Roting Teachers: Progressive Math Pedagogy and the Development of Non-Teaching Experts in Teaching in the United States, 1820-1910

University mathematics education research has long advocated progressive pedagogy, focusing on students’ agency in constructing their own math understandings in contrast to “traditional” or “rote” instruction. This advocacy is part an over 180-year long tradition of pedagogical experts across content areas who wrote—and still write—about progressive pedagogy in their work in normal schools, university schools of education and university academic departments. Drawing on the idea that skill is socially constructed, in this dissertation I analyze experts’ publications on pedagogy to explore how they constructed not only their own skill but that of teachers. I argue that, through their articulations of progressive pedagogy, pedagogical experts constructed their own skill in relation to their construction of teachers as having an intransigent absence of skill. Pedagogical experts portrayed teachers as teaching by “rote,” and thus as “rote” or manual workers, simply by nature of being classroom teachers. In contrast, they constructed themselves as agentic and creative student-advocates who would intervene on “rote” teachers on students’ behalf through their mental labors. By examining this process from 1820 to 1910 during the early development of normal schools and research universities, I consider how pedagogical progressivism not only legitimated the expertise of non-teachers in teaching, but also forged an area of academic expertise in fixing teachers on behalf of the child. My case is mathematics education, which has a paradoxical reputation as both having a propensity to “rote” and to being a paragon of creative and rational thinking. In this way, math has facilitated the representation of teachers as unyieldingly “rote” when math instruction could be so much more, contingent on the intervention of experts. The introduction (Chapter 1) provides some illustrative examples of pedagogical experts’ characterization of teachers and a literature review on perspectives for analyzing the work of teachers and pedagogical experts. I motivate the emphasis on math pedagogy with a vignette on Warren Colburn’s famous arithmetic textbook. Colburn’s early progressivism is illustrative of two of the dissertation’s related themes; the articulation of “practical” instruction or philosophy and the articulation of claims to increasingly abstract knowledge. The following three chapters take up progressive pedagogy in normal schools (Chapter 2), schools of education (Chapter 3) and university mathematics (Chapter 4). Chapter 2 considers the evolution of the progressive “science of pedagogy” from the early 1800s, as normal schools were first arriving on the teacher education scene in the U.S., to the late 1800s as the science of pedagogy made tentative first steps into the university. I argue that even though early textbook writers explicating the science of pedagogy cited their teaching experience as the source of their theory and its legitimacy, the relevance of teaching experience to authoritative knowledge about teaching was gradually eclipsed. I consider how the increasing irrelevance of teaching experience was brought to be through the development of progressive pedagogy in three phases. This includes the antebellum effort to write authoritative texts on teaching, the Reconstruction era importation of pedagogical expertise toward training an increasingly female teaching force, and early efforts to bring pedagogy to the university. Chapter 3 revisits John Dewey’s efforts to both theoretically and administratively forge an education department at the University of Chicago amidst its rapid development as a research university between 1894 and 1904. I argue that, even as he developed a democratic vision of progressive pedagogy, Dewey rewrote the same divide between mental and manual labor that he sought to eviscerate through his distinction between “doing something in particular” versus “actual doing something.” I illustrate this distinction through a consideration of Dewey’s descriptions of his own academic project at the University of Chicago amidst the burgeoning Chicago labor movement, his comparison between teachers’ and experts’ capacity for knowledge production, his theorizing about “the child,” and his leadership of a private laboratory school. I also explain that, even as Dewey developed his more general pragmatist philosophy, he co-opted, abstracted and stereotyped the philosophical sentiments of the “plain man” in order to legitimate his emphasis on “experience” and practical concerns. Chapter 4 turns to the development of “pure” mathematics in the early research university and its influence on math pedagogy from 1876 to 1903, focusing on the influence of the mathematics departments at Johns Hopkins and the University of Chicago. Akin to professors of education, mathematics professors organized for removal from teaching as part of a broader attempt to avoid work that was “rote.” At the same time, they claimed knowledge above and beyond that of teachers about teaching, prescribing that students be taught in professors’ image as non-“rote,” “active producers” of knowledge. Both professors of education and mathematics turned to the exploration of the “foundations” of their fields in avoidance of calculations and application. And yet, for students, they recommended quite the opposite—“practical mathematics,” with familiar concrete objects as opposed to formal abstractions and rules—as a means of becoming “active producers.” In this way, they co-opted the constructiveness of work even as they argued against the constructiveness of the teachers who were purportedly subjecting students to unending “rote” instruction. I close with a discussion on the development of teachers’ content-related professional organizations and unions during the first two decades of the 1900s, and how each form of organization, despite initial claims of making teachers the “active producers” of their own occupational destiny, acquiesced to the view that teachers were “rote” and substantially included experts in their organization. The conclusion of the dissertation situates teachers’ dilemma of being caught between mental (“active,” or “actually doing something”) and manual (“rote,” or “doing something in particular”) labor in the Covid-19 pandemic and battles over school building closure. I discuss implications for teacher education; namely, that even as “progressive pedagogy” claims to professionalize teachers, it does so by teaching them that teachers are inevitably rote workers. I also consider that much of the resources of time and money for the improvement of public K-12 education are allocated to higher education under the assumption that teachers are unable to do the “mental” work of doing their own jobs. However, teachers are the closest to their own work and in the best position to improve it. Finally, I consider implications for progressive pedagogy. Progressive pedagogies claiming to promote equity for poor, working class, and even lower-middle class students will continually fall short of doing so as long as the distinction between rote and active work is maintained, even if it is disguised as judging the teacher to liberate the child.

Advisor: Perlstein, Daniel
Abrahamson, Dor