Teaching as a discipline

I'm really taken with this question that came up in class last weekend of whether teaching is an academic discipline, in the sense that Ford and Fordham (Ford & Forman, 2006) use it:

In any academic discipline, the aim of the practice is to build knowledge or, in other words, to decide what claims "count" as knowledge, distinguishing them from those that do not. Deciding what counts as knowledge implies authority, and thus the raison d'etre of academic practices is how these practices ground disciplinary authority. (Ford & Forman, 2006, p. 3)

So if teaching is to be/come an academic discipline, then we need to sort out what knowledge it might build, who and where the members of the discipline might be that are deciding whether knowledge claims are valid, and what the practices that are imbued with disciplinary authority might be.

First, what knowledge claims might teachers want to make? Broadly, I think knowledge claims in teaching can get sorted into three categories: claims about students, claims about teaching, and claims about the discipline (e.g. mathematics). For instance, teachers make knowledge claims about students when they say things like, “Only 30% of my kids mastered standard 7.3.b” or “My kids struggle with doing their homework because they don’t have support at home.” The former is a claim about students’ mathematical knowledge; the latter is a causal claim about a group of students’ participation in institutional activities. Teachers can also make claims about teaching; for instance, what constitutes a best practice or an effective pedagogical strategy. “When I taught solving proportions, I told my kids to make the fish.” Finally, teachers can make claims about their discipline. A math teacher might claim, “The answer to number 7 is pi over two.”

How these claims get warranted, and what counts as an acceptable warrant is a question of considerable interest. Researchers (Huberman, 1983; Lortie, 2002) have found that teachers’ knowledge claims are often warranted by personal experience and a pragmatic “what works” rather than some underlying framework or theory of what constitutes. This marks a significant difference between teaching and the scientific communities described by Ford and Fornam; personal anecdote and experience carry less weight as a warrant in the disciplines. Thus the work of moving the teaching profession along the path of becoming a discipline will involve a change in the kinds of warrants that are accepted by the community. This is likely no small task.

This raises the question of who the community is; a related question is one of scale: how does one bound the community? However one chooses to bound the disciplinary community, the very nature of a disciplinary community requires disciplinary interaction, by which I mean interactions that build and ground epistemic authority within the discipline. Such interactions are perhaps a subclass of what Ford and Fordham called disciplinary practices. So what might be some plausible candidates for such practices, if teaching were to become an academic discipline? Looking at evidence (in a variety of forms) of students’ learning might be one. Another might be to collectively examine (either live or through some representation) the work (the actual, in-the-classroom interactions between teachers and students) of teaching in order to make claims about the effectiveness of some aspect of a lesson (i.e. something akin to a lesson study).

One additional issue to consider is how to multiply witnesses (Shapin & Schaffer, 2011) – how the knowledge generated by disciplinary practices might get shared. This points to both the infrastructure of the profession of teaching, which has historically been weak (Mehta, 2013), and the organization of local schools, whose organization has been heavily influenced by Tayloristic notions of efficiency. How might the infrastructure be strengthened to support teaching in a disciplinary sense? Some public record of teaching cases could be helpful. These exist in small quantities (e.g. http://www.timssvideo.com/) but one centralized location that systematically organized teaching cases around some framework could be a productive tool for teaching and learning. With respect to the institutional organization of local schools, teachers need reduced teaching loads and more time to collaborate. Of course, time alone is insufficient (Little, 1990); but coupled with other structures or protocols, more emphasis could be placed on the disciplinary practices noted above.

Of course, I don’t think I’ve said anything revolutionary here. Most of this is probably low-hanging fruit. Are there other factors I haven’t considered? What else might be a candidate for the disciplinary practices of teaching?

References

Ford, M., & Forman, E. A. (2006). Redefining Disciplinary Learning in Classroom Contexts. In Rethinking Learning: What Counts as Learning and What Learning Counts (pp. 1–33). SAGE Publications, Incorporated.

Huberman, M. (1983). Recipes for Busy Kitchens: A Situational Analysis of Routine Knowledge Use in Schools. Science Communication, 4(4), 478–510. doi:10.1177/0164025983004004002

Little, J. (1990). The persistence of privacy: Autonomy and initiative in teachers' professional relations. The Teachers College Record, 91(4), 509–536.

Lortie, D. C. (2002). Schoolteacher. University of Chicago Press.

Mehta, J. (2013). The Allure of Order. Oxford University Press.

Shapin, S., & Schaffer, S. (2011). Leviathan and the Air-Pump. Princeton University Press.