ABSTRACT
I cannot redefine the “pleonasm” of teacher development in this final chapter. I can only begin to speculate on what that redefinition would have to be if we truly distanced ourselves from the founding metaphors, narratives, assumptions, and structures that have produced late twentieth century definitions and theories. Redefinitions emerge only after making basic distinctions of the kind that I’ve done throughout this book. For example, I began to show in Chapter 4 how the rhetoric that composed twentieth century teacher development theories was by no means arbitrary or random. They infiltrated university discourse as part of a scientific worldview that was prevalent throughout those institutions and even in general. This worldview was highly distinctive from the pre-scientific version and originated in astronomical discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo. The real transformation of knowledge began with Isaac Newton’s new physical sciences. Jean-François Lyotard was able to show how that worldview promoted a meta-narrated paradigm that dictated theoretical perspectives and determined what methods were acceptable to elaborate on those theories. With regard to development specifically, I showed how its “story-form” had ancient and especially medieval origins and that this story of emancipation was transferred into biology along with methods that came from the scientific worldview generally. When the social sciences took hold of this worldview along with its paradigmatic methods and its theoretical perspectives, “development” took on a life of its own especially when it became implicated with the modern doctrine of progress. The concept even adopted a consistent pattern of movement that conformed to astronomy and to geometry. Development became processed into stages that lined up into progressive steps of adaptive improvement. This linear, temporal process of incremental change is overwhelmingly geo-metric. With that model of research, points coordinate progressively to produce lines of development toward a coherent “form.” That form, or picture of the developed teacher to be evaluated and professionalized, could not have been imagined without the groundwork of scientific formation of principles upon which to build a theory and method of development. Throughout this whole story, therefore, a general theme has prevailed which has determined in many ways how progress, development, and even thought processes were to be conceptualized. To be specific, I could not have
described Waller’s earliest rendition of the rationale for teacher development without using the word “form” a total of 27 times. Teachers personalities were solidified in their formation; theorists hoped to transform the school by assimilating new forms of understanding; theories prescribed measures and methods to better form (i.e. “prepare”) and reform teachers; a “stereotype” for the ancients was the “visible form” of an object; and Waller was interested in how instruction, as a mass-production process formed identical copies of the person that the teacher “is.” This perspective of thought-procedure originates in scientific astronomy and mathematical geometry. Both sciences relied on precise forms of measurement and calculation, the basis for reflective reasoning and for the doctrine of progress. Thinking, therefore, depends on the formation of ideas that consummate into forms of practice that are applicable to problem solving.
