JUDGING THE NATURAL RIGHTS VIEW, XXIII

 

An advocate of natural rights continues his/her presentation[1] …

The last posting looked at teacher effectiveness.  Joseph Schwab, through his theorizing, devised a set of commonplaces that focuses on the factors that affect the way curricula are designed and implemented.[2]  Teacher is one of those commonplaces and can be analyzed by looking at teacher effectiveness.  This posting looks at another attribute, that being teacher knowledge.  Of course, the topics of effectiveness and knowledge, when applied to teachers, are highly related.

Teacher Knowledge

          As Lee S. Shulman, some years ago argued,

 

To teach all students according to today’s standards, teachers need to understand subject matter deeply and flexibly so they can help students create useful cognitive maps, relate one idea to another, and address misconceptions. Teachers need to see how ideas connect across fields and to everyday life. This kind of understanding provides a foundation for pedagogical content knowledge that enables teachers to make ideas accessible to others.[3]

 

Therefore, these teachers must keep up with the latest developments in their disciplines.  Also of importance is for teachers to have a working knowledge of the history and philosophy of their individual disciplines – which means for civics teachers becoming knowledgeable of vying philosophies and theoretical traditions that are prominent in the various social sciences.

          This – extensive knowledge of a teachers’ subject matter – can be a point of concern for a variety of reasons.  Those reasons extend from noting incorrect information – due to more recent discoveries – to looking more closely at some topic or issue.  As one might intuitively surmise, knowledge affects the quality of teaching in any subject including civics.

          Commenting on mathematics teachers, Margaret Walshaw claims,

 

[Knowledge] plays a critical role in extending and challenging students’ conceptual ideas.  Sound subject knowledge enables teachers to mediate between the mathematical tasks, the artifacts, the talk, and the actions surrounding teaching / learning encounters.  Teachers with limited subject knowledge have been shown to focus on a narrow conceptual field rather than on forging wider connections between the facts, concepts, structures, and practices of mathematics.[4]

 

To further this sentiment, Suzanne Wilson, et al. noted that teachers with high degrees of knowledge more often questioned textbook authority in the class, efficiently pointed out students’ misconceptions, readily related subject matter content to other concerns and other disciplines, organized class activities effectively, and meaningfully interpreted students’ remarks and positions.[5]

          Meanwhile those teachers who were not so knowledgeable were more often inaccurate, superficial, and inappropriate in their comments.  Therefore, knowledgeable teachers are preferrable for a variety of reasons.  Unfortunately, in either controlling course content or in the knowledge base one would want for   teachers, certain shortcomings exist.

          In teaching civics, teachers have little say as to what perspective or approach the content will be determined.  Those decisions are left to district curricular designers and, more importantly, developers of textbooks.  This blogger, from his teaching experience of thirty years, agrees with this claim:

 

The textbook determines the components and method of learning.  It controls the contents, the method and the procedures of learning.  Students learn what is presented in the textbook, in other words the way the textbook presents materials is the way the students learn it.[6]

 

          Most teachers do not feel they have a say in those determinations.  Teachers pride themselves in being able to teach what is given them.  This attitude came through clearly in a four-year ethnographic study of a working-class elementary school[7] and at the high school level.[8]  More recent attention has become somewhat viral as concerns over an array of issues have reflected the polarized political environment that prevails today.[9]  What the long-term effects of these developments will have are yet to be known.

          But beyond these more current concerns, what one can still ascertain is that with higher levels of knowledge, teachers can make the viable choices as to what is important content and what is not.  Teachers, irrespective of the textbook used, have great influence in determining how students will come to understand the content of a particular subject.  This influence in turn is, as stated above, dependent on the knowledge and understanding that individual teachers have.

          And in no area is this factor more important than in how teachers treat the textbooks they are assigned.

 

A textbook is only as good as the teacher who uses it.  And it’s important to remember that a textbook is just one tool, perhaps a very important tool, in your teaching arsenal.  Sometimes, teachers over-rely on textbooks and don’t consider other aids or other materials for the classroom.  Some teachers reject a textbook approach to learning because the textbook is outdated or insufficiently covers a topic or subject area.

          As a teacher, you’ll need to make many decisions, and one of those is how you want to use the textbook.  As good as they appear on the surface, textbooks do have limitations.[10]

 

And yet textbooks continue to have the pervasive role. 

This blogger, in his book, From Immaturity to Polarized Politics,[11] has continued a long list of scholarly works that have looked at civics books and evaluated their effects on civics education.  Generally, they point out that while relying on a political systems model, they are varying only in their incorporation of current issues or the utilization of inquiry methods – which are utilized, if at all, to a very limited level.  Therefore, the use of the natural rights perspective with the emphasis on political systems seems to be a prudent course to take.

          This blog will next address the milieu, the last of Schwab’s commonplaces of curriculum development.

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[1] This presentation continues with this posting.  The reader is informed that the claims made in this posting do not necessarily reflect the beliefs or knowledge of this blogger.  Instead, the posting is a representation of what an advocate of the natural rights view might present.  This is done to present a dialectic position of that construct.  This series of postings begins with “Judging Natural Rights View, I,” August 2, 2022.

[2] Joseph Schwab presents his conception of the commonplaces of curriculum development – they are subject matter, students, teachers, and milieu.  See William H. Schubert, Curriculum:  Perspective, Paradigm, and Possibility (New York, NY:  MacMillan Publishing Company, 1986).

[3] “Teacher’s In-Depth Content Knowledge,” University of Northern Iowa (n.d.), accessed October 12, 2022, https://intime.uni.edu/teachers-depth-content-knowledge.

[4] Margaret Walshaw, “Teacher Knowledge as Fundamental to Effective Teaching Practice,” Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education, 15 (May 6, 2012), 181-185, accessed October 16, 2022, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10857-012-9217-0#:~:text=It%20plays%20a%20critical%20role,actions%20surrounding%20teaching%2Flearning%20encounters.

[5] Suzanne Wilson, Lee S. Wilson, Anna E. Richert, “‘150 Different Ways of Knowing:’ Representations of Knowledge in Teaching,” in Exploring Teachers’ Thinking, edited by James Calderhead (London, England:  Cassell Education, 1987), 104-124.

[6] “Role of Textbook in Language Teaching and Learning,” School Education (n.d.), accessed October 16, 2022, https://www.rajeevelt.com/role-of-textbook-language-teaching-learning-educationist/rajeev-ranjan/.  An insight that equally pertains to social studies.

[7] Jane J. White, “What Works for Teachers:  A Review of Ethnographic Research Studies  as They Inform Issues on Social Studies Curriculum and Instruction,” in Review of Research in Social Studies Education:  1976-1983, edited by William B. Stanley (Washington, DC:  National Council of the Social Studies, 1985), 215-307.

[8] Stephen J. Thornton, “Teacher As Curricular-Instructional Gatekeepers in Social Studies,” in Handbook of Research on Social Studies Teaching and Learning (New York, NY:  MacMillan Publishing Co., 1991), 237-248.

[9] Nicole Daniels, “What Role Should Textbooks Play in Education?” The New York Times, January 14, 2020, accessed October 16, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/14/learning/what-role-should-textbooks-play-in-education.html.

[10] “Textbooks:  Advantages and Disadvantages,” Teacher Vision (November 15, 2019), accessed October 12, 2022, https://www.teachervision.com/curriculum-planning/textbooks-advantages-disadvantages.

[11] Robert Gutierrez, From Immaturity to Polarized Politics:  Obstacles in Achieving a Federated Nation (Tallahassee, FL:  Gravitas Civics Books, 2022) AND, for example, Syukron Saputra, “Analysis of Civics Textbooks in Framework of the 21^st Century Learning, Advances in Social Sciences and Humanities Research,” 636, 2022, accessed October 16, 2022, file:///C:/Users/gravi/Downloads/125969102.pdf.