Teaching and Translation
FALSE CHOICES ABOUT TEACHING If you are looking for a cutting edge diagnosis of contemporary debates over teaching, we recommend John Dewey’s Child and Curriculum (written in 1902!). Talk of teaching today reveals a pronounced case of the dichotomous thinking that troubled Dewey: on the one side, there is the principled refusal to teach in the name of the creativity and initiative of students; on the other side, there is the teacher who is monologically trying to impose a body of knowledge on passive students. We see this sort of argument in one way, in Paulo Freire; in another way, in Jacques Ranciere. Like Dewey, we argue that there is a third way that avoids the false choice between imposing a teacher’s point of view or granting privilege to the student’s point of view. It is not the third way of dialogue, or at least not dialogue the way it is sometimes presented: each learning from the other, or a Socratic leading of the student to the teacher’s intended conclusions. Rather, we find the ideas of translation and third space to be potentially productive here.
Traduire la recherche en pratiques : vers un acte de transformation et d’engagement
En s’inspirant des travaux issus de la philosophie de l’education et en adoptant une perspective empruntee a la philosophie du langage, cet essai tente de se distancier des conceptions habituellement retenues pour discuter la traduction de la recherche en pratiques en education. Apres avoir brievement presente un modele de la traduction comme acte de transformation et d’engagement, il examine la fertilite de ce modele au regard des travaux de Paul Standish sur la justice sociale. Puis, a partir de ce modele, il examine un debat important des sciences de l’education: la question du rapport entre la recherche et la pratique. Enfin, il presente deux questions soulevees par ce modele, d’abord la question des criteres qui permettent de juger les qualites et la pertinence de la recherche, puis la question des interfaces de traduction. Ce faisant, il degage quelques implications pour l’enseignement, la recherche en education ainsi que la formation des maitres.
The construction of schooled discourse repertoires: An interactional sociolinguistic perspective on learning to talk in preschool
Abstract Analysis of the discourse demands across the school year within a recurrent event, “Circle Time,” is presented to show how 3- and 4-year-old students learned to be conversationally appropriate partners within a group setting, how the teacher's interactional patterns shifted as students learned to participate in socially and academically appropriate ways within this event, and how participation in the subevents of Circle Time (Milling, Transition, Singing, Talking, and Dismissal) placed differing social and communicative demands on both teacher and students. The overtime analysis of one Circle Time subevent, Talking, is presented to illustrate how 3- and 4-year-old students, in their first school experience, construct with their teachers a schooled discourse repertoire for participating in large group discussions, and how the discourse demands on the teacher shifted across time in the Talking subevent as well as across all subevents.