ABSTRACT
There is no shortage of advice for teachers, new and experienced, about how to become a ‘good’ or ‘better’ teacher. Some informal ‘research’ in the Waterstones bookstore close to where I work revealed a wealth of titles, including the best-selling How to Get the Buggers to. . . series, the vaguely ‘unprofessional’ How to Teach with a Hangover and the slightly ‘urban’ Pimp My Lesson. Then there are more ‘inspirational’ texts such as The 9 Habits of Highly Effective Teachers. Less visible on the shelves are more ‘serious’ texts such as Becoming a Teacher, or Learning to Teach in the Secondary School. These are generic texts about teaching. On the whole they are interested in telling teachers what ‘works’ in real classrooms. Where research is used, it is assessed in terms of its potential to improve practice. Together, these texts seem to address the teacher as competent craftsperson, wherein, ‘the teacher is configured and understood as one who “works upon” the raw material of their students, improving the extent and quality of learning and skills through the application and development of identified skills of their own’ (Moore 2004: 4). Whilst generic texts about teaching have their uses, teachers also look for more specific advice about how to teach their subject, and there is a long tradition of handbooks written for geography teachers, many of them by former teachers who are now involved in initial teacher education. Written with the benefit of hindsight and the luxury of being outside of the classroom, these texts are often strongly influenced by the model of teacher development that is dominant in university departments of education, namely the idea of the teacher as reflective practitioner, which places as much emphasis on teachers’ own evaluations of their practice as on the planning and management skills
into which these evaluations feed (see Chapter 3). These texts insist that teaching is a highly complex and contextual activity, where there are few sure-fire ‘fixes’ that can make life easier for teachers in classrooms, and that one’s development as a teacher is dependent on the continual process of reflection-on-practice. Such texts are sold as offering advice on how the reader can become a ‘good’ geography teacher, and are therefore useful sources of guidance as to what are the characteristics of the ‘good’ teacher. In the next part of this chapter, I undertake a reading of some of these texts in order to explore some of their ambiguities and tensions.
