Have I Become a Better Teacher? Teaching Dutch in Upper Secondary School (1970–2015)

Abstract

In my contribution I give an account of my teaching based on my own memories and those of former students. I rely on reports from my present students, remarks by colleagues and my own reflections. My memories as well as my present reflections are doubtlessly coloured by my growing awareness of the relationships between micro and macro levels of education and educational policy. So I try to illuminate my teaching as well as the topics I taught and teach against the background of the schools and the schools’ cultures, the paradigmatic debate on the school subject Dutch, changes in Dutch teacher education and the arena of ‘rationalities’: meta-discourses on education and society. In short, I started in the context of a rising communicative-emancipatory paradigm, in the societal context of a developing social rationality, striving for ‘empowerment’. I now am more or less forced to teach topics that fit in a communicative-utilitarian paradigm, in the context of a technocratic-economic rationality characterised by among other things the disputable concept of ‘knowledge society’. During my reflections I wondered if I have become a better teacher. I discovered that I cannot answer this question. A teacher’s professional development appears not to be a smooth linear process, but a process of trying out, failures and successes, steps backwards and forwards, questions and insights based upon experiences. And above all, a teacher’s qualities are to a large extent co-constructed by the institutional context of school, colleagues and students.

Keywords:

• Memory as construction
• reflection
• professional development
• professional practice
• meta-discourses on education

‘Language is…’

Last spring I taught reading to a group of 26 students (aged 15–17) in upper secondary school. They had been sent to me because their ‘regular’ teachers of Dutch language and literature had judged them to be ‘weak’ readers. Many experienced teachers know the challenges of handling a remedial group of this kind. Leaving the classroom after a lesson, one girl, Imke, said to a friend: ‘Taal is kut’ – ‘Language is a cunt’. As with the word ‘cunt’ in English, ‘Kut’ is frequently used by Dutch teenagers (not to mention adults) to sum up their feelings about activities and situations that they find hateful. Imke made this remark loudly, when she was going past me, and so I interpreted her comment to be directed at me. What was I to do? Well, in the next lesson I wrote on the whiteboard: ‘Taal is kut’, referring to this remark. I said that ‘kut’ can convey your dislike of an activity, especially if you’re just venting among friends, but that it really wouldn’t do as a description of language. For starters, there’s the difference between language used for interpersonal communication and language as it might be used for the kind of formal, academic learning that you encounter in school (cf. Cummins 1979). I reassured the students that I had no doubt that their skills at using language in social settings were perfectly ok, but my job was to try to help them to use language for school purposes, giving them plenty of examples of language both for the purposes of interpersonal communication and for academic use. I don’t know how I would have reacted to this girl’s comment at the very beginning of my career. I certainly wouldn’t have been able to talk about the distinction between these two categories of language use – I hadn’t read Jim Cummins at that time, and I had a long way to go before I was successfully able to draw on such theories in order to better understand my practices as a language educator. I would like to think, however, that I wouldn’t have been fazed by this girl’s remark – I’ve always enjoyed the company of children and teenagers, and I’ve always been prepared to work with the language they have offered me. Whether I would have made her remark the focus of attention on a white board is another matter. As you grow as a teacher, you become prepared to take more risks, in the hope of opening up lively discussion and engagement on the part of your students, even when the debating point is whether ‘taal is kut’.

Memory and method

A difference between my teaching in the past and my teaching at present is that nowadays I am able to draw on a richer conceptual framework to reflect on and in my teaching. And I am very much conscious of the intellectual resources that I am using. This is not very surprising – I have had a lot of years to learn, and I have put a lot of books and articles behind me. But before all else, ageing for me has involved ‘becoming more introspective, reflective, and contemplative’, ‘constantly writing and rewriting’ the story of my life (cf. Hermans and Hermans-Jansen 1995, 232).

I rewrite here my professional life as a teacher in the upper secondary school. I rely on my own memories and on those of several of my former students, being aware that memories are interpretations, that they are narratives that embody feelings and experiences, which are used by people to understand their lives. Memories are framed by other memories, as well as by your convictions, beliefs and attitudes as they have formed in the course of your life. Memories are always shaped by your current circumstances, and rather than being directed only towards the past, they are often important for understanding our lives at present. They inevitably reflect selective perceptions, not some kind of truth that is available for all to see. Our memories have to fit into our frames, our ‘recurring categories of interpretation’ that we place on our ‘experiences in order to make sense of them’ (Hesse-Biber and Leavy 2006, 155). Well, my frames have changed during the years. So I am presenting here a version of my professional life that is coloured by my present frames of reference.

In order to stimulate and focus my memory, I used my teacher’s work journals in which I planned the topics for my lessons. These journals also contain lists of my former students’ names. I decided to ask some of them about their memories of my lessons. So I selected some names that are not very common and googled them. I quickly found 16 of my former students from the early 1970s. I asked them what they could remember of my teaching, what they thought had been important to them and what they thought had been important for me, what topics I taught, and whatever else came to their minds. Twelve students responded with narratives, anecdotes, key-words. Two others promised to react later, but did not do so. Two said they could not remember anything about my lessons at all – they also remarked that they could recall little or nothing about the whole of the time they had spent at school. I do not know what this says to me about my teaching and about the quality of the education that school offered them.

It was a fairly complex hermeneutic exercise for me when I read and reread the documents that my 12 former students had sent to me. Could I identify any patterns in what they had written? In fact, the students who sent me their recollections presented a similar picture of my teaching in the 1970s. And their memories prompted me to write down further memories that were stimulated by reading what they had written.

I could not draw on the school books that I had used in the 1970s. I had placed them in the historical collection of school books, handbooks and dissertations on teaching Dutch in the last 125 years. It was a unique collection in the Netherlands, 60 metres of books, placed in the cellar of the Erasmusbuilding, that houses the Faculty of Arts. About five years ago, while the building was renovated, this collection disappeared. It was quite a shock for me, and no one can or will tell me what happened to the books.

But let me give an account of my journey: where I began, the various stages in my career and where I have now ended up.

1970–1978: a starting teacher and a new paradigm

I studied Dutch language and literature at the Nijmegen University from 1965 to 1971. This academic study was characterised by a recitation style for the transmission of knowledge (cf. Nystrand et al. 1997), an approach that also featured in my secondary education. Due to students’ protests, we experienced moments of dialogic teaching, when students and teachers co-operated in work groups, but the social and academic upheavals of that time had only a small effect on the way teaching and learning were conducted in the university – at least as far as I can remember. However, it is interesting to note that I prepared all my oral examinations – and there were quite a lot of these – in collaboration with two friends. It was a type of collaboration which subsequently I have come to label ‘exploratory talk’ (Mercer 2008): we asked each other questions, formulated hypotheses and tried to find answers which we then discussed further. Our collaboration was not based on any theory of learning, but on the intuition that the best preparation for oral examination was orally asking and answering questions.

In my fifth year I decided to enrol in the teacher education programme. Prior to that moment I did not formulate any conscious intention to become a teacher, but as I approached the end of my study, it became necessary for me to think about how I could earn a living. As far as I can remember – I also asked this of one of my two friends – the programme comprised a foundations course that presented ideas about teaching, learning and youth psychology. A second course was about subject-specific didactics, which for me consisted of a handbook on teaching Dutch language and literature (Van Dis 1962). That handbook was intended to prepare me to teach literature as part of our cultural heritage, and to support me in the teaching of reading and writing. These courses were obligatory, but we were not required to sit for an examination at the end of them. Both courses were taught in the recitation style that had been a feature of my previous secondary and tertiary education.

I was also obliged to visit two schools and to observe about 20 lessons by a graduate teacher in Dutch language and literature. Visiting the first school was a terrible experience. I found it dull because classes largely consisted of simply transmitting content to students. I missed a sense of ‘life’ in the way subjects were taught. I wanted to have a go at teaching myself, but I was constrained to do this in the common recitation style. The teachers clearly embraced an academic paradigm (Sawyer and van de Ven 2007), in which the teaching of language and literature was largely defined by the way the field was understood at university: teaching ‘written language’ involved a heavy emphasis on the explicit teaching of grammar, while the teaching of ‘Literature’ (with a capital ‘L’) was largely seen as being important for the transmission of a cultural heritage, embracing both a sense of national identity and moral education, again in a recitation style. Sitting in the last row of the classroom during my visit to the first school, I began to detest the way teachers were reduced to simply transmitting knowledge, and I even contemplated leaving the teacher education programme. I cannot remember why I decided to continue and to visit a second school. But it is that school, and the teachers who worked there, who are responsible for my writing this essay, because my experiences there kindled my life-long enthusiasm for teaching and learning. The school, the teachers and above all else the teachers of Dutch were engaged in a great deal of experimentation, all in an effort to become better teachers, and they were very enthusiastic and co-operative. It was hardly surprising that I reacted enthusiastically when they offered me a job.

This school was an institute for teacher education for primary school. For a couple of years it also had a department for an experimental upper secondary. I will not dwell on the history behind this remarkable combination. For my story it is important to note that teacher educators became secondary teachers and brought to upper secondary education their tradition of a child-centred developmental paradigm (Sawyer and van de Ven 2007) that became, under the influence of the so-called reformpedagogiek (based on the work by Freinet, Montessori, Pankhurst, Steiner and Petersen), a strong alternative to the academic paradigm that had dominated secondary schooling for most of the twentieth century. Education was understood as promoting language use by children: their living, spoken language was to be a central focus of attention. Language was no longer primarily a matter of conformity to the conventions of written language, as something only for public use, but was treated as a means for individual children to speak about their personal experiences and to develop their awareness of the world. Normative grammar was replaced by opportunities to reflect on language in use. Teaching writing aimed at individual expression for authentic purposes. Reading was to serve personal development. The pedagogical approach emphasised active learning, as part of an ongoing discovery of the world. To invoke Barnes (1976), the transmission teaching of the academic paradigm was replaced as much as possible by an interpretive approach. My school supervisors brought this tradition to their teaching of Dutch in the upper secondary school. And they inspired me by their teaching to do the same.

In 1969, a new teachers’ association, the VON, de Vereniging voor het Onderwijs in het Nederlands (the association for teaching Dutch) was founded, inspired by ‘the London School’ (Ball 1984) and more specifically the work of Douglas Barnes, James Britton, Harold Rosen and others (e.g. Barnes, Britton, and Rosen 1969). That new association embraced a communicative-emancipatory paradigm (Sawyer and van de Ven 2007), which might be encapsulated as the belief that children needed to learn to communicate in order to participate in society. Part and parcel of this aim was enabling children to gain insight into society and by doing so to support their critical engagement and emancipation. Rather than an emphasis on formal grammar, teachers saw themselves as supporting their students to reflect on the various ways they used language. Accordingly, reading and writing were to be taught as much as possible through focusing on ‘real’ situations. Literature was taught for students’ personal development, as well as for their understanding of self and society. This kind of pedagogical approach was intended to promote active learning, not simply transmission of a formal body of knowledge. It might even be characterised as ‘dialogic’, though that word was not in currency at the time. The VON and its new paradigm emerged at a time when new understandings of language, such as sociolinguistics and pragmatics, were emerging (e.g. Hymes 1968; Maas 1974; Young 1971). It is also noteworthy that it arose out of a period of social protest, out of a belief in the need to challenge existing social structures in order to create a better world. At the core of the protests that were occurring at the time was a desire for democratic participation by all levels of society, a desire to be heard, a desire for empowerment. Language educators saw themselves as playing a crucial role in facilitating reflection on language and language use as a means to that empowerment.

The new communicative-emancipatory paradigm thus fitted in a broader social movement, promoting a social rationality (Matthijssen 1982): a meta-discourse on education and society grounded in ideas of the social construction of knowledge and of society (Sawyer and van de Ven 2007) that found its extension in teaching-learning activities like those already known from the developmental paradigm.

The moments of collaboration that I experienced as a university student, combined with the professional learning that I was able to enjoy with my colleagues as a result of the experimental atmosphere at our school, as well as my consciousness of larger social movements directed towards social emancipation – looking back, I feel that all these dimensions of my life enabled me to develop my teaching in a dialogic style that focused on language use, and on language and literature for understanding self and society. The formal curriculum at that time did not really hinder me in my attempts to develop such an approach. The final examinations that students had to complete did not constrain curriculum and pedagogy in any onerous way. The only difference was that their reading was examined as part of a nation-wide assignment that was assessed by their own teacher and by a second teacher from another school. They also had to write an essay that was assessed as well by these two teachers.

Yet from my standpoint at present I still feel obliged to ask myself: Did I really teach in the dialogic way that I have just described? I have already indicated that at that time I would not have been able to label my teaching as ‘dialogic’, and that I had only a burgeoning awareness of how dialogic teaching and learning might serve the purposes of social rationality (Matthijssen 1982).

I remember myself as an inspired teacher who was passionate about Dutch as a school subject, who enjoyed his lessons and took pleasure in the company of his students. My students and colleagues appear to have appreciated me. I liked planning different activities for my lessons, and I think that I was aware of operating within a new perspective on language education, although I would not say that I self-consciously wore a badge that declared my affiliation with this new paradigm. I had a good relationship with my students – in 1970 I was a young teacher, aged 24, my students were aged 16–17. The girls asked me to train their basketball team. I still see my students sitting in a U-formation, a homogeneous group of 25–30 Dutch students, all or at least nearly all actively engaged in discussion. I remember I paid attention to old and modern literature, encouraging my students to reflect on their experiences of reading a diverse range of texts, both ones that involved characters and scenes that were familiar to them, and others that they found strange. I organised creative writing, using a kind of process model and peer feedback.

My work journals tell a slightly different story, or at least reveal my practice to be more heterogeneous than might be suggested by the idea of working within a new perspective on language education. They show the topics I taught: a segment on the history of literature that involved reading older texts in the classroom, excerpts from modern literature, as well as some literary analysis. I discover that I placed a great deal of importance on the declamation of poems. I planned the reading of factual texts, writing essays and some moments of creative writing, as well as facilitating discussions and oral presentations. I have to admit that I had completely forgotten about those presentations until I dusted off my old journals and read them again, as well as my focus on declamation. And to my astonishment I find that I taught grammar! Maybe I taught grammar as a starting point for a broader reflection on language? I do not know, but I am very surprised.

Some of my former students explicitly frame their memories by referring to their other school experiences, either before or after they had me as their teacher (experiences which they describe as ‘dull’). They are all positive, and some tell narratives of situations I have forgotten. They liked me as a teacher, because I appeared to be young, innovative, enthusiastic and inspiring. They appreciated that I was interested in my students, that I had a sense of humour. I apparently gave clear instructions, they enjoyed a lot of freedom in my lessons, but I also had authority. They recall actively participating in my lessons, referring to group work and other forms of collaboration. They remember my love for literature, including poetry, and my love for language. One of them tells me I tried to encourage him to reflect on language, but he was simply not able to do so. Nevertheless, he managed to achieve this kind of meta-reflection many years later. My former students confirm the topics I remember I taught, including the fact that I taught grammar. Some mention drama, as well as activities that led to critical thinking.

My school was, as I wrote above, a combination of a teacher education institute for primary education, as well as an institute for upper secondary. In 1970 I started to teach at the upper secondary, from 1972 I also taught at the teacher education institute. Of course, I taught other topics like the didactics of mother tongue education and youth literature and so on, but I must have been able to continue to develop in the dialogical mode that I have just described, at least according to 20 student teachers’ texts in a ‘thank you book’ that I received in 1975, from a group I lectured from 1972 to 1975.

My former students’ memories confirm my own memories to a large extent. I have been an enthusiastic, dialogic teacher, liking his teaching and his students. I was inspired by my colleagues, my school and the global social context. I had a lot of freedom and I used it.

1978–2011: Teacher education and research – widening perspectives

I taught from 1970 to 1978. In my first year of teaching I also completed my Masters thesis, also in co-operation with two other students in Dutch Linguistics and Literature Studies. During my third and fourth years of teaching I became involved almost by accident in the school’s leadership. From 1974 I actually held two half-time jobs: teaching combined with a leadership role. Life was good.

And yet in 1978 I decided to leave the school where I had learnt so much. I was now a father, and my wife and I wanted to share our parenthood. The raft of responsibilities I had assumed at my school did not allow me to reduce my load in any significant way if I was to do my job properly. So I applied for a half-time job at the Nijmegen University Department for Dutch Linguistics and Literature Studies (DLLS), which required me to engage in research and teacher education in subject didactics. This role occasionally allowed me to do further secondary teaching, as in the research projects I implemented, which typically assumed the character of classroom-based inquiry or ‘action research’, I was able to share lessons with the teachers who were participating in those projects.

As I have already remarked, for me becoming older seems to have meant becoming more reflective. But for reflecting one needs conceptual frames (van de Ven 2009, 2011). This second period of my professional life was one in which I engaged in ongoing conceptualisation of my work as an educator and increasing reflection, due to the teaching and research that I was doing, as well as to the many discussions I had with colleagues, covering a range of questions, from epistemological debates to social and political issues in education. In the following I shall focus on what I think is important for my understanding of my teaching of Dutch in upper secondary school, both in the past and the present. I will describe in a linear fashion what in fact has been an ongoing and complex process, a Deweyean concept of experience and learning (cf. Dewey 1933).

Although I had studied at the DLLS, at what is nowadays called the Radboud University, a department that also had responsibility for teacher education in Dutch language and literature, I found myself surprised by its atmosphere. Many of my colleagues did not like teaching; they preferred research. Moreover, many of them thought subject-specific didactics and teacher education were not really important: all a teacher needed to know was subject content knowledge. Teacher education was seen as being driven too much by professional and non-academic perspectives. The dominant perspective on teaching upper secondary Dutch was to treat it as comprising an academic content that could be delivered by recitation teaching – this was also the dominant pattern at the university, where teaching largely took the form of lectures, although some courses included work groups. The high status I had at my first school was replaced by indifference or even disdain for what I was doing.

Fortunately, I had three like-minded colleagues in the same field and we could co-operate very well, all members of the new association, VON. We also co-operated with a few colleagues in other departments (history, and foreign and classic languages) who also were concerned with teacher education and didactics, sometimes embracing more dialogic teaching.

I will not detail all the changes that were occurring in university teacher education at this time in the Netherlands. Suffice it to say that because of a combination of circumstances I eventually found myself as an Associate Professor in a newly constituted university teacher education institute that was established in 1994 for all upper secondary school subjects. All teacher educators in the different departments were accommodated in that institute to enable the mutual exchange of knowledge and to establish a coherent research programme.

Throughout this period, I frequently experienced the enthusiasm of my students and my fellow teacher educators – as well as the disdain of many academic colleagues. Many university disciplines, even in the humanities, embraced a rather positivistic epistemology and methodology. And many colleagues, especially in the humanities, thought they would be the better teacher educators (van de Ven 2012b), because they saw teaching as the simple transmission of expert knowledge – and they of course were the real experts. The university institute for teacher education accepted a more multiform perspective on knowledge and research and stimulated more interpretive teaching (cf. Barnes 1976).

During this period the social and political context changed substantially. In 1978 ‘de verbeelding was aan de macht’ (‘imagination ruled’) – a slogan used by commentators at that time and afterwards to characterise the social movements that were striving for the empowerment of everyone. But soon after the scene was transformed into one characterised by a ‘no-nonsense’ politics and a back-to-basics approach to education. There were hot debates on Dutch as a school subject in the 1980s and the early 1990s, between those who continued to advocate a communicative-emancipatory paradigm and those who wished to see the restoration of an academic emphasis in secondary education. During these debates, the communicative-emancipatory paradigm itself gradually became transformed – in a way that those of us who were advocating it hardly noticed – into a communicative-utilitarian paradigm (Sawyer and van de Ven 2007; van de Ven 1996), in which preparation for ‘the market’ became the main aim of education, instead of emancipation and empowerment. The broadly accepted concept of ‘communication’ was adopted by groups who embraced a more utilitarian perspective on (mother tongue) education. In this process its meaning narrowed from communication as construction and interpretation of ideas to the more restricted meaning of transactional language use. To a large extent, that narrow concept of communication framed the discussions on the teaching of Dutch.

Now, at the start of the twenty-first century, the impassioned debates in which we once engaged seem to be completely behind us, making room for pragmatism. VON, the new association for teachers in Dutch, lost so many members that it abolished itself in 2004. In the 1980s and 1990s four different periodicals for teaching and research on the school subject Dutch existed, but nowadays only one remains. The examination demands for the school subject in upper secondary were very limited in the 1970s and 1980s, and could be printed on one A4 page. In 1998 the structure of (upper) secondary education was changed. One of its consequences was a reduction of hours for teaching the school subject, but an increase in examination demands that totalled almost 25 pages.¹ So the specifications relating to what the exam covers, as well as criteria for assessment, expanded massively in comparison with the minimalist requirements of the 1970s and 1980s. (In 2007 there was some reduction in these requirements in response to complaints by teachers and students.)

During the last decade of the twentieth century, and the first one of the twenty-first century, the concept of the ‘knowledge society’ became the new leading principle, which strangely enough emphasised learning general skills rather than acquiring knowledge, on the assumption that knowledge always becomes out-of-date, and so it makes more sense to teach students generic skills that they can apply in a range of fields. This poses a problem for me, because some of the so-called ‘skills’ that have been important in my life have been subject-specific. I am also sceptical of the view that knowledge rapidly becomes obsolete, as this seems to reduce the concept of knowledge to narrowly instrumental purposes (Habermas 1972; see also Carr and Kemmis 1986). Knowledge that is conceived as serving interpretive and emancipatory interests cannot be reduced to a list of ‘skills’. Perhaps it is the case that instrumental knowledge changes rapidly, but this is not the case for interpretive forms of knowledge, such as rhetoric, history, ethics, linguistics or literary studies (cf. van de Ven and Oolbekkink 2008; see Young and Muller 2010).

The developments that I have just outlined have significant consequences for educational research and practice. Mainstream research privileges (neo-)positivist approaches that are predominantly instrumental, experimental and quantitative in nature. This research is supposedly directed towards developing ‘general’ knowledge about ‘good’ and ‘effective’ teaching, which typically takes the form of a set of generic competences that can be applied in any socio-cultural setting, thus contributing to the (inter)national economy. The most important educational aim is preparing for the market, by inculcating general skills and ‘new learning’, or a disposition of ‘learning to learn’ – all of which totally ignores the fact that ‘learning’ is an empty word unless you can specify and justify what is being learnt. Another characteristic that is often emphasised is that ‘learning to learn’ should direct the student towards independent learning, based on the idea that knowledge is constructed individually, perversely ignoring what Vygotsky taught us years ago, namely that learning first takes place at a social level, and after that at an individual level (Vygotsky 1981). Another popular concept relates to the learning of so-called ‘competences’, which are almost always seen as a set of (observable, measurable) skills, although in the Netherlands the ‘official’ definition of ‘competence’ emphasises the combination of (prior) knowledge, skills, beliefs and attitudes as essentially elements of a competence and thus of learning (van de Ven 2011). For me, these understandings of ‘new learning’ as well as ‘competences’ are empty concepts when they are not located in the circumstances and biographies of learners. Part and parcel of this trend is actually neglect of the importance of knowledge and – crucially – of the teacher as the (knowledge) expert in a school subject, because everything focuses on ‘utility’ as the main aim of education. There is hardly any attention to other aims of education, like personal growth, let alone emancipation or Bildung, which for me still remains the most important aim of education (cf. Aase 2006; van de Ven 2012a). Fortunately, there are nowadays some voices that are reaffirming the importance of knowledge understood in this sense.

Despite a political rhetoric about the teacher as professional, during this whole period successive governments have been preoccupied with developing instruments for controlling teachers and education, in the form, for example, of much more detailed examination demands and standards for teachers. I see this as a result of a ‘democratic’ distrust of professionals, who are to be directed by people who have control of the field without understanding it. These controllers reformulate aspects of educational qualities into observable and measurable quantities and ‘indicators’, marginalising the expert knowledge that teachers have developed out of their own experience.

During this period, my research was embedded in the work of the International Mother-tongue Education Network (IMEN; see Herrlitz and van de Ven 2007). The core research questions posed by this network were: ‘What is mother-tongue education? How is it constructed, by whom and why?’ IMEN’s empirical-interpretive research focused on the rhetoric and practice of language education, engaging in international comparisons and historical explorations of the culture of language and literature teaching in various national settings. The distinction between theory/rhetoric and practice was important to us, as was the need to respect the teacher’s voice in the exploration of practice. My involvement in IMEN taught me a lot. I discovered the principle of comparison as a principle of learning – that learning involves developing a capacity to see differences. I studied the history of the school subject Dutch in the Netherlands and also several histories of first-language (L1) education in Northern and Western Europe, which led me to the construction of paradigms of L1 education (Sawyer and van de Ven 2007; van de Ven 1989, 1996). I began to understand the battle between paradigms from a broader perspective. I often used Matthijssen’s (1982) theory on rationalities and Englund’s (1996) theory on educational ‘meta-discourses’. Both theories explain how some forms of knowledge that appeared to possess a successful problem-solving capacity, like the natural sciences in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, could colonise other forms of knowledge so that their ways of ‘seeing’ assumed the character of socially self-evident ways of ‘being’. Nowadays many people, including almost all politicians, still believe that education can be improved by experimental research, or that the climate problem can be solved by ongoing technical development. The ‘technocratic’ way of seeing, the knowledge form of natural sciences, has become a self-evident societal way of seeing (for a short summary of both theories, see Sawyer and van de Ven 2007). Matthijssen, in particular, clarifies how a technical rationality came to influence and dominate other forms of knowledge. Nowadays a technocratic way of seeing has formed an alliance with an economic way of seeing, so that economic standards are colonising many social fields like education and health care (cf. van de Ven 2012a) – and imposing a utilitarian paradigm on L1 education. I learned to see curriculum as divided into different domains (Goodlad, Klein, and Tye 1979) or discourses (Gee 1999). I discovered theories and empirical research on classroom interaction (Mercer 2008; Nystrand et al. 1997; and many others). I discovered how research politics emphasised research outputs in peer-reviewed periodicals, while I nonetheless wanted to write for and with teachers – which I did.

From the 1990s, my research broadened into forms of action research (see e.g. Imants and van de Ven 2011; van de Ven 2001, 2007). In other words, my research focused more and more on what teachers wanted to learn.

While I was engaging in these research projects, I continued trying to teach dialogically at the DLLS, stimulating students towards recognising and analysing exploratory moments. I preferred group work above formal lectures for big groups. With a colleague I organised writing courses including writing conferences and peer tutoring.

In the 1990s my perspective on teacher education changed, in line with a national development towards a more reflective teacher education (Korthagen 1999). Many times my student teachers complained that ‘theory’ did not function in their practice. From a prescriptive standpoint – ‘This is the way one should teach Dutch language and literature’ – I developed a more descriptive-reflective approach: ‘How is the subject Dutch taught, and why in that way’? And ‘What could be a next step towards developing a more innovative approach; and why do you see this approach as being an important one’? In pursuit of this ideal of more reflective teaching I experienced two problems. Many student teachers were critical of me because, as the expert, I was not telling them how to teach – they had clearly been socialised into a transmission mode of teaching and learning. Secondly, when I managed to encourage them to engage in reflecting on their teaching, I began to feel that their reflections were mostly confined to an instrumental level, and that substantial and critical reflection that might embrace larger contexts than their immediate classroom settings were almost entirely absent (van Veen and van de Ven 2008). Furthermore, they hardly made any use of theory. Indeed, they complained to me that theory was ‘not usable’ for practice. This prompted me to find ways of engaging with them in reflecting on the relationship between theory and practice, when together we embraced a perspective that theory is needed to understand practice and that practice is needed to humanise theory (Phelps 1991; Scholes 1989; van de Ven 2009). At least, that is how I wanted them to see the relationship between theory and practice. But whatever my success in achieving this ideal, the relationship between theory and practice became one of my fundamental tenets as a teacher educator (van de Ven 2009).

Parallel to this change in my approach from a prescriptive to a reflective perspective was a shift in focus from teaching to learning. One of the standard questions I asked myself and the student teachers I supervised became: ‘What do you think your students learned today?’ By this I did not mean that they had to identity immediate outcomes, as though learning was always something tangible that lent itself to direct observation. Learning academic language use, learning to reflect on language use, learning to think creatively and critically, learning to be creative – that is learning to read ‘between the lines’, to read ‘beneath’ the surface of words and sentences. Such learning isn’t directly visible; it asks that a teacher can read between the lines of a student’s text, it demands from a teacher to listen under the surface of students’ talk. Such learning is a long-term learning, and such learning isn’t easy to assess. My interest in learning was stimulated by reading Vygotsky and by research on classroom interaction by Nystrand et al. (1997), Mercer (2008) and many others. And again, such research strengthened me in my efforts to teach dialogically. Forced to lecture larger groups of students (100–150), I built in some small tasks students had to carry out in pairs, mainly involving the use of theory for analysing examples from practice. After some time I asked some of them to report, and then continued my lecture with some feedback on those reports, focusing on deepening students’ prior understandings by comparing their remarks and trying to unravel their self-evident framings, by presenting new perspectives, by using theories to clarify problems. Thus, I had some difficulties with forms of evaluation in teacher education that paid little or no attention to the developing understanding by student teachers about the complexities of teaching and learning.

In this period I wrote some articles in Dutch periodicals about my DLLS teaching. Two former students also reported on my teaching in writing (Eckringa 1993; Molenaars 1994). I also wrote about my teaching in teacher education (e.g. van de Ven 2002; van Veen and van de Ven 2008). Accounting for my action research I also published some texts with teachers and one text even with two students and their teacher of Dutch. I think all these texts show that as an educator I was continually striving to achieve dialogue.

From 2011 to the present: still trying to make a contribution

In one of my research projects I co-operated with teachers of Dutch from three different schools. These teachers wanted support in developing their capacity to teach writing. Together, we tried out some methods, such as peer tutoring, group writing and group discussions in which the students exchanged opinions about a range of matters as prewriting activities (Imants and van de Ven 2011). Teachers at one of these schools asked me for continuing support, and so from 2005 I have worked with them as a volunteer, first in my spare time, and then from 2011 in my retirement. I am teaching special courses at the request of my colleagues, who are all teachers of Dutch. I sometimes coach teachers in other school subjects who ask my advice for writing tasks for their students. Teachers ask me to support them by trying out active and dialogic teaching and learning. And I support individual students who ask me for help.

The school where I do voluntary work was established in 1994 when four Nijmegen schools for secondary education joined into one new institute that was to provide education based on the Montessori ideas on education. In 2014 a book was published reflecting on the 20 years that the school had been in existence. In this book, present and former teachers, as well as present and former students, school leaders and supporting staff tell about their hopes and dreams, and most crucially about their experiences of teaching and learning at the school. The comments of most people emphasised the value of reflective learning, stimulating students’ creativity, critical thinking, enhancing students’ self-confidence and sense of responsibility, and learning to co-operate, as well as the opportunities to explore aspects of culture that interested students.

I think all these things are very important. The school apparently manages to achieve learning activities and results that are hardly registered in national and international assessment regimes like PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment). The school consciously tries to go beyond the ‘utility and profit’ perspective that is so dominant in Dutch educational policy. I think that strong mutual co-operation between school leaders and teachers has been an important factor in the school’s ethos, as is the Montessori tradition of more child-centred and dialogic teaching. But this school culture has its more problematic sides as well. Trying to develop education along these lines, and at the same time trying to cope with the national control mechanisms, puts school leaders and teachers under pressure. The school is full of activities in a dense pattern of meetings involving various teacher groups: subject departments, groups exploring topics like active engagement and self-motivated learning on the part of students, students’ research, drama and other cultural activities, and language across the curriculum, not to mention meetings focusing on particular student cohorts. This dense pattern of meetings has partly arisen from the teachers’ initiatives, but it is also something that is forced on them by national regulations. And it has its problems: when teachers of the natural sciences asked for my support in devising writing assignments for their particular subjects, it was almost impossible to find a time and a place to meet. Nevertheless I like this energetic school culture. I feel at home.

To be fair, I think many schools try to exceed the utilitarian perspectives on education, each in their own way. I do not know to what extent they succeed in doing so. So perhaps my school isn’t an exception, though as a teacher educator and researcher I have visited schools that were so busy with simply surviving all the rules and controls that my perspectives on teaching and learning were deemed to be irrelevant.

However, although the present social and political context is characterised by an instrumentalist perspective on education, there are signs of increasing concern about this instrumentalism in the public sphere, as well as in educational publications. The idea that learning is an individual enterprise, that knowledge becomes rapidly outdated, that the teacher is a coach and not a subject expert – these and similar ideas are becoming the subject of debate (e.g. Biesta 2011; Hogenes, Teunissen, and Wardekker 2009; Leemans and Wardekker 2013; Verbeek and Smit 2012). A government committee evaluated the structural changes that had taken place in the 1990s (Tijd voor Onderwijs 2008), offering some critical observations on their impact. To mention some of the criticisms contained in this report:

•	Innovations were initiated on the basis of insufficient analysis of the problems they were meant to address.
•	Politicians followed their own thinking and paid too little attention to alternative ideas.
•	The voices of teachers, parents and students had not been heard.
•	Educational choices were exclusively based on financial considerations.
•	Some innovations hindered other ones.
•	Too much attention was paid to the position of the Netherlands on international achievement lists.
•	There was hardly any scientific basis for innovations like the so-called ‘new learning’ (in the Netherlands a very frequently used concept which stands for ‘learning to learn’ and ‘independently learning’).

This report was warmly welcomed by educational institutes and teachers and even by some politicians. Nevertheless, governments continue to find it difficult to learn, and they seem incapable of taking on board the criticisms made by such a rigorous evaluation when it does not accord with existing policy. The school subject Dutch is still largely shaped by a 2009 frame of reference that emphasises levels of language skills, formulating rubrics that are not based on any substantial empirical research. These rubrics are, as the developers of this framework characterise it, at least partly ‘an educational guess’ (Robben 2008). And of course, like every government, the present government wants to be seen to be having success in education, and so now a broad discussion has commenced about an education that will take young people into the future. But again this discussion remains characterised by rhetoric about general skills, digital skills, social media and the rapid obsolescence of knowledge. This idea of knowledge becoming less important is one of the factors causing the decline of the teachers’ social status, as is the ongoing control of their work that has led to an erosion of their professional autonomy and their disempowerment.

Back to the beginning

Let me conclude by going back to the institutional setting that I evoked at the beginning of this essay.

The core curriculum of Dutch at my present school is taught by the ‘regular’ teachers of Dutch. The school organises some hours during the week in which students can work with minimal supervision on topics of their own choice (such as a school subject, a paper or a small research project). In those hours students can also choose classes that are offered by teachers. It is during this time that I teach the remedial classes assigned to me by colleagues who teach Dutch. Most of my students have been ‘urgently’ advised to attend my classes by their teachers, who deem them to be in need of remedial help.

To be honest, when I observe the amount of teaching and assessment that the teachers of Dutch do at my school, I am glad that I am not a regular teacher any more. I remember teaching as a demanding but personally satisfying profession, time consuming, certainly, but never in the sense that the demands made on me became overwhelming. I now observe my colleagues at my school, and to me they all appear to be exhausted, lacking time for consulting with each other, and for preparation and feedback.

This is why they have asked me to support them by teaching topics they consider to be important, but that they cannot deal with in their lessons because of lack of time. Last year I offered extra courses in peer tutoring in writing, and in reading skills for students who needed extra support. In the regular programme my colleagues teach literature (which comprises literary history, literary analysis, as well as reader response activities according to appropriate age levels) and oral skills (involving discussion and debate). By far the most attention is paid to reading and writing transactional texts, involving assessment by the students’ own teacher. As I have mentioned earlier, reading is evaluated in a nation-wide test that has to be evaluated by the students’ teacher and a teacher from another school. The criteria for reading and writing are specified, by (highly problematical) rubrics. So there is, given the constraints on their time, hardly any opportunity for teachers and their students to enjoy reading literature in class – students have to read works of literature at home and then account for their reading in a portfolio. There is no longer any space for creative writing, for enjoying poetry or reflecting on language. The programme is overloaded, which means that there is hardly any freedom for teachers to improvise, to choose special topics, to discuss spontaneously important issues as they arise from time to time.

To gain a perspective on my present teaching, I have done something similar to what I did when inquiring into my teaching at an earlier stage of my career, inviting the students I teach to reflect on their learning and on my lessons as well. I also asked two closest colleagues who are teachers of Dutch to reflect on my teaching, because I have had the opportunity to team-teach with them, asking them to give me some key words that characterise my teaching.

My students in 2014–2015 report they see me as an enthusiastic teacher, with a lot of knowledge. Most of them respect the authority of my knowledge and experience, though this is not to say that they do not challenge what I say. By and large, they enjoy the learning activities I plan for them: group work, exercises from the thinking skills tradition, reading tasks in which I connect reading to writing. In my observations I see that they struggle with my emphasis on the importance of reflecting on their language learning. I try to support them in their efforts to make meaning of texts: I try to help them make connections between the content of these texts and their own lives. Reading with them a text about the role emotions play in politics (to give one example), I try to discuss with them the extent that they themselves feel guided by emotions in discussing social issues. I often find myself doubting, however, whether I really achieve the results I set out to achieve.

The two ‘team-teaching’ colleagues value my emphasis on the importance of students reflecting on their learning, my dialogic teaching and active engagement, my attention to individual students and my valuing of each student’s contribution to a lesson. They value the way I try to connect abstract topics raised in texts with students’ daily lives, and they think that I am very well aware of the aims I want to reach.

Conclusion: am I a better teacher, or simply a different one?

Have I become a better teacher? This was the motivating question behind this discussion, and yet as I come to the end of this essay I find myself wondering why I have allowed myself to become so preoccupied with it. Underlying this question is an assumption that I should have learned to teach better during all these years, as though teaching should be a continuing process of improvement. But I really do not know why this is an important question, for me or for other people. Perhaps my own preoccupation with this question might be explained as a result of my long history as a teacher educator, working in a context where time and again my colleagues and I have discussed what characterises a good teacher, but I really do not think that the question as it figures in public discourse is really as disinterested as that.

Comparing my past and my present selves, I find that the key question isn’t really whether I have improved as a teacher. I have discovered similarities and differences in my teaching then and now, but the key differences relate to the institutional, social and political contexts that have mediated my professional practice. My inquiry has led me to conclude that teaching reflects more than an individual’s personal qualities – all that I have been (and am) as a teacher is crucially a function of the institutional settings in which I have worked, of the collaborative relationships that I have experienced, and the opportunities they have given me to learn and to grow. Besides that, in trying to find an answer to the question of whether I am a ‘better’ teacher, I have been confronted by other questions, largely to do with the contexts in which I have worked: who is to decide if I am a ‘better’ teacher, and by what criteria? And what is the underlying philosophy of education behind these criteria?

In the Netherlands, student teachers currently have to acquire seven competences at the end of their teacher education programme, and to demonstrate their qualities with a portfolio that is assessed by their supervisors. These competences also form the basis for a national teacher registration system that has recently been introduced to give the profession more status (or so it is claimed). Teachers can seek registration as competent teachers in this system. Snoek (2011, 59) presents the seven key competencies that all teachers in the Netherlands are expected to possess, which are specified in lists of indicators:

1.	Interpersonal competence in creating a pleasant, safe and effective classroom environment.
2.	Pedagogical competence to support children’s personal development by helping them to become independent and responsible.
3.	Subject knowledge and methodological competence that demonstrates substantial knowledge of the subject and appropriate teaching methods.
4.	Organisational competence in organising curricula that support student learning.
5.	Competence to collaborate with colleagues for a well-functioning school organisation.
6.	Competence to collaborate with those in the school environment who also play a role in students’ well-being and development (i.e. students’ parents and colleagues at educational and youth welfare institutions).
7.	Competence to reflect and to develop as professionals over the long term.

I have a lot of problems with this list. In the lists of indicators for each competence the concept of ‘knowledge’ is almost absent. These competences focus on the teacher in the classroom (1, 2, 3, 4, 7) and on the school (5, 6, 7). An orientation towards society is hardly present (just parents, 6). These competences are ‘empty’, they lack a vision of education and society; they lack values. I am sure I am performing rather well nowadays on competences 1, 2, 3 and 5. But what does that really mean if one does not know towards what aims my teaching is directed? When is a teacher competent in reflecting? Is this simply a matter of thinking about instrumental matters? But surely reflection requires engagement with educational issues at a more substantial and critical level (van Veen and van de Ven 2008).

In the Dutch context I am not an average teacher, as I have had the opportunity to engage in many years of teacher education and research. I profited from my university position by establishing a broad conceptual framework that helps me to cope with the constraints and contradictions imposed on teachers by governments and school administration that want good scores on the (inter)national tables. I sense that my experiences are important for understanding education and teaching, but I do not see a place for this kind of theorised understanding in the lists of competences. Elf and Kaspersen (2012) show that the broader the conceptual frame of the Scandinavian teachers whom they interviewed, the better they can cope with the problems that I have been describing. So perhaps I am a teacher who can cope better with the constraints currently imposed by policy, but I still see the rhetoric of continuous improvement as a major obstacle in the way of enacting a truly reflective (and effective) practice as I have come to understand it on the basis of the experiences I have accumulated over the years. Indeed, rather than being a hostage to the future as governments define it for me and the students I teach, I believe that there is value in refocusing on the present moment, and recognising my continuing obligations to my students in the situations in which we come together and interact. (Paradoxically, I do not believe that this kind of refocusing is to turn my back on the future, but is actually a way of embracing the future uncluttered by current educational rhetoric.)

Let me go back to the remark by Imke that sparked these reflections: ‘Taal is kut’. I do not know Imke very well. Once I knew my students a whole lot better, but my contact with her has been limited to a few lessons in the remedial class I teach. My impression of her is that she is not actively engaged in my classes – something that is evinced by the way she continually uses her mobile phone, as well as talking with friends. She has many other interests outside school, in comparison with which what I offer to her must seem dry and remote. Apparently she was not very pleased by my action in making her remarks a subject of scrutiny in the next lesson, and at first denied that she had said anything of the kind, but her friends contradicted her. On reflection, I feel that I have probably strengthened her aversion to my lessons, because I was asking her to do something that she probably does not enjoy, namely to make her own language an object of inquiry. It is simply not easy to engage in critical inquiry, and there are all sorts of reasons (not least the fact that she was compulsorily assigned to this class) that would make such critical thinking even more difficult within an institutional space like school.

But those things said, I must still acknowledge my obligations to Imke. I think my strategy in writing her words on the board probably failed. But in that failure lies a challenge for me: to be fully responsive to her, and to try to understand all that shapes our communication with one another. I need to think about how my communication with her might be more productive. This kind of insight into my teaching can’t be put on some scale of improvement. It is arguably what good teaching has always involved, as collectively as a profession we go on ‘gladly teaching and gladly learning’. One of my former students told me: ‘Jij had plezier in je lesgeven, wij in onze activiteiten’ [ You enjoyed your teaching, we enjoyed our activities]. I have to keep that in mind, also for my present students, including Imke.

Notes on contributor

Piet-Hein van de Ven is Associate Professor Emeritus in subject-related methodology (vakdidaktiek) and till 2011 teacher educator in Dutch language and literature at the Graduate School of Education, Radboud University Nijmegen. His research focused on the practice of the school subject Dutch and on teachers’ professional development. This research includes historical and international-comparative perspectives. Since his retirement in 2011, he volunteers one day per week at a school for secondary education, supporting teachers and students in writing education.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The Netherlands do not have a national curriculum, but the examination requirements for upper secondary education function as such.