by Donald Freeman
 

Note: This is an abridged version of a plenary address given at the 34th Annual TESOL Convention in Vancouver, March 2000. The oral character of the talk has been retained. Part 2 will appear in the December/January issue.

I want to talk about the knowledge we teach by, and I want to start with this point: We are looking in the wrong place if we turn to academic disciplines to define teaching and learning and make them understandable. The knowledge that animates language teaching can--and needs to--be found within the activity of teaching itself and not beyond it, in work about teaching. In the phrase "the activity of teaching," I mean something more than just the actions of individual teachers in the classroom, or the actions and reactions of learners. I'm referring to the teacher and learners as participants: to the ways in which they conduct their work together; to the background of that work; to the tacit norms and the explicit rules they evolve to do the work in the classroom, institution, and wider community; and to the tools they use to get the job done. All of this together constitutes knowledge--knowledge that comes through discovering and testing what teachers know in and through classroom practice. It is knowledge composed of local understandings. It does not need to depend on importing ideas from elsewhere. This is my argument; let me set the stage for it.

The dynamic of knowledge in language teaching is an interesting one. It can be framed in two interrelated questions:

1. What counts as knowledge in language teaching?
2. What knowledge do language teachers teach by?

The first question is purposefully ambiguous. When I ask what counts as knowledge in language teaching, the retort comes: counts to whom? to researchers? teacher educators? administrators? policy_makers? learners? Or to the folks who are doing the job in the classroom? That is precisely my point: What counts as knowledge to one group may or may not be what counts as knowledge to another. The problem is that we assume that there is common knowledge that everyone in the field of language teaching does or should subscribe to. This is where the second question comes in. By asking about the knowledge language teachers teach by, I want to focus directly on language teachers themselves, on how they know what they know to do what they do, regardless of where that knowledge originates.

Let me draw an analogy. A while ago, I heard a radio interview with an academic who had contributed to a newly published UNESCO encyclopedia. In the discussion, the interviewer pressed the author on why a new venture of such magnitude was necessary. After all, she queried, didn't we basically know most of the facts already? The author replied with a story. He explained that his family had lived for generations on the banks of a major river that they knew as the River Niger. Years later, when he was in elementary school, he learned from a then-available encyclopedia in the school library that the River Niger had been "discovered in 1796 by a Scotsman named Mungo Park." This left him with the question: Because the river had been "discovered in 1796," how could his forebearers have lived beside it and never known it was there?

I want to explore this notion of the river that has not been formally named. There is a river by which those who are now working, and who have worked, in classrooms live. But it is unnamed because it has not yet been discovered ... at least by those whose job it is to draw maps, write encyclopedias, and to codify knowledge. Teachers' knowledge is the river that has not been recognized because it has not yet been formally mapped or named.

Knowledge is a lot like that. It is a tool used by those who possess it to accomplish particular ends. Likewise, specific understandings (or domains of knowledge) come with their particular heritages. To the users, some of that heritage may be firsthand, and much of it may be secondhand. Teaching knowledge can be a tool in this same sense. If as a teacher you understand how to do a jigsaw activity or you understand interlanguage, you may use these understandings as tools to do your work. You can set up a lesson according to what you know about jigsaw activities, or you may listen to what your learners say or read what they write using what you know about interlanguage. These ideas are tools that you use in doing your job.

But you don't have to use them. You may not do so because you don't have the tools-- they are ideas you don't know--or because they don't make sense in those particular circumstances. Going back to the snow shovel: If the storm is light or your driveway is short, you may decide to sweep the snow away with a broom or just ignore it. In the same way, as a teacher, you could decide to use your knowledge differently. For instance, you might decide to read one set of jigsaw information aloud and have the class as a whole respond using the other set.

So these are my points. First, that knowledge can be a tool and like any tool, it comes with a heritage that shapes its use. Second, that the same functions can be accomplished with different tools, which appear more-or-less appropriate to the work at hand. Users create and modify tools according to the situation and the tools they recognize. And if they don't recognize them, the tools are not available.

The French Surrealist Marcel Duchamp took a snow shovel, mounted it as sculpture, and called it "In Advance of a Broken Arm." "In Advance of a Broken Arm" is what Duchamp called a ready-made. He defined these sculptures--which included things like bicycle wheels, urinals, and bottle racks--as follows: A "Ready-made [is] an everyday object elevated to the most dignified level of an artistic object at the mere whim of the artist." (Bretón, 1938/1969, p. 23)

Duchamp biographer Juan Antonio Ramirez (1998) elaborates on this definition:

The Duchamp invention which made the most original contribution to the development of contemporary art was the ready-made. Much has been written in an attempt to explain such works, but their essential meaning can be expressed in two words: a ready-made is something "already made" or previously produced. The artist does not create, in a traditional sense, but chooses from among objects of the industrial or natural world. (p. 26)

I don't intend to delve into the history of modern art; rather, I do want to use Duchamp's sculpture as a counterpoint to the actual shovel pictured above. Let me ask the same two questions as you look at this second image. First, what is it? You might reply that it's a snow shovel or--in view of what I have just told you--that it is a picture of Marcel Duchamp's ready-made, "In Advance of a Broken Arm." All three of these answers are accurate. Now let me ask the second question: What does this snow shovel imply? What associations does it bring for you? You might mention art galleries, modern art, maybe Andy Warhol's Campbell Soup cans, and even perhaps a course on art history or Surrealism that you might have taken.

The tool in this case is the snow shovel as a ready-made. Its heritage and associations are being used purposefully to challenge ideas of what art is and how the artistic process works. Duchamp (in Ramirez, 1998) says of the snow shovel, in a magazine interview in 1915: "Speaking as an artist, I consider the shovel the most beautiful thing I have ever seen" (p. 37). This tool is being used to question whether creating and choosing are the same in artistic production, or whether they are two distinct and different processes. If you choose a snow shovel as a sculpture, are you creating it as a piece of art? Duchamp presents two basic alternatives: We either have the same tool in two contexts (your garage and the art gallery) or we have two different tools--the snow shovel in your garage and the sculpture in the gallery. Is it one object in two contexts or is it two different objects? In other words, does the context change the object? Does the use change the tool? Does the frame change the knowledge?

Think about this argument in terms of teaching knowledge. In their daily work, teachers are encouraged to use other people's ideas as ready-mades. The assumption is that ideas can be imported and still be the same ideas. Both preservice training and continuing professional development encourage and require teachers to use concepts and ideas that are produced outside of daily classroom experience. Teachers are expected to import theories and appropriate concepts from elsewhere to use as tools for defining, directing, and explaining what they do with the learners in their classrooms. Thus choosing and creating are seen as the same. Choosing ready-made ideas (or importing theories) takes the place of creating one's own tools or local understandings. Look at some of the archetypal tools of our trade that are regularly imported into classrooms: acquisition and learning, the categories of standard grammatical analysis (e.g., nouns, verbs), learning styles, accuracy versus fluency, BICS and CALPs--the list goes on. These function as tools. They do so in the art galleries of graduate education, in-service seminars, and professional meetings like this one, but how well do they work in the day-to-day snow storms of teaching?

This example could simply prove the point that the tool itself is neutral and that the problems lie in how it is used. I'd argue the opposite: The tool and its use can never be fully separated. The snow shovel always carries with it the potential for snow removal; grammatical categories always carry with them concepts of correctness. Think about finding an object in the back of a kitchen drawer or at the bottom of a tool box, an object that you don't recognize. You take it out and hold it up, trying to figure out what it is and how to use it. Until you figure it out, or someone tells you what it is, the tool is essentially useless to you. Without its potential use, the tool is not a tool. With definition comes potential usefulness. In the case of Black English, Labov's description did not resolve the sociopolitical perceptions that accompany language use. Although it is recognized as a linguistic system, Black English continues to be a stigmatized form in majority settings where linguistic power, and access to it, depend on control of standard English, as Lisa Delpit (1996) and others have demonstrated.

All of which raises the question of what it means to use a tool. In the case of our snow shovel, the tool is a physical object. In the case of acquisition and learning, learning styles, or grammatical categories, these tools are virtual. They are ideas and concepts, but they are tools just the same. Using tools, whether physical or virtual, involves two things: the norms and rules of how to use them and a community that accepts those norms and plays by those rules.

For example, if you use the concept of learning styles as a tool to talk about how a particular student in your class is performing, you will probably do so in an academic or professional setting with fellow teachers. If you do so with the family of the student, the situation will be different. You will likely need to explain the tool itself__what you mean by learning styles–in order for it to make sense to this audience. With colleagues, everyone participating can contribute to the discussion because they know how to use the tools. If you are talking with the student's family however, you, as teacher, control the tools; you have defined them; you need to explain them to the family members in order for them to participate in the discussion. If they don't know how to use your tools, it is hard for them take part in your discussion.

These kinds of interactions happen all the time: between teachers and parents, between administrators and teachers, between new and experienced teachers, and between teachers and researchers. Each of these groups or communities has access to different snow shovels, to different tools for doing their respective jobs.

Consider practice teaching for example. A student teacher comes equipped with conceptual tools from the teacher education program. The classroom teacher uses tools gained from her own professional training and her ongoing work in that classroom. They have different tools that they either have to trade--as in "the intern's new ideas are as helpful here as the teacher's wisdom of practice." Or they need to give up one set of tools and adopt the other, as in "Forget what you learned in theory, this is how things really work in practice." Or they need to develop a new set of hybrid tools, which happens in well-designed school--university collaborations.

This process is an extremely complex one. However they are arrived at, these tools, this common set of ideas, are being used for two potentially different ends. These ideas of acquisition and learning, learning styles, or BICS and CALPs (if these are the tools) are being used by teacher and student teacher to teach the students in the classroom. Simultaneously, these same tools are being used to help the intern learn to teach. In one sense, they are the same tools, the same snow shovel. In another, they are different tools, or rather ideas and concepts already made in one setting, the professional community, that are being used in another--in the classroom. They are sculpture being used as snow shovels.

What I'm getting at here is the notion that the use actually creates the tool. It does so according to the rules or norms for how to use it, norms that or implicate a group or community that use the tool in that way. In 1915, Duchamp used this shovel as a sculpture. It has achieved a heritage of its own according to the rules of the art world. Sixty years later, in 1972, "In Advance of a Broken Arm" was auctioned at Park-Bernet Gallery for $6,000. Thus the norms of the art world supported--and even increased--its value.

This question of how the context makes the object, the use creates the tool, or the frame defines the knowledge is a central one for teaching and learning. Our work constantly involves ideas as tools, tools that we define as we use them. Our common notion that ideas are imported from one setting or community to another is, I think, wrong. Instead, redefinition or re-creation seems more accurate way to describe what happens. My argument is that teaching knowledge is supposed to be built out of imported ideas--these ready-made concepts that are supposed to shape the world of classroom teaching. But these concepts (e.g., acquisition/learning, learning styles, or grammatical categories) are labels about the work; they are not the tools that gets the work done.

Just as the map is not the territory, so too professional knowledge is not teachers' knowledge. On the surface, the tools may appear to be shared, but they are fundamentally different. The tools that are used to build the professional field of TESOL are not those used to do the work with learners in classrooms. They may look and sound the same, but they are used differently, for distinct and different purposes, by each community.

We do not change a tool simply by using it in a new way. That is because a different use brings a different community and makes it a different tool. A shovel in the art gallery, although it looks like a snow shovel, becomes a ready-made piece of sculpture. To make a change, both the tool and its use must be accounted for simultaneously and interactively. The knowledge and its frame have to be dealt with together. This interplay is at the core of the dilemma of teachers' knowledge.

Bernstein, B. (1971.) Class, codes, and control. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Breton, A. (1938/1969). Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme. Rennes, France: Editions Galerie des Beaux-Arts.

Delpit, L. (1996). Other people's children: Cultural conflict in the classroom. New York: New Press.

Labov, W. (1972). Language in the inner city: Studies in Black vernacular English. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Ramirez, J. A. (1998.) Duchamp: Love and death, even. London: Reaktion Books.

Strevens, P. (1976). A theoretical model of the language learning/teaching process. Working Papers on Bilingualism, 129-152.