Constructing teacher knowledge as identity rationality

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Uncovering teacher identity in teachers’ collaborative knowledge construction

Jukka Husu

Department of Applied Sciences of Education/

Centre for Research on Teaching (CRT),

University of Helsinki,

Finland

Paper presented at the 11th Biennial Conference of the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction (EARLI) in symposium

Teacher learning in communities,

August 23–27, 2005, Nicosia, Cyprus

abstract This study aims to show how pedagogical practices can be rendered into pedagogical knowledge with the aid of concept and means of teachers’ identity rationality. When teachers reflect their work they analyze i) their situation - what is possible; ii) their students - what their students need and what they can do; and iii) themselves as teachers - what kinds of teachers they are themselves. When teachers act and interact in a given context, they recognize themselves (and others recognize them) as acting and interacting as certain ‘kind of persons’ or even as different ‘kinds’ at once. These multiple identities are connected not only to teachers’ internal states but also to their performances in schools and classrooms. Within this stance, teachers’ pedagogical knowledge resides in relations as they encounter with others and situations. Negotiative processes characterize these relations and reflect the situational nature of teachers’ knowledge construction though inquiry. The goal of this study is to highlight the importance of to pay attention the multiple contexts within which teachers and students are practically engaged. Also, it underlines the evidence how pedagogical knowledge develops through practical activities and communicative interchange.

Introduction

Recently, a growing number of educational scholars have shifted their attention on teacher knowledge away from the individual perspective and have begun to explore teacher knowledge as socially negotiated (Britzman, 1991; Freeman, 1996; Husu, 2002; Miller Marsh, 2002; Wortham, 2001). The perspective aims to understand how pedagogical discourses work in and through teachers to position themselves in their profession. Discourses are frameworks for thought and action that teachers draw upon as they speak of their work with others. They are culturally and socially generated patterns of thinking and acting that are authorized by their distinct professional code (Fairclough, 1989; Gee, 1996). This paper tries to illustrate constructivist accounts of teacher knowledge through a detailed demonstration of how the construction of teachers’ professional identities occurs in verbal practice – in actual teaching practice in communicative interchange with others. By documenting how interaction and emergent processes play a constitutive role in teachers’ professional identities, this paper argues for a relational and sociocultural perspective in teacher learning.

According to this stance, professional identity construction occurs in the relationship between the individual and the environment, where the environment is seen to encompass both the physical environment and its social surroundings, as well as internal aspects such as individual’s beliefs and knowledge (Roth, 1995). Consequently, a sociocultural approach does make particular claims about how the process of knowledge construction needs to be understood. This paper tries to show how teachers’ professional identities, gained through participation in a range of communities, come to bear on the processes of schooling, and how teachers value that knowledge in their identity construction. Also, the analysis will reveal complex, socially situated, everyday practices that are part of teachers’ construction of their professional identities.

This paper argues that teachers’ professional identities can be constructed through the interrelationship of represented content and enacted positioning in teacher narratives. It gives a detailed and concrete description of how narrative discourse can simultaneously represent the content and accomplish interactional positioning. The stance presupposes exploring teacher talk to see what it might offer in putting forth an understanding of teachers’ professional identities. The argument here is that these findings can have consequences on how to think about the form and the structure of teacher knowledge and its development.

Theoretical framework: teachers’ identity formation as a process of their relational knowing

In the last decade, teachers’ professional identity has emerged as a separate and growing research area (cf. Beijaard, et al., 2004). In order to explain what this concept means, many authors have drawn on the definition of identity used in the social sciences and philosophy. This study, however, examines this phenomenon from another perspective. Based on the research of teacher knowledge, this study argues that teachers’ identity formation can be seen as “a process of practical knowledge-building characterized by an ongoing integration of what is individually and collectively seen as relevant to teaching” (Beijaard, et al., 2004, p. 123). According to the stance, teacher identity is grounded in teachers’ daily work of learning and knowing of their practice (Bullough 1997, p. 21). Teachers form their identity in the social context of schooling and in the ways those contexts enable and limit their meaning making. Thus, teacher identity is partly given and partly achieved by ‘active location’ in a social space of school (Coldron & Smith, 1999).

The concept of professional identity is not a fixed attribute of a teacher but a relational phenomenon. As Sfard & Prusak (2005) state:

[I]dentity features prominently whatever one addresses the question of how collective discourses shape personal worlds and how individual voices combine into the voice of a community. In this context, the term identifying is to be understood as the activity in which one uses common resources to create a unique, individually tailored combination. (p. 15, emphasis original)

The question of the means through which the collective and the common enter into an individual teacher’s activities also lies at the center of the professional learning and development. Within this stance, teachers’ pedagogical knowledge resides in relations as they encounter with others and situations. Thus, professional identities are linked to professional realities, and the construction of those realities is an ongoing process of personal and contextual interpretation (Goodson & Cole, 1994).

The concept and practice of relational knowing (Hollingsworth et al., 1993; Webb & Blond, 1995; Clandinin & Connelly, 1995) draws towards that which lies ahead of a teacher in a given situation. This interactive meaning making involves a certain fluid and present character. Due to this, Hollingsworth et al. (1993) state, it would seem problematic to call it “relational knowledge” (p. 9; emphasis original). According to this stance, pedagogical knowledge is not solely located in persons; it is not a static, fixed and predetermined commodity but something individuals know in contextualized situations.

To view our knowing abilities in this way – as being formed through a matrix of relations, rather than as an already existing storage – shifts our attention to people’s responsive understanding of each other. In Shotter’s (1993) words, knowing in this sense is “the joint activity between people and their socially constituted situations that ‘structures’ what people do or say, not wholly they themselves” (p. 8). When individuals come to know in relationships they enter a hermeneutic circle as “conversational participants” (Shotter, 1993) or as persons whose “paths through life have fallen together” (Rorty, 1980). According to the stance, in these situations they do not rely on a clearly articulated epistemological framework to reach some fixed end. Their rhetorical-responsive approach makes a case for continual questioning of received information through dialogue.

In such a space, the knower and the known cannot be separated. On the contrary, the task becomes seeking an understanding of how an individual is engaged in her/his interactive processes of knowing. Thus, people are not “spectators to bodies of knowledge that are out there somewhere” (Fenstermacher & Sanger, 1998, p. 468). They are, rather, creators of knowledge, as they engage in the world beyond the self. Knowing is not isolated from practice but is itself a relational practice. As such, “to know is a form of competence, an ability to navigate the puzzlements and predicaments of life with moral and intellectual surefootedness” (Fenstermacher & Sanger, 1998, p. 471).

The perspective relies largely on a Vygotskian theory (1978, 1987) of the social formation of the mind. At the core of that theory is the idea that mental structures are not ‘given’ or solely ‘constructed’ in the individual mind. They are created through interaction with social environment. To a certain degree, mental functions are the product of social interaction in such a way that they cannot be characterized or described independently of that interaction.

The stance forces us to go beyond the individual agent when trying to understand the forces that shape human action. We cannot understand identities that are reflected in thinking and action unless we take into account the cultural setting and its resources. As Bruner (1996, ix) states, the individual and the social are interwoven even when one focuses primarily on an individual actor.

This is not to say that knowing and identity do not have an individual dimension. They clearly do. The point is to view this individuality as a relational character rather than as a “separate process or entity that exists somehow in isolation” (Wertsch, 1998, p. 23). Even if this study focuses on the individual teachers, its aim is to formulate its claims in such a way that their relationship to their social context is considered and presented. (It is here that a methodological question also arises.)

Certain claims characterize this relational construction of knowledge and identities. Here, five tenets are considered (Wertsch, 1998, pp. 25-65). First, while we can isolate certain elements for an analysis, it is important to note that these elements are phenomena that do not actually exist independently of action. Second, in practice, action typically has multiple simultaneous goals which are often in conflict with each other. This means that in many cases relational knowledge cannot be adequately interpreted if we presuppose only one neatly identifiable goal. Instead, multiple goals, often in interaction and sometimes in conflict, are typically involved. Third, we can understand actions only if we understand their origins and the changes they have undergone. They also involve a great deal of uncertainty and accident. As Wertsch (1998) sums up: a certain complexity and ambivalence characterize most actions and interpretations of relational knowledge (pp. 34-38). Fourth, culture and particular contexts constrain as well as enable our actions. We either tend to emphasize the enabling potential of our environment or we may perceive our surroundings in more restricted ways. This process affects how we perceive our situations in general. Fifth, relational knowledge construction is associated with issues of power and authority. Instead of arguing whether it is either the individual agent or our social institutions that really is the foundation of power and authority, relational view makes it possible to ‘live in the middle’ and to address the situatedness of action.

The crux of these approaches is that knowing through relationships is central to the investigation of identities. Teachers perceive their practice through their own values, beliefs, feelings, and habits. The self not only influences the way teachers perceive their concrete conditions and requirements but also the way they act.

This resembles Heidegger’s (1962) notion of Dasein as the fundamental mode of human existence. Dasein (literally ‘being-there’) makes a person’s self and world into a single irreducible entity: being-in-the-world (Dreyfus, 1991, p. 192). According to Dasein, we are always somewhere, for some purpose, at some time, and absorbed in some activity. As Roth et al. (2001) interpret, teachers’ Dasein is “one of being-in-this-classroom to teach this subject matter to these children” (p. 186, original emphasis). Teachers find themselves immersed in school settings in which they cannot but participate (cf. Donnelly, 1999).

Many have argued that both the conceptual and practical problems of knowledge construction cannot be solved without developing a more adequate picture of human functioning (e.g., Shotter, 1993; Taylor, 1991; Wertsch, 1998). According to their proposal, the research must stop focusing on self-contained individuals, who construct boundaries to distinguish themselves from others and their living contexts. In turn, they advocate the task of uncovering relational engagement with others in shared practices of knowledge construction.

Method and data

As Freeman (1994) states, most studies of what teachers know depend on an analysis of what they say: “[t]his relationship between the inner world of the teacher and the language which the teacher uses to express that world has provided the foundation for the study of teachers’ knowledge” (p. 77). Within this stance, words are taken as providing a vehicle for thought, and teachers are usually “taken at their word” (Freeman, 1996). Teachers’ words are taken for their capacity to reveal their knowledge and therefore “to represent their thinking” (ibid., p. 734, original emphasis). What teachers know can be seen in the language they use in interviews or in the written documents they produce.

The approach assumes that a narrator and a listener/an analyst can understand a speaker’s meaning with a reference to the content of that speaker’s utterance. Thus, the basic methodological challenge of this research mode is to gain access to the narrator’s views, perceptions, and understandings: stick to the contents of the mind. The narrator’s words are assumed to capture her/his thoughts and beliefs. According to Freeman (1996, p. 734), the data is studied for what it says.

Wortham (2001, p. 157) argues that narratives have particular power to construct teacher knowledge when the represented content and its interactional positioning run parallel. In their work, teachers engage in many types of complex activities simultaneously and the structures and processes that facilitate their behaviors often interconnect. Knowledge construction makes no difference: the same structures and processes in knowing can serve multiple functions. For example, the personal characteristics of a teacher belong primarily to her/his personal realm, but they also have consequences for a teacher’s professional quality. The capacity to produce teaching that meets both professional and personal standards takes advantage of and modifies many areas of shared practices of formal schoolwork.

The research method employed was narrative interview (Cortazzi, 1993; Mishler, 1986). Twenty-nine elementary school teachers, 20 females and 9 males, were interviewed. The duration of each interview was approximately one and a half to two hours per teacher. All the interviews were conducted in Finnish by the author and tape-recorded. Rough transcriptions of the interview data produced approximately 350 pages of text. Later, five interview texts were re-transcribed and translated in to English for a more detailed analysis.

Representational analysis was employed on the extended passages of data, not on short excerpts elicited from the interviews. This is because narrative ordering makes the individual elements of the data comprehensible by identifying the whole to which they contribute (Polkinghorne, 1988, p. 18). However, one cannot understand a narrative simply by interpreting the storied events in sequential order. To grasp the narrative whole, the analyst must infer the general meaning of the narrative based on cues with the aid of her/his own knowledge of the context. The purpose was to provide an adequate account of a narrative analysis that described how cues made certain aspects of the narrative relevant in such a way that an analyst could justify her/his meaning.

The analysis itself consisted of four stages. Each of them brought the analysis to a higher conceptual level. The first stage involved numerous readings of the case data. During the process, certain chunks of the transcripts emerged more prominent than others and the first outlines of the phenomenon became visible. In this phase, these narrative segments were treated on their own terms, ignoring their possible relationships to other parts of the texts. In the second stage, these preliminary labels were used as a kind of lenses through which the transcript could be further examined. The task was to investigate how those chunks of the data cohere, and what implications they have for their conceptualization. The object was to go beyond their original form of narrative segments until their implications and possibilities were more fully played out. Here, the analysis relied on the “mental modes” of the teaching-studying-learning approach (Kansanen et al., 2000) that led to interpret narrative segments in certain ways. In the third stage, the narrative cues were developed in relation to other segments and their tentative conceptualizations. The fourth stage called for a review of the decisions made in the previous stages of the analysis. Here, the interpretation was concerned solely with representational values: the task was to write down the underlying conceptual propositions that narrative utterances communicated. At this level, the analysis depicted narrative utterances solely from the conceptual perspective.

The representational analysis made the conceptualizations of the teachers’ professional identities and their interactional positioning empirically more useful. In order to analyze the interactional positioning accomplished in narrative knowledge construction, the analyst studied conceptual patterns across the narrative data. However, the investigator could not mechanically apply the methodological guidelines to the analyses. Any interpretation of a narrative required a contingent structure. Nevertheless, the analyses were able to provide an analytic entry to the interpretation of narrative knowledge construction of teachers’ professional identities. By recognizing instances of the perspectives, the analyst was able to identify conceptual structures and to interpret their appearances through the narrative.

Results

What is the content of teachers’ identity rationality?

Basically, the teachers talked about three issues: their school community and colleagues, their students, and themselves as teachers. When teachers undertake teaching they analyze

· their situation (‘What is possible in this particular school/class?’);

· their students (‘What do their students need and what can teachers do?’); and

· themselves as teachers (‘What teachers can/aim to do?’; ‘What kinds of teachers they are themselves?’).

The issues were not separate. Instead, the teachers discussed them in quite an integrative manner. The data example in Table 1 presents the case:

Table 1. An excerpt of the data analysis.

Talk/text

Interpretation:

Representational theme

Personally, I see this school as a good working community. This school has not stagnated into old and traditional ways of working. We are open to new ideas and practices, and we want to try out and develop new teaching methods. At least we try to avoid that "in our school we have always done things this way" type of logic. It is a great help that teachers in this school get along with each other very well. We have a good common spirit here.

Situation

What is possible in this

school context?

We try to develop and test new teaching methods. We test teaching students of different ages together in one classroom. Then, this integrated group studies a common theme, and their teachers aim to guide and support students in their studying processes as they seek their own ways of acquiring knowledge. We strive to develop and use teaching methods that ensure that our teaching is not solely based on teachers' talk, and we try to avoid the danger of letting our students to listen to too many teachers' presentations.

Teacher(s)

What teachers can/aim to do (in this school context?)

The student perspective is also considered at the organizational level of our school. I mean the changes when students move from one grade level to another. Sometimes this also means leaving a teacher whom they have come to know well. In order to minimize the possible difficulties that these changes cause to the students, we try to find the sort of teacher on our staff whose aims and teachings methods match those of his/her predecessor as well as possible. In these cases, we want to secure a certain kind of pedagogical continuity for our students.

Students

What do students need (and what teachers can/aim to do in this school context)

I teach the second grade and I have also tried out those student-centered methods that aim to activate students. But in spite of our school's encouraging and progressive atmosphere, I have realized that it is difficult to implement those student-centered ideas in the first two grades where I teach.

Teacher(s)

What teachers can/aim to do (in this school context?)

My students are still so young that they need a kind of a mother-figure who for the most part tells them what to do and how to do things in school. But gradually I can start to guide them to make their own decisions about their own work here in school. Step by step I prepare my students to formulate and take care of their own tasks and duties, and my job is to guide and support them along our common path. However, I have come to understand that in the first grade, and especially in the beginning of their first school year, the students are usually not able to study independently.

Students

What do students need (and what teachers can/aim to do in this school context)

As the data example in Table 1 shows, in the teacher’s narrative, those three topics could often be heard simultaneously. When the teacher was talking about her teaching, she simultaneously told things about her students and about her own character as a teacher. This indicated the relational character of those utterances. Using these three conceptualizations, the data could be interpreted in a way that gave it more coherence.

Teaching was treated as a broad concept. Teaching consisted not only of the teacher’s actions in school, it also involved the facilitation and promotion of change in others, also in the teacher herself. Within these processes, the teacher’s actions and intentions became a part of her professional learning. As the analysis shows, the students greatly defined the teacher’s story of her work. In the representational readings, teaching meant the teacher’s activity while studying described all kinds of students’ activities taking place in the school context. Using these two concepts, the instructional process could be understood as active on both sides.

In addition, teachers’ professional identity was largely defined in terms of teachers’ sense or perceptions of their roles or relevant features of their profession, or in terms of themselves as an occupational group. Table 2 presents an example of this feature.

Table 2. An excerpt of the data analysis

Talk/text

Interpretation:

Representational theme

Perhaps I am a kind of a teacher that needs others around me: colleagues or at least one co-worker who shares with me some ideas about teaching and generally wants to develop this work. I realize now that during my career as a teacher I have had a plenty of time to start to do things a little bit differently but I just never got started! I always relied on my routines.

Teacher(s)

What kind of a teacher I am? (Professional self)

Perhaps this was due to my former schools, where I was not challenged by any new ideas that would have given me something to think about. I understand quite clearly now, when I remember my previous school, how dreadful it was to work for 12 years in a place where literally nothing happened either in my work or in my professional attitudes as a teacher. But moving to this present school and getting this group of teachers around me who support and encourage me in my work has given me an extra spark to set new goals for myself in my work.

Situation

What is possible in (this) school context?

Here I can try out many new things in my classroom that I would never have tried in my former schools. And perhaps that's the reason why I have a feeling that as a teacher you are capable of almost anything.

Teacher(s)

What kind of a teacher I am? (Professional self)

At lest if you have a good community of teachers around you who give you help, support, and encouragement in what you do. And now I can say that I am in that kind of fortunate position. I realize it now when I am surrounded by teachers with whom I can discuss various teaching methods and we can learn new things together.

Situation

What is possible in (this) school context?

We have common meetings where we plan our projects that involve more than one class. In those meetings we also plan our individual classroom teaching. But at the same time I think that our cooperation is rather traditional: individual teachers meet their colleagues, and then they go into their own classrooms to do their job. Our co-planning has not yet progressed to the point where students from different classes often study together on common projects.

Teacher(s)

What teachers aim to do (in this school context?)

We still have difficulties in crossing the boundaries between our classrooms. But perhaps this is due to the sheer size of our school. When you work in a big school like this, teachers are not just one big, united and happy family that always works together. You just have to realize that it does not work out that way. Here we have a group of 10 teachers who work together.

Situation

What is possible in (this) school context?

We have some kind of common vision about how to organize our teaching, what aims and goals we prefer and so on. I see this as a tremendous resource for myself as a teacher, but also for this group of close colleagues and for our whole school community as well.

Teacher(s)

What teachers aim to do (in this school context?)

This gives me a feeling of loyal support whatever I am doing and whenever I face problems and difficulties in my work. I really appreciate this support and encouragement because it has helped me through many tough times. I have reached a certain level of collegiality within this group of teachers. This strikes me as a minor miracle because we are also quite different in many respects. I think it is our personalities that make us an effective, cohesive working team..

Situation

What is possible in (this) school context?

As the data excerpt in Table 2 shows, many utterances were imbued by this personal tone of the teacher’s professional self. However, no matter what the teacher’s personal and professional commitments were, she was strongly affected by her school context. In general, the contextual side plays an important part of in teachers’ professional identity formation. As Reynolds (1996) has emphasized that what surrounds a teacher, what others expect from her/him, and what the teacher allows to impact on her/him greatly affects her/his professional identity. According to her, teachers’ workplace is a ‘landscape’ which can be very persuasive and demanding – both in good and bad.

From representational analysis what emerged was that all the concepts used were broad frames. They were relational concepts through which the teacher could recognize herself as a certain type of professional. It is important that these conceptualizations are not interpreted as “fixed” or “natural categories,” rooted in the teacher’s mind. Instead, their fluid and loose character is essential. Lampert (1991) talks about “boundary blurring.” The concept describes a teacher working in a situation where s/he is “both an insider and outsider, depending on the context, roles, and problems to be solved” (p. 674). The different concepts represent differences in content only as we acknowledge the premise that they cannot be understood apart from the pedagogical contexts in which they appear.

What characterizes teachers’ identity rationality?

Instead of asking what ought to be, we approached the situation by investigating what conditions might explain pedagogical actions and decisions. This meant shifting our focus to places where the conditions and contingencies of pedagogical judgments can best be found. The stance implied exploring the day-to-day details of school life to find out what teachers’ relational knowing and their identity construction entails. Based on our analyses, we identified the following four features that seemed essential for interpretation and understanding of teachers’ professional identities.

1) The compelling power of teachers’ personal justifications Ryle’s (1949) notion that practical performance “has a special procedure or manner, not special antecedents” (p. 32) accords also with the results of this study. When teachers talked about their work, they also talked about themselves; the events were filtered through the person of the teacher. Teachers used themselves as tools to manage their work, and a large proportion of teachers’ responses contained self-referential comments. This blurring of boundaries between the personal and the professional was evident. The personal aspects emerged quite implicitly, seemingly without much conscious thinking, in teachers’ pedagogical knowing.

It became evident that teachers’ knowledge was not based to any great extent upon pre-established forms of reasoning. Rather, it tended to be founded on certain “socially shared identities of feeling” (Shotter, 1993, p. 54) that teachers created in the flow of their pedagogical activities. ‘Being pedagogical’ seemed to require a sort of combination of teachers’ selves and particular situations into a single, irreducible entity. Teachers described they were always somewhere, for some purpose, and that they were absorbed in some activity. Usually, they could not separate themselves from these entities in order to perceive them objectively as ‘properties.’ Instead, teachers felt that those situations required their personal investment. They found themselves in particular situations in which they had no other option than to participate.

For teachers themselves, these first-person attributions of their knowing were internally motivating and often normative. When discussing their justifications for their actions, teachers tended to refer to personally motivating states, e.g. their ideas, wishes, and desires. These features seemed to have compelling power in teachers’ deliberations of what to believe, and what to do in particular situations. What was known and how that knowledge was justified were related to the person of the teacher. They were matters of each teacher’s individual epistemology (Goldman, 1986) where the knower and the known could not be separated (cf. Tirri et. al., 1999).

Teachers perceived and selected issues they were personally and situationally inclined to. Partly for this reason, there was a great deal of variation, uncertainty and unpredictability in pedagogical enterprises. Teachers – as well as students, parents, and colleagues – brought a host of idiosyncracies into pedagogical situations which, in turn, became (even more) difficult to deal with and control.

2) Balancing the personal with the public In this research teachers’ pedagogical knowledge concerned those norms, values, and principles that seemed to govern their conduct. It emphasized the inherent normative meanings that seemed to determine the appropriateness of their practices. Therefore, this normative core provided ways to appraise the reported educational practices in schools. Teachers work in public institutions and make decisions that affect others: they distribute resources, evaluated performance, made curricular choices, and deal with comparatively naive and vulnerable students. Therefore, they need to provide ‘good reasons’ to support their decisions and actions. And thus, the process of justification should be regarded as inescapably social, as well.

As our data examples presented, teachers ‘selves’ were interconnected with significant others (e.g. students, colleagues, and parents). Nevertheless, the main basis for legitimating ideas and actions seemed to be their value for their professional community – and for their classroom. The ‘significant others’ that mattered the most were the students and colleagues. The experience “how it worked” seemed to be an important criterion for justifying teachers’ performances.

Also, school ethos had a considerable effect on teachers’ pedagogical practices. The study highlighted the links between a school’s ethos and teachers’ orientation to their work. Here, it emerges that school cultures appeared to operate like cultures everywhere. School cultures appeared to generate complicated forces and pressures of many kinds that affected teachers’ professional practices. Its forces and pressures seemed to influence teachers’ attitudes in many ways.

3) The absence of a shared code of practice As stated above, this study has characterized teachers’ pedagogical identities as a first-person kind of knowing. How, then, is it possible to address concern for defensible professional action? As Buchmann (1986) has argued,

“personal reasons‑centering one’s habits, interests , and opinions‑are relevant for considering the wisdom of actions where questions is what the individual per se wants to accomplish, but not for professional situations where goals (and perhaps a range of means) area a given (p. 530).

Teachers are in the latter position. Therefore, more is needed when we interpret teachers’ professional identities in a larger public and professionally argumentative framework. In other words, this position calls for the importance of valid justifications concerning the judgments in teaching. According to our results, teachers simultaneously use different perspectives in her practical reflection. Thier pedagogical decisions were shaped by the interrelationship of several elements: basic beliefs, workplace norms, circumstances, personal philosophies, feelings, and intuitions. In deciding what to do, teachers blended them into a situationally functioning whole.

However, the importance of justification in teaching has been shown to be of paramount importance. The basic question “What must a teacher do?” sets a standard that is at least elusive. This is because teachers’ pedagogical knowledge does not constitute a formally organized discipline, with “explicit standards for what counts as proper action, good reasons, or adequate evidence” (Loewenberg Ball, 1993, p. 201). It seems that because teachers are largely ‘on their own’ to invent and develop their pedagogy, their knowing is very personal. Thus, being responsible to the many imperatives of practice remained a highly individual and personal matter.

4) Pedagogical uncertainty For many, one unspoken purpose of teaching is the reduction of uncertainty in students. From this perspective, it seems paradoxical that teachers themselves have to live through such tensions that seem to be inherent to their work. Teachers lived with stable tasks and urgent obligations which often conflicted with each other. Generally, teachers dealt with the human behavior of others. This meant that they were dependent on the actions of their pedagogical partners which, in turn, introduced a great deal of ambiguity into their work as teachers. This was because teachers aimed to consider not only their own values and purposes but also those of their pedagogical partners. The result was often a messy interaction between teachers and students/parents/colleagues.

The multiple tensions made it evident that no ‘definite answers’ appeared to exist and that the given answers could always be contested. It appeared that it was unclear whether much of what teachers knew was professionally specific to them in the sense that the knowledge teachers employed could be considered highly different by character or degree from the knowledge of their pedagogical partners.

Pedagogical knowing was characterized as an active process by which teachers perform their duties in situations involving intense social interactions. Accordingly, definitive statements as to which decision or whose ‘good reasons’ should be observed were of fleeting value. In the context of the school community, the values of teachers were in a constant engagement with each other. The tensions between ‘them suggested that pedagogical knowing could be viewed in terms of how eloquently the participants in question were able to persuade others of the validity of their judgments. The pedagogical “argument” in this art was not the construction of a “proof,” as is commonly assumed. Rather, the idea of “argumentation” tied together the issues debated. This kind of rhetorical understanding enabled teachers to perceive the different sides of issues and, therefore, to gain a better conception of them.

However, this pedagogical uncertainty motivated teachers to relocate their ‘inner’ reasoning towards encounters between them and their colleagues. Instead of viewing the resolution of pedagogical issues functioning according to a set of pre-established rules and principles, solving problems involved active dialogical processes of testing what was at stake for all parties in the issue. Pedagogical problems presupposed that one’s actions could be successful only if they could be accepted by other participants. By adopting different ‘voices,’ teachers were more successful in responding to others under the particular circumstances involved.

Insights for teacher learning

As presented, we can use use discursive practices as tools to interpret teachers’ knowledge and identity construction. Shotter (1993, p. 18) speaks about “the knowing of the third kind” which redirects attention from a focus upon how individuals understand and apply formal theories and principles to how they understand each other in their practical settings. The stance focuses upon people’s use of their ways of talking to construct both their social relationships and their knowing. Within this flow of responsive and relational practices, socially significant dimensions of interaction originate and are formed. Here, people’s responsive understanding of each other is the important issue. Shotter (1993) argues that this kind of joint activity between people actually structures what people do and say. Attention to it reveals a complex and uncertain process of testing and checking various kinds of knowledge issues that have to do to do with judgements about obligations such as care, responsibility, and justice.

This rhetorical-responsive view coincides with the manner of conduct within the occupation of teaching, too. A vast majority of educational problems cannot be solved procedurally by applying a uniquely suitable formula or technique. Instead, solutions to such problems must be found by an interactive consideration of means and ends. In addition, teaching is strongly connected to the betterment of students. Professionally, teachers are morally responsive to their client’s needs, whether the client is defined as the student, the parent(s) or the public community. The teacher has moral obligations to these individuals or groups and this responsibility can be expressed through responsive relationships.

Shotter (1993) speaks of “joint action.” The notion of joint action can be used as a tool through which to look at the workings of rhetorical-responsive knowledge abd identity construction By its use, Shotter (ibid.) concludes, “we can see that in the ordinary two-way flow of activity between them, people create, without a conscious realization of the fact, a changing sea of moral enablements and constraints … ‑ in short, an ethos” (p. 39, emphasis original).

No matter what the teacher’s personal and professional commitments, each teacher is strongly affected by the school’s ethos (cf. Donnelly, 2000). No amount of time spent in formal teacher educaion can develop sufficiently pedagogical thinking and action; such continuous improvement is attained only through teachers’ reflected experience as they work in schools. However, schools all too often engender structures and atmosphere that fail to support teachers’ pedagogical behavior and reflection. Elaboration of teachers’ professional identities largely depends on the existence of forums at which teachers reasonably may deal with particular dilemmas and their more general pedagogical knowing. But what are the conditions needed for sound professional judgment? Arendt (1982) notes that decision making and meaning are only tested and widened when different meanings exist in a community and when teachers are willing to subject the content of meanings to general debate. Frequently, contemporary schools tend not to be such forums.

Special attention must be accorded to create social conditions in schools that permit appropriate conditions for the teachers’ continuous development in their work. Clark (2001, p. 149-155) calls for professional learning and growth in four major areas:

i. Personal growth is a form if inner growth that involves an increased awareness of self related to a teacher’s individual needs, values, and beliefs. Growth in this area can lead to a change of perspective and new ways of thinking about self and others.

ii. Professional growth is focused on what it means to be a professional educator and a learner. Here, the contexts are many, ranging from teachers’ individual competencies to the ability to deal with the social and political nature of schooling.

iii. Staff development relates to the opportunities of collective enrichment within a profession. These opportunities include workshops, seminars, and guiding teachers to reflect their practices.

iv. Curriculum development relates more closely to administratively defined quality in teaching. It involves opportunities for teachers to expand their teaching skills in order to ensure sufficient quality in student learning.

However, if policymakers value pedagogical reflection in the teaching profession and follow the demand for a situation-specific practice connected to deliberation and judgment, then, according to Colnerud et al. (1999), a number of consequences arise. If educational decision making is based upon discourse, then different meanings must be expressed in public dialogue within the school community. Such a collective exchange of meanings presupposes that many different types of meanings become visible. Consequently, such an exchange presupposes a willingness and means to create conditions for open dialogue. Among the attributes of this situation is the need to move away from a rule-governed understanding of practice and open up the number of meanings and descriptions of practice. Finally, collective reflection accepts difference and divergence. It does not regard them as potentially debilitating. One learns to “live with doubt.” Then, the key is not unanimous agreement, but discourse and the testing of plural meanings.

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