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Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Gert Biesta, Professor of Educational Theory and Policy at the University of Luxembourg, for recommending this paper for IJLE, and to the following people for providing feedback: Andy Hargreaves, Thomas More Brennan Chair in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College; Ken Thurston, former Director, York Region District School Board; Colleen Ireland, President, OSSTF (York Region); Trevor Norris, Assistant Professor, Department of Education at Brock University; Frank Cunningham, Professor Emeritus, Political Philosophy at University of Toronto; Brock Baker, Consultant, Kawartha Pine Ridge District School Board; Teresa Steel, Vice Principal and George Ellinas, Administrative Assistant, Bayview Secondary School.
Notes
1. See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (Citation1980/2003). Exploring metaphors that write themselves into educational administration literature, my paper aspires to Hayden White’s (Citation1973) critique of history as literatures informed (tropologically preconfigured) by narrative structures, metaphors, metonymy and synecdoche. Cf. Wittgenstein (Citation1968, PI p. 230) on concepts being like styles of painting—ones we don't necessarily choose as much as they exert influence on our painting and aesthetic judgement.
2. Sections of this paper were presented at the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain (New College, Oxford, 2012), and the Ontario Philosophy Teachers Association (University of Toronto, 2014).
3. Looking for narrative methods to accomplish more, dressed-up in quasi-scientific terms, we end up with ‘investigative activities whose prosecution demands an extremely hazy and indefinite expectation as to what their successful consummation would involve’ (Cioffi, p. 46). See Anderson and Page (Citation1995).
4. On participant observation of teachers’ resistance to outside intervention, see Wood (Citation2011). On academic language as armature, see Fiumara (Citation1990). See also Toulmin (Citation2001, p. 7) regarding the reliability of his autobiographical, immanent critique of philosophy of science. Foucault (Citation1980), p. 64 refers to such persons as ‘specific intellectuals’, an example being Robert Oppenheimer—poised to offer critique of the institutions within which he worked. He was ‘aware of the combats, the lines of force, tensions and points of collision which existed there’; consequently, ‘… The problem and the stake there was the possibility of a discourse which would be both true and strategically effective, the possibility of a historical truth which could have a political effect’.
5. Although philosophers such as Dewey, Freire, Wittgenstein and even Foucault were involved in educational reforms, most philosophers of education do not comment on them. Progenitors of the field, however, like Plato, Locke, Rousseau and Kant, were directly involved in matters of curriculum, acculturation and up-building (paideia, or bildung). Strangely, discourse in educational philosophy and administration pass each other by (cf. Wittgenstein, PI p. 232, on philosophy and psychology passing each other like trains—contents, confusions and methods—moving in opposite directions).
6. See John Hattie’s rankings of Influences And Effect Sizes Related To Student Achievement. Positive interrelations and classroom environment—‘teacher credibility’—far exceed factors like teacher training and subject knowledge. http://visible-learning.org/hattie-ranking-influences-effect-sizes-learning-achievement/.
7. For instance, thinking ‘team spirit’ is another player on the soccer field.
8. Flocks/schools move concertedly through micro-adjustments: a complex dance (dynamic realignment) between forces of attraction and repulsion. Rarely do education systems model such intricate, context-sensitive relations. When nature metaphors are invoked, usually they promote drone loyalty to hive or herd mentality: e.g. geese flying in V formation.
9. A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language, and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably. (Wittgenstein, Citation1968, PI§115).
11. The Quest for Increased Student Achievement and Well-Being: Re-Imagining Public Education. (York Region, 2013) The conference was organized around the themes of Andy Hargreaves’ recent book on the Global Fourth Way (Citation2012).
12. See Pasi Sahlberg, ‘Finnish Lessons: what can the world learn from educational change in Finland?’ (Vanderbilt University, 2011) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kK6u7AsJF8. Singapore’s school-based curriculum innovation (SCI) is connected with a doctrine of ‘Teach Less, Learn More’ (TLLM). On regaining teacher professionalism through autonomy, rooted in Schwab and Hargreaves, see: SingTeach at: http://singteach.nie.edu.sg/issue39-hottopic/.
13. See OME (Citation2010). A support for school improvement and student success (Ontario Ministry of Education, Citation2008). Opening letter from the Chief Student Achievement Officer of Ontario and Assistant Deputy Minister: ‘The indicators, with sources of evidence, assist educators in building coherence and aligning practices across an entire school.’ See diagram of alignment model (2010, p. 9): ‘Alignment of focus and energy on the instructional core is key to teaching, learning and leading in Ontario.’ See also OME (Citation2013). A support for school improvement and student success (Ontario Ministry of Education). http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/literacynumeracy/SEF2013.pdf [Diagram (p. 5)]. Alignment can be broadly defined as the degree to which the components of an education system—such as standards, curricula, assessments and instruction—work together to achieve desired goals. When there is alignment, there is a greater likelihood of sustained progress (OME, Citation2013, p. 45; Fullan, Hill, Crévola, Citation2006).
14. Although there are benefits from defining curriculum in subjects involving sequential learning (math, science, languages), stipulating expectations creates a technical, paint-by-numbers view—de-professionalizing images of teacher-proof curricula that anyone could deliver. On the filamentary structure of curriculum created by criterial approaches to teacher inspection and expectations-based learning, see author, 2009.
15. The notion in Rounds that observers can suspend their judgment (City, pp. 87, 116), working up the ‘ladder of inference,’ is philosophically suspect. For phenomenologists and Wittgensteinians, seeing is automatically value-laden or prejudicial: recognition entails instantaneous categorization and judgment. Rare moments of heightened awareness or anxiety may occasion a loosening of this fore-structuring of perception by language and training, bringing bouts of authenticity and realization of our ordinary enframing of things/people.
16. As a philosophy teacher, what I might benefit from is not a description of whether I introduce students to critical thinking; it is whether I engage them in diverse, useful and interesting means, within their proximal grasp of understanding.
17. ‘Curriculum’ and ‘encyclopedia’ originally referred to this dual sense of liberating or acculturating through a cycle of studies.
18. Cf. Anti-consumerism literature in education.
19. Defending the Ontario high school philosophy curriculum against educrats who fail to see its ostensive value, we easily fall into the trap of extracting its critical thinking skills—making the teaching of logic paramount (see Winstanley, Citation2008), like making grammar the extractable value of studying literature.
20. Using surveys conducted within the district, and anecdotal accounts from debriefing sessions run by the District School Board and Teachers Federation.
21. As a now-retired superintendent explained (late 1990s), it was deemed ‘politically incorrect’ by the superintendent of curriculum and consultants who control PD.
22. Mouffe (Citation2005, p. 1) quotes Machiavelli: ‘In each city are found these two different desires … the man of the people hates being ordered and oppressed by those greater than he. And the great like to order and oppress the people.’
23. Opposing Pitkin, Rorty, Cavell, and Tully, with Rawls, Dworkin, and Habermas.
24. I am also grateful to Blaire Mascall for hiring me to teach the introductory ‘Schools in their Cultural Context’ course in Educational Administration (2009); this critique is in no way meant as an indictment of his research or leadership. I was also supported by Ken Leithwood in my goal toward achieving more genuine distributed leadership through subject-specific PD instead of generic forms, and greatly appreciate his leadership in effecting change in York Region.
25. Initiation into a shared form of life—and in this case adherence to a bundle of interwoven language-games and pictures grafted onto that life form—constitutes a basis for agreement in judgment (PI §§241–242) and in theorizing/practicing education reform, but that does not preclude critical reflection, reasonable dissent or change. As Smeyers (Citation2007) explains: ‘Clearly for him [Wittgenstein] there seems to be a kind of hope that it is possible after all to resist certain temptations of the time. What is changed through a different picture, is, … not just this or that use of a concept, but a whole area of concepts relying on the change of a whole set of practices.’
26. At the risk of contradicting the ‘presupposition of equality’: With many admin teams (e.g. early escapees from the classroom), sadly, schools really could do better relying on luck of the draw for their leadership.
27. Some teachers escape into cyberspace, pursuing learning and offering critique within circles of need: e.g. on-line PLGs. Many others idle time on cell phones playing games or updating Facebook. Efforts to stop them become draconian: administrators striking the pose, with arms folded, sneering at teachers who are woefully distracted by better feed than the gruel served up as PD.
28. See social drama theory (after Victor Turner) in Schechner (Citation1990).
29. In ‘The Circle of Power,’ Rancière declares that emancipation obliges the pupil to use his own intelligence. ‘The master is he who encloses an intelligence in the arbitrary circle from which it can only break out by becoming necessary to itself’ (Rancière, Citation1991, p. 15).
30. On martial metaphors in strategic thought, see Foucault (Citation1980).
31. Dissembling is deeply, metaphorically associated with evil. The word diabola (devil, diabolical) comes from the Greek, ‘to throw apart’, antonym of ‘symbol’, to ‘throw together’.
32. Rancière’s ‘distribution of the sensible’ conveys some affinity with Foucault’s historical a priori grounds for what subjects can hold true-or-false, but, like Mouffe, he takes exception to the image of a unified bedrock or episteme: ‘It retains the principle from the Kantian transcendental that replaces the dogmatism of truth with the search for conditions of possibility. At the same time, these conditions are not conditions for thought in general, but rather conditions immanent in a particular system of thought, a particular system of expression’ (Citation2004a, p. 50). Instead of a new regime of truth abolishing its predecessors, he explains: ‘At a given point in time, several regimes coexist and intermingle in the works themselves’ (Citation2004a, p. 50; re: regimes of truth, see Citation2004b, p. 38). Foucault also speaks of the dispersal of possibilities instead of their unification; it is the a priori ‘of a history that is given, since it is things actually said,’ jumbled together and overlapping in all their flaws, incoherence, replacements and successions (Citation2002, p. 143). Instead of singular, unified pictures and practices governing educational thought and action, they are fragmented, dispersed and sometimes imbricated/overlapping (Stickney, Citation2009b).
33. ‘Become who you are through learning.’ Pindar, Pythian Ode, II, 72, oft quoted by Nietzsche and Heidegger (Stickney, Citation2013). I intentionally say ‘pilot the ship’ instead of ‘pirate the ship’, not suggesting we model teachers on the buccaneer Jack Sparrow (see Postman & Weingarten, Citation1969, p. 218 on the ‘fugitive status’ of intellectual survival strategies), but we might recall that the etymological root of ‘pirate’ is the same as in ‘peril’, ‘experience’, and ‘empirical’. I am advocating that we take reasonable risks in autonomy through ‘trial’ and ‘experiment’, ‘trying over-and-again to succeed’ (which is what ‘pirate’ originally meant).
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Jeff Stickney
Jeff Stickney teaches philosophy in York Region District School Board and Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (University of Toronto). Email: [email protected]. Representing teachers in YRDSB’s New Directions initiative (1999–2001): he participated in rewriting the mission, vision and values, reporting on teacher surveys and focus-groups. Publishing academic papers in educational philosophy, he is also senior author of the textbook: Philosophy. Thinkers, Theories and Questions (McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 2011). With the teachers federation, he strongly advocates for subject-specific forms of professional development.