The Wrench, a new MSc in Engineering Education, and Blogging as reflective practice

During the International Symposium for Engineering Education 2018, which has taken place at UCL over the past two days, I have recommended The Wrench by Primo Levi to two engineering educator colleagues, so I'm including it here too - one of my favourite books, essential reading anyway in my view, but it happens to be about the trials, tribulations and achievements of an engineer, the main protagonist....a wonderfully wise and life-affirming novel (?) which I have written about before.

My Optimistic but Sceptical blog has never exactly become extinct, but I have made very few posts over the past five years.  I am hoping to be able to post more often now, for a number of reasons: first, I have come to the end of my stint as Programme Leader for the Institute of Education post-compulsory PGCE, and second, I am teaching and leading one of the core modules for an exciting new MSc here at UCL Institute of Education, in Engineering Education.

The first change means I expect to have a little more space and time for musing and reflecting on the issues and ideas that arise from my work, and for sometimes at least writing them down.  The second development has come about as a result of my Ed D thesis study, now completed in draft, and awaiting the final stage of formative feedback before formal submission in September.  This study is about the contribution of informal aspects of workplace life and activity to effective practice, practitioner learning, and innovation.  My research sites included a Further Education college and the R&D division of a large engineering company.  My department at the Institute of Education has teamed up with the UCL Faculty of Engineering in a number of different projects, one of which is this new MSc, and I am leading one of the core modules, on Engineering and Education: Practice, Innovation and Leadership. 

This module will cover such topics as:

• Persuading more girls to study engineering

• Organisations and change: the engineering workplace as a site for learning and innovation

• Preparation for C21st engineers: innovative design in UG and PG engineering programmes

• Apprenticeship as a model for learning engineering in times of change

• Approaches to leadership in multinational engineering partnerships

• Policy development and organisational strategies for an uncertain future

Anyone interested in finding out more about this programme should contact me here.

A third reason for coming back to my blog is that one of the stand-out findings of my research is the importance for effective practice, and especially for innovation, of 'writing' on the one hand, and of 'peer review' on the other.  By writing I mean any form of representation of any aspect of practice, including the most informal or temporary incidences of writing - doodles and scribbles for example, also notes, drafts, rough drawings or charts, and more formal types of writing such as reports or position papers, hether or not for publication.  By peer review I mean any kind of evaluative feedback, whether formal and written, or informally and unplanned as part of a conversation. Organisations which enable and encourage these practices as key elements of work, in terms of making space and time available for them, are likely, my study suggests, to be more effective and more innovative.  A blog is both a platform for writing in different degrees of formality, and a medium for sharing and potential evaluative feedback.  So I'm aiming to practise a little of what my study appears to teach.

My final reason for taking up the blog again is that my colleague working on the new MSc, Abel Nyamapfene, blogs regularly about Teaching and Learning in Engineering - see the link over on the right - and I like the idea of occasional blog conversations, especially as we work in different buildings!

Primo Levi

Cultivating and developing intuitive decision-making in teaching

I have to admit that throughout most of my career my ideas about, and practice in, effective teaching have been relatively incoherent and intuitively arrived at, rather than the products of careful and analytical thought. According to Yvonne Hillier (1998) this is common even amongst the most experienced and well-trained of teachers.


At the same time, I don't subscribe to the view that deliberate reflective practice is at the opposite end of the spectrum from intuition: I firmly believe that valuable insights can be gained from both rational thinking and from inspiration, and that in principle it is valuable for professionals in any practice to be receptive to insights that come unexpectedly, unplanned, and from unlikely sources, as much as those that are the product of rational processes of deliberation and analysis. I posted a couple of months ago about the value of deliberately going off piste and 'seeing what happens', and this view connects closely with the idea that effective teaching is not necessarily a neat and tidy business (Derrick 2010).


The tension between these different modes of apprehension has often been polarised into antagonistic and supposedly irreconcilable approaches to the practice of teaching (and indeed practice in other domains): I believe rather that these modes of thought should be seen as complementary, and that teachers need to be able to negotiate a balanced track between the two to be really effective.

Highly relevant to this suggestion is Daniel Kahneman's brilliant survey (2011) of psychological research studies into the way we make decisions: It is as if, he argues, that there are two ways in which we make decisions, which he calls Systems 1 and 2.



System 1 is very quick, in fact more or less involuntary. It utilises what might be called ‘intuition’:


We have all heard….stories of expert intuition: the chess master who walks past a street game and announces “White mates in three” without stopping, or the physician who makes a complex diagnosis after a single glance at a patient. Expert intuition strikes us as magical, but it is not. Indeed, each of us performs feats of intuitive expertise many times each day.... Our everyday intuitive abilities are no less marvellous that the striking insights of an experienced firefighter or physician – only more common. The psychology of accurate intuition involves no magic….Valid intuitions develop when experts have learned to recognise familiar elements in a new situation and to act in a manner that is appropriate to it. (Kahneman p11)


System 2 thinking, on the other hand is slow, requires motivation and effort, and uses what we might call ‘rationality’. We use these different systems in different circumstances, confronted with different types of problem. We prefer to use System 1, which evolved as a survival mechanism, and with which we make very quick decisions based on the continually developing capacity for correct intuitive judgements which we have developed throughout the whole of our past lives. Of course these decisions may sometimes be wrong, but in familiar situations System 1 decision-making has evolved to be accurate most of the time, and as a result it takes a great deal of conscious effort to go against what it tells us.


System 2 is used for problems that clearly do not require an immediate solution, and/or which demand that we follow a procedural algorithm in order to solve them, such as a complicated long-multiplication sum. Kahneman argues that we only use System 2 reluctantly, when we have to, because it takes effort and energy, whereas System 1 thinking is effortless and easy. System 1 decision-making is more likely to be accurate the more familiar we are with the situation we are in; it can work astonishingly well in such familiar situations, even if the problems involved are very complex, indeed too complex to be easily solved by the use of System 2 heuristics and algorithms.




This research-based psychological typology of our decision-making capacity is strikingly reminiscent of Donald Schön’s well-known theoretical distinction between reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action (1983). The key issue for practitioner learning, therefore, given the need for expertise in tackling both well-defined ‘high ground’ problems and complex, ill-defined, ‘swampy’ problems, is how best to develop and improve ‘reflection-in-action’ or System 1. For a new idea to contribute to changed System 1 decision-making, according to Kahneman, and in different terminology, to Schön, the practitioner has to 'practice' using it, reflect on this practice consciously and probably collaboratively (System 2 activity), and repeat this many times over a long period. 'The accurate intuitions of experts are better explained by the effects of prolonged practice than by heuristics' (Kahneman 2011, p 11): there are no short cuts, no quick intellectual fixes or magic bullets, in shaping our intuitive capacities.



This System 2 work of developing System 1, essential to practitioner learning, is difficult, both to carry out and to reflect on: it takes a great deal of conscious effort because it involves a decision to engage in practice in a different way from that informed by our System 1 thinking. This demanding process is one way to imagine that practitioners might strive to enhance their intuitive capacity for ‘divergent thinking’, cited by Schön as an essential capacity for tackling ‘swampy’ problems. Such careful, effortful, disciplined and probably repetitive practice over time does lead to changes in patterning and routines in relation to our work, which gradually influence changes in our intuitive responses to it, and so to our intuitive judgements and actions. What is needed as part of practitioner learning, therefore, is to support a deliberate process of learning that mimics the way our intuitive decision-making capacities have unconsciously and continuously developed and evolved, since we used them to save ourselves from being eaten by lions on the plains of Africa millennia ago.


Derrick J (2010): ‘The messiness of real teaching and learning’, in J. Derrick, U. Howard, J. Field, P. Lavender, S. Meyer, E.N. von Rein, and T. Schuller (Eds), Remaking Adult Learning: Essays on adult education in honour of Alan Tuckett. London: Institute of Education.
Hillier Y (1998): Informal practitioner theory: eliciting the implicit.  Studies in the Education of Adults, 30 (1) 35-52
Kahneman D (2011): Thinking, fast and slow. London: Allen Lane
Schon D (1983): The reflective Practitioner: how professionals think in action.  Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd

Another mystery philosopher of education

Here are some more provocative quotations from yet another mystery thinker about education, another whose work should be better known in my view:

All knowledge, including scientific knowledge, is provisional, and always will be. We cannot prove that what we know is true, and it may turn out to be false.  The best we can do is justify our preference for one theory rather than another.....of course, we assume the 'truth' of our existing knowledge for practical purposes and are quite ready to do so; but we must be ready for it to be superseded....we cannot be sure that we have the truth: we can, however, systematically eliminate error.  the way we eliminate error is by testing.

Of course there have been many people with a sense of unease about the practice of education.  most important, there have been many teachers who have either instinctively or after worrying thought tried to organise learning rather than teaching.  They have encouraged 'discovery methods', project work and independent learning.  But they have been under attack, partly because these methods still sit uneasily in the rest of the system (how, for example, does one examine such work?) and partly because they have been unable to give as coherent an intellectual account of themselves as is claimed by traditional academics. This insecurity is no longer justified.  It is the traditional academic practice which needs to be defended.

What we have, in fact, is a continuum of learning, whose logic is the same, from the new-born babe (indeed, from the amoeba) to the research worker on the frontiers of knowledge.  Each is engaged in the formulation of problems, in solving them and in testing the solutions.  Most people will formulate problems that have been formulated many times before.  Their proposed solutions will be familiar; their tests commonplace.  But they will learn by this activity.  They will not learn better or faster if we parcel up received solutions to problems formulated by others: indeed this is an anti-learning process.  Moreover it inhibits the possibility of progress, because it is always possible that someone will formulate a common problem differently, will propose a different solution or a more effective test.

What is important is not a particular fact or even a particular ordered collection of facts, but method.  It is method rather than information which gives mastery, and it is method which must be the chief business of education.

The presentation of knowledge as bodies of organised facts is a way of ensuring its unhelpfulness to most people.

Since criticism is of the essence of the method, education must offer opportunities for students to be critical and to use criticism. 

Clue: All these quotations come from the same book, published in 1977.  They still appear to me to represent a radical critique of the basic assumptions of our entire education system, perhaps even more so now than when they were written.  Any ideas?  Answers in a day or two.

Standardisation in the work of Teaching and Learning

Forcing everyone to teach by the rules does not improve the “bad teachers”– it only hobbles the good ones (Papert 1990)

I came across this quote from Seymour Papert in Joe Bower's post at http://coopcatalyst.wordpress.com/2011/03/13/the-illusion-of-standardization/. He sees standardisation in education as one of the ways in which mass production techniques are being applied to the work of teachers. The justification for this is 'fairness': the argument is that everyone should have an equal experience of their education, otherwise something isn't fair. The fact that the quality of an experience - how it is felt by two different people - is completely immeasurable, and actually is a completely meaningless idea, is forgotten because of our fear of being unfair. Sadly, the price for alleviating this fear is 'dumbing down' to the minimum level set by the standards, exactly as Papert pointed out more than 20 years ago. Supporters of standards argue that because there are so many bad teachers, we have to have standards to ensure that teaching quality is consistent. This is another concept, along with standardisation, that needs looking at carefully by every teacher.

Joe also includes a link to an article by Maja Wilson, who tells the story of her son choosing a book to read and taking it to school, but being told off because he hadn't chosen the book from the 'levelled book tubs'.

'Standardisation' in education is a paradigm indicator of what Donald Schon, nearly 30 years ago, described as 'technical-rationality':

In the varied topography of professional practice, there is a high, hard ground where practitioners can make effective use of research-based theory and technique, and there is the swampy lowland where situations are confusing ‘messes’ incapable of technical solution. The difficulty is that problems of high ground, however great their technical interest, are often relatively unimportant to clients or the larger society, while in the swamp are the problems of the greatest human concern (Schön 1983 (1991), p42).
Schön uses the term ‘technical rationality’ for what he describes as


the dominant epistemology of practice...which has most powerfully shaped both our thinking about the professions and the institutional relations of research, education and practice – professional activity consists in instrumental problem solving made rigorous by the application of scientific theory and technique (Schön 1983, p21).

He presents a compelling, almost overwhelming argument that the dominance of this version of epistemology in the theories of learning, research and professional practice has obscured the real importance of alternative, more expansive and provisional knowledges, resulting in the diminution of professional expertise and creativity in the design of a wide range of projects, and in addressing major social and educational problems. Unfortunately, his work appeared in the period just before two momentous shifts in Western politics and culture: the advent of computers on every workdesk, and the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. These shifts gave a renewed and powerful impetus first to neo-liberal economic policies and secondly to a new wave of technical-rational social policy fuelled by the new capacity of organisations both public and private, to collect and crunch data. Arguments such as Schön’s for a more nuanced and complex appreciation of the work of professionals of all kinds were swept aside in the rush towards the ‘Audit Society’ – a paradigm of technical rationality, ‘audit’ being seen in strictly well-defined, contractual and numerical terms (Power 1999). This mode of thought is still dominant, probably to a greater degree than when Schön’s work was published nearly 30 years ago, and professional practice is even more clearly subject, though not unresisting, to its sway, not just in the structure, organisation and curricula of universities, as Schön demonstrated in 1983, but nowadays also in social, educational and economic policy, at least in the UK and the USA, where it has become an explicit element of the philosophies of every major political party.

As a result of this continuing dominance, the situation of professionals in every field has become much more problematic than when Schön was writing. They are far less trusted, they are less autonomous in practice, early ideals have been watered down, they are subject to various versions of ‘performativity’, the ethical issues they face are far more complex.  But the most important consequence of this situation is that the work of dedicated, thoughtful and hard-working teachers is undermined, with obvious consequences for learners of all kinds.

Papert. S. (1990, July). Perestroika and Epistemological Politics. Speech presented at the World Conference on Computers in Education. Sydney, Australia

Power, M. (1999). The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Schön, D. (1983, 1991 edition). The reflective Practitioner: how professionals think in action. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd

Professional learning by deliberately cultivating the unexpected

“He that confines himself to one book at a time, may be amused, but is no student.  In order to study, I must sit in some measure in the middle of a library.”

William Godwin, The Scots Magazine and Edinburgh Literary Miscellany, Vol 81, 1818

I take this to suggest that 'students' need to do more than focus on and work directly at the subject of their studies; they must enrich this direct approach with other ideas, stimuli, experiences, so as to allow and encourage surprises, unexpected insights; in short, serendipity.  This might be boringly described as 'reading around your subject', but I think Godwin means something much more than that: something more like Rimbaud's 'systematic derangement of the senses', so as to try to be jolted out of one's preconceptions. 

I am pleased with this idea, as it aligns well with something I wrote recently about the messiness of real teaching and learning (Derrick 2010):

In the dominant model of public sector professionalism today, accidents are seen as prima facie evidence of failure: if unexpected events do occur, it must be due to inadequate preparation or human error. This view of practice assumes that in principle the job and skills of a teacher, social worker, parent, etc, can be defined in detail, without ambiguity, and therefore codified precisely. Regulation and quality assurance of these roles, it follows, is a straightforward process of checking that there is no variation from the code. The training of such professionals is also seen as straightforward, based on a well-defined, unproblematic body of knowledge and an accompanying skill-set that hardly changes over time. This positivist view of practice derives from a positivist view of learning, in some versions almost identical to behaviourism, in which the individual learner is seen as a passive recipient of pre-defined knowledge and skills, which are acquired usually through processes of memorisation and repetitive practice....

There is little room in the positivist view of practice for the idea of teaching as an art, or as a craft, something honed and fashioned over time in the context of a ‘community of practice’, and which takes for granted that changing circumstances and new learners will produce new problems for the teacher, who therefore needs the capacity to respond to new and unexpected situations.  Recent research shows clearly that teachers need to be ready at times to abandon their detailed plans and ‘go with the teachable moment’, not just as a response to difficult situations, but as an optimal strategy when things are anyway going well. Nor can the positivist view encompass the idea of the learning process as active, combining research, creation and re-creation by groups as well as by individuals, with a range of possible outcomes and wider benefits at the level of the individual learner, the group, the community and society in general . It does emphasise the role of the learner in choosing programmes of learning to enrol on, just as a shopper chooses products from the shelves of a supermarket, but this can only be equated with active learning from a reductionist, behaviourist viewpoint....[This] echoes Donald Schön’s famous distinction between different types of professional problem:
In the varied topography of professional practice, there is a high, hard ground where practitioners can make effective use of research-based theory and technique, and there is the swampy lowland where situations are confusing ‘messes’ incapable of technical solution. The difficulty is that problems of high ground, however great their technical interest, are often relatively unimportant to clients or the larger society, while in the swamp are the problems of the greatest human concern.  (Schön 1983)
This view suggests that a crudely positivist philosophy and policy of learning, teaching, and teacher development, whatever its intentions, will be damaging both to society and to individuals. In particular, it will lead to deskilling: it nurtures in professionals a passive, bureaucratic and parochial version of their work, which over time leads to diminishing interest in, curiosity about, and capacity to deal with unexpected situations, or even to imagine crisis scenarios so as to prepare for them. Specifically it leads to diminution in preparedness and of the capacity to make judgements about the best course of action in the difficult, complex situations to be found in classrooms everywhere.
Richard Sennett (1970) argues that everyone needs to experience living and coping with the uncertain and the unfamiliar, of managing and dealing with life in complex and unpredictable situations without being in control of them, in order to reach full psychological maturity. If state-supported education seeks to eliminate the uncertain, the debatable, the unexpected, he suggests that it is condemning people to a kind of passive and frustrating adolescence, whatever their biological age.
Avoiding these problems, and harvesting the full potential of learners and teachers to enrich their practice for the economic, social and cultural benefit of society in general, will mean taking a quite different approach to learning in general, and following its implications through in terms of curriculum, the organisation, funding and accountability systems for state-supported learning, and of course to the formation and ongoing development of teachers.
References:

Derrick J (2010) The messiness of real teaching and learning, in Derrick J, Howard U, Field J, Lavender P, Meyer S, von Rein EN, and Schuller T (eds, 2010) Remaking Adult Learning: Essays on adult education in honour of Alan Tuckett.  London: Institute of Education

Schön D (1983) The reflective Practitioner: how professionals think in action. London: Maurice Temple Smith
Sennett R (1970 - 2008 edition) The uses of disorder – personal identity and city life. New Haven and London: Yale University Press

Teaching doesn't get more productive over time, so it gets to seem more expensive

This point is not often recognised:  it takes just as long to teach a child (or indeed an adult on a vocational training course, for example) today as it did 20 or 200 years ago.  The same is true of caring for the young or the elderly, or providing a meal in a restaurant.  Technology does not in itself make these activities more productive, because in these occupations quality is a more critical issue than quantity, and people haven't become inherently better learners since the 19th century.  (This relates to the points I made in my earlier post on craft, about mass production techniques being inappropriate in education.)  But the point needs stressing because in many other areas of work and production, salaries rise in response to productivity gains.  'Teachers' salaries however, like those of other 'efficiency-resistant' professions, rise in response not to productivity gains in education (which have thus far proven extremely difficult to achieve)' - or indeed to measure accurately - 'but to higher salaries in other sectors.  This means that staff wages consume an ever larger share of the budget, even if education does not improve.  And because the reasons for this are not immediately apparent to the average voter, dissatisfaction with education budgets may also grow.'  There also seems to be an implicit assumption among politicians that introducing new technology inevitably results in increased productivity. A great deal of research says that this is not the case in any clear and straightforward way - and see, for example this post from 'Creative Catalyst': Technology Does Not Make a Classroom Succesful, the Teacher Does.



This rather grim point was made 15 years ago by Paul Pierson, in 'The New Politics of the Welfare State', World Politics, 48.2 (1996): 143-179.

It's important therefore for educationists to question this assumption about increased productivity over time, perhaps by asking how such increases would be recognised, exactly where they might be expected to manifest themselves, and exactly how they could be achieved.  And to get one out of the way straight away, new technology does not straightforwardly enable teachers to teach more students effectively.

Teacher professionalism and craft: a view from TLRP

A recent publication from TLRP, a Commentary on Professionalism and pedagogy, which I wasn't aware of when I wrote my paper on craft (see post before this), seems to me pretty compatible with it - here is a quote from the introduction:


'In a world-class educational workforce – Finland might be used as an example – teachers are the ones who initiate discussions about pedagogy, and then evaluate and critique the ideas they develop. This ‘pedagogic discourse’ aspires to be explicitly grounded in the scrutiny of ideas, theories, ethical values and empirical evidence. It goes well beyond simplified prescription, for instance of ‘what works', and supersedes reliance on centrally-imposed performance targets. In their place is greater trust in teachers’ capacity for self-improvement as an inherent element of their professional identity. However, this trust has to be earned – hence the focus in this Commentary on the nature of pedagogic expertise....

Teaching is a professional activity underpinned by qualifications, standards and accountabilities. It is characterised by complex specialist knowledge and expertise-in-action. In liberal democratic societies, it also
embodies particular kinds of values, to do with furthering individual and social development, fulfilment and emancipation.

‘Pedagogy’ is the practice of teaching framed and informed by a shared and structured body of knowledge. This knowledge comprises experience, evidence, understanding moral purpose and shared transparent values. It is by virtue of progressively acquiring such knowledge and mastering the expertise – through initial training, continuing development, reflection and classroom inquiry and regulated practice – that teachers are entitled to be treated as professionals. Teachers should be able and willing to scrutinise and evaluate their own and others’ practice in the light of relevant theories, values and evidence. They should be able to make professional judgements which go beyond pragmatic constraints and ideological concerns, and which can be explained and defended.

Furthermore, pedagogy is impoverished if it is disconnected from the capacity and responsibility to engage in curriculum development and to deploy a range of appropriate assessment methodologies....

Pedagogic expertise can be thought of as a combination of science, craft and art; this notion helps us to understand the complementary needs for collectively created knowledge, professional skills and personal capacities. It is also important to remember that all these are grounded in ethical principles and moral commitment – teaching is never simply an instrumental activity, a question just of technique.

One of the challenges for pedagogical discourse is to distinguish between what is known in a scientific sense of being explicit, cumulative and generalisable, and what are the irreducibly intuitive and creative elements of teaching.

It is generally accepted now that good teaching requires strategic decisions informed by evidence. But it also requires a large number of implicit and often instantaneous judgements and decisions. These are responses to the dynamic situation in the classroom, often shaped by the ‘community of practice’ to which the teacher belongs. They are also expressions of each teacher’s individual relationship with his or her pupils: how s/he generates a positive classroom climate or takes advantage of unexpected teaching and learning opportunities. This is the ‘craft’ and the ‘art’ of teaching.

And we all need to acknowledge this paradox of teaching – that the more expert a teacher becomes, the more his/her expertise is manifested in sensitivity to contexts and situations, in imaginative judgements in-the-moment sourced from tacit knowledge. The importance of these forms of expertise is often underestimated. Indeed, they often become so embedded, instinctive and taken-for-granted that they are barely recognised.'

This takes the discussion in my craft paper (earlier post) much further into the nitty gritty of teaching expertise, and while using the new government's language of craft, is also aiming, like me, to prevent a reductive use by politicians of the concept of craft in relation to teaching. I am particularly pleased to see them call for teacher profesionalism that goes beyond the 'what works' idea, which now seems to me to rather facile.  Given that this seems to have been published in June 2010, I'm hoping it might be sign that a rich version of the craft metaphor for teaching might be a little bit of zeitgeist!

The bluebell wood above, seen in West Sussex yesterday afternoon, sems to me  good image for 'irreducibly intuitive' elements of the expertise of teachers.  You can't really explain it - you just have to stand and admire....

Teaching as craft

My paper exploring craft as a metaphor for teaching was published this week in Adults Learning.  Here it is, though please do buy Adults Learning as well: it also contains chapters on why the tax relief system should be reformed to support workplace learning for the low-paid and lowskilled, on adult education and the Bog, sorry Big Society, and intriguingly, on the 'Men's Sheds' movement in Australia.

Teaching as craft?
Jay Derrick, Institute of Education


Introduction

Is it useful to think of teaching as craft? It is according to Michael Gove, the Coalition Government’s Secretary of State for Education: ‘Teaching is a craft and it is best learnt as an apprentice observing a master craftsman or woman’ (Gove 2010). John Hayes, Minister for Business and Skills, seems to agree: ‘The instinctive value we feel for craft must be reflected by our education system….this is, this must be the age of the craftsman’ (Hayes 2010). Hayes entitled his speech ‘Craft so long to lerne’, from the first line of the Parlement of Foules by Chaucer, itself a translation, via the latin proverb Ars longa vita brevis, of part of a Greek verse by Hippocrates, the father of medicine:

Life is short,
the craft long to learn,
opportunity fleeting,
experiment fallible,
judgment difficult.

Hippocrates was referring to his work as a doctor. How valid is it to use the word craft to describe teaching? Can Hippocrates’s somewhat world-weary sentiments be applied to teaching? And if we agree that teaching is craft, what implications does this have, for example, for the way we organise the training and development of teachers?

This question is not the same as suggesting that teaching is like this or that craft: conducting an orchestra, for instance, or gardening, though both of these are quite effective metaphors highlighting different aspects of teaching. I want to explore the idea of craft as a generic concept, to see how useful it might be to apply it to teaching. This approach avoids arguments about whether this or that human activity is or isn’t a craft, or about the difference between art and craft. Such discussions are interesting, but don’t help us much in trying to understand the nature of teaching, the kind of people teachers need to be, and how best to train and support them throughout their careers.

This is a timely question, and not just because the comparison has been made recently by members of the Coalition government. The nature of teaching as a profession has been the subject of intense debate for many years, driven by the developments in digital technology, both in terms of the technology people use in everyday life and work (such as mobile phones, facebook, the internet etc) and the technology now available to support teaching and learning (again, mobile phones, facebook, the internet etc). These developments have raised fundamental and new questions about the role of teachers in general (for example, do we need them at all?), and have simultaneously created a wave of new possibilities in terms of learning activities and classroom organisation, which teachers are expected to learn how to use proficiently. At the same time, accelerating globalisation is increasing the cultural diversity of student groups, enriching the resources available to teachers but also creating challenges in terms of expectations and assumptions. This paper is intended to be a contribution to the debate stimulated by these and other developments.

Craft as an attitude

The fact that ‘craft’ is used in relation to many and very different human activities, suggests that rather than being a distinct category which includes some and excludes others, the idea of craft is more helpfully understood as an attitude: as something referring to the manner in which we approach an activity or discipline, or to the way we value it – the way in which we see it as ‘worthwhile’. The idea of craft, from this perspective, puts the spotlight on the human agent, the craftworker themselves, their motivation and dispositions, rather than on the particular activity involved, and still less on the objects or outcomes produced by that activity. The key to craft, and to teaching, I suggest, is not so much what the craftworker or teacher specifically does (though this is of course very important), but the kind of person they are. The first task of craftworkers, from this perspective, is to produce themselves.

So what does ‘the craft attitude’ involve? I think it has six key aspects: attitude to quality, to practice, to learning and teaching, to the workshop (the craft environment in its broadest sense), to time, and finally to mass production. Let’s look at each of these in turn:

1. Quality: the craft attitude implies an absolute commitment to the pursuit of quality, with the practical recognition that this may not always be achieved to the same degree. Edmund de Waal bluntly describes this as ‘a contempt for shoddiness’ (de Waal 2011). Secondly, it seeks to work as efficiently as possible, in terms of time, the cost of materials, and the sustainability of the workshop, as long as quality is not compromised; and finally, it assumes that the ultimate arbiter of quality, efficiency, and mastery in general is the community of practice, ie other practitioners.

2. Practice: this is firstly about a particular orientation towards the discipline of practice, by which I mean respect for the hard, repetitive work required to move towards mastery, commitment to improving practice and knowledge over extended time periods, respect for other practitioners, for the materials and for the tools of the trade; secondly, readiness to collaborate in making, learning, and teaching the craft to less experienced work colleagues; thirdly, seeing accidents, mistakes and less than perfect work as opportunities for reflection and learning; and fourthly, acceptance of a more or less informal hierarchy in the workshop, based on length and breadth of experience, but also on the continuous collective evaluation of the quality of work.

3. Teaching and learning: the craft attitude embodies deliberate and continuous learning through work, with the recognition that this can be both formal and informal; that teaching and developing less experienced colleagues is recognised as an essential part of craft and of improving one’s own practice; teaching and learning is structured around the continuous search for new and better techniques, practices, and tools; and finally that the work is central to the craftworker’s identity: that the character of every worker is embodied in their work.

4. The craft workshop is an environment organised around the needs of practice, as determined by the practitioners, the materials and the tools involved. A key aspect of the workshop is its culture: the extent to which it fosters and supports authentic communication between practitioners, and a mutuality which enables constructive evaluation of each other’s work. This is the team scenario in which there is creative tension between individuals’ strength and weaknesses and the collective expertise of the team as a whole. This has been described as an ‘expansive’ as opposed to a ‘restrictive’ learning culture (Evans et al 2002, Fuller and Unwin 2008). The dynamic of the workshop also reminds us that although craftworkers typically have a main field of expertise, they need to know about related areas as well: beautiful and useful products are often worked in different materials, and need the combined application of very different skills and knowledge. Craftworkers are specialised, their skills have limits, but they are continually learning more about related fields, they work closely with different specialists, and are curious about their work. Workshops facilitate this interdisciplinary practice as far as they can, and continuously evolve so as to do so.

5. Time: it is an inherent quality of craft that knowledge, skill and expertise are hard-won, through long hours, days, weeks, months and years of practice. The craft attitude is suspicious of easy achievement, precocious skill, any work which seems to have been achieved by cutting corners in terms of time. It recognises that while tools make work easier and quicker, the tools themselves have been developed through extended processes of experimentation by hundreds of practitioners, perhaps over centuries. In general, it is an axiom of craft that time is a sine qua non for the sustained achievement of high quality work, and that it is time, filled with sustained practice and learning, that confers expertise – there are no short cuts to mastery.

6. Mass production: the aim of craft is not to produce wholly standardised artefacts, but to reveal the potential of material worked by knowledgeable practice; mass standardised production eliminates the human and the particular from the production process (these are seen as embodying ‘error’): its products are in a very real sense ‘lifeless’, whereas craft aims to maximise the human and the particular in the production process, and embody these in artefacts. Dickens implies all of this in his condemnation of teacher training systems in the mid-nineteenth century:

‘So, Mr. M'Choakumchild began in his best manner. He and some one hundred and forty other schoolmasters, had been lately turned at the same time, in the same factory, on the same principles, like so many pianoforte legs.’ (Dickens 1854)

This quotation is of course from a novel in which the factory system, and the moral philosophy which generated it, is quite clearly delineated as anti-human. The same ideas are explored by Kipling, from a slightly different perspective in which the craft attitude is shown as being distorted and undermined by the institutionalisation of demarcation between different craft specialisms, first in the mediaeval guilds, and later in some aspects of early twentieth-century trade unionism (Kipling 1910). It is an irony that one of the main areas in which the concept of craft survives in the 21st century is in thinking about industrial work which is demarcated into separate crafts for the protection of employment. This point is not just a historical one, but highly topical: there are indications that digitisation of craft expertise in the ‘brainwork industries’ (including teaching) may be leading to social and political consequences similar to those produced by the division of labour and the subordination of humans to machines within the factory system (Brown et al 2011). What Dickens and Kipling remind us so powerfully, however, is that these are moral issues, not merely matters of efficiency or ‘what works’.


Ideas and practices in tension with the craft attitude

Another way of delineating the craft attitude is to look at aspects of life and work which sit uneasily, or are in tension, or even in outright contradiction with it. Among these are firstly, the idea that the outcomes of craft can be evaluated, compared and enumerated objectively. From the perspective of craft, quality is apprehended through the practice of judgement, usually by ‘masters’ of the craft. This judgement may be aided by numerical indicators, but is never determined solely by them, because craftwork does not intend to produce artefacts which are ‘the same but better’ than others, it aims to produce objects that embody the humanity of their maker, and which reflect the highly specific qualities of the materials being used. It is a central tenet of the craft attitude that although craft objects can be compared in a general way, they are not essentially comparable. Richard Sennett puts this another way:

What do we mean by good-quality work? One answer is how something should be done, the other is getting it to work. This is a difference between correctness and functionality. Ideally, there should be no conflict; in the real world, there is. Often we subscribe to a standard of correctness that is rarely if ever reached. (Sennett 2008)

There is therefore an inevitable tension between an idealised, static, ‘objective’ view of quality, and the actuality of a particular piece of work, which may, even if it appears not to be perfect, do the job perfectly well. If practice is systematically subordinated to the idealised perspective, then practice will quickly become restricted, and practitioners will be deskilled.

Secondly, the particular take on time and mastery that is essential to the craft attitude implies that apprenticeship is a long drawn out process and that its completion is only achieved, and arguably not even then, by attaining the status of ‘master’ as judged by peers. The modern idea that apprenticeship finishes when you start work, or even more when you gain your license to practice, is completely at odds with this. So is the modern practice by which apprenticeships within a particular craft are all the same length and contain the same content. Apprenticeship, from the craft perspective, cannot be embodied solely in a formal course of instruction with a fixed length: that is a mass production, rather than a craft model. We will explore the implications of this for teachers a little later. Sennett highlights the learning process itself, and in particular problematizes the tendency of our formal education system to divide and separate the intellectual curriculum from the practical:

Skill is trained practice; modern technology is abused when it deprives its users precisely of that repetitive, concrete, hands-on training. When the head and hand are separated, the result is mental impairment. (Sennett 2008)

Once again, we see that ‘craft’ is not a concept that should be restricted to thinking about ‘vocational’, ‘practical’ skills and occupations: this is a deformation of its true meaning. The craft attitude requires the intellectual and ‘practical’ to be integrated, as each is impaired without the other:

‘There is nothing as practical as a good theory’ (Lewin 1951)

Thirdly, the idea that you can make craftworkers produce better work, or work more efficiently, by setting them quantitative performance targets, is clearly at odds with the craft attitude. Sennett connects this with the promotion of competition over collaboration as the dominant feature of practice (Sennett 2008). Again, this tendency arises from the mass production model of work, and the desire of external authorities to control production and practice.


Implications of a ‘craft’ perspective on teaching

If the craft attitude outlined above is applied to teaching, a number of implications emerge, under each of the six aspects of craft I have discussed: I present a few here for discussion.

Under quality, we would see a confident move towards professional self-regulation by a teacher-controlled body. Self-regulation within the community of practice is an essential aspect of the craft attitude. This doesn’t mean that teachers shouldn’t be accountable: the issue is that they should be accountable to students first and foremost, and to their own community of practice. Bureaucratic attempts to measure the quality of teachers through a standardised framework and through counting qualifications would be abandoned as expensive, misleading, and damaging to practice and learners alike. Teacher training and development would foster ‘contempt for shoddiness’ (de Waal 2011). Teachers would be empowered to distinguish between unimaginative work that satisfies technical standards, and sustained high-quality work. Teaching would be celebrated as a moral and sustaining activity rather than an industrial and technocratic one.

Under practice, we would see a much greater emphasis on professional development through work, with policy attention shifting towards an enabling framework for supporting CPD rather than the present major focus on initial teacher education. There would be a much greater emphasis in the curriculum of teacher education, along with skills and knowledge, on developing learners’ capacity to judge the quality of work, through collective qualitative evaluation of collaborative projects.

Under teaching and learning, all experienced teachers would be involved in ITE for pre-service trainees and in mentoring new entrants to teaching. This teacher-education work would be completely integrated into their role and practice as teachers. Teachers would be seen as new entrants for at least 5 years after their initial training.

Under the workshop: organisations employing teachers would be ‘expansive’ rather than ‘restrictive’ in relation to the learning of their staff (Evans et al 2002, Fuller and Unwin 2008). In relation to time, it would be recognised that there are ‘no short cuts to mastery’, that experience confers expertise that cannot be achieved any other way. And finally, any vestiges of mass production practices and procedures in teacher education would be eliminated: learners would not be expected to be standardised outputs, and would not be measured as such. Variations of practice would be welcomed and encouraged if they served quality, as would be the integration of intellectual and practical skill and knowledge. Efficiency and effectiveness would be measured by qualitative judgements rather than in solely quantitative terms.

All of these implications of adopting what I have called the craft attitude to teaching seem to me to be highly desirable: a great many of them are supported by research as well. The argument against mass production approaches to educational systems is made for example by Ken Robinson (Robinson 2010) on the grounds of its anachronism in the 21st century. Very many teachers, moreover, already have this attitude, and struggle to maintain it, and the quality of their work, in a technocratic system which tends in many ways to deskill them.


Conclusion: learners and teachers

If teaching is craft, learners are the material teachers fashion: they are the artefacts of teaching. However, learning is also work, it is work done by learners, with guidance from teachers. This suggests that we should see the work of teaching as helping learners produce and develop themselves, as individual mathematicians, plumbers, philosophers, nurses, etc, rather than standardised factory-output versions of practitioners of those disciplines, ‘like so many pianoforte legs’, as Dickens has it. At the same time, reflective teachers are continually producing and developing themselves as teachers. So the craft attitude to teaching sees it as a contribution to the collective work of being and continually becoming human; and at the same time as holding off, resisting, and repairing the social, cultural and political damage done by the dominant ethics of mass-production.


References
Brown P, Lauder H, Ashton D (2011): The Global Auction. Oxford, OUP
Dickens C (1854): Hard Times. Harmondsworth: Penguin (2003)
Evans K, Hodkinson P, Unwin L (eds, 2002): Working to learn. London: Kogan Page
Fuller A and Unwin L (2008): Towards Expansive Apprenticeships. London: Teaching and Learning Research Programme
Gove M (2010a): Speech to the National College for Leadership of Schools 17-06-2010, at http://www.michaelgove.com/content/national_college_annual_conference
Hayes J (2010): Speech to the Royal Society of Arts 26-10-10, at http://www.bis.gov.uk/news/speeches/john-hayes-skills-and-their-place
Kipling R (1910): The Wrong Thing, in Rewards and Fairies. London: Penguin (1987)
Lewin, K. (1951): Field theory in social science; selected theoretical papers. D Cartwright (ed). New York: Harper & Row
Sennett R (2008): The Craftsman. London: Allen Lane
Robinson K (2010): Changing education paradigms. Royal Society of Arts Animated Lecture, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U&feature=player_embedded
de Waal E (2011): With these hands, Financial Times 11-03-11, at http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/8f50d924-4b63-11e0-89d8-00144feab49a.html#axzz1H9ksDxWZ
Whitty G (2008): Changing modes of teacher professionalism: traditional, managerial, collaborative and democratic, in Exploring Professionalism, B Cunningham (ed). London: Institute of Education
Wilby P (2011): The awful truth: education won't stop the west getting poorer. The Guardian 01-03-2011

Making and teaching

After giving a lecture last week which explored the idea of teaching as craft, I am working on an article based on this theme for Adults Learning, which will also be posted here. As often happens when I am excited about a bundle of linked ideas, I seem to stumble across relevant work by other people all the time, without trying, by accident. Today I was catching up on some music programmes using Iplayer and I noticed a radio 3 talk given last week by Edmund de Waal, the author of The Hare with Amber Eyes, which is about the history of his collection of netsuke (see above for an example), on his enthusiasm for The Wrench, a novel by Primo Levi, a wonderful book I've been re-reading as part of my work on craft. A version of this talk was published in the Financial Times last week, at http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/8f50d924-4b63-11e0-89d8-00144feab49a.html#axzz1H9ksDxWZ

There is an interesting commentary on de Waal's discussion at Annjrippin's blog at http://annjrippin.wordpress.com/ Ann Rippin is a quilter, but clearly language and concepts, perhaps what she calls 'embodied knowing' are shared. She notes that 'He describes the experience of reflecting on something that you have created and the surprises it can bring, as ‘the epiphany where you see what you have made is different from what you had conceived.’ Very often artists experience this as disappointment or failure, Turner’s famous gap between what was in his imagination and what he was able to put on the canvas and the sense of frustration that can bring, but de Waal sees it in a much more positive light. It is an epiphany, which suggests new beginnings, possibly the receiving of a gift, certainly a happy apparition.'

This realism, the recognition that perfection is an illusion and a distraction rather than a goal, combined with what de Waal describes bluntly as a 'contempt for shoddiness' is what we need to foster in our teachers - and this cannot be done by focussing solely on what they do, because ultimately it is an issue of character, about the kind of person they are. The craft attitude is about trying to lead what Montaigne would call 'a good life', understood in the moral sense. Craft is about morality...

More to come on this very rich seam.....