What teachers know, what teachers do

It would be difficult for us, as authors, to tell you, as readers, how we go about writing this editorial. We could describe a few steps we take, like brainstorming, reading and re-reading the articles, formulating a throughline and finding connections, and creating an outline. But how precisely we go about writing sentences, creating paragraphs, and weaving ideas together is not something we can quite explain, even though we do it all the time. While we do this thing called writing, how different knowledges and experiences inform or shape the way we write is hard to describe. The same is true of teaching. The practices of teachers in classrooms are perhaps more complex than writing an editorial—and the consequences are of course much more significant! How teachers teach has a direct impact on the kinds of experiences students have, what and how they learn—or do not learn—and to some extent, who students become. While some aspects of what teachers do can be described, codified, explained, and made explicit, much of what happens in classrooms is implicit, subtle, based on instincts, and moved by assumptions that are hard to pinpoint or identify, much less explain. Often, experienced teachers do what they do simply because they know—or think they know—that it works, without necessarily being able to explain why it works. This is what some curriculum scholars have framed as teachers’ “practical knowledge,” the things teachers know that implicitly shape what they do in practice (Clandinin, 1985; Elbaz, 1981).

Since its development as a way to understand what teachers know and how it informs what they do, the concept of teachers’ practical knowledge has had a significant influence on curriculum studies and teacher development in particular. As a powerful way to understand teacher practice “as being driven by an intuitive, often inexpressible, and fundamentally situated know-how,” practical knowledge “captures the contingent and situated nature of the day-to-day lived experiences of many teachers” (Aspbury-Miyanishi, this issue, p. 480. Yet, as Edmund Aspbury-Miyanishi points out in the first article in this issue, titled “The Skilled Teacher: A Heideggerian Approach to Teacher Practical Knowledge,” the concept of practical knowledge does not sufficiently account for the contextual circumstances that lead teachers to take some action instead of another. In other words, relying on practical knowledge assumes that teachers take actions based only on what they know and does not account for the external conditions that shape whether and how teachers make decisions about which knowledge is relevant for action under which circumstances.

To address this, Aspbury-Miyanishi proposes a shift toward an “enactivist perspective” that focuses more on teachers’ perceptions of what is possible within a given situation than on what teachers presumably know about what works in that situation. He proposes a Heideggerian approach to expand teacher practical knowledge in order to better understand what guides teaching practice and how practical knowledge guides what teachers do. According to the author, such an approach not only offers a more robust and complex understanding of why teachers do what they do, but he argues it also points to more effective ways for transforming teachers’ work, as it brings more attention to the situated nature of action. This “enactivist perspective” shifts from a focus on what teachers know about practice to teachers’ perceptions of the “affordances,” or what becomes possible as a path for action in a given situation. This approach shifts understandings of the social context as an important influence in how teachers’ make decisions about their practice. Aspbury-Miyanishi points out that how a teacher perceives a situation and the kinds of affordances for action in any given instance is deeply shaped by their prior experiences “including experiences of participation, and watching what others do, in social situations” (p. 486). Key to this are teachers’ prior experiences in teacher education programs as well as their prior schooling experiences.

In the second article in this issue, titled “Special Education Teachers of Color and Their Beliefs about Dis/Ability and Race: Counter-Stories of Smartness and Goodness,” Saili Kulkarni examines how experiences with racism and ableism shape special education teachers of colour’s beliefs and thus their approaches to teaching. Drawing on interviews and written stories collected from students enrolled in two special education courses at a Hispanic Serving Institution in the United States, Kulkarni shows how one Black and one Latinx student teacher constructed ideas about what it means to be “smart” and “good” based on their encounters with racism and ableism in their own schooling. While these two teachers developed preconceptions about race and ability based on their own experiences, Kulkarni argues that teacher education programs can make important interventions to expand the frames of reference that student teachers use and that inform their actions. In other words, teachers’ practical knowledge, shaped as it is by their prior schooling experiences, can in fact be expanded by offering counter-narratives and theoretical frameworks that provide an expansive view of experience. Specifically, through the frames of “whiteness as property” and “Dis/Crit,” the two participants developed their own counter-narratives of what it means to be “smart” and “good,” which in turn expanded their capacity to see beyond the dominant discourses of school.

While Kulkarni’s work confirms that teachers’ practical knowledge is indeed shaped by their prior experiences of schooling, she also shows how particular conceptual frameworks can expand their capacity to recognize a broader range of possibilities for action in the classroom. This is important political work, particularly if we are persuaded by Aspbury-Miyanishi’s (this issue) argument that teachers bring with them frames that determine what they are able to see as possible and the ends toward which their practice moves. Key to this, however, is not just what teachers believe or the frames through which they perceive possibilities in a given situation, but also the context of action itself. After all, “teaching practice in a given educational context constitutes a historically defined set of activities that has over time been developed by largely anonymous other practitioners” (Aspbusy-Miyanishi, this issue, p. 488). This means that even when teachers bring similar political commitments to their work, the context within which they work often leads them to different actions and ways of approaching their work.

The focus on context and how similar commitments lead to different practices within different conditions is central to the third and fourth articles in this issue. In the article titled “Feeling Environmental Justice: Pedagogies of Slow Violence,” Kate Cairns draws from interviews with youth and adult facilitators to explore how two youth-focused environmental organizations in Camden, New Jersey approached pressing issues of environmental injustice. Cairns highlights how these programs diverged in their pedagogical approaches, even as they shared a commitment to addressing the forms of environmental injustice that shaped the lives of the participating youth. By examining the social and economic conditions that shaped the pedagogical approaches of these two organizations, Cairns shows how the context shaped the kinds of practical knowledge that became relevant, how the teachers defined the problem and the aims of their practice, and how they perceived what was possible in their interactions with youth.

While the two programs sought to introduce mostly economically marginalized Black and Latinx youth to issues of environmental injustice in their communities, the two programs operated in very different contexts. One program, Environmental Leaders, operated under white program leaders and facilitators and was connected to mainstream institutions, which enabled them to secure grants to fund its programs. The other program, Seeds, operated under racialized program leaders and facilitators, who all commented on the constraints posed to being able to access funding from government institutions, as well as private and corporate donors. Moreover, the first program was structured as a summer internship that sought to provide youth with knowledge about the environmental issues affecting their community as well as possible employment pathways to address them.

Cairns describes the Environmental Leaders program as employing a pedagogy of immediacy in which youth were positioned as “impatient and action-oriented, unable to grasp the long horizons of history” (p. 530). According to the author, pedagogies of immediacy seek to “generate good feelings through individual impact” (p. 523). However, in doing so, they can reinscribe deficit perspectives by “locating the problem within the very communities that have been subject to harm” (p. 523). In contrast, the Seeds program employed what Cairns calls pedagogies of excavation. Through a garden-based education program in collaboration with community elders, Seeds facilitators centered historical analyses of racist policies and exploitative practices that produced present-day conditions of economic and environmental inequality that affected the community. Unlike the white facilitators at Environmental Leaders, who thought that explicit discussions about environmental racism would overwhelm or disempower participating youth, the facilitators at Seeds sought to work through the negative feelings generated by such discussions and to channel them into forms of collective action that work toward building more just futures. In this article, Cairns illustrates Aspbury-Miyanishi’s idea that each teaching context “has its own landscape of affordances and towards-whiches established by ‘what one does’ as a teacher in that specific context” (p. 488).

Like Kulkarni, Cairns underscores that addressing social injustices, whether related to race and ableism (for Kulkarni) or ecological disaster, requires that teachers expand their pedagogical frames by engaging more complex ways of understanding the problem and thus the affordances of any given teaching situation. For Kulkarni, “teachers must intentionally commit to addressing racism and ableism in classroom contexts” (p. 516). This commitment requires developing counter-narratives that push back against the assumptions about how students enact particular ways of being “good” and “smart” in order to avoid practices that lead to the overrepresentation of students of colour in special education. For Cairns, the climate crisis requires that teachers re-orient their teaching practice toward pedagogies of excavation, which engage in historical and structural critique and channel feelings of anger and frustration into collective action. This is necessary if we are to respond to the devastating implications of environmental injustice and associated violence that disproportionately harm economically marginalized communities of colour. At the same time, as Aspbury-Miyanishi suggests, teachers’ work also occurs within a larger ideological context that shapes a collective understanding of “what one does” as a teacher and thus “maintains powerful normative ways, or ‘dispositions,’ of doing teaching and learning” (p. 489).

While Kulkarni focuses on personal experience and Cairns focuses on social context, they share attention to some of the larger forces at work in shaping how teachers go about their work, particularly racism. Further delving into the social and ideological environment of teaching in the United States, in the final article in this issue, Ajay Sharma examines the way that neoliberal discourses and policies position teachers and public schools more broadly as the main causes for the so-called educational failure of public education. In the article, titled “Neoliberal Etiology and Educational Failure: A Critical Exploration,” Sharma draws on a Foucauldian perspective to frame neoliberalism as a discourse of governmentality and outlines three key ontological commitments that undergird neoliberal discourses. First, Sharma describes neoliberalism’s substantivist ontological commitment, which locates agency within entities such as “teachers” or “students,” while subordinating relational notions. To illustrate this point, Sharma shows how neoliberal educational policies often frame “teacher quality,” an attribute possessed by an individual, as their object of intervention, rather than the web of relationships that find their nexus inside the classroom and that lead to practice and contribute toward learners’ overall learning experiences. The second commitment, which Sharma labels as a strong ontology, refers to the naturalization of stable attributes that may remain “consistent across different teaching contexts” (p. 547). In this case, Sharma refers to the characterization of some teachers as “good,” where teacher quality is linked to performance standards and indicators such as certification programs and teacher evaluation policies. The last commitment is neoliberalism’s privileging of economic relations based on individualized, market-based competition as the “most desirable governing principle for organizing human action and social life” (p. 547). This transforms teaching from a relational practice to a commodity that has value based on econometric assessments such as standardized tests scores or international rankings.

How does neoliberalism impact teachers’ practical knowledge and what they do in classrooms? According to Sharma, the increasing influence of economics research in educational policy has contributed to normalizing the assumption that the failure of public education is tied to the persistence of unqualified teachers in public schools. Sharma focuses on how dominant neoliberal discourses in educational policy (mis)attribute the responsibility of students’ educational success or failure to individual actors (e.g., teachers and schools), rather than position it as part of complex material and discursive systems. Cairns’ discussion, moreover, shows how neoliberal funding regimes perpetuate the racialized and ecological violence associated with the unequal distribution of resources. In these ways, neoliberal ideology shapes what teachers perceive as possible within classrooms as well as the purposes towards which they apply their practical knowledge in schools; in short, what teachers do is not just based on what they know but also on what they perceive as possible within a complex social context.

Each of the authors in this issue draw our attention to the complexities that shape how teachers go about their work and how this unfolds in complex social environments. More than what they know, as Aspbury-Miyanishi argues, teachers rely on their perceptions and the modes of operation dominant in particular learning environments, whether in schools or in community settings. Sharma invites us to draw on frameworks that better represent and respond to the complexities that make up the teaching-learning relationship. Similarly, Cairns points readers to some of the hidden structures that shape teachers’ affective responses to complex societal and ecological problems, and how these impact their practical knowledge and what leads them toward a particular course of action. Lastly, Kulkarni shows how counter-stories can serve as a method for pushing against and challenging the frameworks that seek to perpetuate hegemonic structures. As the counter-stories of the two teachers of colour demonstrate, the opportunities to reflect on their own educational and professional experiences enabled them to reorient their teaching practices, expanding the range of what they perceived as possible and moving away from practices that perpetuate systems of oppression.

When we, as editors of CI, set out to write an editorial, we bring the articles into dialogue with each other and consider the different ways in which ideas, themes, concepts, and contexts come together. In these ways, we identify the overlaps in the “affordances,” to draw on Aspbury-Miyanishi’s article, that each article suggests and look for commonalities. This is certainly a process that involves “practical knowledge,” along with our knowledge of grammar, as well as our background knowledge of the field. Yet we also write these editorials in conversation with a broader field of curriculum studies and within the constraints of academic publishing as well as the demands and expectations of the institution within which we work, as Cairns suggests. Our biographies also shape the writing process, perhaps most powerfully because we see our words as in some way representing us or saying something about how we are that may or may not be immediately obvious to ourselves. Writing, like teaching, is a deeply personal process, and as such—as the authors in this issue invite us to consider—it is driven by forces that are well beyond our knowing, practical or otherwise.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.