Margaret Macintyre Latta

What constitutes becoming experienced in teaching and learning

In this paper, we attempt to address one of the central questions for teachers and teaching: how is it that teachers are able to see and act appropriately in concrete circumstances?To do so, we examine the ontological meaning of experience in teacher education. The discussion is anchored in the concrete particulars of a grade 5 art lesson. Our intent is to show the dynamic processes involved in becoming experienced as a teacher and to draw connections between experience and practical wisdom (phronesis). Thus, we argue that phronesis is not so much a form of knowledge as it is dynamic experience. We argue for the development of what John Dewey called educational experience in teacher education, and in particular its dynamic edge: the making of wise and practical judgments. We assert that such action is made possible, not so much by translating (unsituated) theory into practice through the deployment of specialized technique, or by inducing general, abstract propositions from concrete particulars, but primarily from being mindfully embodied. The primary task for teacher education then becomes to help prospective teachers be in touch, intimately related with the processes of actual experience, such that they learn to be open to their experience, to be radically undogmaticFin touch with self, others, and the character of the circumstances in which they find themselves. r 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Enfleshing Embodiment: ‘Falling into trust’ with the body's role in teaching and learning

Embodiment as a compelling way to rethink the nature of teaching and learning asks participants to see fundamentally what is at stake within teaching/learning situations, encountering ourselves and our relations to others/otherness. Drawing predominantly on the thinking of John Dewey and Maurice Merleau‐Ponty the bodys role within teaching and learning is enfleshed through the concrete experiences of one middle‐school science teacher attempting to teach for greater student inquiry. Personal, embodied understandings of the lived terms of inquiry enable the science teacher to seek out the lived terms of inquiry in her classroom alongside students. Theories are taken up as working notions for the teacher to examine as philosophical/theoretical/pragmatic processes to be worked with, and concomitantly, working as dynamic practice at the core of the teachers thinking and experiences. The theory/practice conjuncture of inquiry is thus enfleshed, gaining embodied understandings. Embodiment as the medium enhancing comprehension is evidenced as holding worthy implications for teacher education. Teacher education must fall into trust with the bodys role in teaching and learning.

Narrative Inquiry Invites Professional Development: Educators Claim the Creative Space of Praxis

ABSTRACT The current educational context calls for evidence-based, measurable student-learning outcomes. Professional-development initiatives are increasingly designed to ensure these outcomes are achieved. Thus, opportunities for teachers to create, adapt, and discern within the act of teaching are closed off. Teachers’ praxis is at stake with less and less felt agency in classrooms. The authors explore how narrative inquiry can become a medium for professional development, creating the needed room in which teacher agency is explored individually and collectively through gaining access to the vital role of otherness. They conclude that narrative inquiry invites participating educators to claim the creative space of praxis in their classrooms and fosters a culture of professional learning across participants seen as the formative work necessary within professional development.

Retrieving Meaning In Teacher Education The Question Of Being

In this article we examine “meaning” and “action” within the “good” work of teaching and learning. One premise of our argument is that teachers and students deserve to experience this good. The second premise is that meaning is part and parcel of Being; the debate about meaning must include attention to meaning as a question/project of Being. We offer our experiences as an educational anthropologist, educational philosopher, and teacher educator who strive to retrieve and pursue meaning and Being as common resources and aspirations.

Terms of inquiry

Teaching and learning continues to be driven by a version of professionalism that construes practice to be a form of applied science. This paper challenges that paradigm. In particular, subjecting and assimilating practical activity to a technical mode of rationality is challenged as not being the most appropriate way to approach teaching, learning, and the process that drives both of these phenomena, inquiry. Middle school science classrooms provide the contexts to explore the situated consequences of embracing the terms of inquiry. Placing inquiry at the core of the thinking and experiences of middle school science educators as a philosophical/theoretical/practical educative process to be worked with, and concomitantly, working as dynamic practice, yields working notions to be necessarily embedded, cultivating, sustaining, and nurturing inquiry in teachers’ practices. As teachers experimented directly with the working notions of seeing, relational knowing, mindful embodiment, and assessment as interrelated and interdependent with inquiry, the teaching/learning outcomes authorized more and more inquiry in teachers’—and then students’—practices. An operative and active professional model emerges out of these working notions with the lived terms of inquiry identified as participatory in nature, vigilant to the question(s) in which the inquiry originates, organic in form, and always turning back on self, as catalysts in support of inquiry.

Professional Development Risks and Opportunities Embodied within Self-Study

This paper documents a self-study research groups development and its effects on 11 participants. Drawing on the scholarship of the self-study tradition within educational research, we see teacher knowledge as an important and largely untapped source for the improvement of teaching. Positioning participants to look at the sense and selves being made on a continual basis is the task embraced by this self-study group. The paper reveals professional development risks and opportunities confronted by educators through vulnerably, accountably, integrally, and mindfully negotiating teaching-learning lives. The findings suggest that our bodies are the reflexive ground of comprehension, confronting vulnerability, seeking accountability to self, negotiating theory as working notions, and experiencing the pull of teaching-learning possibilities. Thus the role of embodiment within teaching-learning practices is elucidated through educator professional development in action.

Learning How to Make Inquiry into Electricity and Magnetism Discernible to Middle Level Teachers

As university professors we sought to disrupt the practice of giving our students the actions we felt they should imitate in their teaching practice. Instead, we sought to actively engage teachers in the creation of workable solutions to real-life problems. We accomplished this by conducting a participatory action research project. This paper illustrates our action research project focused on preparing middle level science teachers to foster inquiry-based learning in their classrooms. The findings of this study not only lead to a revised professional development opportunity for science teachers, but also provided an example of university faculty engaging in pragmatic research focused on addressing contemporary issues in K-12 science education.

The Role and Place of Fear In What it Means to Teach and to Learn1

A dominant theme arising out of a research project concerned with elucidating theory–practice relations in prospective and practicing teachers is the role and place of fear in what it means to teach and to learn. The text for this paper grew out of extended conversations the researcher had with 12 of these participants forming a self‐study research group centered on reconfiguring the concept of fear as holding agency within teaching and learning. Fear and its relation to the lives of teachers is examined alongside these 12 teachers naming fear as an internal concept they grapple with daily in their teaching/learning practices as they confront the given risks and opportunities inherent within the acts of teaching and learning. Participating teachers portray fear as a disconnect between self and other(s) that contains and restrains their practices, compartmentalizing knowledge, separating pedagogy from content, and theory from practice, halting fear as a moving force to be grappled with through deliberation and interaction. Such contained disconnect between teachers and their teaching/learning practices is evidenced through a disregard for self‐understanding, pedagogical tone, and plurality and natality. The result of such disregard is teacher epistemological and ontological insecurity undermining teaching and learning. The relevance and power of theory in addressing such insecurity is evidenced. Seeking accordance within the act of teaching for learning’s sake are the fearful risks and opportunities integral to the work of teachers.

Investing in the curricular lives of educators: Narrative inquiry as pedagogical medium

This paper draws on the experiences of two graduate level curriculum theory classes taught at different teacher education institutions in the US. Teacher educators and curriculum theorists invest in creating reflexive spaces for teachers to explore the complex terrain of lived curriculum. Narrative inquiry is chronicled as acting as an important pedagogical medium toward this aim. The purpose of the paper is to explore what practicing teachers’ narratives reveal about their curricular roles in relation to theory and practice. As participating educators consider their associated teaching identities, phenomenological notions of place are found to be fitting as they navigate understandings of lived curriculum as situated, thoughtful, and intentional. Insights generated through reflexive analysis manifest three thematic intersections: (1) Teachers confronting dissonance between theory and practice as teaching identity displacement; (2) Teachers negotiating greater implacement; and (3) Teachers moving toward embodying the creative space for teaching and learning. Renewed roles surface for teacher educators and curriculum theorists, challenging all involved to purposefully foster contexts for professional learning rather than subservience, and claim the responsibilities to provide the intellectual, emotional, and pragmatic spaces where teachers’ lived curriculum efforts can be developed and nurtured.

Narrative Inquiry: Seeking Relations as Modes of Interactions

T he formation of this special issue on Narrative Inquiry has involved both of us retracing personal connections of “meaning, substance, content—from what is embedded in the self from the past” (Dewey, 1934, p. 71). We each recall encountering narrative inquiry as an empowering form for our voices as practicing teachers. Form, as a narrative way of knowing, elicited stories of values, beliefs, and feelings, regarding our teaching experiences. These values, beliefs, and feelings intersecting with students, contexts, and subject matter, comprised the stuff (Elbaz, 1991) of teaching we negotiated daily in our classrooms. Narrative inquiry attended to how each of us engaged such stuff in creating and recreating learning situations alongside our students. Thus, we each found narrative inquiry to provide “an important avenue for conceptualizing” our teaching identities as “curriculum makers” (Clandinin & Connelly, 1992, p. 386). The more we identified as curriculum makers, the more we attempted to attend to the stuff, the relational complexities that our students, contexts, and subject matter brought to every learning experience. Dewey’s (1938) primary notion of experience characterizes this nexus as the relational inseparability of situation and interaction. We know this to entail active structuring of what is encountered on a continuous basis. Dewey (1938) described how a moving force is created, holding a learning approach and direction. He also warns how experience is betrayed as a moving force if the relational complexities are not seen as modes of interaction. The present political context is living testimony to such betrayals, especially with the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB; 2002), calling for the use of scientifically based research as a prescription to improve the American public educational system. Typically, such prescriptions focus on causes and effects of teaching and learning with little attention to teaching and learning contexts and ensuing relations adapting, building, and changing meanings. In this “deepening chill in the political climate” (Barone, 2007, p. 456) against qualitative research, and narrative research in particular, we narrative inquirers need to seriously think about the reasons why we do what we do. This issue is our attempt to contribute to this important task. Heeding Dewey’s (1938) warning, narrative inquirers insist on the importance of seeing the intercepting and uniting place of situation and interaction as forming the experiential terrain for inquiry. Such seeing entails receptivity, assuming a commitment to finding out about the ensuing interactions, demanding an attentive gaze cognizant of the vital temporality within experience: connecting past, present, and future, and portraying people living in and through a situation. The articles in this special issue are rooted in these fundamental assumptions of narrative inquiry. All authors share an important regard for relations as modes for interaction, manifesting crossings that invite dwelling that Heidegger (1977), Gadamer (1986), and Risser (1997) insisted create a “hold upon nearness” (Gadamer, p. 113). It is the nearness we sought as classroom teachers, holding the needed time and dwelling space to account for the concrete relational undergoings and doings of teaching and learning, acting on them accordingly. It is the nearness that continues to draw us to given particulars, gaining familiarity and lived meanings held within the relations gathering and ensuing. And, it is the nearness to the present (and the potential held within it) that each article in this special issue so vividly and tangibly positions readers to confront, engage, and see otherwise, that powerfully challenges how very shortsighted the primary aims of education reforms over the last three decades have been. Educational aims focusing on objectifying specific learning outcomes, compartmentalizing knowledge, and separating pedagogy from content, knowledge from interests, and theory from practice, have dominated educational policies and practices for some time. Contrarily, narrative inquirers have strived to honor teaching and learning as complex and developmental in nature, seeking connections, and demanding continuous engagement in reflection and deliberation. We turn to Dewey’s (1938) discussion of the notion of preparation in education discourses as being at the crux of concern for some time. Dewey stated: