Discourse and the Conception-Practice Link

Researchers on subject matter knowledge have argued that teachers’ knowledge and beliefs about their subjects are important influences on what they teach and how they do so (Gess-Newsome 1999; Gudmundsodottir 1991; Hillocks, 1999; Cheng and Stimpson, 2004). Within geography, there was also interest in how teachers’ conceptions of geography have impacted on their geography lessons (Baratt-Hacking, 1996; Jewitt, 1998; Corney 2000; Kwan and Chan, 2004; Martin, 2005; Brooks, 2007). Not all the researchers agree on whether there is a direct link between subject conceptions and teachers’ work. For example, Jewitt (1998), Corney (2000) and Kwan and Chan (2004) argued that teachers’ knowledge and beliefs affect how they taught, while Catling (2004) suggested that teachers who are less well-grounded in their subject content taught in ‘traditional’ ways, using a lecture style mode more frequently. Others (Barratt-Hacking, 1996; Martin, 2000, 2005; Brooks, 2007) were less convinced of the link between subject conceptions and teachers’ practice.

Perhaps some of these differences may be attributed to the groups of teachers studied and the variations in context that applied to each case. For example, experience of teaching was one of the many factors that may have affected the research outcomes. Jewitt (1998) and Brooks (2007) studied experienced teachers whereas Barratt-Hacking (1996), Corney

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(2000) and Martin (2004, 2005) worked with their novice counterparts. Catling (2004) and Martin (2004, 2005) also worked with primary school teachers, whereas the others focused on secondary school teachers. Kwan and Chan (2004) did their work with teachers in Hong Kong whereas all the other research was based on teachers in the UK. The point here is that the particularities of the context in which research was based matters, and this has important methodological and analytical implications for my own research. As Moore (2004: 11) argued, it is important that we seek

…better understandings of what it means to be a teacher, of the dialogic relationship between our classroom perspectives and practices, and the wider social contexts within which these perspectives are situated.

However understanding each context in detail without an explanatory framework for why the relationships between conceptions and practice are similar or different across studies is ultimately limiting. I therefore reviewed the literature for a theoretical perspective that would operationalise my study on teachers’ conceptions and practice across different contexts.

In a review of the literature on teacher education, Wideen et al. (1998) called for an ecological approach to researching teacher education, based on Capra’s (1996) ‘new ecological synthesis’ in Science. This new synthesis rejects the idea that the whole can be understood by studying its parts, and argued for the need to understand the teaching and learning process as a whole. A de-contextualised study of pre-service teachers and how they learn to teach would therefore ‘miss the complexities of the learning-to-teach equation’ (Wideen et al., 1998: 168). What is missing in the ecological approach,

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however, is the explicit study of power relationships within education. Bernstein (1990, 2003), for example, was conscious that the enterprise of education was neither neutral nor objective, and that the types of curriculum and forms of pedagogy in education were directly related to social class and the power relations in society between the classes. Lambirth (2006) provided a short introduction to the influence of Bernstein’s work in the area of initial teacher education in the UK, arguing that we could view teacher education and the National Curriculum, for example, as aligned to the dominant (middle class) groups’ cultural aspirations and values.

This recognition that power affects both the curriculum (what is worth knowing) and pedagogy (how best to transmit this knowledge) is useful to my study. However, Bernstein’s analysis is grounded in a structuralist point of view that sees power as a tool exercised within a conflict of interest among social classes. This perspective does not capture fully the processes at work in teaching because it is not sensitive enough to the nuances of power in contemporary post-modern society. I agree with Ryan (1991) instead that no one individual or group (or social class) ever fully controls the process of schooling, and that both the structure and outcome of schools are products of a range of individual and group desires and actions. Such a view does not cast power as something wielded by just one group, but rather, power should be seen as a ‘bottom-up capillary process of social relations’ (Ball, 1993: 112).

The philosopher/historian Michel Foucault provides this perspective, describing the educational system as a ‘political means of maintaining and modifying the

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appropriateness of discourses with the knowledge and the power that they bring with them’ (Foucault, 1971: 46). By ‘discourse’, Foucault refers to the ‘parameters within which our perceptions of the social world and our actions within it are framed’. These parameters are ‘essentially produced and sustained by language and knowledge, and controlled and patrolled by ideologies’ (Moore, 2004: 28). I argue that utilising an analysis of the discourses that frame ‘good’ (geography) teaching in my research illuminates and explains the links between conceptions and practice better, and that this conceptualisation can be applied to studies across contexts.

2.4.1 A Discursive Framing of the ‘Good’ Teacher

Moore (2004) discussed the shifting notions of a ‘good teacher’ in the UK and the particular types of discourse related to these changes: the ‘charismatic’ teacher in the 1980s, the ‘reflective practitioner’ (early 1990s) to that of the ‘skilled craftsman’ (late 1990s) and the ‘effective teacher’ (post-2000). This conceptualisation of discourse and its effects on our understandings of ‘good’ teaching is important to my study as it implies that dominant discourses provide benchmarks against which what teachers do is measured. This has implications for whether teachers draw upon their subject conceptions or not in their teaching, which my study aims to explore. At the same time, discourses are not mutually exclusive over both time and space. Moore (2004) observed that different types of frames for ‘good’ teaching exist at any one point, each reflecting the characteristics and dispositions that are deemed desirable in a teacher.

In her study of pre-service teachers in the UK, Brooks (2007) suggested that teachers are influenced by five different types of cultures of influence in their work – the education

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culture, the geography culture, the geography education culture, the school culture and their own personal cultures. Teachers’ practice was idiosyncratically situated where these different cultures overlapped. This is important to my study because it indicates that teachers are situated in a multiplicity of cultures (or contexts) at any point in time and draw from these to different extents in their practice. In this thesis, these contexts are not seen as neutral entities, but instead each is permeated by discourses on what makes a ‘good teacher’. Such discourses may complement or be in conflict with one another within and across contexts. Each teacher is therefore situated within a complex web of discourse which he/she needs to negotiate in order to be a ‘good teacher’, and I suggest that the examination of this process of reconciling discourse holds the key to explaining the links between teachers’ subject conceptions and their practice.

At this juncture, it is important to caveat that Foucault’s discursive framing of power has been criticised as leaving no room for individual agency. For example, in Discipline and Punish (1979), Foucault draws on the metaphor of the Panopticon, a prison where the captive is always visible, and the captor, never. Hence, from the captive’s perspective there is always the possibility that he/she is being observed. As a consequence, he/she never actually has to be under surveillance; the possibility is enough (Erlandson, 2005: 663). Foucault further argues that this insidious form of power, and its associated techniques of discipline that were refined in prison, has distributed throughout society. Moore (2004) also pointed out that according to Foucault, discourse is especially powerful because it does not appear constructed, but is seen as ‘natural’. Any opposition to the norms dictated by discourse is therefore pathologised. This implies that a

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discursive framing of ‘good’ teaching is potentially limiting since its imposed parameters and frameworks leave little room for alternative discussions of teachers’ work (Atkinson, 2008).

However, even though Foucault himself did not theorise individual agency and ability to subvert discourse, those working in the Foucauldian tradition have. Butler (1990, 1993), for example, posits that what we assume to be ‘natural’ about our (gender) identities is in fact non-existent but is instead a cultural performance. She suggested, after Foucault, that the ‘political regulations and disciplinary practices which produce ostensibly coherent gender are effectively displaced from view’, and in this manner, society ‘disciplines’ the individual while the cause of these gendered performances are seen to come from the ‘self’ and are therefore ‘natural’ (1990: 136). However, in her discussion of the transgressive potential of ‘drag’ (Butler, 1993), Butler argued that those who cross-dress transgress societal norms that are tied to explicit performances of gender identity. In so doing, the discourses that frame a subject’s performed (gender identity) are exposed, and an individual therefore has the potential to consciously subvert social norms.

In discussing teacher identities, specifically that of ‘good’ teachers, Moore (2004: 31) also alluded to an individual’s potential to resist discourse when he stated that

…discourses, for all their objective power and dominance, and for all their capacity to infiltrate the consciousness, are neither immutable nor impenetrable…both their constantly evolving nature and our ability to at least be aware of them inevitably render them contestable and challengeable (Moore, 2004: 31).

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I suggest therefore that any examination of the ways in which discourses frame ‘good’ teachers, affecting whether teachers draw upon their subject conceptions when teaching, must be mediated by the view that each individual can potentially be conscious of these discourses, and in the process, resist them. The ways in which the respondents in my study reconcile (and resist) discourse can be seen in how the individual chooses to ‘perform’ as geography teachers in the Teaching Practice context. I am interested therefore to unpack why teachers, in specific contexts, choose particular performances of ‘good’ teaching. It is also important to caveat here that it is not the actual performance that is important to my research but the factors that influence the teacher’s decision to ‘perform’ in various ways (this has important methodological implications for my study, which I will discuss in Chapter Four).

2.4.2 Framing ‘Good’ Teachers in Context

In this section, I outline the literature on how ‘good’ teaching is framed in different contexts, namely the national education, teacher education, school, subject and personal contexts. I suggest that discursive structures in each context are mutually constitutive - discourse in one context has implications for how ‘good’ teaching is framed in the others. In my research I argue that teachers have the potential to mediate these discursive structures in various ways, depending on their consciousness of and ability to resist discourses. I also suggest that examining these discursive structures will shed light on why the literature on the links between subject conceptions and teachers’ practice is controversial.

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National Education Context

Researchers have noted that state ideologies and practices that aim to control the school curriculum have important consequences for teachers. Lawton (1989) and Bell (1999) provided overviews of educational policy in the UK context in recent decades, arguing that increasing state control of the curriculum eroded teachers’ role as curriculum makers and relegated them to the role of delivering the curriculum instead. Power and Whitty (1999) noted parallel situations in other places such as the USA, Australia and New Zealand, and argued that moves by the state to regulate the curriculum actually privileged within schools a narrow and partial version of knowledge over which teachers have little control. This contrasts with Louis’ (1990) findings that when teachers’ craft knowledge was respected in countries like Denmark, it was the teachers, rather than policy makers who controlled the curriculum. Across different contexts, therefore, state policies regarding the educational curriculum had varying repercussions for teachers’ professional responsibility in developing a curriculum for their students. By extension, this affected how ‘good’ teachers are framed at the level of the national education context.

The literature also suggests that another important element within the national education context is the way in which states appraise and evaluate teachers. This is reminiscent of Foucault’s idea that

The examination combines the technique of an observing hierarchy and those of a normalising judgment. It is a normalising gaze that makes it possible to qualify, to classify and to punish. It establishes over individuals a visibility through which one differentiates and judges them (Foucault, 1979: 173).

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For example, Ball (1990, 1993) argued that the marketisation of education subjected teachers to systems of ‘administrative rationality’ where ‘constraints are replaced by incentives’, prescription by ‘quality or outcome assessments’ and coercion is replaced by ‘self-steering’ (Ball, 1993: 111). Other authors have also studied the recent history of teacher appraisals and commented on how they were a means of control over what teachers did in the UK (Bartlett, 2000; Hall and Noyes, 2009). Halse et al. (2004: 586) also found that similar bureaucratic models dominated in other national contexts like the USA, Europe, Korea, Mexico, Australia and New Zealand.

Such models of teacher appraisal frame what is valued in a teacher, which teachers then have to reconcile with their own preferences and beliefs about the nature of their work. For example, Lasky (2005) suggested that secondary school teachers in the USA faced challenges in reconciling new reform contexts with their identities as professionals whose main purpose was to develop and nurture students. Connell (2009) also suggested that the Australian framework he studied impinged on teachers’ agency to act in ways that benefitted a diversified student base. Moore (2004: 33) found that because teachers in the UK were concerned to be seen as doing a good job, they balanced their personal pedagogical orientations and preferences in relation to discursive frameworks in various ways, ‘shifting their ground constantly and pragmatically in relation to what is possible’. The above discussion implies that in my research, I need to unpack the dominant discourses that frame ‘good’ teaching in the Singapore national education context (Chapter Three) and to study carefully how each individual responds to such discourse in teaching geography. I argue that it is through investigating this process of reconciliation

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and resistance that we can better understand the nature of the relationship between teachers’ subject conceptions and the ways in which they teach geography.

Teacher Education Context

Munby et al. (2001) provided an overview of the changing emphasis of teacher education since the 1960s, from the passing along of findings from research to teachers in the 1960s which would form teachers’ knowledge base, to the acquisition of specific and identifiable skills in the 1970s through to concerns with the development of teachers’ professional knowledge in the 1990s. Furlong and Maynard (1995) also outlined dominant models of learning to teach, namely the competency-based and reflective- practitioner models that have underpinned many teacher education programmes in the UK in the recent past. This changing emphasis of the content of teacher education courses is arguably the result of the different research interests across time (and space) in the area of teacher education, which in their turn are mutually constituted by discourses at the national education level. For example, Furlong and Maynard (1995) attributed the growth of the competency-based models of teacher education to state intervention. In my study it is therefore important to understand how discourses within the teacher education context in Singapore are linked to other contexts like the national education context, and affect the ways in which ‘good’ teaching is understood by my respondents.

The literature on teacher education also suggests that pre-service teachers negotiate a number of competing and sometimes contradictory discourses when undergoing teacher preparation programmes. First of all, the reflective-practitioner model of teacher education (Schon, 1983, 1987; Loughran, 1996; Loughran and Russell, 1997) advocated

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that pre-service teachers should reflect on their teaching relative to established education principles, as well as to critique these educational principles. However, researchers (Furlong et al., 1988; Bullough et al., 2008; Gaudelli and Ousley, 2009) found that there was often little opportunity built into teacher education course structures for pre-service teachers to reflect on or critique what they were learning. Munby et al. (2001) noted a similar contradiction within teacher education where constructivism was advocated in classroom teaching, but did not apply to the education of pre-service teachers. This implies that the value of constructivism as a ‘good’ teaching principle is preached to pre- service teachers, but they are not given the chance to construct this knowledge for themselves and to reflect on its relevance to their teaching. This disjuncture between theory and practice within teacher education is relevant to pre-service teachers’ understandings and attitudes towards ‘good’ teaching and needs to be investigated in my own research.

Furlong et al. (1988) and Furlong and Maynard (1995) also noted that in the UK, school- based teacher training appeared to have gained dominance in teacher education, in alignment with the state preference for the competency discourse over the reflective- practitioner model (Moore, 2004). The competency model refers to the skills that pre- service teachers are supposed to acquire, develop and display for the purposes of assessment within teacher education courses, with the concomitant expectation that these are best developed through school experience. This has implications for how pre-service teachers might come to perceive ‘good’ teaching as there is a strong conscious effort to fit into their mentor’s way of doing things (Calderhead and Shorrock, 1997; Munby et al.,

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2001). The role of mentors in shaping perceptions of ‘good’ teaching is also compounded by the hierarchical relationships between pre-service teachers and their mentors, with the latter taking the lead in establishing the nature of their professional relationship, and in creating opportunities for the pre-service teacher to learn from them (Ferrier-Kerr, 2009).

Subject Context

My study focuses on geography pre-service teachers, and as such, when discussing ‘good’ teaching, subject-specific interpretations of how best to teach geography need to be taken into account as well. These ideas about teaching geography can vary over time and space and are affected by the national education and teacher education contexts. In the UK, it was observed that the field of geography education had moved from one that focused on curriculum development in the 1970s to an almost exclusive focus on pedagogic matters in the 1980s and 1990s (Morgan and Lambert, 2011). In recent years, fieldwork and other forms of pedagogy that encouraged active learning and engagement with the real world were encouraged as viable forms of pedagogy in geography. For example, in its manifesto, A Different View (2009), the Geographical Association promoted the use of geographical enquiry as a means of actively engaging learners with the subject and the real world. This can also be seen in handbooks for secondary geography like Learning to Teach Geography in the Secondary School (Lambert and Balderstone, 2000) and Secondary Geography Handbook (Balderstone, 2006). Such understandings about teaching geography well using experiential approaches are related to about what doing geography and entails and what types of bodies are involved in geographical studies in my research (see discussion in Section 2.3).

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There has also been a renewed interest in the subject matter itself and its purpose in education in general in the last ten years in the UK. This is exemplified in A Different View (Geographical Association, 2009), as well as in handbooks like Geography (Morgan and Lambert, 2005) and Secondary Geography Handbook (Balderstone, 2006) where