Davis, B. & Sumara, D. (December 2003). A Genealogical Tree of Contemporary Conceptions of
Teaching Educational Insights, 8(2). [Available: http://www.ccfi.educ.ubc.ca/publication/insights/v08n02/contextualexplorations/sumara/sumaradavis.html]
A Genealogical Tree
of Contemporary Conceptions of Teaching
Brent Davis & Dennis Sumara
University
of Alberta
Edmonton,
Alberta
In
the Fall 2002 term, along with colleague Elaine Simmt,
we co-instructed a doctoral seminar in the Department
of Secondary Education at the University of Alberta—EDSE
608, Cognition and Curriculum.
In the outline, we described the course as follows:
The
main purposes of this seminar are to review recent
philosophical, theoretical, and empirical research
into human cognition and to situate such work against
the particular concerns of educators and educational
researchers.
As
a backdrop to these discussions, the course will begin
with brief reviews of two earlier “moments”
in theorizing about cognition. The first of these
might be described as oriented by an analytic (from
the Greek analuein, “to break down”) attitude. Philosophy
and research in this moment tended to be framed by
ancient and uninterrogated cultural assumptions on
the absolute and reducible nature of knowledge. Work
oriented by this attitude is often characterized by
rather severe distinctions between mental and physical,
thought and action, internal and external, individual
and collective, knowing subject and known object,
rationalist and empiricist, and so on.
The
second moment in cognitive theory that we will consider
was prompted by a rejection of some of these “Cartesian
dualisms.” Originally informed by phenomenological,
psychoanalytic, and pragmatist philosophies—and
later spurred by postmodernist, poststructuralist,
and various critical perspectives—these discourses
worked to problematize the sorts of the dyads listed
in the preceding paragraph.
Although
certainly not true of all these discourses from the
second moment, a tendency among them has been an ignorance
(often deliberate) of the biological bases of knowing
and knowledge. This matter has moved to center-stage
with recent advances in brain‑imaging and genetic
engineering technologies. As well, research in ecology
and in the complexity sciences has contributed to
an expansion of the notion of cognition, as the phenomenon
has now been stretched across processes that range
from the subcellular to the planetary. The bulk of
the course will be devoted to the study of these emergent
discourses and their significances for matters of
teaching and curriculum.
Included
among the readings were summary accounts of the development
of Cartesian rationalism, the influence of Darwin
on philosophy, the rise of structuralist and poststructuralist
discourses, and the emergence of ecology and complexity
science—all of which were framed by the intertwining
questions: What counts as knowledge? How do people
come to know? and, What are curriculum and teaching
imagined to be?
The
principal texts in the course were Francisco Varela’s
(1999) Ethical know-how: Action, wisdom, and cognition,
parts of Fritjof Capra’s (2002) The
hidden connections: Integrating the biological, cognitive,
and social dimensions of life into a science of sustainability,
and parts of Engaging minds: Learning and
teaching in a complex world that we co-authored with Rebecca Luce-Kapler (2000). In all three of
these texts, poststructuralist, phenomenological,
and ecological discourses are integrated with recent
research in neurosciences, evolutionary biology, and
the complexity sciences. We overlapped and interlaced
these readings with one another and with ongoing interpretive
writing assignments, some aspects of which can be
discerned in the articles that are linked to this
one.
As
co-instructors, we decided before we began that the
course would be at least in part structured around
a project for which everyone involved would share
responsibility. We weren’t actually sure what
that project might be, but we felt a useful exercise
to help us think through the possibilities was to
assemble a glossary of key vocabulary as the course
evolved. The final version of the glossary was 12
pages of single-spaced text in 9-point font that included
more than 100 terms. The glossary’s entries—which
ranged from ancient Greek mythos to current neurophenomenology—were identified
as we went along. Every two or three weeks, we generated
a new version in which previous meanings were elaborated,
new entries were included, and potential new entries
were identified—the past reconfigured by the
present, giving shape to an imagined future.
Almost immediately the structure of the glossary proved to be a little
troublesome. With the first iteration, it became clear
that the organizational strategy of alphabetization
wasn’t going to be very useful to us. It was
almost as though the glossary was actively resisting
such an arrangement. Since our uses of the terms in
the actual seminars tended to be clustered around
different worldviews and sensibilities, in the second
iteration of the glossary, entries were arranged according
to the era and the mindset in which they seemed to
be embedded and from which they seemed to emerge.
In
the processes of clustering the terms and of juxtaposing
the clusters, an interesting thing happened. As a
collective, we started to attend more on the deep
similarities of the various traditions than on the
superficial differences among their vocabularies.
Our attentions came to be focused less on reasonable
definitions and more on the histories of the ideas—specifically,
on those moments at which shifts or differences in
opinion contributed to the emergences of very different
ways about thinking about knowledge, learning, and
teaching. Put differently, we found ourselves assembling
a genealogy of popular answers to the question, What
counts as knowing?
The artifact at the center of this writing, our genealogical tree of contemporary
conceptions of teaching is one of the results. It
is an attempt to trace some of the origins, evolutions,
and entanglements of the terms that we use to talk
about teaching, and it is organized around the moments
at which and the reasons for which once-figurative
notions froze into literalness.
Following
Foucault, we understand a genealogy to be a critical
interpretive practice that is intended to untangle
some of the ways in which discourses constitute the
objects, practices, and/or subjects that are available
for study. Unlike a history, which is popularly understood
to be a linearized chronological narrative of events
that are seen to have precipitated a specific outcome,
a genealogy is a trace of several strands of happenings
as they pull away from and sometimes re-entangle with
one another and as they give rise to a proliferation
of possibilities. Hence, whereas histories most often
obey the image of a (time)line, the image that is
most commonly associated with a genealogy is a tree.
When
the notion of genealogy is applied to a cluster of
ideas—like, for instance, contemporary conceptions
of teaching—certain accommodations are required.
For example, unlike biological ancestry, concepts
do not emerge through successive generations. Critical
moments in their evolutions can occur at any time,
with whole new branches of thought growing out of
old roots or dormant stumps. Hence, the emergence
of a cluster of ideas can’t usefully be interpreted
or represented in terms of any sort of chronology.
But the branching image of a tree is still useful,
provided it is organized around key theoretical developments
and not chronological events.
It
is for this reason that this genealogy starts in the
middle of the 19th century with Darwin, not in the
first millennium BCE with the beginnings of formal
Western philosophy. Darwin offered a new way of thinking
about the universe. He proposed a dramatic break from
the model of the cosmos that had been assumed at least
since Pythagoras and Plato. The influence of Darwin’s
ideas on contemporary thinking about learning and
teaching has been nothing short of revolutionary.
What Darwin did was to propose physical explanations
for the diversity of forms that are observed and the
transitions that those forms undergo. His theories
were offered in place of the metaphysical accounts
that had been entrenched for millennia, and which
in fact prompted the emergence of the very scientific
enterprise that supported Darwin’s work.
Up
until Darwin, scientific research consisted mainly
in efforts to map out the faultlines of the cosmos—that
is, to identify how forms in this universe are and
always were distinct from one another. The results
were extensive taxonomies—systems to parse up
the universe. Darwin introduced a new way of thinking.
Rather than focusing on currentdifferences, he looked back in time to historical emergences.
Few others had thought to do, since it was assumed
that the forms that were observed were the forms that
always were. Darwin’s new way of thinking involved
attending to the common origins of such things and
the conditions that prompted their divergences from
one another.
His
theory did more than interrupt entrenched metaphysical
assumptions. It challenged what it meant to do science.
The dichotomizing attitude championed by the ancient
Greeks and maintained by Descartes and Bacon did not
suit phenomena whose forms were always changing. Science
moved from the quest for dichotomies toward the examination
of bifurcations—or, in terms of narrative structures,
from histories to genealogies—or, mathematically
speaking, from Euclid’s geometry of points and
lines to fractal geometry’s trees, webs, and
endless detail (Davis & Sumara, 2000).
Over the last century or so, in various forms, theories that are rooted
in evolutionary thought have taken hold in educational
research. Included among these are constructivist,
constructionist, critical, sociocultural, poststructuralist,
and ecological discourses. Let us try to map out some
of the current and historical influence of evolutionary
theory by pointing to the histories of a handful of
contemporary terms for the cultural phenomenon of
teaching.
The
roots of many current synonyms for teaching reach
far back into history and extend into many ways of
thinking about what counts as knowing. However, even
as the assumptions and cultural conditions that frame
teaching have been subject to continuous and dramatic
evolutions, vocabularies have tended to linger. A
result is that current discussions of teaching tend
to be framed by terms that have never been completely
dissociated from the webs of assumption from which
they were originally drawn.
We’re
going to offer a truncated genealogy of the following
terms: educating, nurturing, indoctrinating, inducting,
disciplining, instructing, enlightening, training,
conditioning, facilitating, modeling, mentoring, enculturating,
empowering, emancipating, participating, occasioning,
conversing, and caring. (A more detailed version of
this genealogy is available in Davis, forthcoming.)
We’ll
begin with a map of what we’re up to. This discussion
is structured around a small number of key branching
points in Western thinking. Specifically, the discussion is developed around breaks in
opinion that gave or that are giving rise to diverse
interpretations of knowledge, learning, and teaching.
In
what follows, we offer brief descriptions of the branching
points, as illustrated on the tree image. Unfortunately,
we are constrained by a linear discussion of a nonlinear
form, and so these notes are organized as a series of
traces from the trunk to the outer branches starting
from the left-most part of the image and moving to the
right. (Again, this discussion has been rather severely
abbreviated. An elaborated version in available in Davis,
forthcoming.)
THE METAPHYSICAL
We
begin by looking at those words that arose in metaphysical
traditions around the assumptions that the truth is
out there and that learning is mainly a matter of getting
something from the outside to someplace inside of oneself.
THE METAPHYSICAL > GNOSIS
Assumptions
of the separation of mental and physical are pervasive
across ancient Western mystical, religious, and analytic
philosophical traditions. With this notion firmly in
place, it is not surprising that those who focused on
questions of spiritual knowledge and deep meaning—what
the ancient Greeks called gnosis—would see teaching in terms of the soul.
THE METAPHYSICAL > GNOSIS > MYSTICISM
Those
caught up in mysticist traditions tended to focus on
the individual, and they cast teaching as educing
or educating—literally, as “pulling out” or “drawing
forth” the knowledgeable self and that was seen
as a monad locked in a biological prison. Such work
was often associated with mothering; hence the emergence
of terms such as nurturing, “suckling.”
THE METAPHYSICAL > GNOSIS > RELIGION
Those
teachers who were oriented by religious institutions
understood their efforts in terms of pulling people
into established orders rather than drawing people out
of themselves. Their vocabularies for teaching made
this point explicit: inducting (“drawing in”), disciplining (understood in terms of enforcing habits of action
and interpretation), and so on.
THE METAPHYSICAL > EPISTEME
The
complement of gnosis,
spiritual knowledge, in the cosmology of the ancient
Greeks, was episteme, everyday know-how. Episteme was unconcerned with matters
of wisdom or questions of why things are. Its realm
was how things worked, and it began with the fact that
what is, is.
THE METAPHYSICAL > EPISTEME > RATIONALISM
With
Descartes, this starting place—with what is, rather than with why what is, is—was institutionalized as the first principle in an unshakeable
edifice of knowledge (i.e., his cogito). Those who followed his lines of thought began to think of teaching
as instructing—literally,
as imposing structure to enable the learner to organize
and assemble a rational and coherent internal model
of the external world, one that was illuminated by reason.
THE METAPHYSICAL > EPISTEME > EMPIRICISM
Those
who followed Francis Bacon’s empiricism, by contrast,
became obsessed by the power of experimental science
and would extend their obsessions with measurement and
their cause‑effect logic to a teaching that was
all about training
and conditioning. Consistent with the empiricist’s dream of observerless
observations and measurerless measurements, teaching
also came to be associated with examining.
These
all make sense—but they only make sense when the
learner is seen in terms of an incomplete being, something
striving for an unrealizable wholeness. And when what
counts as knowing is something that’s out there
that needs to be taken in.
THE PHYSICAL
But
a totally different way of thinking emerges if learning
is imagined to be a reaching out rather than a taking
in. This is a shift that was triggered by Darwin, along
with the likes of Rousseau and Vico, who proposed that
learning is all about an endless tinkering that’s
made necessary by the fact that learner and context
are dynamic and co‑implicated. In terms of what
counts as knowing, through the 20th century the frame
of discussions shifted from the metaphysical belief
that the truth is out there to the physically rooted
belief that truth keeps happening.
THE PHYSICAL > INTERSUBJECTIVITY
This conceptual move introduced
a new problem: What is knowledge, if not some other-worldly
form that is mined and possessed? The response of theorists
was the development of the notion of intersubjectivity—that
truth was a matter of collective accord, not objective
reality. At the turn of 20th century, the idea was embraced
and elaborated by such discourses as pragmatism, phenomenology,
and psychoanalysis.
THE PHYSICAL > INTERSUBJECTIVITY
> STRUCTURALISM
One
of the immediate elaborations of the notion of intersubjectivity
was the idea that truths and meanings weren’t
about references to an external reality, but about coherences with one another. Truth, that is, wasn’t rooted
in indubitable and rigorous fact, but in viable and
consistent interpretation. This structuralist idea was
first applied to phenonema like language (in the work
of de Saussure) and mathematics (in the work of the
collective known as Bourbaki). By the mid-20th century,
it had been applied to personal cognition (by Piaget),
interpersonal activity (by Vygotsky), and all domains
of knowledge (by Popper, Kuhn, and others). In the hands
of psychologists, sociologists, and educational researchers,
structuralist insights morphed into constructivisms
and social constructionisms. From them come conceptions
of teaching as facililitating, modeling,
and mentoring.
THE PHYSICAL > INTERSUBJECTIVITY
> POSTSTRUCTURALISMS
Poststructuralist
discourses are elaborations of structuralist discourses.
They add the important point that meaning and truth
are not just about coherences, but about deferrals.
Poststructuralist discourses ask us to attend to the
unsaid and the unsayable—what has become transparent
and must remain transparent in order for particular
worldviews to be maintained. For educators, a central
point of poststructuralist discourses is that unjust,
constraining, and pervasive structures are knitted into
popular conceptions of ‘the way things are.’
For them, teaching is most often about enculturating, but a teaching that is conscious of its own conditions
can be about empowerment
and emancipating.
THE PHYSICAL > INTEROBJECTIVITY
Structuralisms and poststructuralisms
are focused on language and human interpretation. At
about the same time that discussions of knowledge within
the arts and humanities were shifting toward notions
of intersubjectivity, there was a movement within the
sciences toward notions of interobjectivity. Among scientists,
current discussions of the natures of scientific inquiry
and scientific fact are coming to be oriented by a realization
that the cultural project of knowledge-making must be
understood in terms of the complicity of the researcher
in knitting the fabric of relations through which knowledge
claims are rendered sensible and significant. In brief,
the suggestion is that there are no observerless observations
or measurerless measurements. Science is seen to be
not just a matter of intersubjective agreement, but
of the mutually affective relationship between phenomena
and knowledge of phenomena—that is, of interobjectivity.
THE PHYSICAL > INTEROBJECTIVITY
> COMPLEXITY SCIENCE
Several
different strands of inquiry, oriented by interobjectivist
sensibilities, arose through the 20th century—including
cybernetics, information theory, systems theory, and
non-linear dynamics. Towards the end of the century,
these and other movements coalesced into ‘complexity
science,’ the study of adaptive, self-organizing
systems. Complexity science is interested in unities
that live and learn—and those unities include
not just individual humans, but various collectives
(classroom groupings, student bodies, bodies of knowledge,
and so on), some subpersonal phenomena (immune systems,
brain regions, and so on), and some supercultural forms
(species, the biosphere, and so on). In brief, all of
these phenomena arise in the co-specifying activities
of similarly complex agents, and this realization points
to a whole new conception of teaching—as participating
in the unfolding of the collective, as occasioning the emergence of more complex possibilities, of expanding
the sphere of the possible and moving into the spaces
that open up.
THE
PHYSICAL > INTEROBJECTIVITY > ECOLOGY
Unfortunately,
for the most part, the dispassionate tones of empiricist
science have tended to be maintained within complexity
science. Although new realms of discursive possibility
have been opened, they tend not to be engaged in terms
of ethical obligation—as evidenced by the fact
that these discourses have been readily and prominently
embraced by big business. Ecological discourses, in
contrast, foreground the ethical imperative to behave
well. These discourses are also rooted in the ideas
of emergence and evolution. For them, teaching comes
to be about engaging mindfully in the unending processes
of bringing forth possible worlds. To the ecologist,
teaching must be attentive and tentative, aware that
it is caught up in an unfolding conversation of what is. In educational and curriculum studies,
this idea has also been represented in terms such as
caring and pedagogical thoughtfulness.
These
notions of bringing forth possible worlds, of immediate
coping, of micro-worlds are all developed by Varela
(1999) in his book, Ethical know-how. Ethics, for Varela, are not principles inscribed in
the universe that can be rationally derived, they are
not instinctive, they are not strictly the artifacts
of culture or a necessary mechanism for our living together.
Ethical action, rather, is action that is appropriate
here, now. It can’t be divined or imposed, it
can’t be derived or discovered. It merely is—or
isn’t.
Provocatively,
this manner of thinking seems to ‘wrap around’
to some of the sensibilities that are present in ancient
mystical traditions. Common ground includes, for example,
the assumed interconnectedness of the cosmos, the need
for close attendance to the emergence of possibilities,
and the insistence on ethical action. There are also
profound differences, however. Complex and ecological
modes of thinking do not advocate a return to past ways.
Rather, they are new manners of interpretation that
foreground some important, ancient, and currently marginalized
intuitions, even while they provide critique of the
metaphysical roots of those intuitions.
References
Capra, F. (2002). The hidden connections:
integration the biological, cognitive, and social dimensions
of life into a science of sustainability.
New York: Doubleday.
Davis, Brent. (forthcoming) Inventions
of teaching: A genealogy.
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Davis, Brent, Dennis J. Sumara, and
Rebecca Luce-Kapler. (2000). Engaging Minds: Learning
and Teaching in a Complex World. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Davis, B. & Sumara, D. (2000).
Curriculum forms: On the assumed shapes of knowing and
knowledge. Accepted for publication in Journal of
Curriculum Studies,
32(6), 821–845.
Varela, F.J. (1999). Ethical know-how:
action, wisdom, and cognition.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
About the Authors
Brent Davis
is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Mathematics
Education and the Ecology of Learning in the Department
of Secondary Education at the University of Alberta.
His most recent book, an elaboration of some elements
of the above article, is Inventions of Teaching:
A Genealogy (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2004).
Dennis Sumara
is Professor of Curriculum Studies and Teacher Education
in the Department of Secondary Education at the University
of Alberta. He is the author of several books, the most
recent entitled: Why Reading Literature in School
Still Matters: Imagination, Interpretation, Insight,
winner of the 2004 National Reading Conference Ed Fry
Book Award.
