Teacher knowledge
Newsletter 9: August 18, 2024
1.
There was a tap on my shoulder.
I’d got up from my seat - the keynote speaker at the 1988 English teachers’ conference had just finished - and I was about to join the hundreds of delegates making their way to morning tea.
I turned around.
‘Are you Steve Shann?’ a scowling middle-aged man said. I was sure I'd never met him before in my life.
I nodded
‘Sit down,’ he ordered, verbally pushing me back down into my seat. ‘I want a word with you.’
I sat.
He stayed standing.
‘I'm a deputy principal in a large government school here in Sydney,’ he began. ‘I've been a teacher for a while and I thought, before the last summer holidays, that perhaps I'd got a bit stale, that maybe it was time to do a bit of reading to freshen me up. I saw your book, School Portrait, in a bookshop and bought it thinking this might be the thing. So, on one rainy day on my camping holiday, I started to read it. I read 20, maybe 30 pages, and then I threw the book across the tent and said to my wife, “This prick wouldn't know if his arse was on fire!” I was furious, really angry. All these platitudes about teaching and learning and none of them applicable to the real world.’
I opened my mouth to reply but he shot me a glance that said he wasn't done yet.
‘I was furious … Really furious …’
He paused.
‘But, for some reason,’ he continued, smiling now as if he was enjoying the drama, ‘I picked the book up again the next day and read it right through. I got drawn into those stories, Steve, and there was one part that had me in tears. I was deeply moved. I was hoping you'd be here. I want to talk to you about it. I want to talk to you about those kids you wrote about, and what they did, and how they managed. I'm really glad you're here, because I haven't stopped thinking about those stories and what they mean.’
2.
I thought again last week, as I finished posting the last chapter of School Portrait, about what it was that made this deputy principal pick up the book in the first place. He was looking for something, he said, that would invigorate him as he dealt with the pressures of working in the real world. He’d been moved, he said, by ‘those kids you wrote about, and what they did, and how they managed’.
There’s a lot in the press at the moment about Naplan results, about an apparent concern from the Grattan Institute, from the Education Minister and from senior bureaucrats about the need to mandate in our schools ‘evidence-based’ literacy teaching.
There’s not so much about actual students. I’ve written about this in a couple of recent newsletters: Teacher, scientist storyteller and Seeing students big.
Here I want to say something about stories that describe what students do, how students think, how students manage. The sort of stories that interested that deputy principal.
And how the telling of these kinds of stories is legitimate and important scholarship.
Stories can speak about (or allude to) complex aspects of our lives that intuitively we know are important but for which the language of rational discourse is inadequate. And, because of the way they are structured and expressed, stories have the capacity to penetrate, to move, to have an impact, in deep and significant ways.
3.
The curriculum theorist James Macdonald (1995) suggested that there are three main ways in which scholars attempt to understand the world: the scientific, the critical and the mythopoetic.
The scientific, he said, is aimed at explaining for control purposes.
The critical is aimed at reducing illusion in order to emancipate.
The mythopoetic engages with the mystery; it draws on the use of insight, intuition and imagination in a search for meaning and a sense of unity and well being'.
These three methodologies, he suggested, are collectively aimed at 'providing greater grounding for understanding’ (p. 176) of a world which we know is far more complex than any one approach can grasp.
I think that Macdonald's inclusion of the mythopoetic represents a moment in our scholarly history when, because of our increasing awareness of complexity and unpredictability, there is a shift from an exclusively rational structuralist perspective to a post-structural sensibility.
The structuralist mind sees a world characterised by a single narrative with atomistic individuals and groups (teachers and students, for example), some at an early developmental stage (students) needing to be inducted by others (teachers) into a workable way of seeing and being in the world. It imagines space (the classroom, the staffroom) as a collection of closed and contained systems, susceptible to structural analysis and measurable outcomes. It assumes the existence of established hierarchies and relationships. It imagines that the solution to a perceived literacy crisis in Australia is to mandate, in an ordered and logical sequence, a particular way of teaching phonics.
The post-structuralist mind sees a quite different picture. It imagines space (a classroom, a staffroom) as an open, contingent, fluid and chaotic site containing not a single narrative but many. Instead of given identities, it imagines identities shifting and being shaped by context, discourse and circumstance. It imagines multiple intersecting life-trajectories coming in and out of connection, affecting and being affected by common worlds with complex and fluid interactions and relationships. The post-structuralist imagination suggests that we come in and out of awareness of the myriad flows and shifting rearrangements, and we never know them all completely. Life is, to a significant extent, shaped by the invisible, the chaotic, and the complex. It acknowledges the work of teachers on the ground who know that what works for one child one day doesn’t work for all children every day, that teaching a class is way more complex, rich and rewarding a task than imparting Skill x one day and Skill x+1 the next.
4.
It would be so much easier if it was so much less complicated, if teaching reading effectively was simply a matter of breaking the skill into its component parts and introducing each component in a logical and ordered sequence. If classrooms and learning could be understood when seen through a logical or structuralist lens.
But life isn’t like that. And learning to read isn’t like that.
Teachers know this.
The deputy principal, no doubt at times overwhelmed by the pressures of systems, bureaucrats and media driven by a structuralist way of thinking, wanted to be reminded of it.
To be brought back to his roots.
To the reasons he became a teacher in the first place.
5.
The painting at the head of this post is by Solomon Karmel-Shann. It’s called ‘A misplaced thought’.
I choose these paintings for my Newsletters not because they illustrate what I’m writing about (though occasionally they happen to), but because I like having my son’s marvellous paintings scattered around the home page of my site!