’s 90th birthday, for example, Kilpatrick chaired a fund committee that was established to raise $90,000—­$1,000 for each year of Dewey’s life—­so that Dewey could contribute philanthropically to the causes of his choice (Martin, 2003, p. 476). The commitment to collegiality continued beyond this initial group. During their overlapping tenure at the college, Greene and Arcilla co-­taught a course on existentialism and education, which Arcilla later referred as one of his “best educational experiences ever” (Arcilla, 1997, p. 449). Jonas Soltis co-­authored books with influential philosophers of education such as Walter Feinberg, Gary D. Fenstermacher, Kenneth Strike, and D.C. Phillips. These books proved so popular with teacher educators that they are now in their fifth edition. Throughout its history, the Program in Philosophy and Education has retained a humanistic (again, not to be confused with anthropocentric) focus. Faculty have avoided becoming mired in the “isms” mentioned earlier, while remaining alert to contemporary debates and mentoring graduates to be prepared to participate in them. In a general sense, they have felt drawn to large and time-­honoured questions such as those we list in the next section. It is the sheer force of these questions that keeps the program’s efforts rooted in teaching and teacher education. Even with the generational changes, faculty have been tireless in their insistence that ideas are not the exclusive purview of the academically trained. Rather, they animate the lives of children, adolescents, and their teachers.

Aims of the Program: Philosophy and Educational Practice In public materials, the program accents the “and” in its title, Philosophy and Education. This trope mirrors our view that philosophical inquiry is indispensable for generating sound educational practice, and that educational practice is indispensable for bringing philosophical inquiry to life. Philosophy and educational practice comprise an epistemic and ethical ecology that resides in the conjunction “and.” It is epistemic because ways of knowing are implicated in all educational work: knowledge of content, knowledge of skills (know-­how), knowledge of

186  David T. Hansen and Megan Jane Laverty the responsibilities that accompany particular activities and tasks, and more. The ecological relation between philosophy and education is ethical because who and what teachers and students are becoming, as persons, is always at play in their interaction, however microscopic the ongoing human transformations may be. Put another way, we believe that questions about teaching, curriculum, educational policy, and assessment walk hand in hand with questions of justice, ethics, epistemology, ontology, and aesthetics. In our view, all these terms—­from “method” to “ethics”—­constitute heuristics for capturing aspects of the extraordinarily complicated, many-­sided nature of educational work. The terms do not point to isolated elements in education that operate independently of one another. Rather, each shines  a  light on  a  particular dimension of what constitutes an irreducible experience on the part of teachers and their students, including teacher educators and their teacher candidates. Through a steady commitment to faculty-­student and student-­student interaction, faculty seek to bring these aims to life by establishing an intellectual agora wherein program members can flourish as scholars of philosophy and education. In our courses, for example, we engage students and ourselves in questions such as the following: ** What is “teaching”? How does teaching differ from other social practices such as medicine, law, social work, and nursing? How does teaching differ from parenting and friendship? And what, or who, is  a  “teacher”? Should teachers be certain kinds of persons, with certain kinds of moral and intellectual sensibilities? In light of such questions, how should educators think about teacher education—i.e., about the best ways to prepare persons to become teachers? ** What is worth knowing and studying? Posed differently, what is a “curriculum”? What is a “course of study”? Is the latter a body of facts to be memorized? A set of questions to be posed and contemplated? A conversation about how we perceive and understand the world? What are the grounds, rationales, and philosophies of life educators might appeal to in their response to such questions? ** What is an educational “policy”? Is it  a  blueprint?  A  prescription?  A  suggestion?  A  hope?  A  political trade-­off? All or none of these? Should educational policy be guided by particular political, social, cultural, or other values, and if so, which ones? How do educational policy and practice intersect with social, economic, cultural, and political concerns, contexts, and forces? How do policy and practice reflect, or call into question, understandings and conceptions of play and work, technology, democracy, the environment, gender, race, class, ethnicity, peace and war? ** What do we mean by “learning” and “human development”? Are these processes and events cumulative, or even progressive? Do

Philosophy and Teacher Education at Teachers College  187 human beings typically become better able, or less able, to dwell in the world? Do human beings construct meaning? Make meaning? Discover meaning? Absorb meaning? And what are human beings—­ what is a self, what is a person? ** What is an “educative experience”? Why are people moved, enlightened, enriched, and transformed by some experiences and not by others? How can perspectives on art and artistic endeavour, on the relation between the mind, the body, and the heart, and on religion and the spiritual life, help us in grasping the nature and contours of meaningful educational experience? Faculty seek to engage students with these and other questions through a variety of forms of pedagogy in our courses, as well as through mentoring. We take up these issues in the next section. We will also discuss steps we take to support students’ future professional opportunities, a key issue in an era where formal faculty positions in philosophy of education have dried up (at least in the United States).

Program Structure and Orientation: Bringing Philosophy to Life in Teaching and Mentoring In recent years, the program has comprised, at any given time, some 20–25 master’s degree students and 20–25 doctoral degree students. (Teachers College is an entirely graduate institution.) These students come from around the world and have widely diverse backgrounds. Some have taught in schools, some in other educational ventures, and still others have worked in various businesses or other activities. All apply and choose to matriculate because they evince a strong interest—­again, expressed in highly diverse ways—­both in ideas and in educational practice. Most enter the program appreciating that it differs in certain ways from a department of philosophy, with such differences boiling down to our aforementioned remarks surrounding the conjunction “and.” Students often state that the program is “the only one of its kind” with its strong emphasis on  a  humanistic orientation to educating, fused with an equally abiding commitment to studying the history of educational thought. As faculty and mentors, we approach our students in the spirit of the aims characterized in the previous section. Students from both degree programs study together in many of our courses, which typically meet once a week for several hours, such as Philosophies of Education (features primary texts by Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Dewey, Confucius, and contemporary figures), Identity and Ideals (addresses the long lineage of philosophy understood as “the art of living”), The Call to Teach (focuses on how to characterize what teaching is and what it means to be a teacher), Dialogue and Difference in the Multicultural Classroom

188  David T. Hansen and Megan Jane Laverty (spotlights issues of race, gender, class, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, and more in classroom dynamics), Education and the Aesthetic Experience (attention to primary and contemporary readings on the aesthetic dimensions of education), School and Society (an investigation of conceptions of the nature and purposes of schools), and two courses on Philosophies of Education in the Americas (addressing, respectively, thinkers and philosophical trends in North and South America). We also offer regularly one-­time courses addressing a particular topic; the latter have included cosmopolitanism and education, irony and education, and contemporary conceptions of teacher education. Two additional courses in formation are Philosophy Goes to School (theories and contemporary practices of teaching philosophy in schools) and Africana Philosophies of Education (a cousin of our courses on Philosophies of Education in the Americas). Every semester, all program students participate in our Colloquium in Philosophy and Education, which convenes every other week and features a guest speaker presenting on their current research. Speakers hail from a range of disciplines and areas related to education, including anthropology, art, counselling, history, psychology, and technology. More centrally, we invite new and well-­established philosophers of education to share their current scholarly research. The colloquium provides an occasion for faculty, students, and guests to celebrate the thinking and conversation that caring about philosophy and education engenders. Although some new students are initially bewildered by the professional format, they quickly come to view the colloquium as a valued, integral feature of their life in the program. It is one of the ways in which we seek to fuse professional development of students with  a  continuing liberal education, in the sense of learning to think together, and to conceive questions together, about ideas and issues that matter. Before turning to our work with program students, it bears mentioning that our courses typically include  a  range of students from other programs in Teachers College. Indeed, in many cases, these students constitute the majority in a particular course. Some students are teacher candidates at the primary, middle, or secondary levels. Others are candidates in administrator programs or are studying educational psychology, policy, curriculum, international education, or other fields. Some take the courses primarily to fulfil an elective requirement for their degrees.  A  good number, according to their own testimony, experience the courses as revelatory. Having never studied philosophy before, and sometimes having very little experience in the humanities, they discover the tremendous platform for serious reflection about education, including teaching and teacher education, that philosophical study opens up. They begin to identify their deepest sources of wonder and concern about education, and they learn to form significant questions about educational theory and practice.

Philosophy and Teacher Education at Teachers College  189 Many students mention that they also learn how to read well: slowly, carefully, and interpretively. We encourage students from the very start of these courses to rethink their habits of reading and study. We contrast the speed of contemporary life with the values of slow reading, which includes reading primary texts at least twice before a given class. We encourage students to learn to develop a “relationship” with the author of a given text: to learn to think “with” the author, to appreciate that the  author is not providing  a  mere report of past thinking, and to study the author’s writing in a spirit of critical sympathy. We often deploy, for the initial session of a course, a text such as Amelie Rorty’s (1997) on the ethics of reading, in which she addresses the reader’s readiness to read well and to let themselves “be read” by the text itself—­that is, to take the risk of allowing the text to challenge their own assumptions and beliefs about education. We also introduce students at the very start to our hope that the courses will become intellectual agora wherein students see that the point is not to triumph in discussion, but rather to participate in a collective endeavour to understand the readings and to elucidate, together, their ramifications for our own views. We encourage everyone to see themselves as having an important role in bringing into being a community of inquiry, where the core aim is not to agree or disagree, per se, with others (though this does happen often as a normal feature of discussion) but to try to truly understand what the text and we ourselves are endeavouring to express. We return periodically, in an explicit manner, to the ways we are reading, interpreting, speaking, and writing. Depending on the particular course, the latter includes short weekly response papers to the reading, a series of three or four 1500-­word papers, or a combination of these activities alongside a final course paper. The courses sometimes feature students leading  a  given session or presenting on the readings and/ or on their own writing. Students often contact us after the fact—­indeed, well after the fact—­to share ways in which their experience in our courses has lingered with them. A recent graduate wrote to us the following: I am currently in my third year of teaching here in New York City as an ESL/social studies teacher to 10th and 11th grade students at a public high school. I just wanted to let you know that between the teaching, grading, mentoring, planning, and assessing, I still remember Rorty, Plato, and Dewey. I return back to my notes in the margins of those texts: a teacher is an attentive student, a guide, a promoter of autonomy, and so on. I reflect on what this means even more now as I am knee deep in the practice. When I am frustrated or disheartened I remember this and it helps me refocus, recenter, and recharge. Even more than the content, though, I find myself pausing as I conference with my students on a paper I have assigned or as I read to

190  David T. Hansen and Megan Jane Laverty select texts on imperialism or World War I for discussion, and I am thoughtful. This is something I also learned from your course. You told us to read our texts before class at least twice. I have tried to instill and develop this habit with my students. So, a very heartfelt thank you for allowing me the space and time while at TC to be thoughtful and to appreciate my craft as a teacher. Not all students from other programs find philosophical inquiry transformative, but enough do to give us hope that such inquiry has a significant, organic place in schools and colleges of education. We attribute their appreciation primarily to the approaches to discussion we enact, in which our program students’ contributions often have a marked influence on students from other programs as well as upon one another, with respect to interpreting primary texts and learning to pose timely questions about educational claims and arguments—­a learned art, in our view, and a signature offering of philosophy. Our hope is deepened by how our program’s master’s degree students, whose formal backgrounds in philosophy and in teaching vary, respond to the courses. (Below, we address the experience of our doctoral students, all of whom are required to have a strong background in philosophy when they matriculate.) Master’s degree students find that their experiences bear out their hopes when they first applied to study here. They begin to reimagine, or rediscover, their deepest motivations for pursuing philosophy in conjunction with education. They start to refine their thinking and to better grasp the educational issues that most interest them. They grow in confidence in their abilities to read well, to contribute to class discussion, and to write. These experiences are crucial when they take on the culminating stage of their course of study: the master’s degree thesis, which is a 25-­ page (double-­spaced) original inquiry into  a  question the student devises in consultation with program faculty. The question typically arises through their work in one or more courses, though it may also emerge from other experiences including those they had before matriculating. Students find the thesis  a  demanding and, at times, intimidating task. They persist, thanks to the scholarly habits and commitments they have begun to build, and thanks to support from peers, faculty, and the program structure; for example, students are provided formal opportunities to present drafts of their theses at feedback sessions organized as part of our ongoing Colloquium series. Our offices are lined with some truly outstanding philosophical studies by our master’s degree graduates. It bears noting that we also offer once a year a course earmarked solely for that year’s cohort of experienced teachers (about 20 people) from independent schools around the US who matriculate in the College’s Klingenstein Center for the Study of Independent Schooling. The Center funds a full-­year sabbatical leave for these practitioners. In addition, we

Philosophy and Teacher Education at Teachers College  191 offer every summer  a  section of our Philosophies of Education course for another cohort of teachers (60 people) in that program. Finally, we offer once a year a short, intensive philosophical seminar on educational leadership to a given year’s cohort of experienced heads of school (again, about 20 people), who also matriculate in the Klingenstein program. In all these settings, we enact our view that educational practice does not involve the “application” of philosophy, but rather learning to perceive the philosophical in the practice. Thus, program faculty read with these educators’ primary texts by Plato, Montaigne, Dewey, and others, alongside contemporary philosophical inquiries into teaching and leadership. We juxtapose questions about school discipline, school policy on social media use, and relations with boards of governance with questions about what constitutes a good or flourishing life, how independent schooling can support democracy, and in what senses educational leadership entails modes of pedagogy. Teachers and heads of school alike attest repeatedly to the value of having a temporary reprieve from the pressures of schooling in order to discover, or rediscover, their individual and collective wisdom of practice. For both students from across the College and our program students, the courses provide occasions for systematic philosophical attention to teaching and teacher education. All of the courses, in one way or another, implicitly address pedagogy, and a particular value of them is the ways in which students themselves draw out these ramifications. In an informal sense, all of the courses embody “teacher education,” in that program faculty cannot help but present  a  “way of teaching” to students, all of whom may end up as teachers of one sort or another even if not in a role so-­named. As one of our doctoral graduates observed (now in her fifth year in the professoriate): The way the program was constructed, I was continually pressed to think about what it meant to be a teacher, that is, to become a person who might educate others … I was confronted with two main educators in the program who taught like no one else I have ever (or ever since) been taught by. They are certainly completely different educators than anyone else I had at Teachers College. So by taking courses with each of them and being asked to consider why they were so different from other teachers was to consistently be pressed to consider what was it that made one a teacher. [from a survey of graduates; see below] Program faculty also bring philosophical viewpoints to teaching and teacher education through serving on dissertation committees of students in other departments, as well as by serving on various academic-­ related institutional committees and through meetings with many faculty visitors to the College who work in teacher education. This observation

192  David T. Hansen and Megan Jane Laverty is not to suggest that philosophical perspectives are always welcome in such settings, perhaps an inevitable feature of working in a professional school as contrasted, say, in a liberal arts college. (We address from time to time in our courses how to interpret the oft-­used term, “professional school,” which several program students have also criticized in their doctoral dissertations.) For our program students, we offer more than  a  series of courses. We also take seriously the scholarly and personal meanings embedded in terms like adviser and mentor. We meet together with each of our master’s degree students at least twice a semester to discuss courses and the like, in addition to individual meetings during their time with us about their courses of study or about ideas they are contemplating. One of us takes responsibility for a given student’s culminating master’s degree thesis, which, as mentioned, constitutes an original philosophical inquiry on a topic of interest they have identified. Many of these studies have been on aspects of teaching and teacher education. Doctoral students undertake  a  four-­year Professional Development Sequence. First-­ and second-­year doctoral students convene every other week for two years in our Proseminar, where we focus on intensive reading of inaugurating texts in philosophy and education. We rotate through Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Jean-­Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, and John Dewey’s Democracy and Education. We also include readings from our Doctoral Fields, such as Ethics, Philosophical Anthropology, Aesthetics, Critical Philosophies, Educational Foundations, Epistemology and Philosophy of Science, and Social and Political Philosophy. Each student concentrates on  a  particular field, comprising ten or so key readings, for purposes of their written doctoral examination, which precedes the dissertation. Third-­ and fourth-­year doctoral students convene every other week for two years in our Dissertation Proposal Workshop, where they read and comment systematically on each other’s draft writings, which may be a “thought piece,” a conference presentation, a submission to a journal, or  a  draft of  a  dissertation proposal (see below for graduates’ comments on the Workshop and Proseminar). Throughout these experiences, attention to teaching in conjunction with attention to modes of philosophical inquiry is continuous in both formal and spontaneous ways. We address what teaching is, what it is to be a  teacher, and related questions,  a  great many of which students press themselves. At the same time—­sometimes in the very same breath—­we question what philosophy is and what it is to be a philosopher. We endeavour to think in a fresh, un-­canned idiom about being a teacher, a student, a philosopher, a faculty member in a teacher education program, and more. A related feature of the program is our practice of accepting applications from self-­supporting visiting scholars and visiting doctoral students from abroad to spend up to a year interacting with us. (We cannot offer

Philosophy and Teacher Education at Teachers College  193 financial assistance to visitors since we struggle every year just to secure reasonable scholarship support for our doctoral students.) Some of these scholars and students focus in their research on teacher education. In a general way, we welcome visitors who can bring scholarly foci and backgrounds that differ from those of program faculty. Since there are only two of us, visiting scholars help enrich the overall scholarly ethos. In this respect, our visitors complement our ongoing Colloquium series, mentioned earlier, which constitutes an ongoing opportunity for our students to meet and learn from colleagues the world over. Our visitors have come from countries such as Australia, Brazil, China, India, Japan, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey. Almost all of our doctoral students aspire to a career as a scholar and teacher in higher education. Since actual positions in philosophy of education have diminished in recent years—­a mirror to the ongoing decline in enrolment in the humanities in colleges and universities—­we try to ready students for faculty positions in which they will often be heavily involved in teacher education. We do so through the means touched on earlier that include formal and informal studies. We do so through discussion about the realities of teacher education in our time under the present “accountability” regime, and through supporting students in cultivating a portfolio of publications and conference presentations that will render them competitive for faculty positions. Faculty devote an evening session every fall to the dynamics of publishing and conferencing, alongside considerable individual advice. We plan to intensify this feature of the doctoral program in light of advice from recent graduates. As one graduate (now in his seventh year in the professoriate) notes about the value of presenting work at conferences while  a  doctoral student: Being able to engage in a discussion with “real” scholars (as opposed to “larval” graduate students) through the formal process of the papers/ sessions, and the informal process of conference-­going, introduced me to the lifeworld [of being a professor], one that I would presumably join if I could get an academic job. We also encourage our doctoral students to serve as adjunct faculty at institutions in the greater New York City area, since such experience has become important in securing a tenure-­track faculty appointment. Happily, most students can do so because of long-­standing relations we have with local departments of philosophy and colleges of education, as well as through word-­of-­mouth. A corollary here is that we have incorporated in our admissions’ criteria a requirement that prospective doctoral students have taught in K-­12 schools, ideally for a minimum of two years. This background, too, is increasingly valuable in order to secure future faculty appointments. It also bears highlighting what we call The Course Staff Model of integrating doctoral students into the teaching of our service courses (such as Philosophies of Education, mentioned previously). The model, developed with funding from our Provost’s

194  David T. Hansen and Megan Jane Laverty Office, positions a faculty member to work with two doctoral students on a given course, involving them in every phase: planning the course, giving lectures, leading discussion groups, and taking full responsibility for assessing a portion of the class. This programmatic effort has proven beneficial on many counts. It provides our people excellent experience in working with students from teacher education, curriculum studies, educational policy, educational psychology, and more. According to our graduates’ testimony, some of it garnered through a recent survey of their views on the topic of this chapter, our doctoral students vary in how much support, guidance, and structure they need while in the program. The kind and degree of support are a function, in part, of the backgrounds they bring to the program, as well as of the particular profile of experiences they undertake while with us (ranging from courses, to research assistantships, to working in local schools or educational non-­profit organizations, and so forth). In the sections that follow, we take up their testimony about their experience in the program as well as their views about the future of the program and the future of philosophy of education as a field of inquiry.

Predicaments and Prospects for Philosophy in Teaching and Teacher Education Program faculty are fortunate to be able to work with superb graduate students, both inside and outside our program. We have touched earlier on our master’s degree students and the deep investment so many make in their studies. We develop particularly close professional relationships with our doctoral students, with whom we work intensively over the course of their sojourn in the program (typically five years on average). Because there are only two of us, we admit each year only some three to five new doctoral students. We work with them in the aforementioned Proseminar and Dissertation Proposal Workshop, which we take turns teaching. We also interact with them as they progress through the College’s “Certification Process”: course work, a written comprehensive examination based on core texts and fields in the program, a  qualifying paper that constitutes  a  critical review of the literature in an area in which their eventual dissertation will be rooted,  a  proposal to undertake a dissertation-­length inquiry, an interim seminar where they meet with their five-­member dissertation committee to receive feedback on an initial draft of their core chapters, and finally the dissertation defence itself. Alongside these formal undertakings, faculty regularly meet with doctoral students to discuss ideas, possible conference presentations and journal articles, and other matters. As mentioned, we aspire to take as seriously as possible the elements of good mentoring—­and our students constantly teach us, if not in so many words, how best to do this work.

Philosophy and Teacher Education at Teachers College  195 All in all, the structure of the program creates continuous professional proximity between program faculty and students. Although from time to time we struggle with a doctoral student who is her-­ or himself struggling to succeed (sometimes because of confusion about their fundamental aims in life or about what is entailed in becoming  a  scholar-­teacher), we relish what we feel are rewarding, trusting, and lasting professional relationships with our doctoral students. We stay in touch with many graduates, and at each year’s annual meeting of the Philosophy of Education Society, we gather for a program reunion breakfast (attended by upwards of 20–25 graduates). Our respect for them constitutes one reason we sought to survey their views for the purposes of this chapter. Our intent in so doing was not to undertake a scientific inquiry in the sense of a formal analysis of data. Rather, we simply sought something more systematic than the informal feedback graduates regularly provide us. We distributed the survey directly to students who had graduated from the program during the last ten years and whose work, in one way or another, bears directly on teaching and teacher education (17 of the 25 graduates we contacted were able to respond, all of whom are full-­time faculty, save one who is an educational specialist at a company and another who is an administrator at  a  university). The survey was not anonymous; graduates responded directly to our emailed invitation. In light of their written testimony and, as importantly, their extensive informal feedback over the years, we believe that they expressed their frank views. We will present below a sampling of their perspectives on (a) what they learned in their course of study in the program, and (b) future prospects for the field of philosophy of education. To reiterate our aforementioned point, we approach their testimony not as analysts of data but as teachers and scholars deeply invested in the relations between philosophy, teaching, and teacher education. Before doing so, we wish to highlight that while their remarks about their experience in the program are positive, they did share suggestions for how the program might reimagine some of its features in order to enhance students’ knowledge and engagement with teacher education. They wrote as eloquently about their recommendations as they did about points (a) and (b) above. For example, there was unanimity about how valuable it is to teach on an adjunct basis while in the program, such that—­as a graduate five years out of the program put it—­they could have a “reality check” in juxtaposition with “the hearty but fairly one-­ sided philosophical diet that I was receiving during the first four years.” We intend to retain this teaching requirement, and will be reflecting on related suggestions graduates offered for how we might better prepare them for the professoriate in teacher education: invite doctoral students to regularly write and share literature reviews on specific topics in teaching and teacher education, which would give them a grasp of the field;

196  David T. Hansen and Megan Jane Laverty conduct focused workshops on creating syllabi, writing grants, preparing lesson plans, designing  a  teacher education course, supervising teachers, and publishing in contemporary journals; provide an explicit sense for how  a  philosopher of education can be useful in committee meetings, in large-­scale curriculum design, and in deliberations about policy; invite dedicated, dynamic teachers from schools to present in our Colloquium series; place students in field work projects in schools for academic credit; discuss creative ways to collaborate with future faculty colleagues in diverse fields; take one or more research methods courses to be able to bring this skill to the table; and introduce a program seminar on the actual dynamics of teaching in higher education with an eye on teacher education. There is much that our graduates commend by way of reconstructing features of the program. That said, when we contemplate their testimony, taken as a whole, we gain confidence in our program’s emphasis on working at the conjunction of philosophy “and” education, in juxtaposition with a systematic focus on what we take to be a remarkable history of educational thought. We turn now to our graduates’ voices, because in some respects, they are the most qualified to comment on the program. Our gesture of including them, rather than merely synthesizing their views into general remarks, mirrors our attempt in the program to assist each student in cultivating their distinctive ways of thinking and inquiring philosophically—­what Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Dewey would call their “intellectual bent.” The fostering of this voice is crucial, in our view, while engaging and being challenged by other voices. We proffer no “school of thought” in the program, and we do not presume or extol a particular interpretation of the texts we study. As noted previously, we try to think with our authors, and one another, in the conviction that how a person thinks and elucidates ideas is as important as what they actually say. In what follows, our graduates’ testimony contributes to a conversation that is necessarily inconclusive and ongoing, while also constituting an accomplishment. Perspectives on the Program’s Relation with Teacher Education Most respondents felt that the program does a solid job of foregrounding the relation between philosophical study, teaching, and teacher education, though there was some disagreement on how explicitly the program should make these links: ** Almost all aspects of the program prompted this kind of thinking. Since so many of the doctoral students and MA students were teachers before the program, or were teaching during the program,

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or aimed to teach after the program, the conversations were infused by  a  concern about teaching and teacher education. The  coursework prompted a kind of philosophical reflection that illuminated teaching and teacher education in ways that were, at least for me, unfettered by an obsession to discover just those activities and teaching methods that “worked.” I think it’s tempting to think that there’s some kind of advantage in asking explicitly, in one’s engagement with others of a philosophical text or presentation or whatever, “how will this impact teaching and teacher education,” or “how would a teacher implement this (philosophy) in her teaching?” But in my experience so far as an assistant professor, being explicit in this way with students often distracts them from the possibility of realizing and drawing a connection between philosophy and education for themselves. In other words, being explicit at a certain level is contrived. [4th year out of the program] I came to the doctoral program after a graduate degree with teaching certification and five years of classroom teaching, so  I  myself was very invested and keen to think more philosophically about teacher education. [Also important was] the fact that I was taking classes with mainly non-­philosophy students who were preparing to become teachers themselves, therefore bringing to class discussion the themes and questions specific to their intended career and experience. [7th year] I  think the interdisciplinary approach in the program, via the encouragement to take a number of different kinds of classes (political theory, sociology, philosophy, psychology, media studies) generated the prompting to think about the relation between philosophy and teaching and teacher education. The opportunity to think about a practice like education as a philosopher was well-­served by encouraging different disciplines of study. [5th year; the graduate is referring to the distinctive block of “elective” courses each doctoral student undertakes as part of their education.] I was teaching at the time when I was in the program, and the discussions of philosophical questions related to teaching naturally felt integrated with my efforts to succeed as a K-­12 museum educator and history educator. [12th year] Teacher education and teaching always seemed to come up in the courses I took, but mostly in the way that it does in a lot of articles [in the field]. We start with a problem, a reading, a philosophical question, or some philosopher, we discuss the ideas, implications, consequences, etc. in the ideas or thinking, and then at the end might say “So what does this mean for teachers and/ or teaching?” For some of my colleagues, that last bit was the most interesting, but for me, I spent that time refining my thinking about what we’d

198  David T. Hansen and Megan Jane Laverty done to that point, adding to my notes. Even though  I  knew I’d eventually be teaching in an education department, I just didn’t focus on that part, and partly because I think I already had done some of that work while  I  was teaching [in  a  school]. During the program, I just added the philosophical pieces to that, and when I eventually started teaching teachers, I used that. It was seamless to me and I don’t think it needed much attention … I don’t think you need to be that pedantic about the relationship between the program and teaching/ teacher education. [7th year] ** The program definitely encouraged my thinking about the relation between philosophy, teaching, and teacher education. In fact, I would say that my culminating dissertation project was a meditation on the question, “why should teachers study philosophy?” I think that, if one were to remain open to the vibrant place of learning that Teachers College is, then any doctoral student in the Philosophy & Education program would naturally explore this relationship at some point … As for my own experience, certain courses fueled my own inquiries—­The Call to Teach comes to mind. I would say also that much depended on the initiative of faculty. When reading texts in the philosophy of education, faculty must encourage and be open to locating the relationship between philosophy and teaching/ teacher education—­for example, what are the implications for teacher education when considering Rousseau’s educational project in the Emile? What does Michel de Montaigne mean when he suggests that a teacher should be “well-­formed, and not simply well-­filled”? These kinds of questions could be pushed aside, or they justifiably could take center-­stage. [12th year]

Why Should Teachers and Educational Scholars Study the History of Educational Thought? As described previously, our program emphasizes the long “conversation” (cf. Oakeshott, 1959) on education inaugurated, in the so-­called West, by figures such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. To a person, respondents supported the values in this focus, and did so in distinctive ways: ** To give this question the justice it deserves would take a lifetime or more to really capture what the conversation with Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, and Dewey has gifted me as a philosopher of education and as a person. [12th year] ** My thinking, writing, and teaching are all equally influenced by the historical training in philosophical thought that I received from the program. I cannot imagine getting by without drawing on the history of philosophical thought on education. [4th year]

Philosophy and Teacher Education at Teachers College  199 ** The curriculum deeply rooted in the history of philosophical thought is very important. It provides a kind of solid foundation. For example, my [present faculty] job forced me to have to learn the literature in the field of curriculum studies very quickly. Having spent much time, and much slow reading and thinking (something we often cannot afford later in our careers), with Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Dewey, and others, was very helpful to read the people who in the 20th century wrote about curriculum. The history of ideas is there, underneath contemporary debates. [5th year] ** My “initiation” in the long historical train of philosophical thought had a profound impact on me. …I find myself drawing mostly from the more historical figures and thinking about new thinkers in relation to them. In my professional work, I refer back to these thinkers regularly. [4th year] ** For me,  a  highlight of the program was that it trained me to see education in  a  variety of perspectives—­historical, psychological, sociological, and historical. I gained the sense that “new” ideas in education are often old ones, and it has been  a  major advantage in my teaching and research to be able to draw on these different perspectives. [4th year] ** This [emphasis] strikes me as  a  key, if (for lack of  a  better word) “under-­messaged” aspect of the program. I am grateful for the historical foundation I have. In many ways, it is the best inoculation against the fads that dominate much educational thinking. This may be cynical, but it is not difficult to contribute to the existing literature in education. The difficult thing is changing the conversation so that it remains meaningful. As well, and in a Deweyan spirit, we TC graduates are positioned to reconstruct policies and practices because of the distance we have from making an immediate contribution to education conversations as they are currently framed. I know that some of my peers were frustrated that there wasn’t more professional development, where this means quite narrowly training us for success in getting published. What our program does is so much more valuable. It helps us take—­to use Dewey’s way of putting it—­ the long view. My colleagues are doing really important work, but the work they are doing exists because of their contribution, not because they hooked into an existing conversation. This expresses the value of our program in many ways. We keep the energy of deep change alive. Though it seems irresponsible to disconnect from the immediate conversations and problems of education to engage with Plato (for example), the work we graduates do now because we’ve given ourselves that space is a force of good. [9th year] ** I think the field of teacher education is victim of the trend of following the newest fad (always promising to solve all problems) only to become disillusioned, lose momentum, and catch the next wave

200  David T. Hansen and Megan Jane Laverty

**

**

**

**

(typically every five years or so). I think philosophy and history can offer antidotes to that (or vaccines maybe, in the case of teacher candidates). I imagine courses in which students consider some trendy approaches and then address the same themes by reading philosophers who thought about similar ideas, often more critically, more beautifully, and more creatively. For example, there is not much in the trendy ideas of “design thinking” that was not anticipated by Dewey. [4th year] I think [the program] simply takes thinking seriously and thinking does not happen in a void of space and time. I also think it is okay with being unfashionable and that is a strength. Being repeatedly encouraged to pursue my true interest without any strategic considerations has helped me maintain a compass and also nourish “dis-­interested interests” which I think can be beneficial to research. [7th year] I  would say that the benefit of TC’s historical emphasis is that it has allowed me to reach beyond the oftentimes technocratic and myopic spirit of the education department [where I work], and be welcomed by colleagues in philosophy and the humanities. This has made me, I think, a more vital member of the broader university community. My hope is that if the TC program is to be reconfigured in the future that it does not lose this historical orientation—­ now, more than ever, does the world need the humanities, and to be mindful of the longstanding conversation on education and the human prospect. [12th year] I was deeply influenced by reading Emile. The nearly absurd idea of thinking through a person’s education from birth to nuptial bliss! It helps me to gain perspective and distance on the many educational strategies and fads on the market. None of them take [as] much time [as does Rousseau], or have Rousseau’s ambition. I was also deeply influenced by Dewey. Reading him established a trust in the value and power of communication across social and institutional boundaries. [3rd year] I liked reading the historical canon, and was almost obsessed about how to work with it and use it to teach teachers … The progression seems “natural” to me, and proceeds in  a  chronological and genealogical way, and I think is an antidote to one of the things that is wrong with contemporary schooling. Nowadays, schooling privileges personal narrative over dialogue, expression over contestation, and individual creativity over a grounding in a discipline. How can you produce new ideas if you don’t know anything about the ideas that came before you? How can you improve upon a structure, system, or process if you don’t understand those that we have and those that came before them? Knowing those things means I can engage in wide-­ranging philosophical conversations with others and almost always find a thread to engage in ideas outside the discipline of philosophy … So much of

Philosophy and Teacher Education at Teachers College  201 what is tossed around in schooling policy, and particularly that stuff that is destructive, seems to have no memory of anything, and even worse, no grounding at all. Repeating mistakes because you don’t know how it failed before is one thing. Making a mistake because you didn’t even bother to look is quite another. [7th year] ** It is so empowering to realize that people have not always thought as they think now—­partly to realize where we have made, or are shakily trying to make, improvements on tradition, and partly to realize how strong ideas and approaches to life that are not mainstream now can hold value for us in coming up with better solutions to difficult educational problems, and better and less hectic approaches to living … I need to have good answers to my students—­answers that respect them intellectually—­when they have skeptical questions about current educational orthodoxies, and this kind of philosophical study, combined with study of the history of society and education, is of ongoing importance for this purpose. [12th year]

Views on the Structure and Content of the Program in Philosophy and Education All graduates found enduring value in the Proseminar and Dissertation Proposal Workshop, which forms the basic professional frame of study in the program: ** I  generally think it’s good to have  a  shared set of texts that cohere a program/ field together so there’s a common language, and the program definitely does that … There’s a kind of rigor that goes into the program in terms of its curriculum and focus on these texts. [5th year] ** Another thing I deeply appreciated about my experience was the chance to gather in small group seminars to examine and discuss challenging texts. Reading Plato, Rousseau, and Dewey with  a  handful of others who were equally interested in these texts was  a  pinnacle of my time in graduate school. The small group seminars and dissertation proposal workshop in particular offered us the chance to learn from texts as well as from each other. [4th year] ** The doctoral seminars, both versions, are excellent and valuable. The first is an introduction to not only the program canon, but the way to engage in high level (i.e. Ph.D level) close reading, analysis, discourse, and writing. The second (the Workshop) was a great way to practice both collegial criticism and how to respond and write in light of criticism received. A text cannot prepare you for that; you have to do it, and this seminar did. Learning how to detach myself

202  David T. Hansen and Megan Jane Laverty from my own ideas, my own work, even my own sentences and my love of commas, was not only invaluable, but necessary. [7th year] ** The Workshop was also, for me, a way to “practice” being a professor. Especially in my 4th year … I tried to use class time to ask questions of my colleagues or to draw them out into discussion, rather than to promote my own ideas or express my own thinking. I tried to view my reviews of their papers as ways to understand what they want to accomplish, understand where they are in that process, and then try to help them get to where they want to go. In my 3rd year, I had spent more time trying to challenge their thinking or even poke holes when I didn’t like what they were doing, but that’s not entirely constructive (though it can be). I realized that soon I was going to have to help students write and think better. I do think it helped me be a more humane professor my first year … [Thanks to making this adjustment], I had a shorter distance to travel from my days as a doctoral student to being a professor. [7th year] ** I cannot forget the moment I sat on a bench in Central Park and read Emile. It was the best moment in New York. It was beautiful to read, study and discuss classics with ample time … As I studied Dewey and [later] wrote my dissertation, I had the experience of turning around all aspects of my educational, social, political, and economic views. [2nd year] ** The Dissertation Proposal Workshop and the program’s scaffolded approach to building me up to writing the dissertation was an excellent fit for my development. [12th year] Summing up his regard for the program as a whole, one graduate wrote: The years in the doctoral program helped me understand that all my favorite teachers, as masters of dialogue, are philosophers, not in the professional sense of publishing in certain journals or holding positions in university philosophy departments, but in the sense of maintaining a personal, intellectual discipline. I mean the discipline that combines an ongoing search for meaning, striving for elucidating and embodying values (aesthetic, moral, ethical), and an ongoing effort to understand, as [Wilfrid] Sellars puts it, “how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together.”  A  discipline that over time makes the philosopher ever more interested in people, and that leads to a certain kind of wisdom that comes from thinking more clearly, more generously, more humanely. The program taught me, through the books we read, the conversations we had, and through the faculty members’ example, that it is those qualities of the philosopher that make a great teacher, whatever the subject they teach. [5th year].

Philosophy and Teacher Education at Teachers College  203 The Current and Future State of the Field Some graduates expressed serious concerns about the anti-­intellectualism they see as plaguing educational policy in our time; an ethos, they suggest, percolates into the mindset of faculty and teacher candidates alike: ** It might benefit doctoral students to know, or assume, that the majority of scholars working in teacher education work with the presumption that philosophy is largely useless in preparing future teachers. The burden of proof, it is assumed, falls on the philosopher of education. I don’t think it’s beneficial to have a defensive attitude, but it would be beneficial to be prepared (and to practice) to draw out the connection between philosophy and education in a dynamic and interesting way when one enters the job market. Faculty in teacher education programs who did not study ­philosophy of education are quite often hostile or disparaging of philosophy’s contribution to education. [4th year] ** The biggest obstacle is the general perception that philosophy is useless and pointless, and this perception influences the teacher education students I have. They view teaching as a series of strategies and methods, and once they learn them, they will be a good teacher. Most have very little interest in the art of teaching or in the nuances or moments of discovery in teaching. I used to complain that too many of them wanted to “inspire” children to “be the best they can be” and all of that other drivel that they really have no control over, but at least they had some indefinable goal or interest. Increasingly, my students don’t even have that naivete. It shouldn’t be surprising since we are now getting as teacher education students the people who spent their entire schooling lives during the NCLB/ testing regime. They have been schooled to be uninterested in anything that isn’t practical or instrumental. My students view the teacher education program exclusively for what it is: a training program. In their minds, asking them to ponder questions that do not have definitive answers is not only a waste of their time, but “educational malpractice” on my part—­an actual quote from one student, a sentiment echoed by others. [7th year] ** While  I  appreciate, enjoy, and am continuously drawing on my readings and knowledge of Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, and Dewey in both my personal and professional life, it has been a hard school of reality to recognize that using these figures in my writing and teaching has to be consistently justified, as I am met with challenge whenever I write or teach on any of these figures … I teach Rousseau’s Emile and that usually goes well, but I’m not entirely sure my colleagues find this justified. I often have to point out how I challenge this text within my courses and I try and demonstrate in my

204  David T. Hansen and Megan Jane Laverty syllabus how we can still use Emile to problematize modern constructs of schooling, childhood, and gender. [5th year] Graduates disclosed in their testimony that the institutions in which they work differ with respect to administrative and collegial support, as well as with regard to the ethos of students. For example, the same graduate who worries about hostility to philosophy in his department had this to say about his teacher candidates: My teaching evaluations since I’ve been hired have been stellar, and the majority of the free-­handed feedback in my evaluations (viz “Can you share any other comments or concerns you have about the course”) show that undergraduate teacher education students feel a tremendous sense of satisfaction and see  a  deep value in studying the history of philosophical thought on education [4th year]. Another graduate offered this perspective: I also notice that veteran teachers and administrators who return to the university for an advanced degree are much more receptive to philosophical approaches to issues in education than teacher candidates.  I  think it is a factor of professional and life experience. I think there is potential for philosophy to play  a  more central role in educational leadership programs. I have heard from many graduates of the Klingenstein Center [cf. above, p. 10] that Megan’s [philosophy and education] classes were their favorite and what they learned there has become an important part of their work [5th year]. Several graduates echoed the following remark: A free-­standing program at TC is essential, but it must educate graduates who work broadly and in very different fields. The old-­school model PES, where there are philosophically-­inclined folks talking broadly about education without engaging on-­the-­ground with educators is (in my mind) a thing of the past. There won’t be jobs for free-­standing philosophers of education in the future. There should be a handful of places like TC that are independent, but they should be mindful—­as TC is—­that their graduates won’t be teaching at places like TC. Though some lament this, I see it as very exciting. I can only point to the work of my colleagues. None of us are doing the same thing, but all of us are successful in our own ways. I think our program needs to find a way to “sell” this. Philosophy and Education at TC needs its independence so that it can create this type of diversity [9th year].

Conclusion: On the Values in Philosophy and Education As program faculty, we are mindful of the apparently quixotic nature of our orientation summarized in the term “philosophy and education.” This orientation can be regarded as neti neti, to borrow an expression from the South Asian Upanishads: “not this, not that.” As one of our graduates (fifth year) wrote, it is not philosophy “proper,” i.e. as

Philosophy and Teacher Education at Teachers College  205 conceived in departments of philosophy, nor is it education “proper,” i.e. as conceived in much of contemporary policy and public opinion. More pointedly, we might say that in today’s educational climate, the study of philosophy and education is atopos, an ancient Greek term for “out of place”—­which is how Plato sometimes regarded both Socrates and himself, as have countless philosophers ever since. Here is how another graduate characterized the current scene: ** I also think that [the challenge to the field] is the result of humanistic study being squeezed out of teacher education programs under the current technocratic regime of assessment, accountability, and so on. Perhaps this trend will cease, and I can imagine that one day, perhaps very soon, a philosopher of education will sound the clarion call to return to the here and now of the schools. But will there be anyone in the academy, in the schools, and in public policy to listen? … Teacher education is viewed ever more so as a job that requires training, rather than as a vocation that requires education. When I am in a less optimistic mood, my sense of the future is that all humanistic endeavours in the academy, and especially philosophy of education, will find devotees here and there, but will no longer expect the ongoing support of administrations competing fiercely for tuition, grant, and public dollars … Does this mean that there will no longer exist any thoughtful public discourse on education? Does this mean that scholarly efforts will cease? Does this mean that the reading and discussion of the educational writings of Plato and Rousseau and Dewey will no longer happen? I don’t think so. I just think that these kinds of things will tend to happen, with increasing frequency, outside of the academy, as scholars cast their vote for a “Benedict Option” in the field. [12th year] The “Benedict Option” refers to how Alasdair MacIntyre closes his After Virtue,  a  now-­classic account of contemporary society in which the author concludes that emotivism—­the view that ethics and morality simply mean whatever  I  prefer or want them to mean—­has won out over less subjectivist conceptions. MacIntyre suggests that people today face a predicament similar to what thoughtful persons confronted when the fall of Rome ushered in what historians have called “The Dark Ages.” He concludes: What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the

206  David T. Hansen and Megan Jane Laverty frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—­ doubtless very different— ­St Benedict. (1984, p. 263) Is our program in philosophy and education, alongside other such programs around the world, a MacIntyrean “local form of community” in our current “dark age”? In some respects, as our graduates illuminate, the answer is yes. In other respects, as they also suggest, the image is radically misleading. While contemporary circumstances can indeed seem bleak, we should resist—­as our graduates also underscore—­adopting a despairing, defensive, or Rodney Dangerfield-­like posture: “We don’t get no respect!” Our graduates report numerous ways in which philosophical inquiry and teaching are alive in their work. They highlight how they, and philosophical inquiry itself, can and do gain the respect of peers and students alike, a reality we have experienced ourselves as faculty in our home institution. The same fifth-­year graduate who wonders about the tenability of the field also wrote: I do think it’s important to have philosophy be present because [this] mode of thinking yields possibilities that other fields don’t. I’ve found  I  can add things to intellectual conversations and teach teachers things that my colleagues trained in other methods just don’t. It’s hard to describe, but philosophy of education’s prizing of individual reflection on presumptions behind practice is unique. I value that highly. It seems to us that scholars working at the crossroads of philosophy and education can be mutually supportive in describing the educational values in what they do, a crucial task since humans live, work, suffer, and find joy under particular descriptions, or narratives, of who and what they are. Philosophers have faced this challenge ever since its modes of inquiry emerged in human culture, and it appears that the effort will remain necessary for as far into the future as we can imagine. In our view, scholars of philosophy and education should embrace—­again, with as much mutual support as possible—­the artful, political task of making a home for themselves in schools, colleges, and departments of education that may, in some respects, be indifferent or unwelcoming. We take heart from our graduates’ creative efforts to accomplish this aim as they contribute, visibly and significantly, to teacher education and other fields. We intend to amplify our own efforts to help future graduates make  a  successful transition from being “inside” philosophy and education, as embodied in our program, to being “outside” dominant educational discourses even while maintaining a rich philosophical ethos as professors and persons. We hope future students can echo the following comment: The program at TC prepares you  …  to

Philosophy and Teacher Education at Teachers College  207 think philosophically about education in the broadest sense, so that, in my case, even when  I  had to teach courses outside of philosophy of ­education, or take up administrative tasks, I was still a philosopher of education performing those duties [12th year]. We would add that while this ethical undertaking implies being “outside” various conventional notions of education (as, e.g., a mere means to economic productivity), it does not mean isolating oneself from other colleagues and students. On the contrary, the courage required to be a scholar of philosophy and education today encompasses being present to everyone they encounter, and to being dedicated to establishing generative relations as much as circumstances realistically permit. As our graduates disclose, the challenge sometimes is to accept the mantle of parrhesiast (Foucault, 2001), an ancient Greek term for a person who speaks the truth about themselves and about society while doing so in a politically wise manner (thus our term “artful,” cast earlier). The difficulties in this currere—­a Latin term for “a course of action”—­are all too real, and sometimes discouraging. Again, all who care about philosophy and education will need as much solidarity as they can muster. This ethical commitment mirrors why we are more moved than ever about our graduates,’ and our field’s ultimate prospects. Our collective labours today move beyond the criticism of educational assumptions and the clarification of educational concepts, as vital as these long-­standing endeavours remain. They encompass transforming our understanding of what sorts of knowledge and human community we need in education today. This task beckons through thick and thin. As has been true since Plato put stylus to parchment, knowledge, ethical insight, and wise judgement grow best when they walk together in inquiry, policy, and practice. Now as much as ever, we need to walk together even as we hum our own distinctive songs.

Acknowledgements We thank the graduates of our program who took the time from their busy schedules to respond to our survey. We remain deeply grateful for the support of Dr. Sue Ann Weinberg (Ed.D., Teachers College, 1997), who has endowed both a faculty chair and several fellowships in support of our students. Our program, like the humanities writ large, depends heavily upon such support to sustain itself, particularly because our students come from widely diverse economic strata.

References Arcilla, R. V. (1998). Education of the undead? In S. Laird (Ed.), Philosophy of education 1997 (pp. 449–451). Urbana, IL: Philosophy of Education Society. Beineke, J. A. (1998). And there were giants in the land: The life of William Heard Kilpatrick. New York, NY: Peter Lang.

208  David T. Hansen and Megan Jane Laverty Cremin, L., Shannon, D. A., & Townsend, M. E. (1954). A history of teachers college, Columbia University. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Foucault, M. (2001). Fearless speech. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Kilpatrick, W. H. (1918). The project method. Teachers College Record, 19(4), 319–335. MacIntyre, A. (1984). After Virtue (2nd ed.). Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Martin, J. (2003). The education of John Dewey. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. McCarthy, M. R. (2006). The rise and fall of Ed200F. Educational Studies, 39(2), 134–145. Oakeshott, M. (1959). The voice of poetry in the conversation of mankind. London, UK: Bowes & Bowes. Rorty, A. (1997). The ethics of reading: A traveler’s guide. Educational Theory, 47(1), 85–89.

Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. Abelard, Peter 148 ACT (American College Test) 57, 61, 61n3 Adler, Mortimer 158 administrative progressives 26–7, 157 “administrative progressivism” 157 AERA conference 136 After Virtue (MacIntyre) 205 Aldrich, Richard 116 Alexander, R. J. 96 alternative teacher-education programmes 74–5 ambiguous individualism 31–2, 35 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) 22; US National Science Education Standards 123 American Association of Universities 175 American colonial colleges 151–2, 162n6 American Council of Learned Societies in Education (ACLSE) 174 American Council on Education 175 American Educational Research Association 171 American Hegelianism 30, 36 analytic philosophy 18; of education 5; explanation of 19–21; importance of 21–4 Ancient Athens 147 Ancient Greek philosophers 149, 152 Ancient Greek philosophical tradition 149 Anscombe, Elizabeth 160 Anselm of Canterbury 148 Antidosis (Isocrates) 147 Apology (Plato) 148

“apprenticeship of observation” 69 Aquinas, Thomas 2, 148 Arcilla, René 184–5 Arendt, H. 60 Argyris, C. 70 Aristophanes 147 Aristotle 2, 18, 147, 155, 158, 162n9, 171, 187, 192, 198 Augustine 148 Bachelor of Education programmes 113 Bachelors in Education degrees (BEd) 89 Bacon, Francis 150 Baconian enthusiasm 31, 34 BA Education Studies 89 Bailin, S. 93, 101 Ball, D. L. 66 Barnard, Henry 2, 7 Basedow, Johann Bernhard 151 beep test 116–17, 119n2 behaviourism, limitations of 5 behaviours 22, 50, 70, 73, 77, 79–80, 167, 173, 176; moral 21; rules 68; Socrates’ 148 Benchmarks for Science Literacy document 123 “Benedict Option” 205 Bengtsson, J. 73, 75 Bird, Alexander 131 Blacker, David 39–40 Boethius 148, 152 bona fide philosophy 17 Borgmann, Albert 31–2; ambiguous individualism 31–2, 35; Baconian enthusiasm 31, 34; methodological universalism 31, 34; modernity elements 31–2, 34–5

210 Index Bowne, Mary 80–1 Boyle, Robert 125 Boyle’s Law 125 Bristol University 129 Bruner, Jerome 128 Bulletin #14, The Professional Preparation of Teachers for American Public Schools 174 Bunge, Mario 131 Burbules, N. C. 117 Callan, Eamonn 27, 30 Campbell, E. 94 Campe, Joachim Heinrich 151 candidates (teacher): dialogue 72; not a blank slate 69–70; novices to, teacher training programmes 67; philosophical beliefs and values 70–1; to practitioners 71–3; and research 73; self-reflection 71–2 Capella, Martianus 148 Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching 174 Carr, W. 49, 52 Carter Review of ITE 90 Cartesian methodological universalism 31, 34 Case, R. 93, 101 Cassiodorus 148 Centre for Research Ethics and Ethical Deliberation (CREED) 78 Childs, John 184, 185 Chinnery, A. 110 Cicero 148 Civil Rights Act of 1964 168 “classroom management” 69, 75, 105, 146 classroom pedagogy 124 classroom processes reform 28 The Clouds (Aristophanes) 147 Collins, C. 170 communicative action theory 47, 55, 57 “Community of Practice” (CoP)/“Community of Enquiry” (CoE) style 87, 95, 97–100 Conant, James 124 “concept stretching” 86–7 Condliffe-Lagemann, Ellen 27 Confucius 187 conservatism 29–36 constructivism 107; didactic 127; humanistic 127; problems with

constructivist epistemology 132–3; problems with constructivist ontology 133–5; radical 133; in science education 126–36; situative 127; social 132; sociotransformative 127; Thomas Kuhn’s imprint on 129–32; waning of 136 constructivist epistemology 132–3 constructivist ontology 133–5 constructivist theory 124 Coombs, J. R. 93, 101 corporatism: described 1; and teacher education 1 Council for Social Foundations of Education (CSFE) 165, 177n1, 177n2 Counts, George 10, 27, 41, 184–5 “critical educational science” 52 critical philosophical self-reflection 57 critical reflection 1, 56, 60, 71–2, 77, 79, 175 critical sciences, and interest 49–54 Critical Theory 48–9, 52, 183; and human cognitive interests 48–9; and philosophical reflection 54 Cuban, L. 167 curricular organization 109 dame schools 88, 156 Daniels, L. B. 93 Dare the School Build a New Social Order (Counts) 27 “The Dark Ages” 205 Darwin, Charles 124–5 Darwinian evolutionary theory 125 “decline literature” 6, 25 Defining an Identity: The Evolution of Science Education as a Field of Research (Fensham) 136–7 Delgado, M. 75 deliberative democracy 58 Democracy and Education (Dewey) 34, 37, 41, 192 Descartes, René 150 Dewey, John 4, 5, 8, 10, 18, 157, 173, 176, 185, 187, 191, 192, 196; ascent in schools of education 41; and Baconian enthusiasm 34; educational writings 29; Eurocentric version of history 30–1; liberation through science approach 35; modernity 31–6; as modern thinker 36–40; pedagogy, and

Index  211 racism 29–31; popularity in schools of education 26–9; progressive education 25, 27; on reflective experiences 34; and responsiveness to the world 183–5 dialogic teaching 79, 96 dialogue: dialogic teaching 96; vs. discussion 96; in education 97; and teacher candidates 72 didactic constructivism 127 discourse ethics 55, 57–8 discrimination, statistical method of 57 discussion: described 96; vs. dialogue 96 diversity 59–60, 124, 157 Doctorate in Education (EdD) 17 Dodge, Grace 183 “doing philosophy” 110 domination of nature 31; Dewey’s views on 37 Doyle, James 16 Driver, Rosalind 134–5 Dubois, W. E. B. 30–1 Ducharme, E. R. 28, 38 Duhem, Pierre 124 “dumbing down” approach 106 Duschl, Richard 122 Edlin, M. L. 70 education: analytic philosophy of 5; dialogue in 97; ideology in 4; institutionalized teacher 1–4, 7; Peters on 21; progressive 25, 27; system in the United States 6; teacher see teacher education (TE); on the values in 204–7; see also philosophy of education; teachers; specific types Education Act (1870), England 88–9 educational constructivism 128, 129 educational foundations: continued importance in teacher education 171–3; decline in teacher education programmes 166–71; overview 165–6 educational philosophy: decline of the field of 6–7; and grammar school teachers 5; and philosophy of education 1; and teacher certification 1; and teacher education 1; see also philosophy of education

educational psychology 1, 5, 7, 188, 194 educational research 4–5 educational scholars: studying history of educational thought 198–201 Education Reform Act (1988) 89–90 Einstein, Albert 124 Elementarwerk (Basedow) 151 Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 168 Elliott, Harrison 185 An Elusive Science: The Troubling History of Education Research (Condliffe-Lagemann) 27 emancipatory interests 52–3; cognitive activity of 55; defined 52; norms 52; and schooling 58–60; and selfreflection 55; (self)-reflection for 54–6; and teachers 56–8 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 196 Emile (Rousseau) 106, 151, 192 empirical research, and philosophical input 22 England: absence of theory in teacher education 87–91; Bachelors in Education degrees (BEd) 89; BA Education Studies 89; Education Act (1870) 88–9; Education Reform Act (1988) 89–90; Post-Graduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) 89–90; private schools in 88; see also United Kingdom (UK) Enlightenment 150, 157; educators 123; ethos 152; pedagogical theory 151; philosophers 123, 146, 150, 152; philosophy 150; rationalism 151; thinkers 150–1 Ennis, Robert 122 environmental ethics 124 epistemological relativism 133 epistemology: problems with constructivist 132–3 equality 86, 157 espoused theories 70, 72, 77, 81 “essentialists” 19 ethics 92; discourse 55, 57–8; and teachers’ assessment in UK 92 Eurocentrism 29–31 Europe 2–3, 113, 151, 161n6 European Enlightenment 150 Everett, Edward 154 “evidence-based” research 1, 5–6 “evidence-based teaching methods” 158

212 Index Ewert, G. D. 49; human cognitive interest linkages 49 experts, in teacher education 67 explicit philosophical thinking: in teacher education (TE) 96–8 Fallace, Thomas 30 The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame (Blacker) 39 Feinberg, Walter 30, 185 female seminaries 147, 153, 156, 160 Fensham, Peter 126, 136–7 Fenstermacher, Gary D. 185 Fenwick, Tara J. 111 Finland, teachers in 91 Foot, Philippa 160 “forms of knowledge” thesis 16 Forzani, F. M. 66 Fosnot, Catherine 128 Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (Kant) 161n1 Fraser, J. W. 153 Freire, Paulo 18, 97, 159 Fuller, F. F. 75 Galileo 124 Garcia-Padilla, M. C. 78 “generational transaction” 171 “Genetic Epistemology” 128 Gergen, Kenneth 133 German classicism 151 German classicist movement 151 gifted person 19 Golinski, Jan 131 grammar school teachers 3; and educational philosophy 5; see also teachers Greek Antiquity 146 Greek philosophy 152 Greene, Maxine 10, 184–5 Gribble, Jim 16 Grundy, S. 52 Habermas, Jürgen 9, 46, 49–54, 60; communicative action theory 47; conceptualization of modernity 56; critical philosophical selfreflection 57; definition of interest 49; knowledge constitutive interests see knowledge constitutive interests (KCIs); “reconstructive science” 55; on self-reflective critique 55; technical interests and positivism 50

Habermasian emancipatory construct 47–8 Hadot, Pierre 149, 152 Hanna, Paul 27, 41 Harvard Educational Review 145 Harvard University 131 Hegel, F. 18 Hegelian views 30 Heilbronn, R. 78 hermeneutics 183 Higgins, Christopher 184 Higher Education Academy (HEA) 94 High Middle Ages 148 Hirst, Paul 8, 16; “forms of knowledge” thesis 16 history, research in 126 “History and Nature of Science Standards” 123 history and philosophy of science (HPS): philosophical and curricular arguments for 121–6; in professorial and teacher formation 136–9 History of Western Philosophy (Russell) 23 Hobbes, Thomas 150 Holmyard, E. J. 124 Holton, Gerald 124 Honneth, A. 55 Hook, Sidney 39 Horkheimer, M. 53; “social philosophy” 54 Howard, Vernon 16 HPS and science teaching (HPS&ST) 123, 126 Human Accomplishment (Murray) 22–3 human actions 49, 50 human cognitive interests 48–9 humanistic constructivism 127 Hutchins, Robert M. 158 ideology 52; in education 4; schooling as 48 implicit philosophical thinking: described 96; in teacher education (TE) 96–8 indigenous knowledge 124 Individualism: Old and New (Dewey) 35 institutionalized teacher education 1–4, 7 intellectual acts, of teaching 68

Index  213 interests: and critical sciences 49–54; emancipatory 52–3; fundamental, for humans 49; Habermas definition of 49; practical 51–2; technical 49–50 Isocrates 147–8 “issues and problems” model 5 Jimenez-Silva, M. 97 John Dewey Society 27, 39 Jung, Walter 124 Kagan, D. M. 75, 81 Kant, I. 18, 150 Karier, Clarence 30 Kemmis, S. 49, 52 Kendhammer, B. 31 Kilpatrick, William Heard 184–5 Kitchen, W. 168 Kleinig, John 16 Knight, S. 170 knowledge 6–7, 16, 18, 20–1, 133, 150; comprehensive 75; content 169; Dewey on creation of 54; emancipatory 59; growth in 36; practical 59, 75; professional, in teaching 74; scientific 32, 41, 125, 132; tacit 67; technical 58–9; see also knowledge constitutive interests (KCIs) knowledge constitutive interests (KCIs) 46–7, 49; emancipatory interests 52–3; importance of 53–4; practical interests 51–2; technical interests 49–50 Komisar, B. P. 68–9 Kuhn, Thomas 29, 130, 137; academic fields and 130–2; imprint on constructivism 129–32; Kuhnian cliff 130 Labaree, David 26–8, 38–9 Lacan, J. 111 Lagemann, E. C. 157 language 19, 55, 76, 110–11, 177n1; public 72; structure of 55; of teaching 69; of theory 48 Learned, William S. 175 Learned Report 175 learner support act, of teaching 69 learning: environment 109; problemsbased 107–11 learning enhancement, of teaching 69

The Liberal Art of Science (AAAS) 122 liberal arts: education 148; philosophy as 147–52 liberal education: civic service and 147; Enlightenment thinkers on 151; as liberating education 151; and professional preparation 146 liberal educationalists 124 liberal political theory 160 liberal science education 124–6 liberal teacher education: contemporary barriers to 157–9; in North America 152–7; prospects for 160–1 Locke, J. 150 Lortie, Dan 69 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 32–3, 38 Mach, Ernst 124 MacIntyre, Alasdair 205 McPeck, John 16 Magoon, Jon 129 Mann, Horace 2, 7, 153, 154 Margonis, Frank 30 Marx, Karl 48 Melanchton, Philip 149 “Mental and Moral Philosophy” 153 mental philosophy 153 mentoring: bringing philosophy to life in 187–94 metaphysics 148, 150 methodological universalism 31, 34 Middle Ages 167 modernity 31–6; defined 31; elements by Borgmann 31–2 Montaigne, Michel de 191 morality: and philosophy 24; and teaching 24 moral philosophy 148, 153 multiculturalism 124, 157 Murray, Charles 22–3 Murris, K. 95 My Pedagogic Creed (Dewey) 27 NARST conference 136 National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) 166 National Defense Education Act 168 A Nation at Risk 6, 45–6 natural philosophy 148, 153 “natural talent” 20 “nature of science” (NOS) 122

214 Index Neill, A.S. 18 neohumanism 151 neo-liberal capitalism 40 Neuhumanismus 151 New Empiricism 157 Newlon, Jesse 184–5 Newman, John Henry 158 Newton, Sir Isaac 124 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle) 106, 192 Niethammer, Friedrich Immanuel 151 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act 45–6, 168, 173, 176 Nock, Albert 45–6, 61n1 normal schools 147, 153–7 North America 113, 146; emergence of liberal teacher education in 152–7; and philosophy of education 25; schools of education 28 Novak, Joseph 129 novices: from candidates in teacher training programmes to 67; teacher concerns 75–6; in teacher education 66 Nunn, Percy 124 Ogren, Christine 155 Ohio Teacher Evaluation System 177n3 Olson, K. 97 Orchard, J. 78 ordinary language philosophy 19, 159; see also analytic philosophy The Origin of Species (Darwin) 29 Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics (Dewey) 36 Page, David 154 Parsons, Jim 111 Pasteur, Louis 124 Payne, Joseph 2 “pedagogical competence” 145 “pedagogical content knowledge” 74, 145 pedagogy 2–3; and pluralism 4; racial assumptions in Dewey’s 30; traditional teacher-directed forms of 109 personal analysis 23–4 personal philosophy statement 80–2 Perspectives on Science course 123 Peters, R. S. 5, 8, 16, 110; on absence of philosophy in TE 88; on education 21

Petrarch 149 Phenix, Philip H. 184 phenomenology 51, 183 Phillips, D. C. 16, 108, 185 philosophers: and philosophy 76; and teacher effectiveness 76–8 philosophical interventions: pegs for 77–8; personal philosophy statement 80–2; Philosophy For Teachers (P4T) practice 78–82 philosophical reasoning 106 philosophy: bona fide 17; and educational practice 185–7; “isms” of 4; as liberal arts discipline 147–52; and philosophers 76; prospects for 160–1; research in 126; and teacher education 16–18; and teaching 91–3; in teaching and teacher education 194–204; and theory 91–3; on the values in 204–7 Philosophy For Children (P4C) 72, 78–81, 129; “concept stretching” 86–7; described 86; and P4T 94; vs. P4T 99–100; and personal teaching philosophy statement 81–2 Philosophy For Teachers (P4T) practice 9, 78–82, 86, 98; aims of 94–5; “Community of Practice” (CoP)/“Community of Enquiry” (CoE) style 87, 97; described 94; impetus for 94; and P4C 94; vs. P4C 99–100 philosophy of education 4; applying problems-based approaches in 114–18; case for shifting how we teach 105–7; courses in 76–7; criticisms of problems-based learning to 111–14; decline in teacher education 1–2, 25; and North America 25; problems-based approach in 105–19; problemsbased learning 107–11; and teacher education programmes 4; see also educational philosophy Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain (PESGB) 15, 94 Philosophy of Education: The Principles and Practice of Teaching (Tate) 3 Piaget, J. 128 Plato 18, 106, 147, 187, 191, 192, 198 pluralism 5, 51; and pedagogy 4 Politics (Aristotle) 158 Popper, Karl 135

Index  215 positivism 56, 159; Habermas criticism of 46, 50 positivist theory 50 Post-Graduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) 89–90 The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Lyotard) 32 post-modernity 32 practical interests 51–2 practical reflection 71–2 praxis 47, 48 “principles of education” courses 3 problems-based learning 107–11; applying in philosophy of education 114–18; criticisms of 111–14 Process of Education (Bruner) 128 “Professional Learning Communities” (PLCs) 97 Program in Philosophy and Education, Teachers College 182–207; aims of 185–7; bringing philosophy to life in teaching and mentoring 187–94; current and future state of field 203–4; history of 183–5; John Dewey and responsiveness to world 183–5; overview 182–3; philosophy and educational practice 185–7; predicaments and prospects for philosophy in teaching and teacher education 194–204; relation with teacher education 196–8; structure and orientation 187–94; teachers and educational scholars studying history of educational thought 198–201; on values in philosophy and education 204–7; views on structure and content of 201–2 progressive education 25, 106; Deweyan 27, 29–30 “The Project Method” 184 Prussian model of teacher education 153 psychology 24, 51, 128, 138, 160; educational 1, 5, 7, 188, 194; empirical 157–8; and sociology 22; sub-disciplines of 89; as subject and teacher-education programmes 16 Psychology (Dewey) 36 Psychology and Epistemology (Piaget) 128 “pub talk” 109, 119n1 “pure theory” 53 Quintillian 148

Race to the Top 45 racism 29–31 radical constructivism 133 Raup, David M. 184–5 Raup, Robert Bruce 184 Rawls, John 160 Readings in the Foundations of Education (Rugg) 165 “reconstructive science” 55 reflection: critical 72; practical 71–2; and teacher candidates 71–2; technical 71, 75 reflective experiences 34 Renaissance humanists 149 Renaissance learning 151 Republic (Plato) 106, 147, 192 research: in history 126; in philosophy 126; in science teaching 126 residency programmes 74–5, 82n2 Robert and Maurine Rothschild lecture 131 Robinson the Younger (Campe) 151 Romans 30, 149 Rorty, Amelie 189 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 2, 18, 106, 151, 187, 192 Routledge 15 Rugg, Harold 27, 165, 185 Russell, Bertrand 23 Russell, James 166, 183, 185 Russell, Tom 81 Ryan, T. G. 70 Ryerson, Egerton 2, 7 SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) 57, 61n3 Scheffler, Israel 8, 16, 78, 121, 130 Scholasticism 148, 150 Schön, Donald 66, 70 School and Society (Dewey) 29, 33, 35, 42n1 “school humanism” 151 schooling 45–8, 50–2, 57, 191; and emancipatory interests 55, 58–60; expansion of 182; public 7; reform 49; technocratization of 56 “school keeping” 2 Schorske, Carl 158 Schulman, Lee 145 Schulz, Roland 139 Schwab, Joseph 124 science education: constructivism in 126–36; liberal 124–6; philosophical and curricular arguments for HPS in 121–6

216 Index Science & Education 126 “Science Education and Philosophy of Science: Twenty-Five Years of Mutually Exclusive Development” (Duschl) 122 Science for All Americans (AAAS) 122 science teaching: research in 126 scientism 23 Second World War 3–4 self-reflection: critical philosophical 57; and emancipatory interests 55; and teacher candidates 71–2 self-reflective critique 54–5 septem artes liberales (seven liberal arts) 148 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act 168 Shapere, Dudley 130 Shimony, Abner 131 Shulman, L. S. 74 Siegel, Harvey 16 “situated philosophy” 117 situative constructivism 127 Skinner, B. F. 5 Snook, Ivan 16 social constructivism 132 The Social Frontier 185 “social philosophy” 54, 59, 76–7 social sciences 22, 46, 48, 51, 165 Society for the Advancement of Philosophical Enquiry (SAPERE) 95, 97 sociology 16, 24, 51, 89, 165, 172; of education 6, 91; and psychology 22 socio-transformative constructivism 127 Socrates 147, 150, 171, 198 Soltis, Jonas 10, 184 South African National Research Foundation (NRF) 94 South Asian Upanishads 204 Spencer, Herbert 2, 30 Standards for Academic and Professional Instruction in Foundations of Education, Educational Studies, and Educational Policy Studies (ASCLE) 174 statistical method of discrimination 57 Steeg, Jules 151 Stove, David 130 Strike, Kenneth 185 Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn) 29, 129, 130, 132

structuring 67–8 Studying Teacher Education 171 “study of education” 3, 7–8, 15, 18, 28, 89, 91 Tanner, Daniel 39 Tate, Thomas 3 teacher candidates see candidates (teacher) teacher certification: and educational philosophy 1; see also teacher education teacher education (TE): absence of theory in, England 87–91; aim of 66; continued importance of educational foundations in 171–3; and corporatism 1; and decline in study of philosophy 16–18; decline of educational foundations in 166–71; and educational philosophy 1; experts 67; explicit philosophical thinking in 96–8; implicit philosophical thinking in 96–8; initial situation in 69–71; institutionalization of see institutionalized teacher education; in 19th-century Britain 2; in 19th-century North America 2; novices 66; philosophy in 194–204; philosophy of education’s decline in 1–2; as practical training 65–6; in South Africa 91; and teaching 65–7; see also teacher certification teacher-education programmes: alternative 74–5; and emancipatory self-reflection 60; and history subject 16; novices in 67; and philosophy subject 16; and psychology subject 16; and sociology subject 16; traditional 74–5 teacher educators 2–4, 6–8, 98–100, 159, 183, 185–6; and classroom processes 28; on Dewey 37; and P4T practices 94, 100; and philosophy of education 76; university-based 74 “teacher libraries” 2–3 teachers: and critical reflection 72; education in Finland 91; and emancipatory interests 56–8; ethical dilemmas facing 111; managing role of 69; as moral exemplars 24; novice 66, 77; philosophy for

Index  217 78–80, 94–5, 98–100; physical education 116; practical training for 65; prospective in 19th-century 2; role of structuring 67–8; role of teaching 68–9; Rousseauian 151; and self-reflection 60; “social justice” programmes in education for 47; studying history of educational thought 198–201; trainee 154; see also education; schooling; teaching Teachers College, Columbia University 4, 10; Program in Philosophy and Education at 182–207 teaching: acts 68–9; and aim of teacher education 65–7; bringing philosophy to life in 187–94; dialogic 96; and moral dimension 24; and philosophy 91–3; philosophy in 194–204; structuring 67–8; tasks of 67–9; technocratization of 45; and theory 91–3; see also schooling; teachers technical education 125 technical reflection 71, 75 theories-in-use 70, 71 theory: and philosophy 91–3; and teaching 91–3 Theory and Practice of Teaching (Page) 154 A Theory of Justice (Rawls) 160 “Thinking in Science” programmes 129 thinking teachers 87, 93, 99, 100–1; see also teachers Thomassen, L. 53 Thorndike, Edward 26–7 Tobin, Ken 136 traditional teacher-education programmes 74–5 traditional theory 53

The Trouble with Ed Schools (Labaree) 26 Trump, Donald 41 truth 112, 123, 150, 170 Tyack, David 26 Tyler, Ralph 39 United Kingdom (UK): Philosophy for Teachers (P4T) 9; philosophy of education 5; Professional Standards for assessing teachers 92; teachers’ involvement with philosophy 16; see also England United States 2, 5, 8, 90, 155; education system 6; residency programmes 82n2 US National Association for Research in Science Teaching (NARST) 126 US National Science Education Standards 123 Van Manen, M. 71 Vergerio, P. P. 161n4 von Glasersfeld, Ernst 133–4, 137 von Humboldt, Wilhelm 151 Vygotsky, Lev 128 Wagenschein, Martin 124 Weltanschauung 127 Westaway, Frederick W. 124 Western educational tradition 146 Western Philosophy 23 Whitehead, Alfred North 124, 125 “whiteness” 58 Willard, Emma 153 Wilson, William 155 Winstanley, C. 78 Wolfe, S. 96 World War II 125 Zeichner, K. 175