Theme Five Theorising: the L-word and not the T-word
4.3 Theme one Orchestrating lived experiences
4.3.2 Sub-theme two: synchronous contingency management
While ACM entailed ‘engineering’ specific situations for the purposes of engendering cognitive and affective reactions on the part of the STs, synchronous contingency management (SCM) involved the in-the-moment ability to respond to and unpick, from a theoretical perspective, how the STs had reacted. Here the purpose was centred upon ‘understanding the reasons why’ (D1). In elucidating the essence of SCM, it is helpful to consider what the TE aimed to achieve in respect of promoting STs’ theoretical understanding. First, she harboured an antipathy towards formalised reflective frameworks such as Kolb (2015) and Gibbs (1988) because she regarded them as ‘an intellectual enterprise with little meaning/relevance’ for the STs (personal communication, 19.12.16). Equally irrelevant, in her view, was sharing with STs some of the dilemmas she faced when teaching them: ‘But how can a student teacher make the link and learn from what’s going on your head? It seems to be a bridge too far to me’ (TE2). Her approach to reflection was to keep it ‘embedded in the learning process’ and ‘just do it’ (ibid). Second, citing Vanassche and Kelchtermans (2014, p.123), the TE stated that she wanted her STs to apply ‘knowledge (a broad repertoire of theories of teaching) and skills to reflectively judge particular situations and decide on appropriate actions accordingly’ (personal communication, 19.12.16). The TE’s citing of Vanassche and Kelchtermans, although applied to what she hoped her STs would be able to do, summarised perfectly what was also required of her when helping her STs to make sense of experiences. In short, she needed to be able to draw on ‘a broad repertoire of theories of teaching’. For the TE, this was integral to her teaching role (TE3); but equally important, in her view, was being able to feel ‘comfortable with not knowing’, something that would not have obtained earlier in her teaching career when she felt she ‘ought to know the answers’ and her role was ‘to provide them’ (personal communication, 30.12.16).
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Being able to feel ‘comfortable with not knowing’ stemmed from the confidence of having done her ‘homework’ (ibid). This involved the key principle of planning for the ‘unpredictable’ (TE3), where the ‘unpredictable’ was often ‘predictable’ on the basis of the TE having explicitly ‘engineered’, through ACM, a particular reaction on the part of the STs. In other words, through her ACM strategies she could often predict what the STs’ reactions would be, and thus could prepare in advance how to respond to them. I would propose that this process could be captured in the oxymoron of the planned-for ‘unpredictable’. The TE’s reasoning for this was that ‘if you start planning for the ‘unpredictable’, you become more skilful when the real unpredictable happens: a) you spot it and b) you know how to react in a pedagogical manner (TE3). Following through on the idea of the planned-for ‘unpredictable’, the ‘real unpredictable’ would be the unanticipated unpredictable. When the latter occurred, the TE no longer had a sense of inadequacy from not knowing; instead, she professed to be merely ‘intrigued’ (personal communication, 30.12.16). This suggested that, through her experience and extensive preparation for the planned-for ‘unpredictable’, she regarded not-knowing as a developmental opportunity rather than an existential professional threat. This observation is borne out by the TE herself who provided an insightful metaphor in which she referred to herself at the start of her TE career as a ‘butterfly without flowers’ (TE4), implying inadequate knowledge and not knowing what to attend to. That situation had now changed (TE4, emphasis in original):
I/er So what sort of butterfly are you now?
TE I think I’m plotting a course. I want that flower; that flower; that flower, but I still want to be attentive to what flower they’ve noticed. Because that gives me an insight into what they are ready to notice and what they are not quite ready to notice yet.
But how did the STs view this process, especially in relation to ‘applying a broad repertoire of theories of teaching’? The answer to this question was perhaps best exemplified by a comment made after a spontaneous debate amongst the STs, in which they had just deployed, in the most matter-of-course way, different theories as tools for thinking about declarative and procedural approaches to language learning (4.7). At the end of the discussion, Marie (F1) observed that she was ‘pretty sure most people would not have understood what we have just said (Laughter from rest of group). It means we are using our own language’. It would appear that the STs were utilising the discourse of the discipline as a tool for thinking. But what was the source of this discourse? Its origins, as with most of the STs’ references to theory, flowed
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from the TE’s SCM skills (4.7) in unpicking lived experiences from a theoretical perspective. Iris (F2) provided a summary of the principles involved:
I think the approach she is using is maieutic in the sense she is taking out from us all our reflections about how we learn; how people can learn; all the differences, not all, because it’s infinite, but the many, many differences that are in learning.
Intrigued by her thinking, I wrote to Iris asking for further exemplification. I was particularly interested in her use of the term ‘maieutic’, derived from the Greek for midwife, to capture the SCM process. Here is part of her response:
Maieutic: of or denoting the Socratic mode of enquiry, which aims to bring a person's latent ideas into clear consciousness … I linked [TE’s name] approach to that because I felt helped by her to give life to my ideas and realise them with much more clarity, but without being told what I had to think or to do. (Iris, personal communication, 10.12.17) Iris’ observations were analogous to Scott’s (1Scott) earlier comment (4.2) on how the TE opened up ‘ipsative opportunities’. However, what Iris and Scott did not realise, or certainly did not mention, was the role of the planned-for ‘unpredictable’ and the discrete directional forces that were being deployed, a process the TE referred to as ‘convergence in the pursuit of divergence’ (D2). Nor would they have been aware of the thinking that went into creating learning experiences replete with dilemmas and incipient dissonance ─ not to mention the preparation that was required to equip oneself to respond, from a theoretical perspective, to STs’ reactions to lived experiences. The themes that now follow serve to unravel these particular mysteries. Further, I also return to SCM in 4.7 where more practical examples are explored.