Burbules, Nicholas C. and Hansen, David T. (Eds.). (1997). Teaching
and its Predicaments. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Pp. 192 pages
$65.00 (Cloth) ISBN 0-8133-2863-2
$21.00 (Paper) ISBN 0-8133-2864-0
Reviewed by Barbara S. Stengel
Millersville University
September 10, 1998
Teaching and its Predicaments (edited by Nicholas Burbules and David
Hansen) is an interesting, thoughtful, often provocative, and always
valuable collection of essays authored by an array of accomplished
educational researchers. Each essay highlights a sense of the complexity
of teaching and its normative nature, and each essay conveys a sense of
commitment to an always challenging, often frustrating, nonetheless
joy-filled endeavor. Each essay calls for intelligent but never
rationalistic response, and each provides an enjoyable read. Nonetheless,
I put this book down feeling mildly disappointed. More on that later.
The notion of "predicament" is the hook on which this collection hangs.
Burbules and Hansen begin the volume with these words:
A predicament is a problematic state of affairs that admits of no easy
resolution. Predicaments require compromise and trade-offs. They do not
necessarily paralyze human action; people can and do respond to them all
the time. However, responses to predicaments tend to take the form of
provisional, working resolutions: provisional because no response can
permanently dissolve the predicament, but working because the response at
least provides a strategy or a way of addressing the situation. (p. 1)
They go on to maintain that "misunderstandings, conflicting needs and
values, unfulfilled hopes, and unmet expectations -- in short, predicaments
-- are part of the ethos of [the practice of teaching]. For Burbules,
Hansen and their contributing authors, teaching is "indeterminate" and
"unpredictable." The purpose of Teaching and its Predicaments is to
empower teachers to deal more constructively and reflectively with the
predicaments that underlie this indeterminacy, that is, "to illuminate new
ways of perceiving those dilemmas, to make them more manageable, less
debilitating, and perhaps even a source of interest and inquiry on the part
of teachers, prospective teachers, and others who care about the practice"
(p. 2).
What are these predicaments? They are not easily listed for their
statement requires context and circumstance. Bob Floden ("Reforms That
Call for Teaching More Than You Understand") explores the dilemma forged
of current educational reform that teachers are often asked to teach more
than they know. Nel Noddings ("Must We Motivate?") questions the
(liberal) assumptions about freedom and equality that prompt us to assume
that teachers should, or even can, motivate their students to learn. Bob
Boostrom bemoans the plight of teachers who want to teach for meaning in a
social context that values only information transmission, or what he calls
"Teaching by the Numbers." Nick Burbules ("Teaching and the Tragic Sense of
Education") observes that all educational growth is loss, and thus, that
education is an inherently tragic endeavor. Jo Anne Pagano articulates
"The Problems of Teacher-Student Relationships in Trouble Times",
maintaining that teachers in higher education are pressured to construe
their work in oppositional rather than relational terms, pitting teacher
against student, separating knowledge and identity, and describing the
world in black and white terms. Elaine Atkins offers "Predicaments in
Curriculum Deliberation," highlighting the ways in which one's personal
philosophy of teaching rubs up against curriculum constraints, particularly
in the implementation of innovative programs. Kathryn Au and Sheila
Valencia ("The Complexities of Portfolio Assessment") focus not precisely
on a predicament but on "the tension between portfolios as
professional-development process and portfolios as evaluation product"
(p. 140), arguing that when you change assessment in any educational effort,
you change everything about the educational process. Magdalene Lampert
("Understanding and Managing Classroom Dilemmas in the Service of Good
Teaching") provides examples of the range of always unique dilemmas that
face teachers when pedagogical goals conflict, and offers strategies for
response that involve reframing dilemmas as well as constantly redefining
goals. Finally, David Hansen ("Being a Good Influence") argues that
teaching inevitably results in unintended consequences, particularly in the
realm of character and moral development, and exhorts teachers to "think
about the habitual nature of much of what one does as teacher when in the
presence of one's students" (p. 173).
Hansen and Burbules suggest in their introductory chapter that the
arrangement of these chapters is "intentional": 1) essays by Floden,
Noddings and Boostrom focus on predicaments generated by the culture of
educational practice; 2) essays by Burbules and Pagano examine predicaments
that merge from societal conditions; and 3) essays by Atkins, Au and
Valencia, Lampert, and Hansen highlight predicaments that stem directly
from the practice of teaching. While this categorization is reasonable
enough, it is less than successful at illuminating the connections among
the chapters. Hansen and Burbules anticipate this response:
[T]his way of distinguishing the chapters, however, is neither hard nor
fast. The chapters overlap considerably in terms of the authors' concern
both for the broader circumstances in which teachers work and for the
immediacies of everyday practice. Recurring themes cut across the
individual contributions. We hope that readers find something of value in
each of them. (p. 2)
There is unquestionably something of value in each essay.
Bob Floden describes contemporary teachers finding themselves in the center
of educational reform, asked to teach what they have never been taught. He
explores and then reframes the issue, arguing that teachers can enable
students to take responsibility for active learning by taking advantage of
rich curriculum materials and information technology. Teachers can in this
sense sometimes teach what they do not know . This can only result if the
teachers in question have developed an understanding of inquiry in their
particular fields, and if they can bring that type of inquiry to bear on
their students' learning and their own pedagogical practice.
Nel Noddings states her punch line in the opening paragraph of "Must We
Motivate?" "My conclusion is that we must work more closely with students'
own motives if we are to succeed in teaching them things we take to be
worthwhile and in preparing them for democratic life"(p. (29). Her focus on
motivation stems from her concern with questions surrounding a common
curriculum. Motivation is only a question when students are "forced" to
study what they do not care about. Noddings' predicament highlights
"[T]eachers [who] are urged again and again to motivate students to work at
tasks they dislike" (p. 41) In a wide ranging essay drawing from liberal,
critical, and postmodern theory, Noddings explores current political
assumptions regarding freedom and equality and makes a case for a more
interactive approach to curriculum that allows teachers to engage but not
escape the motivation predicament.
The predicament identified by Bob Boostrom is that experienced by "teachers
who feel forced to teach by the numbers", (p. 47) that is, to teach with
reference only to measurable outcomes. He makes use of Phil Jackson's
distinction between mimetic (imitative/reproductive, intellectual,
subject-centered, traditional) and transformational (change-oriented,
moral, child-centered, progressive) traditions in teaching and argues that
this "teach by number" predicament is a function of the dominance of the
mimetic tradition. He explores in some depth the idea of knowledge
(detachable, transmissible), the idea of expertise (expertise = knowledge,
knowledge is measured on tests, tests certify expertise), and the idea of
equality (students equally capable of learning when they enter the
classroom), and contrasts the conception of these ideas evident in the
transformative tradition. Boostrom does not offer the transformative as
the solution to the problem of mimetic beliefs and practices. Our mimetic
beliefs are well if narrowly founded. Rather he recommends "rowing
against" the tide of our own taken-for-granted beliefs about schooling,
while maintaining a healthy skepticism about how far upstream we are ever
really going to get.
In his consideration of the tragic nature of education, Nick Burbules, as
he has elsewhere, makes a provocative case for education as ultimately
tragic, that is, as always and inevitably involving loss as well as gain.
Here he takes it further to consider how tragedy is "itself an educative
force." (p. 66) Early in his piece, Burbules notes that his view is built
around "dilemmas", five conflicts "surrounding teaching [that] carry a
sense of force and immediacy for [him]." These include authority,
progress, the hegemony of canonical texts, diversity, and uncertainty in
assessment. These are not predicaments of the kind discussed by Floden,
Noddings and Boostrom; they are not really predicaments at all, at least as
defined by the editors. They constitute a set of meta-practical issues
that classroom teachers would rarely recognize, let alone articulate, on
their own. Still, Burbules' piece expresses important tensions intrinsic
to teaching and prompts conscious awareness of the inescapability, if not
the educative value, of these tensions.
Like the previous essays, Pagano's is well worth the time spent reading it.
She writes acutely as a cultural critic, bemoaning the conception of
education as oppositional that seems endemic in late 20th century American
society. Students are pitted against teachers, traditional texts against
contemporary ones, ignorance against knowledge. As with Burbules' chapter,
there is no tightly drawn teacher-centered predicament to be considered
here, nor does Pagano's point require one. She responds to an oppositional
view of education (set within a higher education context) with a call for
"generative criticism" as a method both of scholarship and of teaching.
Generative criticism "operates simultaneously within two discursive
universes: that of relationship and the necessity of acknowledgement, and
that of the public world and the claim of knowledge" (p. 92). This approach
to educational efforts makes room for the change -- in self, in
relationship, in knowledge -- that inevitably occurs when teacher, student,
and "text" meet.
Elaine Atkins takes up "the role that tacit knowledge and submerged values
play in making [curriculum] decisions" (p. 95) at the community college.
Atkins states her concern early: "It is my contention that helping teachers
become more aware of the differences between their avowed pedagogical
commitments and the resilient, silent values and assumptions that permeate
their curriculum planning will enable them to make more consistent
decisions" (p. 96). She does not limit her reference to higher education
instructors, but I would argue that the kinds of decision-making and
curriculum control she describes are rarely afforded teachers in basic
education, where, more commonly, the experience is one of having another
dictate what and how one will teach. She spends much of her text providing
rich description of the interactions and decisions of two pairs of
instructors who worked on a particular curriculum project. Yet Atkins'
"predicament" does not surface until the last paragraph of her essay and
even then it is stated obliquely. "I suspect that many educational
programs with partially articulated stances and a small set of pedagogical
principles are staffed by at least some faculty members who embrace
incompatible or incongruent positions on both an explicit and tacit level.
This creates a predicament . . . " (p. 120).
I believe that Atkins ought to have articulated a pluralized conception of
her predicament, because the predicament faced by program participants and
program proponents will be different, varying by role and personal
understandings and values. Au and Valencia do note multiple "problems and
dilemmas" (but not predicaments) in focusing on "The Complexities of
Portfolio Assessment." Like Atkins', their essay is a descriptive
analysis of a particular educational program focused on the use of
portfolio-based assessment in the elementary school. After explaining
what a portfolio assessment system might look like, they go on to highlight
dilemmas that stem from both external and internal system conditions, from
the process of professional development, and from the tasks of generating
and determining, and evaluating portfolio evidence. In all, Au and
Valencia note fourteen dilemmas and two problems in portfolio use! The
authors summarize by saying, "Throughout this chapter we have highlighted
the tension between portfolios as professional-development process and
portfolios as evaluation product (p. 140)." They ask, "Why bother with
portfolio assessment?" and provide a solid response. Still, this piece
appears to be about portfolios and only tangentially about "predicaments"
in the sense articulated by Hansen and Burbules.
Magdalene Lampert focuses more on how to respond to teaching-based
predicaments than on articulating them. She maintains that teachers have
multiple goals by virtue of the nature of the work. These goals are often
incompatible. Borrowing from William James, Lampert notes that every
dilemma is a unique one, and suggests that teachers should be prepared to
respond intelligently to conflicting goals and values, rather than be
limited to mutually exclusive choices. She uses three case studies to
"provide examples of what is possible rather than models of 'correct'
teaching practice" (p. 147). These possible strategies include "social
reorganization, restructuring the materials of instruction, and negotiating
with students" (p. 157). While these strategies do not exhaust the list of
possibilities, they do suggest "the sort of thinking required to do the
work of 'dilemma management'" (p. 157). An emphasis on redefining problems,
moving incrementally toward ever-changing goals, and exploratory teaching
are Lampert's recommendations for good teachers who seek to "act
responsibly in the fact of multiple and conflicting goals" (p. 159).
David Hansen's concern is "the gap between, on the one hand, teachers' aims
and purposes and, on the other, their non-self-conscious actions and habits
enacted in the classroom" (p. 163). This gap gives way to a specific
predicament -- that while teachers "hope to have a good influence on
students, they cannot control, much less fully imagine, the influence they
end up having" (p. 163). This predicament is not to be avoided, but engaged
by reflective teachers who think about "the habitual nature of much of what
one does as a teacher when in the presence of one's students" and who hold
"faith in the idea that unpredictability and uncertainty in teaching are
not synonymous with failure or a lack of expertise" (p. 173).
What then is the impact of this collection? First, impressively, the
reader has no choice but to acknowledge that teaching -- at any level --
calls for and calls forth intelligence, judgment, wisdom, patience, good
will, knowledge and humility. Second, the reader is also confronted with
the truth that teachers' response to predicaments matters, that educational
efforts are productive or pointless, constructive or confounding,
depending on how individual teachers face the inevitable conflicts in
values, actions, and goals. Together, these two observations caused me, at
least, to remember why we must continue to attract and prepare talented,
morally sensitive human beings to be teachers.
Lessening the impact of the important lessons noted above, however, were
three shortcomings of the collection as a whole: 1) the overall
organization of the essays did not flow in a way that increased the impact
and understanding of the volume's central idea; 2) the notion of
"predicament" is not rich and variable enough to encompass the range of
issues raised by the authors; and 3) the "compromise and trade-offs"
called for by the editors in their initial description of "predicament" is
incongruent with the response to predicament actually explored and
recommended by the authors.
The contexts for these essays are basic education, higher education, and
education "in general." They raise questions of teacher knowledge,
curriculum, student-teacher relations, the teaching-learning transaction,
assessment, specific programmatic efforts and public attitudes toward
education. This is a strength in that it conveys the complex nature of
teaching in all its guises, at all moments in the endeavor. This breadth
presents a peculiar challenge to the editors, however, who have the
responsibility of linking and ordering the essays.
The editors raise expectations for the collection's consistency by choosing
to begin with generally complementary essays by Floden, Noddings and
Boostrom. Each in turn takes up a narrowly drawn predicament faced by
teachers in the present educational environment of reform, liberalism, and
neo-positivism. One follows easily after the other examining first
knowledge for teaching, then motivation's role in teaching and learning,
and finally the pitfalls of transmission-based pedagogy. Each is concerned
with the nature of knowledge, the meaning of expertise in teaching, and the
status and role of students in learning. Each offers a sophisticated
philosophical argument that makes reference primarily to predicaments
evident in basic education. Each is carefully drawn to fit the editors'
description of "predicament" as the organizing metaphor.
So I came to expect essays of similar style, tone and focus. Nick
Burbules' essay stopped me short as not really about a predicament at all.
I was jarred a bit when Jo Anne Pagano shifted me to higher education. I
was taken aback when Atkins' essay shifted the substance and style from
more abstract to more concrete, and I could not figure out why Au and
Valencia's nonetheless interesting essay was included at all. Lampert and
Hansen returned me to the "feel" of the first three essays (though I would
have reversed the order since Lampert explored not a kind of predicament
but a way of responding to predicaments generally), but by then it was too
late.
I readily admit that this may be my own personal idiosyncratic reaction. I
prefer coherence of a particular kind in philosophical arguments, in flower
gardens, among basketball team members, and in essay collections.
Nonetheless, I believe these essays might have been arranged differently to
provide more flow (supported by an introduction that alerted the reader to
the twists and turns). Let me suggest an alternative arrangement.
I would begin with Burbules' consideration of the tragic. If all efforts
at education are, at root, tragic, then of course one who undertakes such
efforts faces specific predicaments that manifest the underlying sense of
tragedy. I would follow with Floden, Noddings, Boostrom and Hansen -- all
examples of carefully drawn "predicaments." I would ask Elaine Atkins to
rewrite her piece substantially, not because her present essay is not of
high quality, but because her "predicament" is not the central focus of the
paper as written. I would omit Au and Valencia's essay as inconsistent
with the focus and flavor of the others. Pagano and Lampert make clear
suggestions for responding to dilemmas in teaching, generative criticism
and reframing respectively. I would place these two essays together at the
end of the collection as representing potentially fruitful forms of
response to the reality articulated throughout the collection.
While the organization
and flow of this collection prompt puzzlement, I
have also considered the possibility that it is really the volume's central
image -- that of predicament -- that is not quite satisfying. Are
"misunderstandings, conflicting needs and values, unfulfilled hopes and
unmet expectations" always predicaments as the editors maintain? I think
not. Predicaments, that is, "problematic state[s] of affairs that [admit]
of no easy resolution," may arise in the face of these factors, but are not
equivalent to them. Many of the issues raised by the authors do not
represent the "damned if you do, damned if you don't" feel of a
predicament, but do convey complex challenges that elude easy or obvious
response.
The predicaments referenced in this book's title and discussed in each
essay vary, for example, in the degree to which they are intrinsic to any
effort to educate or are linked to the particular nature of schooling in
late 20th century America. Burbules' "conflicts," Lampert's "dilemmas"
and Hansen's "predicament" reside in the nature of educating, varying only
in particulars in any culture or for any teacher. Both Noddings' and
Boostrom's "predicaments" and Pagano's "problems" are prompted by cultural
attitudes (with regard to liberalism, positivism, and patriarchy) that mark
contemporary American culture. Floden's "predicament" and Au and
Valencia's "dilemmas and problems" stem from specific educational reform
efforts. Atkins' "predicament" is a hybrid, quite general in the sense
that teachers' values are always implicated in curriculum deliberation and
implementation, quite specific in the sense that only in a higher education
environment in this particular age of democratic educational reform would
these issues emerge.
Is this collection really a consideration of "teaching and its
predicaments"? Whatever the answer, the collection as presently
constituted is really about the need for intelligent response to the
indeterminacy of teaching, indeterminacy that appears in all kinds of
situations at all levels of educational endeavor. This theme runs through
all the essays. I suspect that a title conveying this sense and an
introduction that allows that predicament is just one sort of indeterminacy
would serve the collection better. In other words, as editor I would
either have changed the title and introduction or altered my selection and
organizing criteria for the essays.
One final inconsistency puzzled me. In the opening paragraph and again
later in the introduction, Hansen and Burbules note that "predicaments
require compromise and trade-offs." (p. 2, 9). But both editors and
contributing authors clearly view predicaments (or dilemmas or problems) in
teaching not as things to be (re)solved but as tensions to be encountered,
maintained and met with intelligent response. Compromise is not the same
as intelligent response, a lesson taught to us by the Progressive "prophet
of management", Mary Parker Follett. Follett (p. 1995) called for "creative
integration" and did not use the phrase "intelligent response," but the
strategies suggested by the authors in this collection (for example,
Pagano's "generative criticism" and Lampert's "reframing") are congruent
with Follett's vision. Follett offered creative integration as an antidote
to other, less effective responses to conflict such as domination and
compromise. In compromise, nobody wins; everybody is unhappy. When
important values are traded-off or compromised, no good comes of it.
Intelligence generates new options that allow for a win-win, rather than
win-lose, outcome. Intelligence, suggests the authors of this volume,
enables the teacher to visualize alternative conceptions of the situation
and take action that enlivens values. In other words, predicaments do not
require compromise. Predicaments require the intelligence and openness to
create new responses beyond the apparently mutually exclusive "givens."
This is likely what Hansen and Burbules refer to in the introduction, when
they say that predicaments can be "perhaps even a source of interest and
inquiry on the part of the teacher" (p. 2). Follett goes further to state
baldly that conflict, analogous to the tensions inherent in teaching
articulated in this volume, is a positive phenomenon, offering
opportunities for new--and intelligent--response.
Teaching and its Predicaments is a valuable and useful collection of essays
most pointedly because of its unabashed view of teaching as complex,
intellectually demanding, morally challenging, and therefore rewarding. I
recommend it to all who want to understand teaching and who crave support
for the view that teaching done well is as difficult as any human activity
imaginable. Nonetheless, I believe that the editors did not spend enough
time with this collection editing, shaping and illuminating the connections
between and among essays. If this collection of stimulating essays had been
more tightly woven, it would have been harder hitting. .
References
Graham, Pauline (Ed.) (1995). Mary Parker Follett: Prophet of
Management. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
About the Reviewer
Barbara S. Stengel
Millersville University
Professor, Philosophy of Education and Social Foundations
Ph.D. University of Pittsburgh, 1984, Philosophy of Education
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