Читать книгу The Art of Foreign Language Teaching - Peter Lutzker - Страница 10

The concept of teaching as a science became an accepted view of teaching in the course of the 20^th century. Its origins can be found in educational thinking in the second half of the 19^th century, largely due to the widespread influence of Johann Friedrich Herbart’s writings and the ensuing Herbartismus. From this point on, the practices of teaching and teacher education increasingly came to be seen as legitimate fields of scientific inquiry offering the underlying basis for educational theory and practice. This is evident, for instance, in most educational research in which the methods of the natural sciences have generally been accepted as a standard paradigm. Concurrently, it has also been the dominant perspective in the training of teachers, shaping the entire approach to pre-service and in-service training. This view of teaching is also inherent in the traditional development of educational research and theory in a university setting, generally set apart from the actual practice of teachers working in schools. The fact that teacher education occurs chiefly within this academic context can be seen as a further manifestation of this prevalent view of teaching as an educational science. In regard to both educational research and teaching this perspective has generally proved to be self-perpetuating: most researchers and teachers trained in this vein have naturally tended to think and work within these same categories.

Whereas the methods of science have been seen as offering a model for objective, research-based educational theory and practice, the paradigm of successful business practices has often been considered to offer a model of efficiency and productivity. From a perspective based on attaining the best possible results in the most efficient manner, schools have increasingly been viewed as a form of service institution in which teachers are held accountable for productivity, generally measured on the basis of their pupils’ standardized test scores.23 A number of studies have examined the prevalence of such business frameworks in both curriculum design and teacher education and in this context the underlying metaphor of the teacher as a technician trained to achieve optimal results has been consistently remarked upon.24 Writing in 1977, Elliot Eisner argued that in the course of the 20^th century the dominant images which formed educational views were the factory and the assembly-line, in which productivity and efficiency were the primary goals:

Consider, for example, our interest in control, in the productivity of schooling, in the creation of measurable products, in the specification of criteria against which products can be judged, in the supervision of the teaching force, in the growing breach between labor (teachers) and management (administrator), the talk about quality assurance and quality control, in contract learning, in payment by results, in the hiring of probationary teachers on the one hand and superintendents on the other. What happens is that such terms become ubiquitous, their conceptual implications are taken for granted, they become a part of our way of educational life without the benefit of critical analysis. (…) Such an image of education requires that schools be organized to prescribe, control, and predict the consequences of their actions, that those consequences be immediate and empirically manifest, and that they be measurable.25

There can be little doubt that what Eisner wrote then is more valid than ever today. Even within the very different educational traditions and systems of the United States and Germany, a deeply held view of the necessity of achieving that degree of standardization and accountability which both science and economic production demand is clearly prevalent. This has become particularly evident in policies precipitated by recent educational developments in the United States and in a number of European countries, including Germany. The disastrous results of national and international tests in regard to the basic skills of reading and mathematics along with clear deficits in pupils’ scientific knowledge have made educational reform one of the most pressing issues on the political agenda. The catastrophic economic and political dimensions of failing schools have become so apparent that it has led to an unprecedented range of large-scale programs and initiatives, for example, the “No Child Left Behind” program in the United States, or the national Bildungsstandards in Germany. In their wide-scale attempts to establish objective and measurable standards for all pupils, these programs evidence the continued dominance of a view of teaching and learning based on the dictum of education as a ‘hard science.’ The dominance of this position can also be seen in a host of curricular decisions, ranging from the widespread propagation of ‘scripted teaching’ methods in the United States, to the clear tendency towards adapting curricula to meet the requirements of increased standardized national testing at all age levels which can be found in both Germany and the United States.

What Eisner has recently described as a formalist vision of schooling based on the goal of efficiently reaching narrowly defined aims, can be considered the basis of most contemporary educational thinking and policies in both the United States and much of Europe. He writes,

…a formalist vision conceives of curriculum and teaching as rule guided activities that lead to pre-specified ends capable of being achieved if the pedagogical and curricular methods employed are appropriate. The aim of educational policy is to create institutions that make the realization of those aims possible. (…) Like the management of an assembly line, predictability, control, order and specificity are prized and pursued. The administrator’s main task is to run the organizational machine so that students achieve intended outcomes. In this vision, schooling is taken “seriously.” By seriously I mean that the student’s life within the school is analogized to the world of work. Schooling is the child’s work and the teacher’s job is to supervise its development so that it is performed well.26

It is this view of schooling and teaching, formed by the paradigms of science and business, which must be seen as the dominant contemporary perspective in shaping most educational policies. These models and their relevant metaphors can also be seen as highly influential in the framework of teacher education, shaping both pre-service and in-service training. Although it is perhaps unsurprising that Science and Business have been considered to best exemplify accomplishment and progress, the far-ranging implications of the adoption of such criteria deserve to be considered more closely. One of the central aims of this study will be to critically examine these models and metaphors in the context of exploring an alternative view of teaching and teacher education based on the concept of teaching as an art.