14
Negotiating the shared educational beliefs and values of a school’s social curriculum
Jukka Husu
University of Helsinki
Paper presented at the European Conference on Educational Research, University of Crete, 22-25 September 2004
Abstract This study aims to investigate the content and structure of teachers’ pedagogical values that aim to guide their everyday school work. School values concern teachers’ judgements of approval towards abilities, qualities and behaviours teachers think worthy of striving for. To speak of school’s values implies that the holding of those values is definitive of membership of the community in question. We cannot successfully teach values if our schooling institutions are not committed to anchor their values in real school life situations. The case study method and design, including two phases of investigation were used as the major approach of inquiry to explore teachers’ pedagogical values. A group of 24 teachers from public urban secondary school took part in the research. The analysis produced three meta school values and six applied school values. With the aid of these value conceptualizations, the study develops a preliminary spectrum of teachers’ school consciousness.
Introduction
Nowadays, schools are under a pressure to create safe, orderly, and effective learning environments where students can acquire social as well as academic skills that will allow them to succeed in school and beyond. Over the last two decades, student populations – but also teachers – have become increasingly diverse. Students and teachers sharing the same school can come from a broad rage of cultures and socio-economical backgrounds. Schools face the challenge of creating pedagogical environments that are sensitive to numerous individual backgrounds in order to support students’ social and academic success. Schools can no longer afford to focus solely on delivering academic curricula; they are also responsible for establishing and maintaining school-cultures that empower students and teachers alike – to negotiate the diverse values and social norms of our communities. The aim is to improve social competence among all pedagogical participants. This is because social curricula are crucial for mutually productive interactions and durable interpersonal relationships. However, students benefit not only socially, but also academically, when they are supported by caring classroom and school environment (Noddings, 1992; Wentzel, 2003).
This paper investigates the content and structure of teachers’ pedagogical values that should guide their everyday work at school. According to earlier empirical studies, teachers are noticeably unaware and even unconscious of the ethical ramifications of their own actions and overall practice (Jackson et al. 1993; Husu, 2001, 2003a). The current discussion on teacher knowledge also has a tendency to neglect the value dimensions of teachers’ pedagogical knowledge, classroom knowledge, and curriculum. Therefore, we need more clarification and discussion on teachers’ pedagogical knowledge and the values and beliefs underlying that knowing (Husu, 2002). A more transparent sense of this value knowledge could provide teachers a renewed sense of professionalism and it could open up new possibilities for teacher development (see Evans, 2002). Value clarification can be used as a vehicle for a renewed school culture in which teacher learning is embedded in a larger process of a school community.
This study presents the process and the content of value clarification with 24 Finnish secondary school teachers in an urban school. The challenge was to create a teacher learning experience that would prepare teachers to create, sustain, and educate in a ‘community of learners’ (Shulman & Shulman, 2004). Teachers were encouraged to recognize, articulate and express their own values and beliefs related to their professional practices within their school community. The study focused on the process in which teachers transformed their individual experiences into more generalizable conceptions via individual and collective reflection. The main goal of the project was to increase the reflection of school ethos among teachers. In order to understand the process and the products of teacher reflection, we need to frame a more comprehensive conception of school values and teacher learning within communities and contexts.
Theoretical Background
School values and social curriculum
Value education is a direct and indirect intervention by the schooling institution that aims to affect the moral development of a person including one’s behaviour, one’s ability to think about and perceive issues of right ands wrong, and the actual opinions of right and wrong one holds (Lipe, 2004, p. 2). The definition is broad in two ways. First, the definition encompasses not only deliberate, acknowledged efforts and effects of a school institution on the moral development a pupil, but also accidental, unplanned effects on a pupil’s development. Second, according to the school’s pedagogical functions, the aim of the value education is to take account: “(1) actual behaviour of a person in a situation involving right and wrong; (2) the person’s ability to think critically about moral problems; and (3) the actual moral opinions held by an individual” (ibid.). Without these preconditions, value education could easily turn into indoctrination, i.e., teaching a given set of values without considering other views and the evidence for or against such views.
Many educational scholars have recognized the school’s role in value education and in moral development. Already Dewey (1934) viewed value education as crucial to the basic purpose of a school. According to him, “the child’s moral character must develop in a natural, just, and social atmosphere. The school should provide this environment for its part in the child’s development” (p. 85). The statement reflects the general notion that the school should help to develop pupils’ values. Later, i.e. Jackson et al. (1993), Goodman & Lesnick (2001), Campbell (2003), and Slattery & Rapp (2003) have emphasized the ethos of the school in the pupils’ value construction. They all deliver the message that schools simply cannot avoid being involved in the (moral) values of pupils. This is because pupils absorb in and are affected both by the formal instruction and its unintentional side effects. All and all, the ethos of the school makes pupils’ pedagogical practice.
Clark (1995) argues that the most effective moral lessons are the virtuous responses to students’ needs or the failures to provide these responses. He lists ten basic needs of students/children: i.e., to be led, to be vulnerable, to make sense, to have hope, to be known, and to be safe. Clark has also suggested virtuous responses to each of those needs that every student/child deserves. He claims that these responses, or the negative manifestation of them, are the value-laden educational events that carry moral messages and can change and shape students’ lives (Clark, 1995, 25-28).
As presented, in the value domain students have important learning challenges in school, in addition to those explicit and formal goals in the cognitive, affective and social domains. Some of these learning goals are explicitly expressed in the National Curriculum (Framework Curriculum for the Comprehensive School, 1994). Such basic values as student welfare and the importance of schools in helping students grow into active citizens are emphasised. In order to achieve these ends, the responsibility of all members of the school community is highlighted within the framework of the operation culture of schools. It is believed that these basic values operate as principles that help define the professional practices taken place in schools. These fundamental values and tasks of the school include i.e. personal growth, individual freedom and integrity, and participatory citizenship. They must be taken into consideration in all pedagogical activities of schools.
The national framework curriculum forms the basis for drawing up local curricula in schools. Within this process, the basic values of national curriculum must be seen as instruments of orientation and interpretation. Teachers are not free to choose whatever they personally regard as valuable. The task of teachers is to make already given – and abstract value prescriptions to work in practice. In addition to these broad guidelines, schools establish their own, and often more specific, rules that the students should learn to follow.
School values and teacher reflection
Teacher reflection is considered as an important means for developing teachers’ pedagogical knowledge. As research has shown, a common perception of teaching is the tendency to work in isolation from colleagues (Jackson, 1968; Lieberman & Miller, 1992; Lortie, 1975; Waller, 1961). However, because teachers work in increasingly diverse schools where multiple (and often contra dictionary) reforms are implemented, reflection defined as a technical and isolated skill is insufficient to support meaningful teacher learning (Ladson-Billings, 1999).
Among others, Dewey (1933) and Schön (1983) have argued for a proactive and learner centred form of reflection in which the teacher becomes the subject and the owner of her/his own reflection. According to this vision of reflection, it is vitally important that teacher reflection focuses on the socio-historical and institutional contexts in which students are educated. How teachers use reflection must be understood as situated in the activity systems of schools, classrooms, and professional development events (cf. Engeström et al., 1999).
A key premise of this starting point is the social origin of teacher learning. Professional learning emerges first in a social plane in relations with people and is subsequently appropriated as psychological and pedagogical categories. As Hoffman-Kipp et al. (2003) formulate it: “Reflection without participation is as impossible as thought without language” (p. 251). Teacher reflection in social context occurs as teachers engage in and share their reflection in many ways. Whether through writing, speaking, or simply listening teachers are participating in a construction of their pedagogical knowledge as well as their professional identities. In professional communities, teachers can function as resources for one another, providing each other with assistance on which to build new ideas.
An accomplished teacher understands what must be taught, as well as how to teach it. Therefore, teacher reflection must be framed both as a meta cognitive effort and a social practice (Hoffman-Kipp et al., 2003). According to the former, to teach in a compatible way, a teacher must understand “both the first principles of the problems, topics, and issues of the curriculum … their rationale, [and] their relationships to one another (Shulman & Shulman, 2004, p. 262). In addition to that knowing, s/he must be capable of performing those activities that are necessary to transform the goals and visions into pedagogical action. The category of this kind of understanding and reflection is large. It hosts many elements that are commonly included in the knowledge base of teaching. The domain includes:
§ Disciplinary and content knowledge;
§ Curriculum understanding;
§ Pedagogical content knowledge and case-based knowledge of multiple instances;
§ Knowledge and skills of classroom management and organization;
§ Capability to understanding and act simultaneously on many levels of school community (classroom, department, school, local community, and larger socio-political contexts);
§ Understanding learners (students and teachers) intellectually, socially, culturally, and personally in a developmental perspective. (Shulman & Shulman, 2004, p. 262)
The analysis of teacher reflection and learning of this kind moves away from a concern with individual teachers and their learning to a conception of teacher learning within a broader context of school institution, politics, and profession. It is important to note that a failure to ensure this kind of professional reflection easily leaves the field open to common sense and often superficial considerations as the sole guides of pedagogical action: “These are the values of our society, and that’s that, so we’ll better fit the line” – type of argument. In turn, teacher reflection and learning should lay the foundations for thinking about the goals of learning more generally, for students in a variety of settings, and for teachers as well.
School values and teacher community
School values concern teachers’ judgments of approval towards abilities, qualities and behaviors teachers think worthy of striving for. To speak of school’s values implies that the holding of those values is definitive of membership of the particular school in question. As Aristotle (1955) argues, the essential cement of solidarity among group members is a shared conception of the good. On the more practical level, we find Bellah & colleagues’ (1985) definition of community to be useful. According to them, community is
a group of people who are socially interdependent, who participate together in discussion and decision making, and who share certain practices that both define the community and are nurtured by it (p. 333).
Schools can be regarded as such communities. In them, teachers and students ‘share many pedagogical practices’ that ‘define the school as educative community.’ All participants in educational undertakings are ‘socially interdependent’ and, to a certain extent, should ‘participate together in discussion and decision making.’ Regarding teachers, members of the same profession share a sense of identity and relatively common (professional) values. They also share the same (formal) role definitions and professional language. Ultimately, teachers control the reproduction of their professional community through socialization process as well.
As Grossman et al., (2001) report, such communities are not quickly and easily formed. It is crucial how the formation of group norms occurs and how they come to define school community. Norms represent the shared moral life of a school community – that element which encourages participants to discipline their desires for the sake of membership in the group (Carter, 1998). Since so much more than rational beliefs are involved in the values teachers hold (attachment, emotions, identity, and so on), mutual reflection is vital in the process of value clarification and change in school communities. Also, if the process of value clarification is to be educational and not mere social engineering, it needs to be undertaken with degree of understanding the process on the part of the teachers involved (Wringe, 1998). The aim is to change behavior by clarifying and changing values, and this is a social process. Teachers cannot successfully teach and transmit values if their institutions are not committed to their applications in real school life situations.
This study regards values as a legitimate mode of community discourse and reflection. Therefore, critical reasoning should be a crucial element in the process of value clarification taking place in schools. If values are understood as something generated by members of a school community rather than received by some distant authority then shared experience of a positive kind is the principal way in which they are to be acquired. Therefore, this study regards values as essentially social and positive, not prohibitions and prescriptions. The concern is not just with a good behaviour in schools (i.e. school discipline), but with influencing he pupils’ long-standing value commitments and in consequence their whole future way of life. Those relevant experiences need to be enjoyed in a pedagogically supportive atmosphere and subject to appropriate guidance and supervision.