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JOURNAL OF LEADERSHIP STUDIES, Volume 3, Number 2, 2009©2009 University of PhoenixPublished online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) • DOI:10.1002/jls.20108

DUNCAN WAITE

LDR 2 LDR: UNIVERSITY FACULTY

COMMUNICATING PRACTICE

THROUGH THEORY

My mentor, Harry Wolcott, shared this anecdote withme: His mentor, George Spindler, was visiting whenHarry came upon him early one morning goingthrough the books and other papers in his library. Afterchiding Harry for not citing him in a particular piece ofhis writing, Spindler told Harry something to the effectthat, “You know, Harry, after more than 30 years in thisprofession, I’ve come to the realization that it’s really allabout the teaching.” The impact that Spindler’s admis-sion had on me can be put into perspective by stoppingto consider that it was first communicated and thenrepeated by two scholars who, jointly, have arguably hada greater impact on the field of anthropology in educa-tion, and quite possibly qualitative research ineducation, than any other scholars.

I find myself reflecting on this bit of wisdom morenow, as I enter what is perhaps the midpoint of my owncareer spent teaching prospective educational leaders.The genesis of this article was a charge I was given re-cently to present my research. I could have taken anynumber of directions in such a presentation. But thisinvitation spurred me to reflect on my career and howI wanted to represent myself in this particular instance,to this particular audience. I chose to give a retrospectiveaccount of my career, aided by some analysis and inter-pretation (that is, theorizing), with implications for prac-titioners, both academic and school-based.

Concurrent and continuous questions by school-based practitioners—some of whom are my students,

some of whom are school administrators with whom Ideal—as to my biography and credentials have at timesforced me to defend myself, my position, and what Ido. Practicing administrators often ask, though not in somany words, Who am I to teach them anything? HaveI ever served as an administrator?

Andy Hargreaves (1984) found attitudes similar tothose of the administrators and reported them in his ar-ticle, titled “Experience Counts, Theory Doesn’t.” Par-allel, if not strikingly similar, issues infuse debates insuch areas as instructional supervision and coaching(and other areas of expert knowledge attainment andsharing) and, more generally, in teaching. One of theseissues might be characterized as Does one need to be ex-perienced in order to teach something? (Space limitationsprohibit a thorough discussion of related topics, suchas the relation between experience and development ofexpertise, and the role of pedagogical content knowl-edge in teaching.) But experience is a funny thing.Sparky Anderson, the former manager of the Cincin-nati Reds and Detroit Tigers baseball teams, who ledboth teams to a World Series championship, once said,“Experience is that which allows you to recognize yourmistakes when you make them again.” (Anderson, bythe way, played only one full season as a major leaguebaseball player before becoming a manager.) Similarly,W. Edwards Deming, the originator of the TQM pro-cess, has said that experience teaches nothing; theorydoes.

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Though I personally have no experience as a schooladministrator, I comforted myself in thinking aboutexperience as did Sparky Anderson and W. EdwardsDeming—until, that is, I came upon a relatively ob-scure science article in the New York Times on ancientphysics and theories (Gugliotta, 2008). In describingthe early work of Archimedes on the lever, the scholarscited in the article concluded, “The Archimedesresearchers have discovered that the evolution ofphysics—or, at least, mechanics—is based on an inter-play between practice and theory. The practical usecomes first, theory second. Artisans build machines anduse them but do not think about why they work. The-orists explain the machines and then derive principlesthat can be used to construct more complex machines”(¶ 10).

This point—that practice proceeds theory (at least, insome circumstances)—reminded me of Anthony Gid-dens’s notion of the double hermeneutic (1990), ofwhich he says that “the development of sociologicalknowledge is parasitical upon lay agents’ concepts; onthe other hand,” he continued, “notions coined in themetalanguages of the social sciences routinely reenterthe universe of actions they were initially formulated todescribe or account for” (p. 15).

In simpler language, I responded to a recent queryabout my administration credentials by saying, “I amnot the flower, but the honeybee.” What I meant to con-vey, and this is a precise conception of myself and mywork, both as a researcher and as a university professorof educational leadership, is that I gather informationthrough empirical observation and convey it throughwriting ( journal articles and books) and speaking (teach-ing, professional presentations, lecture) to other simi-larly situated practitioners—hence the title of this article:LDR 2 LDR. This process mimics the work of anthro-pologists who, as part of the USAID Farmer-to-Farmer

program, act as gatherers, conduits, and disseminatorsof other indigenous farmers’ knowledge.

The part I play in this process of disseminating edu-cational leaders’ so-called best practices, the part mostacademics play, is in theorizing the practice, packagingit for ease of transmission. That is to say, the practiceitself cannot be transported, just as empirical data can-not be extracted from the life world without the assis-tance afforded by theory use and application.Theorizing is endemic to perception (knowing what tolook for), assessing, and categorizing (knowing the“good” from the “bad” and discerning the applicabilityof knowledge), and finally to communication. To mymind, theory is what makes practice accessible for re-flection and other operations, and this is the part I playin educational leadership studies, LDR 2 LDR. Know-ing this, I will no longer make apologies for what I do.Despite our profession’s valorization of academicresearch and publication, this too is really all about theteaching.

ReferencesGiddens, A. (1990). The consequences of modernity. Stanford, CA:Stanford University Press.

Gugliotta, G. (2008). The ancient mechanics and how they thought.The New York Times (April 1, 2008). Retrieved July 23, 2008, fromhttp://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/01/science/01clas.html?_r�4&pagewanted�1

Hargreaves, A. (1984). Experience counts, theory doesn’t: Howteachers talk about their work. Sociology of Education, 57,244–254.

Duncan Waite is a Professor in the Education andCommunity Leadership Program at Texas State University-San Marcos. Duncan earned his Ph.D. from the Univer-sity of Oregon in curriculum and supervision. He can bereached at dw26@txstate.edu.