How does a science teacher distinguish himself as a good professional? An inquiry into the aesthetics of taste for teaching

ABSTRACT

This paper introduces the notion of taste for teaching a subject, especially science, as a conceptual framework to analyse the aesthetics of teacher development as a lifelong process. We draw on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and John Dewey in order to account for how teachers distinguish admirable practices and, in doing so, distinguish themselves as inspiring professionals. In order to illustrate this framework, we report a narrative inquiry on the life story of Tomas, a white man nationally prized for his science teaching. This inquiry was inspired by sociological portraits recommended by Bernard Lahire. Results indicate how a practical disposition (as opposed to a theoretical one) played an important role in developing Tomas’s individual taste for science teaching, producing a strong continuity between his early experiences as a masculine boy raised in a family of construction workers, on the one hand, and his later experiences as a biologist and a science teacher enacting inquiry-based activities. The significance of the findings for science education is discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Aesthetics
• class struggle
• gender
• narrative inquiry
• sociology of education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The ‘ideal type’ is historically ascribed to Max Weber. It is intimately related to sociological reasoning. It is a generalisable representation of a large variety of individual ways of being. Ideal types are useful fictions often employed in order to produce a meaningful and general image of the social world.

2 Literature is filled with references that support this typical image of men as builders and women as care-takers. Regarding research in science education, this pattern is remarkably evident in students’s science-related interests (Jones et al., 2000; Šimunović et al., 2018).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development, CNPq: [Grant Number 436910/2018-7]; the Federal District Research Support Foundation, FAPDF: [Grant Number 00193.00002099/2018-65].