Chapter 29: Does Practice Itself Know Nothing?: Probing Teachers’ Felt Experiences of Mandated Practice

Across North America, the shift in the locus of control of teaching—from out of the hands of teachers and into the hands of an administrative and research policy-making elite—is well advanced and constitutes a de facto takeover of teaching that is without precedent in modern times. The mechanisms behind this takeover are subtle, and designed to appeal to the professional identity and scientific predispositions of the well trained, data-proficient, modern teacher. Although these mechanisms take various forms, they all begin by assuming that teaching is made more efficacious when it is treated as an applied scientific activity, and that theory developed outside or beyond the classroom is better positioned to govern classroom practices than knowledge arising from within. Whether the mechanisms underlying this takeover are enacted through the growing use of prepackaged curriculum programs, the expanded application of a regime of high-stakes testing, or the ongoing surveillance of teachers via intensified regimes of curriculum inspection, the result is the same—the space available for teachers and for teaching has narrowed to the vanishing point. When these curricular “innovations” are then combined with externally developed learning standards—which is to say both content and student performance standards—little is left for teachers other than to implement the externally designed curriculum as dutifully as possible. The question to be asked is: Can teaching as we know it, that is a teaching that is genuinely and substantively educative, survive the onslaught of an enforced process of curricular control and predetermination? Or in more personal terms: Can teachers thrive in a climate of enforced (mandatory) practice?