Theorising teaching as a sociocultural practice

One aspect of theorising teaching as a sociocultural practice in the research literature is theorising teaching as a social practice (Bell, 2005a, 2005b; Bell and Cowie, 2001). Teaching involves social interaction with others; it is not something a teacher does without students. The dialogue between teacher and student is a social practice and we call this teaching. It requires the teacher to use her or his knowledge, and hence teaching as a knowledge practice is included as part of teaching as a social practice. One aspect of teaching as a social practice is that of teaching as a knowledge practice. Teachers know and use many different kinds of knowledge to teach (Shulman, 1987; Shulman and Shulman, 2004), including pedagogical content knowledge, which is seen as important as it is unique to a teacher’s professional knowledge (Loughran et al., 2006; Hume and Berry, 2010). Sally indicated that she used different kinds of knowledge in her teaching practices, including her knowledge of content:

. . . and academically I feel very confident and very strong in especially English, it’s been my passion for years . . . it’s not say I know everything the kids ask obviously. There’s content questions I don’t know or I haven’t read the book or whatever. . . . in terms of grammar or structural stuff like that, I don’t have any problems at all. [Sally]

She had a knowledge of her students; for example, what interested them and engaged them:

[The department] suggested to me two extended texts and two films and I just looked at the kids . . . and I thought ‘it ain’t going to work, there’s just no way this is going to work’. . . . [I spoke with the] Year 12 coordinator in English and told her of my concerns. . . . I said ‘I just can’t see these kids interacting with either of these things’ and she said ‘well it’s your call, you know, you do it’. So I went with my gut instinct and it was exactly right. I mean it ended up with things that the kids loved. . . . I got huge satisfaction out of realising that I was right in terms of my gut instinct . . . I was spot on with them . . . just the match between the film and the girls was perfect and they are not good writers but at least they had something that they did engage with and they were happy to talk about. [Sally]

. . . the way I work in the classroom is that I use that peer appreciation all the time . . . at age 18 their peers are their model and I notice it in the classroom. I can see it happening in front of my eyes and I use that in the class and a lot of that group work is because they work well together. You know, they do listen to each other. They’re more inclined to listen to each other than they’re ever going to listen to me. So group work works in those situations provided you can keep the classroom management. You know, the structure has got to be there. [Sally]

She indicated the ways in which she engaged the students with the thinking and learning. For example:

I am very controversial and I like to, for instance we did [the book] Whale Rider recently and I said to them . . . ‘Aren’t whales just cows in the water?’ . . . and everybody was up in arms, and I love doing stuff like that because then that promotes a discussion and they’re able to prove to me that what I’m saying is incorrect. So playing the devil’s advocate sometimes encourages that sort of thing as well and I don’t mind them challenging me and I don’t mind when I get it wrong. . . . and I say to them that’s wonderful because that shows me that you’re being responsible for your own learning, you’re not dependent on me, you’re thinking for yourself. [Sally]

Sally spoke of how she mediated her students’ learning, for example via another teacher, by having a specific dialogue with the student on language use:

I have, for instance, a child in my Year 11 extension class, very, very bright young woman, but her first writing . . . and I picked a consistent grammar problem. So in the first week of her writing . . . I took that [the student’s writing] down to the ESOL teacher and she’s been on a programme ever since, one period a week, and her writing just improved incredibly. It was just a grammatical hitch that’s all . . .she’s obviously going to do something wonderful at university. Incredibly bright, very talented young woman. [Sally]

She spoke of how she had scaffolded the units of learning so that the students could succeed in each step of the task:

these kids. [Sally]

[In what ways have your assessment practices developed over the past 18 months?] I’m not so structured on the test as I was; I use different forms of assessment now in terms of formative assessment than I did before. . . . I do it with my senior Year 11 extension class. . . . I gave them a task, they had to do an essay, 200 words . . . And then, I gave them a structured template to have a look at . . . they felt they could judge for themselves where they might have gone right or wrong. If they were happy with that, they didn’t have to rework it. . . . and they got another person of their own choosing to go through and check grammar and spelling and punctuation and things like that, and then they got it back again, then they had to rework it. And then I gave them an assessment sheet, the one I used for the marking criteria, and they had to mark it themselves. . . . I went over to see what they had done and in fact they marked themselves incredibly harshly, but they also had moved. There were individual differences in the way they were writing, and they had moved away from that [initial] format . . . I wanted to see some thinking and some different levels of thinking . . . so that was very successful. [Sally]

2. Teaching as a relational practice

Teaching may be viewed as a relational practice, with relationships being seen as very important by teachers (Bauml, 2009). It is within a relationship that the work of a teacher is done. After six months of teaching, Sally identified her relationships with the students as a key priority for her:

[When you graduated last year, what did you think teaching would be like?] . . . it is exactly what I thought it would be and I really, really enjoy it . . . it’s a comfortable sort of, very satisfying feeling that I get from it and I love the challenges and I love the kids and I never realised the relationship you would form so easily with them and I’ve never laughed so much, I love every class, they’re just gorgeous ...’