Beyond Reflection: Perception, virtue, and teacher knowledge

Abstract

AbstractIn this article, I aim to vindicate the belief that many teachers have that their intuitions, insights, or perceptions are legitimate—and indispensible—guides for their teaching. Perceptions can constitute knowledge. This runs counter to some number of views that emphasize ‘reflective practice’ and teachers as ‘reflective practitioners.’ I do not deny that reflection can be important, but it is a derivative task, dependent on teachers being the ‘right sort of subject,’ having the ‘right orientation’ to their work, at the service of achieving that orientation. That orientation is a matter of virtue, where virtue is manifested in the capacity to read situations correctly for what is required to serve persons’ welfare, for them to do well. This entails that good teaching is more experienced-based than research-based. Ultimately, it is life experience that provides for teachers’ ability to see well.Keywords: reflectionreflective practiceperceptionvirtue, teacher knowledge AcknowledgmentsMy thanks to Michael Peters and two anonymous reviewers for pushing me to improve an earlier version of this article. I also benefited from conversation with and feedback from Eric Evans, Rita Hermann, Fran Keating, Aaron Musson, and Mary Sinclair.Notes1. As one reviewer noted, ‘perception’ and ‘recognition’ are not synonymous; yet I use them more or less interchangeably. I should explain. On one hand, there would seem to be recognitions that involve little if any perception, in the sense that one has to be a perceptive person in order to recognize something. So, people recognize a stop sign, or I recognize a friend’s face in a crowd. On the other hand, there would seem to be perceptions that involve little recognition. A teacher perceives that her class is upset. Perhaps, she recognizes that much, but she has no clue about the source or significance of the turmoil. Then, there are intermediate occasions. I am trying to find a friend in a crowd at a dance club. It’s dark, the strobe lights are flashing, and people are moving constantly. I catch sight of a figure. I do not get a clear look at the face, but there is something about the profile, the clothes, the hairstyle, the way the person is moving. Yes, that’s him/her. Another friend standing with me insists it is not our friend, but I persist. I recognize our friend, but it requires some perception. When I refer to perception I have in mind examples of this last sort, a perception that is also a recognition, a particular species of perception.2. I need to be careful here. Kuhn (Citation1970) does propose that what is tacit and intuitive is ‘not in principle unanalyzable’ (p. 191). If we pressed the nurses who know via intuition, they might well be able to reflect and begin to articulate particular aspects of their intuition: ‘I recognized that this patient had the measles by the color of the spots on his stomach, their size, shape, and density.’ However, this tacit or intuitive way of knowing is ‘misconstrued if reconstructed in terms of rules that are first abstracted from exemplars and thereafter function in their stead’ (p. 192). Recognizing the measles cannot be systematized into rules such as ‘Look for spots of this description.’ Rather, we can think of it as a Wittgensteinian process of learning a concept, such as ‘a game.’ We learn what a game is by learning exemplars: ‘That (chess) is a game. That (rugby) is a game. That (Russian Roulette) is a game.’ We misconstrue the process if we think we can take from these exemplars sufficient and/or necessary conditions for something to be a game. If we imagine that among sufficient conditions for something to be a game is that it is fun, the fun involved in chess, rugby, and Russian Roulette is quite different for each. Having a rule such as ‘games are fun,’ even if true, does little to help us recognize games. Similarly, a rule such as, ‘If you want to recognize the symptoms of measles look for spots of this sort’ has limited value abstracted from the experience, the way of seeing, the nurses possess. The nurses to whom Klein refers could not know how they see, because their sight is the precondition for knowing at all.