Getting a Grip on the Classroom: From Psychological to Phenomenological Curriculum Development in Teacher Education Programs

Abstract

A major field of psychological research in education concerns the relationship between teachers’ beliefs and their practices. A contested yet fairly consistent assumption underlying this literature is that the beliefs that teachers hold concerning the educational profession directly and/or indirectly affect their practices in actual classrooms. Because of the assumed causal power of beliefs, teacher education programs should therefore help students clarify their beliefs concerning best practices, which in turn will help foster more consistent and reasonable practices in their future classrooms. Thus the underlying model of excellence is a critically self‐reflective teacher. Using a phenomenological lens, we argue that this approach to teacher education is flawed in two respects: (1) the intellectualist approach misses prepropositional forms of meaningful coping and dealing with an environment that define everyday teaching and (2) does not adequately describe what constitutes “excellence.” In conclusion, we suggest teacher education curricula shift from promoting teaching as critical self‐reflection to promoting tactful coping.

Notes

Notes

By “tact” we mean to evoke a sense of environmental sensitivity; manners and politeness are general ways of being whereas tact is responding in a unique and authentic way to the situation at hand. In this sense, the tactful teacher is always flexible and open rather than habituated and constrained by certain normative behaviors that would be considered “proper” by common sense. Of course these general ways of being are always operating in the background and thus cannot be completely abandoned, but they can be creatively reconfigured as needs be.

Shaun Gallagher’s () compelling, interdisciplinary overview of neuroscience literature provides scientific evidence that such coping is more basic and pervasive than intellectual theorizing. See also Mark Johnson () for an overview of the body and of practical activity in the life of the mind, and David Stern () who draws heavily from Dreyfus in order to argue that skills are not mental representations and are acquired without passing through higher‐order consciousness.

Of course there is always the retort that conscious beliefs are only the “tip of the iceberg” and that beliefs go “all the way down” into the unconscious becoming a kind of unsensed mover. Yet this claim can be disputed on two levels. First, this intellectualist model denies what engaged coping feels like from the first‐person perspective. The expert experiences immediate responsiveness to the situation at hand and what is called for. When the intellectualist model of beliefs does not take into account the subjective experience of actors, we should be suspicious of it (Zahavi, ). Second, there is now some evidence from neuroscience to suggest that feed‐forward neural networks do not function according to an intellectualist model of the mind (see Dreyfus, ).

Indeed, the dialectical model proposed by Zembylas is, we would argue, only possible as a derivative of a more basic, atmospheric mood. Stated differently, emotion is the withdrawing from mood or the privation of mood in response to a lack of environmental equilibrium.

By “equipment” we mean to evoke the notion of the transparency of environmentally situated objects that support our day‐to‐day successes. Heidegger uses the simple example of an operational hammer, yet this example can be transposed generally when discussing a classroom that is flowing successfully. “Equipment” can translate to anything that attunes us to an environment that allows us to navigate seamlessly.

Indeed, there is evidence from psychology itself to suggest that learning and a student’s beliefs about his or her learning capabilities are deeply impacted by positive and negative moods (see Efklides & Petkaki, ). Thus moods are constitutive features of the atmosphere of classrooms.

One might question this definition of success from a social reproduction standpoint. If, the argument goes, class, race, and gender divisions are structural features of schools, then when the expert “gets in the flow” of classroom life he or she is merely conforming to existing, institutionalized form of inequality. This same issue has been raised by Evan P. Selinger and Robert P. Crease () in relation to Dreyfus’s notion of expertise: How can we account for the biases, prejudices, and other cultural predispositions that may have informed the expert prior to acquiring expertise? In the literature on teachers’ beliefs, the “solution” to this problem has largely been a rejection of phenomenology for critical self‐reflection on beliefs. Our gambit is that while social reproduction theory might pinpoint a problem which phenomenologists (including Dreyfus) often ignore, their solution is inadequate. Critical self‐reflection (“unpacking” one’s racial privileges, “deconstructing” racial hierarchies, consciously becoming a “class traitor,” and so on) might very well clarify one’s beliefs in response to racial, class, or gender inequalities, yet there is no guarantee that belief clarification will affect racial, class, or gender bias that exists on the motor intentional level of teaching‐in‐the‐classroom, which always remains in excess of any one belief. It is this more basic and primordial level that concerns us here. The “equilibrium” that we define as success is not simply reproduction of the status quo. Indeed, this would be the generic, everyday, normative response lacking the corporeal motor intentionality and attunement needed to respond authentically to particular situations. Building up sensitivity to what matters means being free to be bound by what emerges as meaningful and necessary, even if this interrupts the reproduction of the status quo; disrupts class, race, or gender hierarchies; and “rudely” refuses the official distribution of who can speak and think in classrooms. It is therefore possible that situated equilibrium is a kind of disequilibrium of social norms.

An important reference here is the distinction that Heidegger draws between idle talk and genuine talk. Genuine talk, according to Heidegger (), “makes manifest what it is talking about, and thus makes this accessible to the other party” (p. 56), whereas what is said in idle talk is “understood only approximately and superficially” (p. 212). The former makes entities manifest in all their richness and phenomenological density whereas the later levels down meaning to a kind of average, everyday sense (through the use of generic clichés, accepted metaphors, banal analogies, stereotypic observations, superficial reproduction of “what the teacher wants to hear,” and so on).

More often than not, it would seem that preservice teacher education classes dwell on the level of superficial curiosity about schools. For Heidegger (), curiosity is constantly searching for “distraction” (p. 216) from seriously observing and marveling at entities. In other words, activities such as informational “treasure hunts” to find out facts about school districts, or other such games that can be found in preservice teacher education introductory classes do not create the deep sense of marveling that is necessary to move beyond surface curiosity toward richer appreciation for teaching as a focal practice that defines a particular form of life.