Lee Shulman
Lee Shulman is giving a talk entitled “From ‘Psychologizing the Subject Matter’: A Century of Thought on the Specificity and Generality of Teaching and Teacher Education.”
At the dinner last night, Terence McDonald, a historian and the dean of LS&A, noted that the chair established 125 (or maybe 126) years ago, whose anniversary we are celebrating, has in fact been vacant since 1907, as far as he has been able to determine. Shulman refers to this missing chair periodically throughout the talk.
Here are some notes:
1. He notes that John Dewey made the 5th spot on a recent list of the 10 most harmful books of the 19th and 20th century. He argued that there were two Deweys—Dewey-sub1, the complex and nuanced philosopher who was deeply aware of the importance of knowledge and Dewey-sub2, the idealogue who sanctioned the focus on child-centered and process-oriented excesses of progressive education.
2. He also noted that when he proposed the need for an understanding of content as part of “pedagogical content knowledge” he askedeveryone in a large audience to write down what the “missing paradigm” in education research was—no one came up with content knowledge. He also noted that this idea is much more congenial with higher education than with K-12; his premise “Given a text…” has been attacked as the wrong starting point by early childhood researchers (who would prefer “Given a child”).
3. Professional education is distinctive in that one is taught to do something. Different professions have their own distinctive pedagogies. [Aside about mathematics and engineering teaching—“dorsal pedagogy”—where the professor writes on a blackboard and glances over his should at students].
Professions have their own routines of pedagogy—“rules of engagement” for interacting with the students. Lectures don’t—could give this lecture without an audience. In signature pedagogies of professions student production is an integral piece. Notes term “accountable talk”—from elementary education. Impossibility of invisibility. Need to render students visible, accountable, and active.
Signature pedagogies are both affect-laden and relational—need to exchange with one another.
Why was Dewey the authors of one of the 10th most harmful books? University was a kind of holy place, a special kind of sanctuary where you preserved, interpreted, and transmited sacred texts of disciplines. Unsolved question in role of relation between teacher education (and professional education) and disciplines is the question of what is the role of text in the profession.
Clergy is a field where they have found a good balance between focus on the text and on the person.
[I’m not sure what the text means here—what is the the text in engineering?]
Were the people who put Dewey at #5 on the list of harmful books right? In many ways, yes. John Dewey permitted Dewey-sub2 to dominate Dewey-sub1. Dewey-sub2 is the seminary without the text; content and pedagogy in different shopping malls. Arts and Sciences took the bat; pedagogy took the ball, and there was no game.
comments
Although I deeply agree with most of what Shulman had to say, I’m troubled by this issue of what “the text” is. I think it’s not coincidental that in the two professional domains he focused on—law and divinity—the texts were written down by someone else, long ago, and are authoritative. His model would work quite well for the case of medieval science, where problems could be solved by consulting Aristotle. It works much less well in medicine, for example, where “the text” is a moving and distributed target.
It is fair to say that education has done a terrible job of identifying the facts that underlie successful teaching and learning, but this is a process that clearly will be more like medicine than like either legal or theological education.