Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate

Introducción

RICHARD F. ELMORE

THIS BOOK TOOK SHAPE in unusual circumstances: a group of faculty from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, with a common bond to a distin- guished university, came together to reflect on their teaching, to discuss their ideas with each other, and to write about these ideas for a broader audience. Their conversation is a tribute not just to the authors but also to the intellectual stature of Harvard University, the institutional leadership of the Harvard Business School and its dean, John H. McArthur, and, not least, to the persistent efforts of Professor C. Roland Christensen to develop new ways to help instructors learn to practice their craft more effectively.
But why should it be unusual for university faculty to reflect on and write about their teaching? Teaching, after all, is a major part of what university faculty do. Even on campuses where research is highly valued, it is difficult to be a university professor without spending a substantial chunk of one's career in the classroom. Furthermore, teaching involves the sorts of intellectual puzzles that attract people to academic life in the first place-deep, complex, layered problems, which yield answers only in the form of new questions. Also, teaching can provide some of the most profound rewards of academic life-direct experience with the in- tellectual growth of people coming to grips with problems in the presence of knowledge. Nonetheless, teaching is seldom taken as a subject for serious intellectual discourse in universities; still more rarely are books about teaching written by university faculty. The reasons for this neglect have to do both with the nature of teaching and with the conditions under which teaching occurs.

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Teaching as Transformation

The authors of this volume have modest aims. They would like to tell us about their experiences with discussion teaching. They would also like us to understand that discussion teaching can be applied broadly in the curriculum of schools and universities, whether in the liberal arts, the sciences, or the professions. Although they focus on their own experi­ences with discussion teaching, their insights are deeply connected to a long historical conversation about the nature of teaching and learning.

David Cohen sums up conventional pedagogy as follows: 'Teaching is telling, knowledge is facts, and learning is recall."1 That is, teachers are responsible for delivering content, in the form of factual information. Students are responsible for receiving it. The relationship between teacher and student is satisfactorily completed when the student has suc­cessfully transferred factual material back to the teacher at the required moment.

In conventional pedagogy, with its emphasis on factual information, distinctions among students can be based on objective criteria-those who "get it" at some minimally acceptable level succeed; those who don't, fail. Albert Shanker, the iconoclastic president of the American Federation of Teachers, is fond of telling people about a sign in his office. The first line reads, "I taught the material, but the students didn't learn it." The second line says, "Define the meaning of 'teach' in that sentence." These lines capture the essence and limits of conventional pedagogy.

The authors of these essays challenge us to think about teaching quite differently. At the core of discussion teaching, as Roland Christensen argues in Chapter 2 and Abby Hansen develops in her essay on teaching and learning contracts, is the idea of reciprocity between students and teachers. People learn to the degree to which they can actively manipu­late facts within some general framework and can relate general ideas to specific events in their experience. We have knowledge, in other words, only as we actively participate in its construction. Students do so by engaging, with other students and with the teacher, in a process of in­quiry, critical discourse, and problem-solving. The teacher's role is to foster conditions in which students are encouraged to construct knowl­edge. In this conception of teaching, the roles of teacher and student are easily reversible. Students teach each other, and they teach the teacher by revealing their understandings of the subject. Teachers learn by this process, not only by being exposed to students' understandings of the subject, but also by steadily accumulating a body of knowledge about the practice of teaching. In this view, teaching is enabling, knowledge is understanding, and learning is the active construction of subject matter. If teaching can be learned, through collegial inquiry and discussion, then it becomes a subject for professional discourse. Such discourse, however, requires a language and a set of core ideas that spark an argu­ment. These factors have been largely absent from university teaching. Although there is an extensive body of research on teaching in elemen­tary and secondary schools, dialogue has been largely confined to re­searchers and only rarely penetrates the world of practitioners. The au­thors here take professional discussion about teaching seriously. They have developed a language for talking about teaching and a set of ideas that can be used to shape arguments about what constitutes effective ways to teach.

The distinction between conventional pedagogy and discussion teach­ing also raises the question of what teachers should know about how students learn. Conventional pedagogy is essentially ideas about teaching disconnected from ideas about learning. To teach is to convey informa­tion; thus teaching consists of organizing and communicating content. We discover whether students have learned by seeing how well they are able to report back what we have told them; how they learn is not our concern. To the authors of these essays, on the other hand, knowledge of teaching depends on understanding how students learn. To teach is to engage students in learning; thus teaching consists of getting students involved in the active construction of knowledge. A teacher requires not only knowledge of subject matter, but knowledge of how students learn and how to transform them into active learners. Good teaching, then, requires a commitment to systematic understanding of learning.

In taking this view of teaching and learning, the authors join a conver­sation that has been under way in Western civilization at least since Socrates questioned the young slave in the Meno about his knowledge of geometry. This conversation, as Howard Gardner suggests, "is an extended rumination on the nature of knowledge: where does it come from, what does it consist of, how is it represented in the human mind."2 Lately, the conversation has grown to include many of the best minds in such areas as psychology, philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, com­puter science, and neurophysiology.

Current research on human learning has converged on a few key ideas about the nature of learning and their consequences for teaching. These ideas are remarkably parallel with what the authors of these essays have discovered by studying their own teaching. In describing their experience with discussion teaching, they have tapped into a broader set of ideas that could have far-reaching consequences for the way teaching and learning are conducted in our society.

One insight from the current research is that all learning is contextual in at least three senses: new knowledge is acquired by extending and revising prior knowledge; new ideas acquire meaning when they are pre­sented in a coherent relationship to one another; and knowledge becomes usable when it is acquired in situations that entail applications to concrete problem-solving. These three meanings of context set a frame of refer­ence for thinking about effective teaching.

Discussion teaching, as defined and practiced by the authors, is essen­tially a systematic way of constructing a context for learning from the knowledge and experience of students, rather than exclusively from the canons of disciplinary knowledge. Hence, when Roland Christensen ar­gues, in his essay on questioning, listening, and response, that students should take collective responsibility for determining the direction of the discussion, and that teachers should enable that responsibility, he is acting on a belief that learning occurs when students actively form the relationship of new knowledge to its intellectual and social context. Dan­iel Goodenough explains that his experience dealing with the physicians treating his wife caused him to rethink his role as a teacher of medical practitioners. "I was helping to train doctors so narrowly specialized that they had difficulty seeing beyond their own areas of expertise," he recalls. For Goodenough, teaching became not just a matter of imparting knowl­edge of his specialty, histology, but a process of helping physicians under­stand the human context in which their knowledge would be used.

Another important insight from current research on human learning is that the acquisition and application of knowledge are fundamentally social acts. Children acquire language, for example, through complex social interactions with adults and other children. Carpenters, bookmak­ers, chefs, surgeons, experimental scientists, and practitioners of other occupations requiring complex strategies of estimation and decision mak­ing acquire a large portion of their practical knowledge from observing and interacting with other skilled practitioners. Lauren Resnick has sug­gested that, although the social dimension of learning is critical to practi­cal application of knowledge, we construct formal learning in schools and universities in ways that discourage social interaction. We emphasize individual cognition over social interaction, abstract manipulation of symbols over concrete application in practical settings, and generalized learning over applications in specific social contexts. 3 As a consequence, learning in school becomes progressively isolated from the kind of learn­ing that affects people's competencies in real life. The problem for teach­ers is not whether students will learn when they are not in school. People are inveterate learners. Rather, the problem is how to construct learning in school so as to maximize its influence over learning in the world.

The authors of these essays clearly see social interaction as a key component of learning. The basic premise of what David Garvin refers to as "active learning" is to create a community of interest within the classroom in which students think of themselves as enabling each other's learning. The techniques of questioning, listening, and responding de­scribed by Herman Leonard and Roland Christensen are the basic con­stituents of a community of discourse, which values collective support of learning. The close analysis of interaction patterns in the classroom, suggested by Julie Hertenstein, goes to the core of how teachers construct and understand a community of discourse.

The essays also address the ethical dimensions of teaching, a subject that has not received the attention it deserves. Good teachers, Joyce Garvin argues, are powerful and influential people who are often so preoccupied with their own understanding of the subject matter that they are unaware of how much they influence their students. Even if dedi­cated to enabling students to exercise independent judgment, Garvin suggests, teachers are always at risk of exercising "undue influence" by virtue of their expertise, or alternatively of not exercising enough "due influence" in their role as enablers. Teachers with encyclopedic knowl­edge of their subjects, John Hildebidle observes, are not necessarily good teachers, even when their students value and respect them. Good teach­ing, in the ethical sense, enables students to engage in intellectual dis­course, to learn how ideas are shaped and used, and to articulate those ideas clearly. Knowledgeable teachers often slip into defining teaching as knowing and telling it all.

The ethical dimensions of teaching, David Garvin argues, usually take the form of dilemmas that require decisions but have no obvious right answers: valuing divergent questions versus keeping the discussion on track, acknowledging right answers versus encouraging deliberate discus­sion, publicly revealing students' flawed reasoning versus correcting stu­dents' understanding, capitalizing on an individual's feelings for the pur­pose of making a good teaching point versus respecting the individual's personal stake.4 Teaching, it seems, is a struggle for mastery not only of content and craft, but also of self. Learning to teach is, in important respects, learning to view one's own knowledge and expertise as instru­mental to others' learning, rather than as something to be displayed.

This book aims to persuade us that teaching is an essentially trans­formational vocation. The aim of teaching is not only to transmit infor­mation, but also to transform students from passive recipients of other people's knowledge into active constructors of their own and others' knowledge. The teacher cannot transform without the student's active participation, of course. Teaching is fundamentally about creating the pedagogical, social, and ethical conditions under which students agree to take charge of their own learning, individually and collectively. These essays help us to understand what those conditions are.

To introduce more ambitious conceptions of teaching, however, we must not only change the way teachers and students think about teach­ing and learning; we must also transform the institutional conditions in which teaching and learning occur.

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