title: Accessing the Professional Artistry of Teaching
Creators: name: Grainger, Sheila
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2003
Subjects: subject: teaching
subject: teaching as an art
subject: teachers
subject: performance management
subject: New Zealand
subject: Critical Discourse Analysis
subject: educational policy
subject: job satisfaction
subject: professional artistry

description: This study accesses the professional artistry of teaching which I argue is being eroded by the representation of teaching in a discourse of technical rationality (Fish, 1991, 1995). Accessing professional artistry is the first step towards identifying how it figures in teaching practice and how it can be (mis)represented in theory, policy and teachers' own talk about their practice. The research method involved: analysing the official New Zealand documents pertaining to teacher performance management to demonstrate how the dominant or hegemonic discourse of technical rationality marginalises the contesting discourse of professional artistry (Schon, 1983, 1987, 1995) and impacts negatively on the profession; collecting interview data through a process of video stimulated recall with student teachers to allow them to reflect on their own professional artistry; exposing the complexity of the student teachers' decision making in action through analysing the video stimulated recall data using the membership categorisation tools (Sacks, 1996; Baker, 1982, 1997, 2000) available in discourse analysis; using Fairclough's (2001) framework for Critical Discourse Analysis to explore the discursive and semiotic aspects of an identified social problem, namely teachers' disillusionment with the teaching profession and their alienation from their professional artistry, 'to produce knowledge which can lead to emancipatory change' (Fairclough, 2001, p.30). I argue that the identified problem is so deeply embedded in the discursive and semiotic aspects of the networked practices in which teaching is carried out, that a common sense interpretation of teaching is inadequate to expose the complexity of teachers' work and therefore inadequate to allow the professional artistry of teaching to be accessed and appreciated. A growing rhetoric/reality gap between teaching theory/educational policy and teaching practice serves to entrench the problem in the New Zealand Education System, positioning teachers in a disempowering discourse of technical rationality in which they are 'not to be trusted with more than the technical aspects of the job' (Fish, 1991, p.31). I argue that the contesting discourse of professional artistry valorises teachers' agency in interpreting and framing the problems of practice, crafting individual solutions to them and wanting to do a good job from a personal and professional commitment to their work and that this is the discourse in which teaching is represented at the local level by teachers themselves. This discursive positioning of teachers, contrasted with their positioning in the official discourse of educational policy offers an enlarged view of all aspects of professional practice as having the potential to inform theory as well as be informed by it, and therefore to generate new knowledge about teaching possibly leading to emancipatory change.