Pedagogical craft and its science: Janus-faced in pre-service teacher education

Abstract

The authors of this article propose that theory and practice, as the science and the craft of teaching, are reciprocal and interfacing. To manifest this construct in teacher preparation courses, they suggest the analogy of ‘bootstrapping’ as a way of thinking about the epistemologies of theory and practice in tandem. With this analogy in mind, they explore the use of a specific curriculum tool to bring theory and practice closer together. Survey and interview data in a study they conducted indicate that new teachers’ experience of their first year or two in the workplace is largely positive with regard to what they think they know and can do pedagogically, while revealing that they nevertheless perceive themselves as unprepared to cross the boundary into the workplace. The authors conclude that more can be done in teacher education programmes to amalgamate the epistemologies and the discourses of the science and the craft of pedagogy in non-clinical work.

Keywords:

• Discourses of division
• intermediary tool
• pre-service teacher education
• science and craft of teaching
• theory–practice divide

Acknowledgements

The research on which this article reports was conducted with grant support from the Gauteng Department of Education.

Notes

1. Evidence of this is the almost universal reference by South African teachers to Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky as the main theorists of cognitive development in children, long after their theories have been followed by contemporary work and many other leading theorists. Teachers do not generally top-up on theoretical advances.

2. We invoke the theory only as another explanatory device to view the findings, arguing that meaning-making takes place in an embedded discourse setting, supporting specific ‘webs of belief’. Moreover, and according to Fairclough's model of analysis, existing discourses, with the systems/webs of meaning from which they draw, are strengthened by the discourse practice itself, as if feeding on itself. In other words, if there is a lot of ‘talk-and-text’ about the lack of practical preparation of teachers at universities, while at the same time there is also much ‘talk-and-text’ about the ‘divide’, these two discourses support and structure each other and thus expand the ‘web of belief’.