Seeing the difference: Anticipatory reasoning of observation and its double gesture in teacher education

Abstract

This article explores the cultural practice of observation in teacher education, focusing on how teachers “learn to see” the differences between students. Conceptualizing “the visual” as a curricular problem that produces certain knowledge as in/valuable, I historicize the practice of scientific observation as embodying anticipatory reasoning, which directs teachers to see, name, and categorize the differences in the present in relation to the normative future. The analysis highlights the double gesture of observation; whereas teachers understand seeing diversity as a precondition to providing pedagogical and curricular supports for all students, this practice actually maintains the boundaries that demarcate human differences. The findings provide insights into evidence-based education today. Compared to the teachers at the turn of the twentieth century who contributed to visualizing racial differences, today’s evidence-based reforms prepare teachers to reduce the achievement gap that is associated with students’ racial, ethnic, and linguistic diversity. Despite this historical change towards more equitable education, teachers continue to contribute to reifying the racialized social ordering by failing to question how the white-centric gaze of deviancy structures the racial, ethnic, and linguistic diversity in the education system. I suggest that studies of diversity in education should consider visual politics and that teacher education programs should promote cultural and historical sensibility to prepare teachers to challenge the pre-established curricular discourse and systemic racism.

Keywords:

• Observation
• cultural studies
• systemic racism
• diversity
• temporality
• school/educational reform

Disclosure Statement

There is no potential conflict of interest.

Notes

1 In this article, I interchangeably use the phrase making up the kinds of people with the constitution of the subject. According to Ian Hacking (1995), “people classified in a certain way tend to conform to or grow into the ways that they are described” (p. 21). This “dynamic nominalism” (Hacking, 2004) is helpful to understand how teachers’ observation of the child has contributed to sustaining the racialized status quo of the society; that is, teachers’ observations have been engaged through the interactive processes of classifying those who are not-yet classified by seeing, naming, and categorizing the child through the pre-classified categories.

2 Some psychologists criticized moving the lab into the classroom as pseudo-scientific. Edward Lee Thorndike (1898) criticized the data gained by teachers’ classroom observation as “inaccurate, inconsistent, and misguided” (p. 5). Instead, he suggested using behavioral psychology that draws on the empirical evidence created by psychologists from the lab in combination with learning theories, later to be applied to classrooms.

3 Historians of science inform us how everyday and scientific experiences have been shaped and sharpened to the specific ends that the observer holds (Daston & Lunbeck, 2011; Latour, 1986). The senses of seeing are refined and extended in recording, correlating, and displaying data, which has made observation an objective practice. However, observation is not merely objective; this is because both of the private observation and the coordinated observing practices through the actions of turning the individual sense into the forms of evidence occur based upon certain conditions that direct observers to see in particular ways.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sun Young Lee

Sun Young Lee, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Teacher Education at Weber State University, USA. Her research lies at the intersections of curriculum studies, teacher education, and transdisciplinary studies of visual cultures, to critically examine the discourses of observation in education reform, policy, research, and practice. Her most recent work has appeared in Journal of Curriculum Studies, Teaching and Teacher Education, Qualitative Inquiry, and an edited volume The International Emergence of Educational Sciences in the post-World War Two Years: Quantification, Visualization, and Making Kinds of People (Routledge). Her current project historically and contemporarily explores the algorithmic systems of reasoning in the U.S. and global teacher education as a way to re-think today’s evidence-based education and justice education. She is currently co-chair of the Post-foundational Approaches (PfA) Special Interest Group in Comparative and International Education Society.