A Poetics Of Teaching

Educational Theory

Volumn 54, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 119-142

  Hansen, David T ^a  

^a Och Spine at New York Presbyterian Hospitals   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33748950487     PISSN: 00132004     EISSN: 17415446     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.0013-2004.2004.00001_54_2.x     Document Type: Article

References (86)

1. Peter M. Grimmett and Andrew MacKinnon, "Craft Knowledge and the Education of Teachers," Review of Research in Education 18 (1992): 385-456;
2. Michael Huberman, The Lives of Teachers (New York: Teachers College Press, 1993);
3. Susan M. Johnson, Teachers at Work (New York: Basic Books, 1990);
4. Daniel Lortie, Schoolteacher (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975);
5. and Sylvia M. Yee, Careers in the Classroom: When Teaching Is More than a Job (New York: Teachers College Press, 1990).
6. Miriam Ben-Peretz, Learning from Experience: Memory and the Teacher's Account of Teaching (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995);
7. Michele Foster, Black Teachers on Teaching (New York: The New Press, 1997);
8. David T. Hansen, The Call to Teach (New York: Teachers College Press,1995);
9. Joseph McDonald, Teaching: Making Sense of an Uncertain Craft (New York: Teachers College Press, 1992);
10. John Olson, Understanding Teaching: Beyond Expertise (Milton Keynes, England: Open University Press, 1992);
11. and Max van Manen, The Tact of Teaching (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991).
12. Cary A. Buzzelli and Bill Johnston, The Moral Dimensions of Teaching: Language, Power, and Culture in Classroom Interaction (New York: Routledge Falmer, 2002);
13. Elizabeth Campbell, The Ethical Teacher (Maidenhead, England: Open University Press, 2003);
14. David T. Hansen, Exploring the Moral Heart of Teaching: Toward a Teacher's Creed (New York: Teachers College Press, 2001);
15. and Daniel Liston and Jim Garrison, eds., Teaching, Learning and Loving: Reclaiming Passion in Educational Practice (New York: Routledge Falmer, 2004).
16. See also Virginia Richardson and Gary D. Fenstermacher, "Manner in Teaching: The Study in Four Parts," Journal of Curriculum Studies 33, no. 6 (2001): 631-637. This issue of the journal features a set of integrated articles on the moral nature of teaching that grew out of Richardson and Fenstermacher's The Manner in Teaching Project.
17. There are studies in arts education that attend to the intellectual and the aesthetic together, especially with respect to students' learning. An intriguing recent project that looks at science learning through an aesthetic lens is Mark Girod and David Wong's "An Aesthetic (Deweyan) Perspective on Science Learning: Case Studies of Three Fourth Graders," Elementary School Journal 102, no. 3 (2002): 199-224.
18. Jim Garrison provides a philosophical treatment of several aesthetic, moral, and intellectual dimensions of what he calls "wisdom and desire" in teaching; see Jim Garrison, Dewey and Eros: Wisdom and Desire in the Art of Teaching (New York: Teachers College Press, 1997).
19. The engineering conception of teaching informs a variety of current school programs, including some forms of what is called "direct instruction" in which teachers employ commercially prepared scripts rather than their own lesson plans.
20. Compare with Roger D. Abrahams, "Ordinary and Extraordinary Experience," in The Anthroplogy of Experience, eds. Victor W. Turner and Edward M. Bruner (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 45-72.
21. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Malcolm Heath (London: Penguin, 1996). My comments also reflect Aristotle's moral philosophy articulated in his Nichomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald (New York: Macmillan, 1962).
22. Harold Bloom, Poetics of Influence: New and Selected Criticism (New Haven, Connecticut: Henry R. Schwab, 1988).
23. Charles W. Moore, The Poetics of Gardens (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988);
24. Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, Classical Architecture: The Poetics of Order (Cambridge:MIT Press, 1986);
25. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans.Maria Jolas (New York: Orion Press, 1964);
26. John G. Galaty, "Ceremony and Society: The Poetics of Maasai Ritual," Man 18, no. 2[(1983): 361-382;
27. and Michael Herzfeld, The Poetics of Manhood:Contest and Identity in a CretanMountainVillage (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1985).
28. Herzfeld, The Poetics of Manhood, xv, 16, 18, 274, all emphases in original.
29. Richard H. Brown, A Poetic for Sociology: Toward a Logic of Discovery for the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
30. For a useful summary and critique of positivist assumptions in social inquiry, see Denis C. Phillips and Nicholas C. Burbules, Postpositivism and Educational Research (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 4-26.
31. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 5.
32. Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 70.
33. For representative treatments, and enactments, of the interpretive turn, see Norma Haan, Robert N. Bellah, Paul Rabinow, and William M. Sullivan, eds., Social Science as Moral Inquiry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983);
34. Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan, eds., Interpretive Social Science: A Reader (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979);
35. and Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan, eds., Interpretive Social Science: A Second Look (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
36. For markers of the pervasive impact of the interpretive turn on educational research, see, for example, Phillip W. Jackson, "The Functions of Educational Research," Educational Researcher 19, no. 7 (1990): 3-9;
37. Richard M. Jaeger, ed., Complementary Methods for Research in Education, 2d ed. (Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association, 1997);
38. and Virginia Richardson, ed., Handbook of Research on Teaching, 4th ed. (Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association, 2001).
39. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 5, 193.
40. Their terms in the first quotation echo Aristotle's pioneering definition in his Poetics: "A metaphor is the application of a noun which properly applies to something else. The transfer may be from genus to species, from species to genus, from species to species, or by analogy," 34 (57b).
41. Ibid., 5.
42. For an overview of how scholars making the interpretive turn sought to move beyond the Cartesian inheritance of mind/body, person/world dualism, see Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983).
43. Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 239.
44. Ladina Bezzola Lampert, Imagining the Unimaginable: The Poetics of Early Modern Astronomy (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), 15-16.
45. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Ark, 1970), 77, 94.
46. For studies of the place of metaphor in human expression and understanding that mirror developments in the interpretive turn, see, for example, Brown, A Poetic for Sociology, especially chapter 4;
47. Mark Johnson, ed., Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1981);
48. Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984);
49. and Sheldon Sacks, ed., On Metaphor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).
50. For a set of useful background essays, see William Taylor, ed., Metaphors of Education (London: Heinemann, 1984). Field-based research on teaching shows how indispensable metaphor appears to be to teachers, both in making sense of and in carrying out their work.
51. See, for example, Bruce F. Gurney, "Tugboats and Tennis Games: Preservice Conceptions of Teaching and Learning Revealed Through Metaphors," Journal of Research in Science Teaching 32, no. 6 (1995): 569-583;
52. J. Gary Knowles, "Metaphors as Windows on a Personal History: A Beginning Teacher's Experience," Teacher Education Quarterly 21, no. 1 (1994): 37-66;
53. Timothy J. Lensmire, "The Teacher as Dostoyevskian Novelist," Research in the Teaching of English 31, no. 3 (1997): 367-392;
54. Steven I. Miller and Marcel Fredericks, "Uses of Metaphor: A Qualitative Case Study," Qualitative Studies in Education 1, no. 3 (1988): 263- 272;
55. Hugh Munby, "Metaphor in the Thinking of Teachers: An Exploratory Study," Journal of Curriculum Studies 18, no. 2 (1986): 197-209;
56. and Eugene F. Provenzo, Jr., Gary N. McCloskey, O.S.A., Robert B. Kottkamp, and Marilyn M. Cohn, "Metaphor and Meaning in the Language of Teachers," Teachers College Record 90, no. 4 (1989): 551 573.
57. I suspect that a systematic study of qualitative research on teaching - that is, one focused on research in which metaphor is not attended to directly - would confirm its ubiquity and value in characterizing the work.
58. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 77.
59. John Dewey, Experience and Nature (1925), in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953, vol. 1, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), 74-75, 82, 90-92, and 94-96.
60. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, xxvi.
61. What Aristotle said of metaphor could be said of Nietzsche as stylist: "It is a great thing, indeed, to make proper use of the poetic forms . . . .But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor"; and "Ordinary words convey only what we know already; it is from metaphor that we can best get hold of something fresh." Quoted together in Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 190.
62. Friedrich Nietzsche, "On Truth and Falsity in Their Ultramoral Sense," in Early Greek Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Maximilian Mugge (New York: Russell and Russell, 1964), 180.
63. For a discussion of the quality of "seriousness" in educating, see John Wilson, "Seriousness and the Foundations of Education," Educational Theory 48, no. 2 (1998): 143-153.
64. I have argued previously that understanding students, in the pedagogical sense of the term, entails paying intellectual and moral attention as a teacher. See David T. Hansen, "Understanding Students," Journal of Curriculum and Supervision 14, no. 2 (1999): 171-185. My focus in that article was on teachers of children and youth, an emphasis I retain here. However, although I can only assert the point, I believe a poetics of teaching resonates strongly with teaching in many higher education settings as well
65. John Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916), in John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899-1924, vol. 9, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), 181. 29. John Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916), in John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899-1924, vol. 9, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), 181.
66. See, for example, David C. Bricker, "Character and Moral Reasoning: An Aristotelian Perspective," in Ethics for Professionals in Education, eds. Kenneth A. Strike and P. Lance Ternasky (New York: Teachers College Press, 1993), 13-26;
67. Shirley Pendlebury, "Practical Arguments and Situational Appreciation in Teaching," Educational Theory 40, no. 2 (1990): 171-179;
68. and Patricia J. Simpson and James Garrison, "Teaching and Moral Perception," Teachers College Record 97, no. 2 (1995): 252-278
69. As David Granger writes, "we are much more than 'epistemic subjects' whose primary purpose in life is to generate and manage propositional claims about the world." See David Granger, "Toward an Embodied Poetics of the Self: Personal Renewal in Dewey and Cavell," Studies in Philosophy and Education 20, no. 2 (2001): 107-124, 122.
70. Dewey spoke of the movement from the aesthetic to the artistic, understood as moving from a sense of felt meanings to felt possibilities and their incarnation in various works, which could encompass everything from executing a painting, to building a road, to responding to a student's question. See Dewey, Experience and Nature, 280-281.
71. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and Leonard Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), xxviii.
72. Robert N. Bellah, "The Ethical Aims of Social Inquiry," in Social Science as Moral Inquiry, eds. Haan et al., 374-380;
73. and Charles Taylor, "Interpretation and the Sciences of Man," in Interpretive Social Science: A Reader, eds. Rabinow and Sullivan, 66-68.
74. Martin Heidegger, "... Poetically Man Dwells,... " in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 213.
75. Mr. Gradgrind is the relentless drill-master whom the reader meets at the start of Charles Dickens' novel, Hard Times. James Taylor takes Gradgrind's vision as the counterpoint to what he calls "poetic knowledge."
76. See James S. Taylor, Poetic Knowledge: The Recovery of Education (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998).
77. See Martin Heidegger, especially the following essays in Poetry, Language, Thought: "What Are Poets For?"; "... Poetically Man Dwells... "; and "Building Dwelling Thinking."
78. Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? trans. J. Glenn Gray and Frederick Wieck (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 138-147, passim.
79. For criticism of this impoverished (and impoverishing) view of teaching, see Christopher R. Higgins, "Teaching and the Good Life: A Critique of the Ascetic Ideal in Education," Educational Theory 53, no. 2 (2003): 131-154.
80. Naoko Saito, "Gifts of Teaching," Philosophy of Education 2002, ed. Scott Fletcher (Urbana, Illinois: Philosophy of Education Society, 2002), 307.
81. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? 15.
82. For a wide-ranging discussion of Heidegger's philosophy of education, see Michael A. Peters, ed., Heidegger, Education, and Modernity (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002).
83. See also Ignacio L. Gö tz, "Heidegger and the Art of Teaching," Educational Theory 33, no. 1 (1983): 1-9.
84. On the issue of personal development from the perspective of a poetics, see Granger, "Toward an Embodied Poetics of the Self." Granger highlights what he sees as Dewey's image of the self as, at its best, a poetic construction: "The poetic self has an enhanced capacity to receive, respond to, and integrate imaginatively the creative possibilities of the present moment," 111. For a comparable analysis, see Barbara Garlick, ed., Tradition and the Poetics of Self in Nineteenth-Century Women's Poetry (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002). The contributors to this collection trace the interplay between a maturing poetic self and a developing oeuvre in the poetry of Caroline Bowles Southey, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Dickinson, and Christina Rossetti.
85. Compare with Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978).
86. Compare with David T. Hansen, "From Role to Person: The Moral Layeredness of Classroom Teaching," American Educational Research Journal 30, no. 4 (1993): 651-674.