Handbook of Research on Teaching

Introduction

Drew H. Gitomer

Rutgers University

Courtney A. Bell

Educational Testing Service

In the pages that follow are many insightful, provocative, and important contributions to the literature on teaching. This relatively brief introduction describes our general approach to the volume and some of the focal areas that appear across the chapters.

The structure of the fifth Handbook of Research on Teaching rests upon at least three critical assumptions. First, we assume that most, if not all, of the fields covered in this volume have their own handbooks. We do not attempt to replicate the intellectual contributions in those handbooks, which are produced for narrower audiences with deeper knowledge of the many arguments and issues specific to each field.

Second, we assume that for more general readers, especially those who are earlier in their careers or come to this volume with a desire to learn about a new field, the fifth Handbook of Research on Teaching offers a unique opportunity to encounter high-level integrated views of large fields of research. Such integrated views can serve as a countervailing force to the diffusion and fragmentation that often happen as fields become specialized and develop local research communities. The high-level view that each chapter offers can provide a framework through which a beginner might better understand and construct her own map of the field.

Third, we assume that any single high-level view of the field will necessarily be partial. The authors were asked to make difficult choices about the boundaries of their reviews. They charted and explained their paths through complex terrains, making decisions that can be interrogated by readers.

Given these assumptions, we outline six focal areas that were particularly salient for us when we stepped back from our detailed editorial efforts on individual chapters. These areas encompass only some of the ideas that are shared across chapters. We selected them because they mark commonly held ideas that have not always been widely shared across the field, and because they mark important issues with which researchers of teaching are or should be grappling.

It is important to note that the overarching focal areas we identify here are subject to all of the issues that studies of the sociology of knowledge have so eloquently addressed. Specifically, as researchers who work primarily in the measurement of teaching, teacher education, and policy and practice areas of the field, the foci we select reflect what we see as relevant to the advancement of research on teaching. Two different editors working in other areas of the field with different epistemological frameworks would likely read these chapters and highlight somewhat different foci. Further, and perhaps more important, the focal areas we describe reflect the authors and chapter editors with whom we have worked over these many months. Together with the handbook’s advisory group, we selected scholars who could fulfill our vision for the volume.

In that vision, each chapter would be a seminal piece for beginning researchers and would serve as a canonical reference for the field for some reasonable number of years. The chapters would help readers see how particular areas of research connect with the larger issues of teaching and teacher education. They would help nonspecialists understand the shape of each area. And they would move the field of teaching research forward by helping researchers to understand methodological and conceptual advances in other fields that could contribute to their own areas of specialization.

We asked authors to make a macrolevel scholarly contribution about the state of one large integrated area of the field, based on scholarly analyses of more microlevel interactions of teaching and learning in classrooms. Only authors with specific intellectual inclinations would be interested in this type of review effort, so the selection of the authors and chapter editors necessarily made some foci more likely to be emphasized than others.

As one example, policy-oriented readers will notice that while the contributors were encouraged to include, and in fact did include, research by scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds (e.g., economics, policy analysis), scholars who were trained and published principally in such fields did not become contributors or chapter editors for the handbook. We chose to invite authors who had strong empirical research backgrounds in classrooms. Clearly, the selection of authors, chapter editors, and reviewers shaped the content of the chapters and therefore the foci we nominated. We encourage readers to critique these choices and consider what is missing in the handbook, and how the missing foci and missing voices might suggest other directions for the field.

The Volume’s Recurring Foci

Each chapter is ambitious and stands on its own. Yet we see certain foci cutting across chapters, which reflect general trends in educational research and in research on teaching, specifically. Among the many candidates, six stand out as central markers that differentiate this volume and this era from previous handbooks and eras: the purpose of education and teaching, sociocognitive and sociocultural perspectives, teaching and learning as systems phenomena, inequality of opportunity, teaching as adaptive expertise, and the interactive nature of teaching.

The Purpose of Education and Teaching

Virtually all research on teaching carries with it strong assumptions about teaching and its relation to the purposes of education. The writing of each chapter in this volume required a commitment, not necessarily explicit, to one or more purposes of education. However, a number of contributions also delved deeply into the issue of purpose itself and its implications for how teaching and research on teaching are conceptualized.

In considering purpose, a number of authors pushed back against a unitary focus on the dominant and dominating perspective that the purpose of teaching is to support learning that contributes to a globally competitive knowledge society. Critiquing this neoliberal economics, Marilyn Cochran-Smith and Ana Maria Villegas (Chapter 7) argue that subscribing to this purpose alone has shaped much of educational research and policy and that, in effect, it tacitly supports the reproduction of inequalities (p. 440).

Perspectives about the purpose of teaching have always been contested, and as noted by Elise Cappella, J. Lawrence Aber, and Ha Yeon Kim (Chapter 4), are embedded in and influenced by a host of historical, structural, political, organizational, community, and other factors (p. 252). In Chapter 1, Gert J. J. Biesta and Barbara S. Stengel capture philosophical perspectives in six iconic conceptions: Plato’s dialogic questioner; Jean Jacques Rousseau’s responsive (and autonomy-seeking) tutor; John Dewey’s democratic designer; Paolo Freire’s liberator; Jacques Rancière’s critical egalitarian; and Nel Noddings’s carer.

Differences in purpose, though, are not simply a matter of philosophical consideration. As Judith Kafka notes in Chapter 2, Teachers, parents, elected officials, administrators, reformers, students, citizens, and communities have battled on stages both large and small over what it means to teach and what the role of public education should be in our American democracy (p. 71). Cappella et al. cite a specific tension:

At least for the last five decades, since the creation of Head Start in the 1960s, the debates over the key goals of preschool and K-12 education pitted those who wished to focus on academic achievement against those who wished to adopt a whole-student approach. (p. 249)

Negotiating multiple purposes is a focus of several chapters. For example, in Chapter 21, Barry Fishman and Chris Dede claim that the rising emphasis on 21st-century skills is a recognition that the nature of problems in the world is changing and that society requires problem solvers who are prepared in new ways to attain different skills. The emphasis in school must shift from teaching what is already known (‘learning about’) toward teaching how to address ‘hard’ problems (pp. 1274–1275). Chapter 23, by Sarah Warshauer Freedman, Glynda A. Hull, Jennifer M. Higgs, and Kyle P. Booten, also references these changes and argues that the goal of literacy education is to produce people who are not just literate but literate in a digital age. In Judith M. Burton’s view (Chapter 14), engagement with art is important not only for developing traditional art goals, such as aesthetics, but also for developing disciplines of mind and skills that can be used for vocational pursuits.

Sociocognitive and Sociocultural Perspectives

The field of research on teaching, as evidenced by this volume, has widely adopted sociocognitive and sociocultural perspectives as means of studying and understanding teaching and learning. These perspectives influence not only the study of teaching but also research methodologies (Pamela A. Moss & Edward H. Haertel, Chapter 3) and approaches to assessment (William R. Penuel and Lorrie A. Shepard, Chapter 12).

Sociocognitive approaches focus on how students become proficient in, and how teaching supports, disciplinary understanding. Across chapters, particularly those associated with teaching in particular domains, there has been a focus on disciplinary practices and teaching practices that support student development (Keith C. Barton and Patricia G. Avery, Chapter 16; Burton; Daniel Chazan, Patricio G. Herbst, and Lawrence M. Clark, Chapter 17; Freedman et al.; Victoria Purcell-Gates, Nell Duke, and Joseph Stouffer, Chapter 20; Mark Windschitl and Angela Calabrese Barton, Chapter 18). Some examples of discipline-specific practices are engagement in discourse, artifact creation, argumentation, and the development and use of models.

Sociocultural perspectives consider learning as a social and cultural activity, in that it is done in collaboration with social others, makes use of cultural artifacts and tools, and is conducted with a social or cultural goal in mind (Na’ilah Suad Nasir, Janelle Scott, Tina Trujillo, and Laura Hernández, Chapter 5, p. 365). "The teacher is seen as always socially, culturally, and historically situated, and this perspective assumes that any learning can only be understood within a larger system" (Rosemary S. Russ, Bruce L. Sherin, and Miriam Gamoran Sherin, Chapter 6, p. 391). The sociocultural approach emphasizes the kinds of resources that students, and also teachers, bring to the learning context. Using concepts such as funds of knowledge (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992) and third space theory (Gutiérrez, 2008), many of the chapters consider the rich family, community, and cultural histories that students bring to the classroom. Lynn Paine, Sigrid Blömeke, and Olena Aydarova (Chapter 11) focus on how culture, politics, and economics affect interactions in classrooms around the world. Diane Larsen-Freeman and Diane J. Tedick (Chapter 22) describe how a sociocultural perspective has fundamentally shifted the focus of research on language teaching, from cognitive acquisition of linguistic skills to language as communicative interaction for particular purposes.

This general consensus, however, stands in contrast to large-scale policy studies and directives that have considered context quite differently, as noted in a number of chapters. Rather than attempting to simply account for context as an intervening variable, as in the policy research paradigm, the goal is to understand context in a sociocultural approach. Chazan et al. (Chapter 17) argue that simply including context in concentric circles around the instructional triangle (e.g., Weissglass, 2002) does not provide researchers with ways to conceptualize how social contexts and historical narratives have a direct influence on interactions inside the instructional triangle (p. 1053).

Teaching and Learning as Systems Phenomena

Strongly related to the sociocultural perspective is the idea that teaching interactions are part of much more complex systems in which actors are both nested and interactive. One major contribution of the chapters in this volume is the careful consideration of how teaching interacts with and is shaped by system influences. However, the chapter authors define unique systems and system relationships in order to clarify the particular dimensions of teaching and learning they are exploring.

Thus, Nasir et al. (Chapter 5) consider the interactive role of social context in shaping opportunities to learn:

It is not simply the case that the broader levels, like the political context of cities, affect what happens in classrooms; it is also the case that processes in local settings, like classrooms, constitute the nature of the school climate, and can lead to new policies and social structures. (p. 350)

Similarly, Larsen-Freeman and Tedick (Chapter 22) consider how, in language teaching and learning,

the different levels do not stand in a static hierarchical relationship in which the top level of the scale always influences the levels beneath it. Indeed, in a complex system, the influence of one level or scale can work on another in either direction. (p. 1341)

Paine et al. (Chapter 11) examine context from a global perspective, noting that how teaching is defined, studied, and managed today is influenced by contexts beyond a local community or a national policy system; teaching today is informed by the discourses and actions of transnational, international, and global actors (p. 717).

In several chapters, the authors argue for the importance of viewing systems as complex and nested but also recognize that research designs and methods are only beginning to be able to address such complexity. Cappella et al. (Chapter 4) note that considerations of achievement are often incomplete because

the complexity we face can be (partially) represented and (imperfectly) estimated via dynamic, multivariate, multilevel statistical models. The central insights upon which to build are that, first, time is nested in within-person processes nested within persons nested within microcontexts (face-to-face) nested in meso/macrocontexts. (p. 302)

Larsen-Freeman and Tedick (Chapter 22) also recognize that fully capturing the nature of these systems is a work in progress:

It is not realistic to expect that all levels of a complex system will be coordinated, but it is necessary to understand that they are not independent. CT [Complexity Theory] is a relational theory. What this means in the present context is that we must not just focus on each level but, rather, look for their connections. (p. 1341)

Adopting a systems approach also helps us understand why particular teaching reform efforts do not take root readily or effectively. For example, Brian Rowan and Stephen W. Raudenbush (Chapter 19) argue that teacher evaluation efforts lead to distorted and less useful information due to the process of bureaucratization [that] ties evaluation practices to the complex personnel classification systems that develop in bureaucratic organizations (p. 1163). Windschitl and Calabrese Barton (Chapter 18) note that the improvement of science instruction requires a system of professional activity (p. 1142) in contexts in which knowledge within the system is not sufficiently developed. Fishman and Dede (Chapter 21) point out that changes in educational technology are often disappointing: Evolution is a very slow process because educational systems resist and undercut small changes in their functioning (pp. 1320–1321). Therefore, these authors suggest a model of disruptive transformation (Christensen, Horn, Caldera, & Soares, 2011; Christensen et al., 2008), [which] involves creating a new educational model outside of the traditional system that, over time, displaces the current model (p. 1321).

Inequality of Opportunity

The chapters in this volume take, as a starting point, the stark inequality of learning opportunities that our students face in the United States. As Nasir et al. observe: We are in an unprecedented time of social and educational inequality in the United States (Hacker & Pierson, 2010). Wealth gaps and access to key societal resources are more disparate than at any time in recent history (Chapter 5, p. 349). Some chapters discuss learning opportunity gaps at a societal level, considering them in relation to subgroups of the U.S. population and attributing them, in part, to larger social and economic trends in the United States such as school segregation and increasing wealth bifurcation (Christian J. Faltis and Guadalupe Valdés, Chapter 8; Kafka; Nasir et al.). Other chapters detail micro-level inequalities in learning opportunities for students (Prudence L. Carter and Linda Darling-Hammond, Chapter 9; Chazan et al.; Janette Klingner, Mary Brownell, Linda H. Mason, Paul T. Sindelar, and Amber Benedict, Chapter 10; Windschitl & Calabrese Barton). Whether writing about broader social forces or everyday classroom opportunity gaps, the idea that teaching shapes and is shaped by inequalities at all levels of the educational system is common across the chapters.

Some chapters review the evidence for potential solutions to these opportunity gaps or perspectives that, when adopted, might begin to support a more equitable distribution of learning opportunities. For example, Carter and Darling-Hammond (Chapter 9) note that a large body of research indicates that the most effective teachers of varied student populations are those who maintain mindsets, pedagogy, and practices that deeply grasp the value of diversity and adaptability (p. 628). In addition to identifying teachers’ skills and attributes that may support more equal learning opportunities for all students, authors consider what we know about how teachers are trained or how various contextual features of schools and society shape students’ learning opportunities (e.g., Chazan et al.; Cochran-Smith & Villegas; Faltis & Valdés; Freedman et al.; Klingner et al.; Nasir et al.). For many of these authors, the urgency with which we—as researchers and citizens in a democracy—must act, is palpable. Faltis and Valdés (Chapter 8) emphasize the moral dimension of this urgency, explaining, it is morally bankrupt … when we are so clearly failing to appropriately teach many students (p. 552). Across chapters, authors explicitly or implicitly point to the deleterious effects of these inequalities and identify the gaps in our research base that could be filled, thereby supporting more equitable learning opportunities for all children.

Teaching as Adaptive Expertise

Our fifth focus—the fact that expertise in teaching is characterized by adaptability and the use of judgment—is somewhat less explicit than the other foci but nonetheless important. As a human act, teaching requires sustained attention to the ways in which teachers’ and students’ actions achieve, or do not achieve, specified purposes and are subject to real-time revision. This process requires adaptability and judgment. Authors discuss in various terms the nature of expertise in teaching, how it develops, how it is assessed, and how researchers study it (Barton & Avery; Biesta & Stengel; Cochran-Smith & Villegas; Penuel & Shepard; Russ et al.; Gary Sykes and Suzanne M. Wilson, Chapter 13). As noted earlier, the research reviewed in this volume generally takes the view that teaching is a complex, situated social practice. Expertise in teaching, therefore, elevates the role of teacher from that of technician to professional, one who makes myriad reasoned decisions daily to ensure his or her students’ learning (Cochran-Smith & Villegas, p. 477).

In Chapter 16, Barton and Avery describe this frequent decision making in the context of teaching social studies:

Even in highly controlled settings—including those with nationally prescribed curricula and official school inspections—teachers make a great many curricular and instructional decisions. These include deciding what to emphasize within a unit of study, whether to encourage students’ questions (and how to respond to them), how to develop learning experiences, and how to create meaningful classroom discussions. (pp. 1011–1012)

Barton and Avery go on to review a number of researchers’ conceptualizations of teachers’ decision making and the findings associated with some conceptualizations.

Philosophers Biesta and Stengel (Chapter 1) take a different view of the adaptability and judgment required of teachers. From their perspective, teachers’ moments of judgment can be categorized by what the judgments apply to: purpose, balance, and actions. First, teachers must make judgments about the purpose of their interactions with students and content; that is, they must decide what they want to accomplish and why they want to accomplish it. Second, they must balance the competing and sometimes conflicting purposes of teaching and learning. How, for example, does a teacher balance the need for students to master a body of knowledge that is privileged in society with the need for students to develop their own preferences, skills, and abilities for self-determination? Finally, teachers must decide what actions to take and consider the degree to which those actions might be considered educationally appropriate. This requires that we reflect on what our students might learn or pick up from the ways in which we organize, arrange, and enact education (p. 33). Conceptualizations of adaptability and judgment vary even more widely than is suggested by the social studies and philosophy chapters in this volume. But across that variation it is clear that teaching as an interpretive, situated act requires adaptability and judgment.

The Interactive Nature of Teaching

A final focus across chapters concerns the complex ways in which students, teachers, and the subject matter of instruction (i.e., the vertices of the instructional triangle) interact with one another in specific contexts (e.g., Chazan et al.; Kafka; Klingner et al.; Penuel & Shepard). For example, the authors trace and discuss ways in which classroom teaching is defined by the students in the classroom: their identities, their cultures, their languages, and their interests. But at the same time, of course, the instruction that students experience is defined by the teacher in the classroom: her identity, culture, language, and interests. Kafka (Chapter 2) details this type of interactional construction of the teaching and learning experience as she reviews historical records of how Latino and Native American students were profoundly shaped by the instruction they were given—and how they profoundly shaped the instruction. She reviews scholarship that details how missionary teachers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were sent to New Mexico with instructions to convert Latino families and to teach only in English. The teachers wrote letters and reports that documented how they increasingly veered from the Christian curriculum they had been sent to deliver, as they found greater success if they sought to draw on ‘children’s everyday experiences’ and find ‘common ground’ with their students as opposed to antagonizing them (p. 95). They also taught in both Spanish and English. Looking across a number of historical studies, Kafka concludes that who was in the room, along with expectations about what they were supposed to learn, to some degree determined classroom practices (Butchart, 2010; Finkelstein, 1989; Kaestle, 1983; Tyack & Hansot, 1990) (p. 90).

In Chapter 23, Freedman et al. explain a central feature of the teaching and learning of literacy: that the texts and tools available to students via instructional opportunities shape the literacy practices in which students engage, and vice versa (an idea that is connected with our third focus, teaching and learning as systems phenomena). The authors use the history of the development of the violin to illustrate this point:

Early violins could be made to produce a certain kind of sound, but humans were reaching for what they thought would be a more beautiful sound, an ideal sound that they had never heard. They changed the instrument so that it could produce this imagined more beautiful sound, and they kept engaging in the same process over time. With each improvement in their tool, violinists developed new goals for the sound because of the new capabilities of their instrument. (p. 1393)

In the teaching and learning of literacy, the interactions between the students, the teaching, and the texts or tools (e.g., a text on an iPhone or a digital text returned to a student through a search of the Internet) profoundly shape what writing is understood to be and the specific literacy practices that students develop. Like the development of the violin, these interactions iterate over time and change the very nature of how literacy, in a broad sense, and writing, more narrowly, are conceived of and learned by students.

Taking this interactional point one step further, some of the chapters document how the disciplinary nature of the subject matter being taught, the goals of schooling, and the structural features of the contexts in which teaching and learning occur, shape one another and the dialectical interactions among teachers, students, and content (e.g., Burton; Chazan et al.; Bruce Fuller, Luke Dauter, and Anisah Waite, Chapter 15; Larsen-Freeman & Tedick; Nasir et al.; Penuel & Shepard). If the view that teachers teach externally defined content to students who are blank slates was ever commonly held, this handbook’s contributions resoundingly refute that view of what it means to teach and learn.

Closing Comment

With these introductory remarks, we have attempted to lay out a small set of markers for a collection of extraordinarily rich ideas and scholarship. We invite you, as readers, to engage with this handbook as it makes sense to you. We hope and expect that you will be as stimulated as we are by the contributions of these authors.

References

Butchart, R. (2010). Schooling the freed people: Teaching, learning, and the struggle for black freedom, 1861–1876. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

Christensen, C. M., Horn, M. B., Caldera, L., & Soares, L. (2011). Disrupting college: How disruptive innovation can deliver quality and affordability to postsecondary education. Washington, DC: Center for American Progress. Retrieved from https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/labor/report/2011/02/08/9034/disrupting-college/

Christensen, C. M., Johnson, C. W., & Horn, M. B. (2008). Disrupting class: How disruptive innovation will change the way the world learns. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Finkelstein, B. (1989). Governing the young: Teacher behavior in popular primary schools in nineteenth-century United States. New York: Falmer Press.

Gutiérrez, K. (2008). Developing a sociocritical literacy in the third space. Reading Research Quarterly, 43(2), 148–164. doi:10.1598/RRQ.43.2.3

Hacker, J. S., & Pierson, P. (2010). Winner-take-all-politics: How Washington made the rich richer—and turned its back on the middle class. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Kaestle, C. (1983). Pillars of the republic: Common schools and American society, 1780–1860. New York: Hill and Wang.

Moll, L. C., Amanti, C., Neff, D., & Gonzalez, N. (1992). Funds of knowledge for teaching: Using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms. Theory Into Practice, 31(2), 132–141.

Tyack, D., & Hansot, E. (1990). Learning together: A history of co-education in American public schools. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Weissglass, J. (2002). Inequity in mathematics education: Questions for educators. The Mathematics Educator, 12(2), 34–39.

1

Thinking Philosophically About Teaching

Gert J. J. Biesta

Brunei University London

Barbara S. Stengel

Peabody College, Vanderbilt University

1. Introduction

What might it mean to think philosophically about teaching? Why and how does thinking philosophically about teaching matter? Our response, in brief, is that a philosophical standpoint challenges, qualifies, deepens, and even transforms our understanding of a phenomenon—in this case, teaching—that may seem commonplace and straightforward. The more refined and more complex understanding of teaching that emerges from this exploration is itself a form of research on teaching, but also more than that. This type of inquiry can inform any attempt to practice teaching or teacher development, to create policy that frames teaching in the context of public education, or to make teaching or teacher education into an object of research.

We offer this chapter with all the members of the educational family in mind, cognizant that the ideas and analyses offered here will and must be taken up differently by those with different foci in practice. We write not for philosophers of education but for teachers, for teacher educators and teacher education researchers, for learning scientists, and for policy makers and educational reformers. In short, we write for all those whose work will be more useful, more focused, and more expansive if prior questions of purpose, concept, and assumption are asked and explored. Philosophy as a practice does not resolve such issues unequivocally, but thinking philosophically uncovers that which animates and motivates any program of practice, policy, and research. It makes intellectual honesty and integrity both possible and more probable.

We are animated and motivated by a shared concern that questions of purpose, intention, and relationship are too often assumed in contemporary policy seeking to fix systems, teachers, and teaching; too often undertheorized or underarticulated in investigations of this or that proposal for practice; and too often unexamined with respect to teacher development and teacher evaluation. The trend toward taking pedagogical purposes and relations for granted has been (sometimes unwittingly) intensified by the turn to learning as the focus of educational efforts. This has enabled the diminution—or even erasure—of the singular contribution of the teacher to educational experience by policies that both control teachers and hold them accountable for fixed performances that may not be educative in purpose or outcome (see Biesta, 2010a). At the same time that policy makers seem intent on narrowing teachers’ prerogatives, research on teaching is opening up to the exercise of teacher judgment (e.g., Heilbronn, 2008), with particular reference to ambitious teaching practice (e.g., Lampert, 2001), leveraging student thinking (e.g., Singer-Gabella, Stengel, Shahan, & Kim, in press; Smith & Stein, 2011), high-leverage practices (e.g., Ball & Forzani, 2010), content knowledge for teaching (e.g., Ball, Thames, & Phelps, 2008; Shulman, 1986, 1987), and disciplinary literacy (e.g., Wineburg, Martin, & Monte-Sano, 2012). When these research and practice vectors are situated in a view of teaching as sociocultural practice (Horn & Kane, 2014; Horn & Little, 2010), both the purposes for and the relational dimensions of teaching are incorporated, but not always clearly articulated.

We wonder at these perhaps paradoxical phenomena and aim to put the questions of purpose, intention, and relation at the center of any effort to pursue, understand, or alter teaching practice and, in the process, to highlight the importance of both judgment and humility in conceptualizing, shaping, or studying teaching. These are philosophical considerations with utterly practical implications.

At first glance, and particularly in the contemporary context of educational reform, it seems beyond argument that the point of teaching is student learning. But it is philosophy’s value that it takes nothing as beyond argument, and it is the role of philosophers of education and philosophically minded educators to question even this assumption about teaching, to point out that learning is an at least incomplete, and perhaps nonsensical, response to the question of teaching purpose (see Biesta, 2015a). And once the question of purpose is assayed, other questions emerge as well: What does it mean to teach? What does it mean to be a teacher? Can learning occur without a teacher? Can teaching occur in the absence of learning? As we shall show, these questions and others like them have been part of the conversation that is philosophy as long as there have been teachers. As we shall also show, asking and answering such questions always occur against a backdrop of social and political assumptions about who we are and what we can and should become.

In our explorations, we will draw not only from the modern field of philosophy of education but also from wider, philosophically inspired traditions of educational scholarship and from philosophical literature more generally. We do so for two reasons. First, philosophy of education as a distinct educational subdiscipline, similar to but also distinct from, for example, sociology of education or psychology of education, only emerged in the 20th century and only came to fruition from the 1950s onward (see Phillips, 2001). Philosophers have, however, been thinking and writing about educational matters ever since philosophy came into existence, and classic philosophical conversations have influenced contemporary assumptions about teaching often without our knowing it. Second, the idea of philosophy of education as either an educational or a philosophical subdiscipline is a peculiar construction of the Englishspeaking academic world. In other contexts—such as the German-speaking world—the academic study of education developed as a discipline in its own right (Biesta, 2011; Furlong & Lawn 2010). This discipline—in Germany called Pädagogik—did glean insights from philosophical texts and other studies, but it established itself as its own point of departure (see also Siljander, Kivelä, & Sutinen, 2012). We will engage with both the longer tradition of educationally relevant philosophical work and different traditions of philosophically informed educational thought.

To think philosophically about teaching requires some sense of what philosophy itself actually is or stands for. Philosophers have, over the centuries and to the present day, developed an array of different answers to this question, often contesting whether new ideas and approaches would actually count as philosophy or not. The answers given range from attempts to identify the very essence or nature of philosophy up to the suggestion from the American philosopher Richard Rorty (1978) that philosophy is simply a literary genre among others or, as he put it, a kind of writing, held together not by form or matter but by tradition. What seems to be common to all effort rightly called philosophical, despite internecine squabbles, is a sense of wonder about that which is attractive or repulsive, desirable or distasteful, satisfying or perplexing, rewarding or problematic, motivating or enervating, calming or disruptive. Wonder issues in questions, prior questions, about the meaning of or the conditions for the possibility of some experience. The philosophical stance does not accept thoughtlessness; it interrogates relentlessly.

In light of the diversity of philosophical scholarship, we have chosen to combine a systematic approach—focusing on themes and issues—with a historical one—showing continuity, development, and change within philosophical thought and scholarship relevant to the task of understanding teaching. Because the history of philosophy is very much a history of philosophers and their ideas, we will focus on particular insights and arguments that either address educational matters directly or are relevant for deepening our understanding of teaching. Our discussion will reveal that many of the widely known contributions to the development of Western philosophy have been made by White men—which constitutes an existential limitation within the canon of Western philosophy in general but also for the field of philosophy of education in particular (see Martin, 1985). Unlike empirical research where new insights often replace older insights, much of the philosophical tradition has not been invalidated by later developments but has, rather, been refined, complicated, and transformed. In fact, as women (e.g., Greene, 1973, 1978, 2001; Martin, 1985), scholars of color (e.g., Gay, 2010; Ladson-Billings, 2009; Leonardo, 2013), disability studies advocates (e.g., Ferri & Connor, 2006; Gabel & Connor, 2013), and queer theorists (e.g., Mayo, 2007b; Shlasko, 2005) have voiced their points of view about teaching practice, policy, and research, philosophy of education has been, and continues to be, complicated and transformed. The careful reader will note in both text and reference below the diversity of perspective regarding what constitutes a worthy philosophical issue and a defensible method of inquiry.

As sketched above, our chapter consists of three substantive sections that give way to a discussion of contemporary issues illuminated philosophically. We begin by tracing lightly the development of the distinction between the philosophical and the empirical. Doing so will allow us to identify some key steps in modern philosophy that are relevant for an understanding of teaching and research on teaching. Against this background, we report on a conversation across time and culture about what teaching is and should be by presenting six teacher icons, that is, six iconic conceptions of teaching and the teacher that have been developed in the philosophical literature. We draw from Plato’s dialogic questioner, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s responsive (and autonomy-seeking) tutor, John Dewey’s democratic designer, Paolo Freire’s liberator, Jacques Rancière’s critical egalitarian, and Nel Noddings’s carer. Such icons not only help us to see the different ways in which teaching can be understood and the teacher has been conceptualized but also highlight a number of philosophical issues and insights that we continue to confront and appreciate. In the third section, we focus on the very idea and the very ideal of teaching. It is here that we give explicit voice to the central problematic of our chapter: Teaching is a matter of purposeful judgment that cannot fully determine its own outcomes, and teaching is necessary to (at least formal) education. How can this be? And (how) can research on teaching proceed if teaching is understood in this way? In the concluding section, we bring the main lines of the discussion together by reflecting on a number of contemporary issues concerning teaching and research on teaching as they are illuminated by the constitutive elements of teaching as purposeful, intentional, and relational.

Note that this chapter may be read straight through as a coherent argument or more selectively so that chapter sections function as resources instead of as a single argument. We have tried to provide clear signposts for what can be found where.

This chapter can be understood as an interpretive essay examining a single question—How does philosophy intersect with teaching?—in order to illuminate teaching practice, policy, and research through philosophical inquiry and to enrich philosophy through the careful consideration of questions arising from educational practice, policy, and research. It can also be read as a kind of research review, gathering in one place a selection of both classical and contemporary efforts to think philosophically about teaching. But, as suggested above, our goal is more intentional and less agnostic about what can and should be learned by this kind of examination. Specifically, we argue for a progressive understanding of teaching that preserves its traditional centrality in any framing of formal education but avoids the authoritarian control of teaching and teachers that pervades today’s policy deliberations.

The Philosophical and the Empirical

To think philosophically about teaching requires some understanding of what philosophy is and, more importantly, how it differs from other ways to explore and understand teaching. Our guiding question concerns the distinction between the philosophical and the empirical, that is, between the specific contribution of philosophical inquiry compared with that of empirical research—a distinction that, as we will show, simply did not exist until relatively recently and is still not as hard and fast a distinction as one might think. Note the role that the development of modern science has played in splitting the philosophical from the empirical, fostering the split while also prompting epistemic, social, and political questions that require both the philosopher and the empirical researcher to answer. We explore this distinction to demonstrate how it is useful for—and how it may be dangerous to—any rich understanding of the practice that is teaching. In the process, we also identify some of the main philosophical roots and anchor points of contemporary educational thought.

The Love of Wisdom and the Nature of Knowledge

The suggestion that philosophy is about the love of knowledge and wisdom rather than the possession of it hints at an important characteristic of contemporary philosophy. Self-identified philosophers today see it as their task to ask critical questions concerning discursive claims made about what is true, rational, right, just, or beautiful, as well as about what is useful or important, rather than to generate knowledge about social and natural phenomena. In asking such questions, philosophers are particularly interested in exploring the quality and strength of the reasons people have or give for their ideas, beliefs, and actions and the quality and consistency of underlying assumptions—without suggesting that philosophers agree about what counts as a good reason or a valid assumption. On the other hand, self-proclaimed empirical researchers—whether natural or social scientists—take their task to be the generation of true and useful (that is, guiding, explanatory, and/or predictive) knowledge about the natural and social world. While this particular way to distinguish between the philosophical and the empirical may sound obvious, it actually is a relatively recent idea that emerged with the rise of modern science in the 16th and 17th centuries.

For the ancient Greek philosophers and throughout the Middle Ages, the distinction between science and philosophy was far less articulate. In the writings of Plato and Aristotle, we find not only more familiarly philosophical themes about what we can know and what it means to have knowledge, about what it means to lead a good or virtuous life, about language, about argumentation and logic, about the ultimate nature of reality, and about the proper organization of the state but also more empirical lines of questioning about the origins of the universe, about the substances the universe is made of, about the weather, about animals, and about natural processes of growth and decay and so on. While from a contemporary perspective, we might say that thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle combined scientific and philosophical work, for them the distinction was not really a meaningful one. Their interest was in the broad study of almost anything that could be better understood, and the methods and ways of reasoning they used for this were distinctively different from the methods of empirical experimentation that came to characterize modern science.

It was the rise of modern science that gradually introduced a division between the empirical—that is, knowledge derived from systematic observation and, often but not always, from intervention and experiment—and the philosophical—that is, insights based on analysis, reasoning, and argumentation. A further division of labor took place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with reference to the social sciences between such disciplines as psychology, sociology, and political science, on the one hand, and philosophical anthropology and social and political philosophy, on the other. But these distinctions, although well established in academic organizations, remain a permeable membrane rather than a solid wall, made permeable by the common reliance on interpretation with respect to human action. Philosophers—and even more so philosophers of education—make good use of empirically generated knowledge (see, for example, Santoro & Wilson, 2015), just as philosophical ideas and insights often provide frameworks for empirical research.

The emergence of modern science not only influenced the division of labor between philosophers and empirical researchers but also gave rise to new fields of philosophical study. Given that modern science not only made strong claims about the natural world—for example, Galileo Galilei’s claims about the movement of the planets or Isaac Newton’s formulation of the laws of motion—but also developed new and effective technology based on this knowledge, philosophers became increasingly interested in questions about the status of scientific knowledge and particularly the question of whether scientific knowledge can claim to provide us with a more accurate and more true account of reality than our everyday knowledge. These issues became major themes in the work of philosophers such as René Descartes (1596–1650), John Locke (1632–1704), David Hume (1711–1776), and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and led to the establishment of the branch of philosophy called epistemology or theory of knowledge. Epistemology focuses on questions about what it means to know, how we can know, and how we can make any claims about the status, validity, and truth of our knowledge claims. One prominent—and continuing—discussion in this field concerns the question of whether knowledge is something we receive through our senses or whether the mind actively contributes meaning to what is perceived. The latter line of philosophical thinking, a constructivist view of knowledge, was co-opted and transformed in the second half of the 20th century into a theory of learning and a theory of pedagogy (see, for example, Roth, 2011).

The Mechanistic Worldview and the Question of Human Freedom

That modern science increasingly depicted the whole of nature, both animate and inanimate, in mechanistic terms, that is, as a machine operating according to universal laws of cause and effect, also led to a renewed interest in questions about human freedom and human responsibility, for example, in the writings of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), John Locke, Baruch de Spinoza (1632–1677), Immanuel Kant, Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), and Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860). The question of human freedom also increasingly became a political issue, for example, in the American Revolution in the second half of the 18th century (resulting in the Declaration of Independence in 1776) and the French Revolution (1789–1799). The writings of Hobbes and Locke provided important philosophical justifications for the idea of human freedom as the basis for any form of political association and, by extension, any form of public education.

The often-violent struggles for human freedom that took place in the 18th century were paired with an intellectual revolution that became known as the Enlightenment. Enlightenment philosophers—such as, in Scotland, Adam Smith (1723–1790) and David Hume; in France, Voltaire (1694–1778), Montesquieu (1689–1755), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778); and, in Prussia, Immanuel Kant and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832)—all singled out the human capacity for rational thinking as the basis for human freedom and autonomy. Along these lines Enlightenment philosophy had a major impact on modern educational thought and practice, not only by highlighting the role of education in the formation of rational autonomy (see particularly Kant’s [1803/1982] claim that the propensity to free thinking could only be brought about through education [p. 710]) but also by conceiving of education as a process of empowerment and emancipation oriented toward the realization of human freedom.

That the struggle for human freedom not only was a matter of overthrowing the power of absolute monarchs but also had to do with overcoming the workings of power within society—for example, between the rich and the poor or between the upper classes and the lower classes—became a theme in the writings of social reformers such as the French socialist thinkers Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865), and François Fourier (1772–1837). This was further developed and radicalized in the work of Karl Marx (1818–1883). Marx particularly put questions about the analysis of the dynamics of the economy and the theme of class struggle firmly on the agenda of modern (political) philosophy. Contemporary debates about equity and equality in education can be more richly understood against the background of these philosophical developments.

All of these strains together—the development of the scientific method as a tool for understanding and controlling our natural and social worlds, the valorization of individual freedom, the privileging of reason as the basis for freedom claims, and the recognition of social and economic power at play in any human interaction—contributed to changing understandings of the function of and need for education in modern society (Gilead, 2011). Those changes are captured in part in the iconic images of teaching discussed in Section 2.

Twentieth-Century Developments

Over the course of the 20th century, the divide between philosophy and the empirical sciences became more starkly delineated but also more complicated. The formal development of the philosophy of science, the differentiation of the natural and the human sciences, the analysis of concepts linked to their verification and use, the centering of consciousness as the source of meaning and meaningfulness, the emergence of American pragmatism, and the rise of the postmodern and poststructural perspectives each rendered new ways of pursuing philosophical thinking that carved out separable, if not separate, spaces for empirical and philosophical modes of inquiry, sometimes privileging the value of empirical inquiry over philosophical thinking in the process.

Philosophy of science. The radical claim by the philosophers of the so-called Vienna Circle—such as Moritz Schlick (1882–1936) and Rudolf Carnap (1891–1971)—that only statements that can be verified scientifically are meaningful transformed the empiricism of Locke and Hume into the basis of what we now call, via the work of the British philosopher A. J. Ayer (1910–1989), logical positivism. For the logical positivist, only that which can be verified empirically is seen as cognitively meaningful—and this would hold for both the natural and the social sciences. Other claims—for instance, normative claims—are therefore literally seen as nonsense, that is, as being without meaning. In this view, meaning is the domain of the scientist, while the philosopher is limited to the exploration of logical truth and contradiction.

The Austrian philosopher Karl Popper (1902–1994) moderated the logical positivist position with a wide-ranging critical rationalism. He argued that the essence of science lies in its method and that the scientific method is hypothetic-deductive, starting from hypotheses about what might be the case in order to explore, through confrontation with empirical evidence, whether such hypotheses can stand the test or should be seen as falsified by empirical evidence. If the logical positivists saw science as a process of finding truth, Popper depicted science as a process of eliminating falsehood. And whereas the logical positivists would argue that there is no meaning outside of the domain of empirical science, Popper was interested in the more modest distinction between scientific and nonscientific claims, where he saw the latter as potentially meaningful but not falsifiable through empirical testing and hence not belonging to the domain of science. Calls for randomized control trials in education can be seen as an offspring of Popper’s moderated position (Biesta, 2007).

Popper’s prescriptive approach to science and its method came under criticism in the second half of the 20th century as a result of the rise of historical and sociological studies on the development of science and scientific knowledge. In 1962 Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996) published his highly influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn, 1962), in which he depicted the development of the natural sciences as a process of revolution rather than as an evolutionary process through which our knowledge grows over time. In the wake of Kuhn’s book, philosophers of science have come to stress the important effect that the social organization of science (or any discipline) has on the knowledge it produces—which has raised important questions about the status of scientific knowledge compared with everyday or commonsense knowledge (see, for example, Bloor, 1976; Latour, 1987; Nersessian, 2008). This has implications for what and how we can know about teaching as a sociocultural practice.

Complicating the philosophical–empirical relation. In the late 19th century, Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) argued that human phenomena—including education—can only be investigated properly if we approach them as phenomena meaningful to those involved rather than as independent physical processes. Instead of the methods of the natural sciences, empirical research on human and social phenomena therefore needs to use interpretive methods that center on this understanding. Dilthey provided the philosophical groundwork for the development and establishment of education as an independent academic discipline—known in German as Geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik (see Biesta, 2011). The German philosopher and social theorist Jürgen Habermas (born in 1929) and the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault made significant contributions to understanding the specific nature and identity of the social and human sciences as focused on human interaction and power relations.

While Dilthey and others carved out space for the study of human action as a distinctively social science, philosophers in Britain and Austria were claiming a modest space for philosophers with respect to language use and meaning. Stemming from the philosophy of mathematics and the philosophy of logic in the work of Gotlob Frege (1848–1925) and Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), analytic philosophy became increasingly focused on questions of language and meaning and, more specifically, on the analysis of concepts. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) and, later, J. L. Austin (1911–1960) and Gilbert Ryle (1900–1976) redirected analytic philosophy to the critical analysis of everyday language use in what is now known as ordinary language philosophy. In the English-speaking world, the analytic intention continues to shape the practice of philosophy in general and philosophy of education in particular, influenced by Israel Scheffler (born in 1923) in the United States and Richard Peters (1919–2011) and Paul Hirst (born in 1927) in the United Kingdom. Michael Scriven’s delineation of conceptual analysis in the American Educational Research Association’s first edition of Complementary Methods for Research in Education (Scriven, 1988) is a useful guide to both the philosophical and the empirical use of this mode of thought.

The tendency toward analysis in philosophy has been tempered by the emergence of an original school of thought in North America known as pragmatism. Although the philosophers who inaugurated pragmatism—most notably Charles S. Peirce (1839–1914), William James (1842–1910), John Dewey (1859–1952), and George Herbert Mead (1863–1931)—had a deep knowledge of Continental philosophy (many of them spent several years studying in Germany and France), they developed an approach to philosophizing that is significantly different from what was happening on the other side of the Atlantic. One distinctive quality of pragmatist philosophy is that it is willing to take insights from modern science into consideration rather than positioning itself as (only) an arbiter of the quality of scientific knowledge claims or as (only) a critic of underlying assumptions. Thus we find, particularly in the work of John Dewey and George Herbert Mead, a strong influence of Darwinist thinking, resulting in, among other things, a philosophy that starts from an understanding of human action and interaction rather than from a focus on what is and can be known.

Pragmatist philosophy is also characterized by a forward-looking orientation. Rather than searching for origins and foundations, it is first and foremost interested in the consequences of thought and action. Although the pragmatists made significant contributions to the study of logic, knowledge, and language, their work was not initially appreciated by mainstream philosophy of science and analytic philosophy of language. In more recent years—particularly as a result of the work of W. V. O. Quine (1908–2000), Hillary Putnam (born 1926), and Nelson Goodman (1906–1998) as well as neopragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty (1931–2007)—pragmatism has gained more prominence within academic philosophical circles. Within the philosophy of education pragmatism has always had a strong presence, particularly in North America. This is mainly due to the efforts of John Dewey, who, in addition to making important contributions to philosophy and sociology, not only wrote extensively about educational matters but also was practically involved in educational reform and renewal, for example, through his role in the establishment of the so-called Laboratory School at the University of Chicago in 1896.

Both analytic and pragmatist philosophical stances are typically contrasted with Continental philosophy, which refers to philosophical traditions and approaches that emerged in countries such as France and Germany from the end of the 19th century onward. One line, emerging in Germany from the work of Edmund Husserl (1859–1953) and the original, influential, and controversial work of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), is that of phenomenology—a philosophical approach with a strong interest in structures of consciousness (particularly in the work of Husserl) and the phenomena that appear in acts of consciousness. In France, Gabriel Marcel (1889–1974), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) practiced a phenomenologically inspired philosophy developed into an approach known as existentialism. Educational philosopher Maxine Greene (1917–2014; for example, Greene, 1973, 1978) typically integrated a phenomenological approach with an existentialist stance to analyze our lived experience of educational interactions and educational phenomena. Another main line of Continental philosophy developed from the work of Karl Marx into what is known as critical theory. Important contributions to the development of modern critical theory—which has strongly influenced educational thought from the late 1960s onward both on the Continent and, about two decades later, in North America—were made by Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969), and Jürgen Habermas. In Horkheimer’s (1982) terms, critical theory seeks to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them (p. 244) by employing both social scientistic and humanistic tools and insights. Michael Apple, Paolo Freire, and Henry Giroux are among those who continue to inspire critical analysis of educational experience with respect to social class. For two decades, scholars of color have been extending and reinventing critical theory to put race at the center of critical analysis, both theoretically and empirically (see Parker, Deyhle, & Villenas, 1999).

The 1980s also saw the rise of what became known as postmodern and poststructural philosophy. Emanating from France, particularly in the writings of Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007), Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998), and Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), intellectually connected to phenomenology and existentialism, and with a large following in English-speaking countries (more strongly in North America than in Britain), these philosophers rejected the idea that it is possible to identify secure foundations for thought and action, recognizing, rather, that claims to truth are always themselves rooted in metanarratives situated in culturally conditioned and power-laden practice and discourse. While many perceive this antifoundational way of philosophizing as a form of relativism—in which there are no longer any criteria for truth, justice, and beauty so that anything goes—a more careful reading of the work shows a profound engagement with ethical and political questions and an insistence that these questions cannot simply be solved by the right knowledge or by scientific truth (see Biesta & Egéa-Kuehne, 2001). Although the Lithuanian-born philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) is not often characterized as a postmodern philosopher, his reflections on the human being and on human existence follow a similar line of thinking, highlighting that our humanity is realized through our responsibility for other human beings.

Discussion

While philosophers have always been engaged in thinking critically and carefully about what is and about what might be—that is, about factual and normative questions—the rise of empirical science in the 16th and 17th centuries brought about a more clear division of labor. Empirical inquiry became focused on generating factual knowledge about the natural and social world, and philosophy’s task focused more strongly and explicitly on the critical examination of the underlying assumptions of such endeavors, on questions of logic and argument, on questions about the possibility and status of knowing and knowledge, and on normative questions in such domains as ethics, politics, and aesthetics. This division of labor is, as Foucault recognized, both useful and dangerous. The separation of the empirical from the philosophical enables the development of rigorous and specific modes of inquiry and finely developed insights; but that same separation both blinds us to the normative and political grounds of our facts, theories, and methods and privileges the scientific—that is, empirically verifiable—over the philosophic—that is, defensible but not empirically verifiable. This can be seen in current debates about what works in teaching and learning (Biesta, 2007, 2010d; Smeyers & Depaepe, 2006) and about evidence-based practice in a culture of science (see, for example, Hursh, 2011; Kvernbekk, 2011).

Whereas some—both from the side of philosophy and from the side of the sciences—would like to maintain a rather strict separation between the two, we have identified above recent developments that recognize the impossibility of substantive separation. Most recently, both empirical researchers and educational philosophers are trying to make sense of the interpretive dimensions of research on teaching. From understanding that teaching is a social practice that admits of multiple interpretations (Horn & Kane, 2014), to the formulation of a research question that draws upon conceptual and value assumptions (Smeyers, Bridges, Burbules, & Griffiths, 2015, p. 1), to the claim that generalizability is a local contexualized phenomenon (Fendler, 2006), to the recognition that data are not just gathered but created in relation to and with the data sources, human and statistical (Smeyers et al., 2015), the interpretive nature of even the most scientific research seems undeniable.

We acknowledge the distinction between the empirical and the philosophical as useful for specific purposes while insisting both that philosophy is rooted in lived sociocultural experience and that empirical research is an interpretive endeavor from beginning to end. Understanding and enacting the practice of teaching demands attention to both. This is a point to which we return in our final section as we bring a philosophical analysis of teaching to bear on selected issues of teaching research, practice, and policy. We turn now to showing what it might mean to think philosophically about teaching, first by considering iconic images drawn by specific philosophers who have shaped our presuppositions about teachers and teaching and then by pursuing our own analysis, one that employs language analysis, phenomenological insight, and pragmatist inquiry with a deconstructive temper.

2. Iconic Conceptions of the Teacher

One’s image of teaching and the teacher typically has deep roots in personal experience and in iconic figures that are available to us through popular culture (see Broudy, 1963). What is less well or widely realized is that both our individual experience of the teacher and the figure of the teacher in popular culture are reflected in and reflections of classic images created in the social, political, and explicitly educational musings of major Western philosophers. In this section, we limn six such iconic conceptions of the teacher that are particularly influential in contemporary educational thought: Plato’s dialogic questioner, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s responsive (and autonomy-seeking) tutor, John Dewey’s democratic designer, Paolo Freire’s liberator, Jacques Rancière’s critical egalitarian, and Nel Noddings’s carer. Such images both inform our understanding of teaching in rich and sometimes paradoxical ways and limit our ability to think otherwise. And each offers a view of teaching that is thoroughly entwined with a clear commitment to some identifiable educational purpose, that highlights the teachers’ judgment as indispensable, that exposes the pedagogical intention, and that draws out (if not always drawing attention to) the relation between teacher and student.

We chose these six because, in our view, they represent an important set of concerns with respect to teaching. We might have chosen otherwise, of course. We might have included Maria Montessori, who represents a view of the teacher as present in the educational setting as observer but absent to the student’s actual learning. We might have chosen Friedrich Nietzsche, whose postmodern