ABSTRACT
There is a fairly widely held view that says ‘teachers are born, not made’. Against that there is a more exclusive view that teaching is essentially a matter of an assured fluency on the teacher’s part in the subject being taught. This latter view, which overlooks pedagogical considerations, has been quite common until recent times in universities and academic secondary schools. At its most precious, it regards good teaching as that which occurs when students assemble to overhear a dedicated scholar communing with his or her muse. They catch something of the Olympian drama as it were, although essentially as spectators. Now for all its self-preoccupation, this viewpoint emphasizes an often-overlooked aspect of teaching that we explored in Chapter 3 – namely, the active character of the teacher’s relationship to the voices of the subject being taught. But it quite neglects the point that these voices seek to engage students through the quality of the teacher’s own enactments and the teacher’s pedagogical accomplishments more generally. This exclusive view waned, but didn’t disappear, as universal post-primary education became the norm, and later as students from an unprecedented diversity of backgrounds began to fill institutions of higher education.
