A discursive constructionist perspective on action, knowledge and understanding

Having provided an overall description of the study’s research questions, participants and data-gathering and analysis procedures, the rest of this chapter deals with more fundamental issues about the methodological approach taken by the study. Some fundamental problems pertaining to the role of discourse data in the study of teacher cognition are highlighted and addressed. As will be seen, the metatheoretical

assumptions inherent in a social practice and constructionist epistemology have critical consequences for the ways in which decisions are made about which data are collected, how they are analysed, and how the findings can be interpreted. Key to these

methodological decisions is the ontological status of the key constructs under study, such as the different conceptions of teachers’ knowledge. If we go back to the quote from Freeman in section 4.4.1, we can see that he grants PCK two possible ontological statuses. It can be some kind of pre-existing knowledge on which engagement in classroom practices is based. Or, it can be knowledge ‘which that engagement expresses in practice’ (2002: 6). With the second option, Freeman opens up the possibility that knowledge, rather than being the underlying or ‘hidden’ cause of whatever ways teachers and students engage with content, may be found in those very practices. This study overall takes the second option by adopting a ‘social practice’ perspective on the phenomena it investigates - CLIL teachers’ language awareness as part of their practical knowledge for teaching. In this perspective, there is no assumption that the ‘outer’ world of behaviours and actions is somehow controlled by an ‘inner’ world of cognitions such as knowledge and belief. Knowledge is not some pre-existing mental entity which swings into action every time we engage in a practice. Rather, knowledge is manifested in and through practice itself.

A social practices approach does not separate the inside and the outside, but sees the achievement of practical outcomes as mediated and prefigured by ‘arrangements of sayings, doings, set-ups and relationships’ (Kemmis 2009: 32). In a practice

realm forever out of sight, but as bound up in the flow of human activity. As Schatzki (2001: 2) defines them, practices are ‘ embodied, materially mediated arrays of human activity centrally organized around shared practical understanding’. In this view, then, there is no need to separate ‘cognitive’ phenomena such as ‘knowledge’ or

‘understanding’ from other practical actions. The accounts and descriptions of practice that people produce are essentially part of that same practice. As Bourdieu points out, the ‘knowledges’ produced in practitioners’ representations or explanations of practice are ‘the product of the same generative schemes as the practices they claim to account for’ (Bourdieu 1977: 20). Thus, in this thesis, CLIL teachers’ language awareness (TLA-CLIL) as an aspect of their PCK is theorized as an essential component of the shared practical understanding which contributes to the organization of the embodied, materially mediated activity of teaching content through a foreign language.

Related to this social practice perspective, the study also adopts a social constructionist approach. Potter (1996: 97-98) provides a useful description of social construction by comparing two metaphors: the mirror and the construction yard. In the mirror metaphor, language is seen as reflecting how things are in the world. People’s descriptions and accounts of reality can be more or less reliable, but the assumption is that there are things out there in the world which can be pretty unproblematically reflected in language. In the ‘construction yard’ metaphor, people’s descriptions and accounts are seen as constructing versions of the world. Facts are not just ‘out there’, but people can work up descriptions and accounts to make them ‘facts’. Also, descriptions and

accounts are themselves constructed, assembled from sets of different materials and resources, such as words, expressions, metaphors, rhetorical flourishes etc. The social constructionist approach is entirely compatible with, and indeed shares Wittgensteinian roots with, the social practice perspective (Potter 1996; Schatzki 1996). It is critical of a cognitivist view of language which, as Potter puts it, ‘loses sight of the way language is oriented to activities: it obscures its practical nature.’ (Potter 1996: 72. Italics in

original). Thus, rather than using language to gain access to a hidden mental realm, or to ascertain the reliability or truth of participants’ descriptions or accounts, a social

constructionist perspective focuses on

(…) a world of descriptions, claims, reports, allegations and assertions as parts of human practices, and it works to keep these as the central topic of research

rather than trying to move beyond them to the objects or events that seem to be the topic of such discourse.

(Potter and Hepburn 2008: 275)

In this study, then, the teachers’ descriptions, claims and reports relating to their practices as elicited in the different verbal commentaries, are themselves a topic of research, and not simply a window onto their pre-existing cognitions. The theoretical shift in the study is to take a step further what both Loughran, Mulhall and Berry (2004) and Hashweh (2005) were already starting to do by moving PCK out of the realm of individual cognition and seeing it as a construction. In doing so, the study aims to circumvent some of the theoretical and methodological problems which have beset