Thinking Philosophically About Teaching

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Biesta, G.J.J. & Stengel, B. (in press). Thinking philosophically about teaching. In D. Gittomer & C. Bell (Eds) AREA Handbook of research on teaching. Fifth edition. Washington, DC: AERA.

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Thinking Philosophically About Teaching

Gert J. J. Biesta

Brunel University London

Barbara S. Stengel

Peabody College, Vanderbilt University

<h1>1. Introduction

What might it mean to think philosophically about teaching? Why and how does thinking philosophically about teaching matter? Our response, in brief, is that a philosophical standpoint challenges, qualifies, deepens, and even transforms our understanding of a phenomenon—in this case, teaching—that may seem commonplace and straightforward. The more refined and more complex understanding of teaching that emerges from this exploration is itself a form of research on teaching, but also more than that. This type of inquiry can inform any attempt to practice teaching or teacher development, to create policy that frames teaching in the context of public education, or to make teaching or teacher education into an object of research.

We offer this chapter with all the members of the educational family in mind, cognizant that the ideas and analyses offered here will and must be taken up differently by those with different foci in practice. We write not for philosophers of education but for teachers, for teacher educators and teacher education researchers, for learning scientists, and for policy makers and educational reformers. In short, we write for all those whose work will be more useful, more focused, and more expansive if prior questions of purpose, concept, and assumption are asked and explored. Philosophy as a practice does not resolve such issues unequivocally, but thinking philosophically uncovers that which animates and motivates any program of practice, policy, and research. It makes intellectual honesty and integrity both possible and more probable.

We are animated and motivated by a shared concern that questions of purpose, intention, and relationship are too often assumed in contemporary policy seeking to “fix” systems, teachers, and teaching; too often undertheorized or underarticulated in investigations of this or that proposal for practice; and too often unexamined with respect to teacher development and teacher evaluation. The trend toward taking pedagogical purposes and relations for granted has been (sometimes unwittingly) intensified by the turn to learning as the focus of educational efforts. This has enabled the diminution—or even erasure—of the singular contribution of the teacher to educational experience by policies that both control teachers and hold them accountable for fixed performances that may not be educative in purpose or outcome (see Biesta, 2010a). At the same time that policy makers seem intent on narrowing teachers’ prerogatives, research on teaching is opening up to the exercise of teacher judgment (e.g., Heilbronn, 2008), with particular reference to ambitious teaching practice (e.g., Lampert, 2001), “leveraging student thinking” (e.g., Singer-Gabella, Stengel, Shahan, & Kim, in press; Smith & Stein, 2011), “high-leverage practices” (e.g., Ball & Forzani, 2010), content knowledge for teaching (e.g., Shulman, 1986, 1987; Ball, Thames, & Phelps, 2008), and disciplinary literacy (e.g., Wineburg, Martin, & Monte-Sano, 2012). When these research and practice vectors are situated in a view of teaching as sociocultural practice (Horn & Kane, 2014; Horn & Little, 2010), both the purposes for and the relational dimensions of teaching are incorporated, but not always clearly articulated.

We wonder at these perhaps paradoxical phenomena and aim to put the questions of purpose, intention, and relation at the center of any effort to pursue, understand, or alter teaching practice and, in the process, to highlight the importance of both judgment and humility in conceptualizing, shaping, or studying teaching. These are philosophical considerations with utterly practical implications.

At first glance, and particularly in the contemporary context of educational reform, it seems beyond argument that the point of teaching is student learning. But it is philosophy’s value that it takes nothing as beyond argument, and it is the role of philosophers of education and philosophically minded educators to question even this assumption about teaching, to point out that “learning” is an at least incomplete, and perhaps nonsensical, response to the question of teaching purpose (see Biesta, 2015a). And once the question of purpose is assayed, other questions emerge as well: What does it mean to teach? What does it mean to be a teacher? Can learning occur without a teacher? Can teaching occur in the absence of learning? As we shall show, these questions and others like them have been part of the conversation that is philosophy as long as there have been teachers. As we shall also show, asking and answering such questions always occur against a backdrop of social and political assumptions about who we are and what we can and should become.

In our explorations, we will draw not only from the modern field of philosophy of education but also from wider, philosophically inspired traditions of educational scholarship and from philosophical literature more generally. We do so for two reasons. First, philosophy of education as a distinct educational subdiscipline, similar to but also distinct from, for example, sociology of education or psychology of education, only emerged in the 20th century and only came to fruition from the 1950s onward (see Phillips, 2001). Philosophers have, however, been thinking and writing about educational matters ever since philosophy came into existence, and classic philosophical conversations have influenced contemporary assumptions about teaching often without our knowing it. Second, the idea of philosophy of education as either an educational or a philosophical subdiscipline is a peculiar construction of the English-speaking academic world. In other contexts—such as the German-speaking world—the academic study of education developed as a discipline in its own right (Biesta, 2011; Furlong & Lawn 2010). This discipline—in Germany called Pädagogik—did glean insights from philosophical texts and other studies, but it established itself as its own point of departure (see also Siljander, Kivelä, & Sutinen, 2012). We will engage with both the longer tradition of educationally relevant philosophical work and different traditions of philosophically informed educational thought.

To think philosophically about teaching requires some sense of what philosophy itself actually “is” or stands for. Philosophers have, over the centuries and to the present day, developed an array of different answers to this question, often contesting whether new ideas and approaches would actually count as philosophy or not. The answers given range from attempts to identify the very essence or nature of philosophy up to the suggestion from the American philosopher Richard Rorty (1978) that philosophy is simply a literary genre among others or, as he put it, “a kind of writing,” held together not by form or matter but by tradition. What seems to be common to all effort rightly called philosophical, despite internecine squabbles, is a sense of wonder about that which is attractive or repulsive, desirable or distasteful, satisfying or perplexing, rewarding or problematic, motivating or enervating, calming or disruptive. Wonder issues in questions, prior questions, about the meaning of or the conditions for the possibility of some experience. The philosophical stance does not accept thoughtlessness; it interrogates relentlessly.

In light of the diversity of philosophical scholarship, we have chosen to combine a systematic approach—focusing on themes and issues—with a historical one—showing continuity, development, and change within philosophical thought and scholarship relevant to the task of understanding teaching. Because the history of philosophy is very much a history of philosophers and their ideas, we will focus on particular insights and arguments that either address educational matters directly or are relevant for deepening our understanding of teaching. Our discussion will reveal that many of the widely known contributions to the development of Western philosophy have been made by White men—which constitutes an existential limitation within the “canon” of Western philosophy in general but also for the field of philosophy of education in particular (see Martin, 1985). Unlike empirical research where new insights often replace older insights, much of the philosophical tradition has not been invalidated by later developments but has, rather, been refined, complicated, and transformed. In fact, as women (e.g., Greene, 1973, 1978, 2001; Martin, 1985), scholars of color (e.g., Gay, 2010; Ladson-Billings, 2009; Leonardo, 2013), disability studies advocates (e.g., Ferri & Connor, 2006; Gabel & Connor, 2013), and queer theorists (e.g., Mayo, 2007b; Shlasko, 2005) have voiced their points of view about teaching practice, policy, and research, philosophy of education has been, and continues to be, complicated and transformed. The careful reader will note in both text and reference below the diversity of perspective regarding what constitutes a worthy philosophical issue and a defensible method of inquiry.

As sketched above, our chapter consists of three substantive sections that give way to a discussion of contemporary issues illuminated philosophically. We begin by tracing lightly the development of the distinction between the philosophical and the empirical. Doing so will allow us to identify some key steps in modern philosophy that are relevant for an understanding of teaching and research on teaching. Against this background, we report on a conversation across time and culture about what teaching is and should be by presenting six teacher “icons,” that is, six iconic conceptions of teaching and the teacher that have been developed in the philosophical literature. We draw from Plato’s dialogic questioner, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s responsive (and autonomy-seeking) tutor, John Dewey’s democratic designer, Paolo Freire’s liberator, Jacques Rancière’s critical egalitarian, and Nel Noddings’s carer. Such icons not only help us to see the different ways in which teaching can be understood and the teacher has been conceptualized but also highlight a number of philosophical issues and insights that we continue to confront and appreciate. In the third section, we focus on the very idea and the very ideal of “teaching.” It is here that we give explicit voice to the central problematic of our chapter: Teaching is a matter of purposeful judgment that cannot fully determine its own outcomes, and teaching is necessary to (at least formal) education. How can this be? And (how) can research on teaching proceed if teaching is understood in this way? In the concluding section we bring the main lines of the discussion together by reflecting on a number of contemporary issues concerning teaching and research on teaching as they are illuminated by the constitutive elements of teaching as purposeful, intentional, and relational.

Note that this chapter may be read straight through as a coherent argument or more selectively so that chapter sections function as resources instead of as a single argument. We have tried to provide clear signposts for what can be found where.

This chapter can be understood as an interpretive essay examining a single question—How does philosophy intersect with teaching?—in order to illuminate teaching practice, policy, and research through philosophical inquiry and to enrich philosophy through the careful consideration of questions arising from educational practice, policy, and research. It can also be read as a kind of research review, gathering in one place a selection of both classical and contemporary efforts to think philosophically about teaching. But, as suggested above, our goal is more intentional and less agnostic about what can and should be learned by this kind of examination. Specifically, we argue for a progressive understanding of teaching that preserves its traditional centrality in any framing of formal education but avoids the authoritarian control of teaching and teachers that pervades today’s policy deliberations.

<h2>The Philosophical and the Empirical

To think philosophically about teaching requires some understanding of what philosophy is and, more importantly, how it differs from other ways to explore and understand teaching. Our guiding question concerns the distinction between the philosophical and the empirical, that is, between the specific contribution of philosophical inquiry compared with that of empirical research—a distinction that, as we will show, simply did not exist until relatively recently and is still not as hard and fast a distinction as one might think. Note the role that the development of modern science has played in splitting the philosophical from the empirical, fostering the split while also prompting epistemic, social, and political questions that require both the philosopher and the empirical researcher to answer. We explore this distinction to demonstrate how it is useful for—and how it may be dangerous to—any rich understanding of the practice that is teaching. In the process, we also identify some of the main philosophical roots and anchor points of contemporary educational thought.

<h2>The Love of Wisdom and the Nature of Knowledge

The suggestion that philosophy is about the love of knowledge and wisdom rather than the possession of it hints at an important characteristic of contemporary philosophy. Self-identified philosophers today see it as their task to ask critical questions concerning discursive claims made about what is true, rational, right, just, or beautiful, as well as about what is useful or important, rather than to generate knowledge about social and natural phenomena. In asking such questions, philosophers are particularly interested in exploring the quality and strength of the reasons people have or give for their ideas, beliefs, and actions and the quality and consistency of underlying assumptions—without suggesting that philosophers agree about what counts as a good reason or a valid assumption. On the other hand, self-proclaimed empirical researchers—whether natural or social scientists—take their task to be the generation of true and useful (that is, guiding, explanatory, and/or predictive) knowledge about the natural and social world. While this particular way to distinguish between the philosophical and the empirical may sound obvious, it actually is a relatively recent idea that emerged with the rise of modern science in the 16th and 17th centuries.

For the ancient Greek philosophers and throughout the Middle Ages the distinction between science and philosophy was far less articulate. In the writings of Plato and Aristotle, we find not only more familiarly philosophical themes about what we can know and what it means to have knowledge, about what it means to lead a good or virtuous life, about language, about argumentation and logic, about the ultimate nature of reality, and about the proper organization of the state but also more empirical lines of questioning about the origins of the universe, about the substances the universe is made of, about the weather, about animals, and about natural processes of growth and decay and so on. While from a contemporary perspective, we might say that thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle combined scientific and philosophical work, for them the distinction was not really a meaningful one. Their interest was in the broad study of almost anything that could be better understood, and the methods and ways of reasoning they used for this were distinctively different from the methods of empirical experimentation that came to characterize modern science.