IP 89-1 The careful vision: How practical is contemplation in teaching
Abstract
This philosophical paper on teacher thinking has three main purposes. First, it suggests that the conception of teacher thinking must be expanded beyond planning and decision making. People's ordinary conception of thinking includes, for instance, imagining and remembering, judging and interpreting, as well as aspects of caring and feeling. Hence, to understand the full scope and meaning of teachers' thoughts, researchers have to broaden and diversify their ideas and also reconsider the assumed links of teacher thinking to action and utility. Second, the paper analyzes the concept and activity of contemplation as one crucial process of teacher thinking that, though remote from the immediacies of planning and decision making, directs and supports the comprehensive practical life. Defining contemplation as careful attention and wonderstruck beholding, it examines subject matter and children as primary objects of teachers' contemplative concern. Third, the paper makes an argument for the practicality of contemplation by developing a concept of practice that goes beyond what an individual teacher does or what can be typically observed in teaching. This collective, ethical concept of practice invokes vision and ideals of perfection as part of the teacher's active life; these spiritual and ideal elements of teaching can be made available in contemplation. The paper contends that, in principle, contemplation and practice (in this moral sense) mutually involve each other; in reality, the activity of contemplation depends for its flourishing on political and practical wisdom. It includes examples of teacher contemplation and draws on philosophical work, both classic and current.