ABSTRACT
How are we to understand the growth of understanding? Most attempts by students of human development have been made outside the classroom, in laboratories and clinics, or in the studies and libraries of universities and research institutes. Or if research has taken place within classrooms, it has been conducted by outsiders who have played little part in the daily life of the class, least of all in teaching. Participant observers have not, for the most part, been observant participators. It is commonly assumed that the requirements of objectivity oblige us to eliminate teaching from the list of serviceable research techniques. The unfortunate consequence is that we thus deprive ourselves of a powerful, if rarely articulated, source of evidence and insight as to the nature of intellectual growth. For part of the art of teaching consists in eliciting, analysing and seeking to make more reflective the thought and action of others: consists, that is to say, in asking children questions, discussing their ideas, exchanging experience with them, finding out what they know and how they think, watching them grow. There is a self-consciousness implicit in this aspect of a teacher’s activity that makes those teachers who manage it successfully-however fitful and fragmentary their success-students of those they teach as well as their teachers. Participant observation is characteristic of their method and inseparable from it.
