Beginning to Understand Teaching as a Discipline

Abstract

We explore the possibility of understanding teaching as a discipline in its own right, rather than as a domain that is ancillary to the many academic disciplines. While teaching looks easy and is widely regarded as easy, the image of teaching as transmission and the perspective of technical rationality mask the many ways in which challenging and engaging teaching represents a highly disciplined view. When extended to teacher education, the perspective of teaching as a discipline sheds powerful light on longstanding frustrations reported by those learning to teach. We argue for the conclusion that teaching is a discipline and that teacher education is the home of that discipline, with self-study as one of the central methodologies for making explicit the knowledge inherent in teaching seen as a discipline.