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Living with Ghosts: ‘Disciplines’, Envyand the Future of Teacher EducationViv Ellis aa Oxford Centre for Sociocultural and Activity Theory Research,Department of Education , University of Oxford , Oxford , UKPublished online: 01 Jun 2012.
To cite this article: Viv Ellis (2012) Living with Ghosts: ‘Disciplines’, Envy and the Future ofTeacher Education, Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education, 19:2, 155-166, DOI:10.1080/1358684X.2012.680758
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Living with Ghosts: ‘Disciplines’, Envy and the Future of TeacherEducation
Viv Ellis*
Oxford Centre for Sociocultural and Activity Theory Research, Department of Education,University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
The continuing instability of Education as a discipline is examined againstrenewed arguments for its ‘disciplinary’ status. Teacher education in particular isseen as Marjorie Garber’s concept of ‘discipline envy’ to propose a more posi-tive relationship between disciplines that might work for the good of teachereducation.
Keywords: teacher education; philosophy; discipline envy; James Britton
Responding to the continuing instability of Education as a discipline and, in particu-lar, the disciplinary position of teacher education, this article considers disciplinarityin relation to the formation of teachers and, ultimately, makes an argument for thefuture of teacher education as a disciplinary enterprise in its own right. It is an argu-ment that engages with the past, refers to the present and looks to the future. Perhapsit seems odd – especially to continental European readers – that I feel the need tomake that case but, as I will argue, teacher education as an intellectual project, as afield of practice central to the academic mission of university Education departments,continues to be under threat from within as well as from outside in several parts ofthe world. Seeing teacher education in the UK, the US and Australasia as somethingwe just ‘do’ – something ‘clinical’ or practical that brings in a significant and, untilrecently, relatively stable source of income for Education departments – while a smallgroup of people get on with thinking fine thoughts for research assessment exercisesor ‘output’ audits in another part of the building is intellectually unsustainable. Now,in the UK, thanks to Coalition and financial crisis, it is likely to be economicallyunsustainable too.
I begin by turning to the philosophy of education as a specific case of disciplin-ary claim-making. I go on to situate claims for a philosophical perspective in rela-tion to arguments about the foundational ‘disciplines’ of Education, a 50-year-oldargument recently reasserted in a strong articulation by Furlong and Lawn (2011).In responding to this argument, I use Marjorie Garber’s concept of ‘discipline envy’(Garber 2001) to suggest how interdisciplinary relationships might work for thegood of Education, and teacher education specifically. And to imagine an exampleof how these disciplinary relationships might work in the future, so that a core Edu-cational concept such as pedagogy might be developed, I turn to the past and the
*Email: [email protected]
Changing EnglishVol. 19, No. 2, June 2012, 155–166
ISSN 1358-684X print/ISSN 1469-3585 online� 2012 The editors of Changing Englishhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1358684X.2012.680758http://www.tandfonline.com
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work of James Britton, a teacher educator and specialist in English teaching at theUniversity of London from 1954 to 1990.
‘Disciplines’ and the risks of perspectival advantage
In May 2011, the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain, sensing a crisisin direction, convened a symposium on ‘Philosophical Perspectives on Teacher Edu-cation’. The call for participation in this symposium was interesting for the way itpositioned the philosophy of education and how this positioning was accomplished.Two phrases in particular were significant. The first proposed the symposium as a‘dialogue’ between separate categories of person or activity – ‘Teacher Educators,Educationists and Philosophers of Education’. I would want to argue that the firstand second categories, at least, are likely to be the same and perhaps it is possiblefor all three to be identical. The alternative seems to use the separation of persons(or activities, at least) to make distinctions in material terms that are not justifiable.I realise this effect is partly a result of how words such as ‘teacher education’ and‘philosophy’ are heard and understood, but the effect is nonetheless to propose sep-arate categories, and I think there are risks for all in that separation if we sharecommon interests. A second phrase in the call – ‘“theory”, hence the university’ –made what I understand as both an unjustified and undesirable association and rein-forces the separateness of those earlier categories. I think ‘“theory”, hence the uni-versity’ is unjustified as so often what goes on in the name of teacher education,even at ‘elite’ universities such as my own, is not ‘theory’ in the sense implied.Similarly, I think the association is undesirable in that it relegates a category ofwork and a category of person (school teaching and school teachers who mentorstudent teachers) to the sub-intellectual, a- or even anti-theoretical, perhaps evennaïve realm of ‘practice’. So to paraphrase a political philosopher, it is a division oflabour that converts a partial task to the entire destiny of a certain class of person.
The problem is a persistent Educational one and is by no means confined to thePhilosophy of Education Society, which in fact provides an important forum for justthis sort of discussion. The problem is the persistence of the Cartesian dualism andthe separation of the mental and the material, ‘theory’ and ‘practice’, mind andaction. Philosophy seems to be advanced as a peculiarly ‘theoretical’ mode ofenquiry that offers its practitioners unique capacities of abstraction. Philosophy toooften simply becomes a synonym for thinking, for abstract concepts and for deliber-ative discourse of a kind unavailable from other modes of enquiry.1 I don’t thinkthat the philosophy of education is alone in appearing to make this claim, as I willargue later. But the risks of this sort of claim are high for Education as a whole, inthat it accepts that only certain kinds of recognisably ‘disciplinary’ intellectual work(i.e. philosophical, psychological, sociological, historical, etc.) can be capitalised inthe market for academic standing and research excellence. Sometimes academicwork is conceived of as a dichotomy between embourgoisement and proletarianisa-tion (Guillory 1994). I don’t think it is as simple as an either/or but the problem forEducation, and teacher education in particular, is that it is the scholarship thatexplicitly presents itself as ‘disciplinary’ that has exchange value and allows theindividual to accumulate academic capital, whereas the work of those who eschewexplicit ‘disciplinary’ associations relegates them to the academic proletariat. Butthis is not only a question for individuals but for the field and for institutions. Ifteacher education is something merely ‘practical’ or mundane that needs another
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disciplinary perspective on it in order to have academic value or to develop ‘the-ory’, then Education departments might as well pack up and go home (rather likethe department at the University of Chicago) or go across the road to the ‘disciplin-ary’ department (if it will have them). The risk of ‘disciplinary’ perspectival advan-tage is that eventually there will be nothing left to have a perspective on.
I should state at this point that I see great value in the resources philosophyoffers for improving education and educational research. In my own areas of interest,I think it is necessary to understand the work of Lev Vygotsky as a radical experi-mental method, a psychology of art, a pedagogical project and as a continuation of aphilosophical argument about concepts and historical change responding to Hegel,Spinoza, Kant, Marx and Engels. Too often, I think Vygotsky and Leontiev-influ-enced work in Education seems to draw on Groucho rather than Karl Marx in over-simplified applications of complex ideas such as ‘zone of proximal development’(reduced, so often, to ‘social learning’) or activity systems rendered diagrammati-cally with almost incomprehensible geometry and presented as ‘the answer’. Therecent, exciting work from Engeström on the third generation of activity theory andhis ‘formative interventions’ into situations of collective human activity is stronglyinformed by an orthodox Marxist account of historical change through the analysisof contradictions, a core category in dialectical materialism. It is necessary to under-stand this conceptual inheritance in order to grasp what Engeström means by‘change’ and ‘development’. And it is also necessary to understand the inheritancein order to develop further the tools themselves – so that post-Marxist ideas of ‘asurplus of the social’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985) and multiple antagonisms can use-fully supplement the orthodox and very Russian focus on binary contradiction, col-lectives and abstract rationality.2 We need to know our Marx if we are to askquestions about materialism in Vygotskian analyses and whether Marx did in factachieve the reversal of Kant’s battle of ideas when conceptualising historical change.
Philosophy can also help us to ask better questions about teachers’ knowledge,questions that can lead the development of our work with student teachers as wellas engage in more intellectually significant research. Teacher education, in particu-lar, has tended to conceptualise knowledge as a thing, as something that exists onlyin the head of the teacher rather than as a socio-historical phenomenon. So, inEngland, it is common for teacher educators to talk of ‘audits’ of subject knowledge(essentially the student teacher ticking lists) or to read research in esteemed teachereducation journals that asks the question ‘what are the essential bits of knowledgenecessary for effective teaching, always and everywhere? (How much algebra?How much grammar? What’s the proportion? Etc.)’. Whether it is Wittgenstein orDewey or Toulmin or Polanyi, I would assert that philosophy can improve the prac-tices of teacher education and of educational research through better conceptualisingknowledge and knowing. Rather than merely deferring to these ‘old Masters’ or theBluffers’ Guide to Epistemology, it is necessary to engage in ongoing conversationsabout these ideas and their critiques. So it is no longer adequate, for example, toquote Ryle’s distinction between ‘knowing how’ and ‘knowing that’ as the lastword on tacit knowledge. It is important that critiques of Ryle from philosophers oflanguage from the 1950s onwards (e.g. Brown 1970) inform work in Education sothat we can move forward on the basis that tacit ‘know how’ can indeed also becodified (using more ‘that’s’ and relative clauses) but that for whatever social, his-torical or linguistic reasons we chose not to spend time thinking and writing allthose long and convoluted sentences.
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I have made these comments about the usefulness and importance of philosophyin relation to both teacher education and educational research, which I regard astwo different but complementary fields of practice within the same discipline (Edu-cation). I have argued, albeit briefly, for the value of philosophical resources in ourteaching and supervision of students (whether prospective or experienced teachers,or other kinds of students) as well as in research. Recently, there has been a broaderreassertion of the value of the ‘disciplines’ of education, specifically in terms ofeducational research, and it is to this assertion and the arguments for it that I turnin the next section.
The ‘disciplines’ as ghosts – spectral agents of higher authorities
In their recent edited collection, Furlong and Lawn (2011) offer something of a gen-erational lament for the passing of the post-Robbins era and the established chairsin sociology, psychology, philosophy and history in Education departments, the par-allel rise of what they see as the ‘practical turn’ and the audit culture in higher edu-cation. Beginning with a ghostly epigraph from Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (byway of Jane Kenway),3 the impression is of spectral agents of ‘disciplinary’ authori-ties frustrated by increasing fragmentation in Education departments and the conse-quent loss of power and status (in institutional rather than purely personal terms)for those who profess them:
…it would seem to us that the earlier post-war foundational model of the patronage ofkey professors of education and the establishment of key journals has been replacedby a proliferation of professors of education, a disconnection between many of themand older disciplines, with a concentration on useful methods, multiple sources of pub-lication and governmental funding. (Furlong and Lawn 2011, 10)
Overall, Furlong and Lawn’s argument is interesting for the almost complete erasureof Education – the institutional home, the academic and professional practices, thesubjects associated with schooling, pedagogy, people. ‘Educational research’ is apurely abstract phenomenon; it is not seen as a kind of work – something that peo-ple do, sometimes. They talk of ‘disciplines of education’ as though a universityEducation department is entirely made up of a curious mix of these ‘ghosts’ (orwannabe outsiders) from sociology, psychology, philosophy and so on; Educationdoesn’t seem to exist in any sense itself as a discipline or field, outside these ‘older’disciplines’ professions of it. ‘Disciplines’, in this argument, have prepositionaladvantage, ‘disciplinary’ perspective bestowing a grammatical distinction. In myreading of this argument, teacher education is merely something that ‘disciplines’have lessons for rather than as any sort of intellectual field. It is almost as if a ser-ies of mundane processes happen in classrooms and lecture halls and work-places,and in nurseries and homes, etc., that can only be understood through the lens ofone of the select ‘disciplines’. Moreover, the authors seem to accept that ‘theory’ inEducation can only come from a ‘disciplinary’ perspective as the knowledge claimsand means of their evaluation can only be determined by these rigorous ‘disci-plines’. While I accept that the book is subtitled ‘Their role in the future of educa-tion research’, their position seems dangerously narrow and simultaneouslyundermining to their institutional footing. If you profess the sociology or philoso-phy or psychology of an absent or worthless or uninteresting or ‘practice’-basedphenomenon, you still work in an absent, worthless, uninteresting field where
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practice has been separated out and relegated to the lower division. It is also, asBiesta points out, a peculiarly Anglo-American construction of the Education disci-pline that stands in stark contrast to the continental European construction with ‘itsown forms and traditions of theorising’ (Biesta 2011, 175) focused on the study ofteaching and learning from an interested perspective (i.e. one with certain moraland ethical commitments).
What concerns me most, therefore, about the ‘disciplines’ position, is the aban-donment of Education as a discipline that has its own intellectual energy, interests,action and theory. In part, this paradoxical position is reflected in current policy inEngland and the distaste for undergraduate degrees in Education, the associated pro-motion of teaching as a ‘Master’s level profession’ and the strange ‘M-levelness’ ofPostgraduate Certificates of Education (PGCE) where there is a rush to empiricalwork in classrooms with narrowly utilitarian aims which are then substantiated aspostgraduate academic work through detailed (not to say repetitive) recitation of‘research methods’.
A key problem with the ‘disciplines’ position, in this neo-Hirst and Peters artic-ulation, is that it is inevitably selective in what counts as a ‘discipline’. For Furlongand Lawn, sociology, psychology, philosophy, history, economics, comparative andinternational education and critical human geography are in; linguistics, anthropol-ogy, literary and cultural studies, rhetoric, and so on, are out. Frankly, Furlong andLawn’s inclusion of comparative and international education and the exclusion ofanthropology and linguistics seems strange given the history. Chomsky’s linguistics(e.g. Chomsky 1965) showed us how children learned by internalising grammaticalregularities through hypothesis-testing and had a major impact on how primary andsecondary teachers understand child language development and the development ofcompetence in different codes and varieties of language (even as subsequent devel-opments in linguistics have challenged certain Chomskyan assumptions). MichaelHalliday showed us the importance of early adult–child interactions for later educa-tional success and prompted us to recognise that educational failure is partly a fail-ure of language (e.g. Halliday 1975). Dell Hymes demonstrated the importance ofthe anthropological study of language, framed as an ethnography of communication(e.g. Hymes 1973), that was to set the ground for subsequent, seminal studies ofclassroom interaction by the likes of Courtney Cazden (Cazden 1988). Morerecently, Brian Street’s early anthropological fieldwork in Iran has led to the devel-opment of distinctively ‘new’ studies of literacy practices and the fundamental dis-tinction between autonomous and ideological models of literacy (e.g. Street 1984).These are strong and useful conceptual contributions to Education from those whoworked, at one time or another, on the borders of Education departments or outsidethem. But they are now core ideas at work in Education, not exclusive ‘disciplin-ary’ borrowings for which Education should be grateful.
The exclusion of linguistics and anthropology in Furlong and Lawn’s account isindicative of the fundamental problem with the ‘disciplines’ position, which is thatif you don’t regard Education as a discipline then you have to start making selec-tions from other disciplinary areas to make it up. In making it up, you will inevita-bly make a selection based on certain criteria that may be neither Educational nor‘discipline’-based, but narrowly personal. The irony of the ‘disciplines’ position isalso that it runs contrary to contemporary movements – whether interdisciplinary ortransdisciplinary – across higher education, where far from being seen as fragmenta-tion and disconnection or the ‘proliferation of professors’, new modes of enquiry
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emerge and become institutionalised as they try to ask new questions that are seenas valuable. The field of linguistic anthropology is just one new mode and area ofgrowth, with Shirley Brice Heath (e.g. Heath 1983) one of its notable practitioners.So the ‘disciplines’ position is untenable, I am arguing, if you seek the strengthen-ing of Education as a discipline. It seems more genuinely a lament for a particularhistorical moment rather than the end of a tradition stretching back to Aristotle.
The different kinds of conceptual resources available to Education are diverseand powerful. And the aspiration to raise the quality of the work that goes on underthe heading of Education, whether in teaching or in research, is essential. Yet therehas to be a sense of a shared endeavour for these aspirations and joint work to havemeaning; otherwise the outcome is the intellectual evacuation of Education and afragmented retreat to the ‘disciplines’. Marjorie Garber has written a persuasive andsubtle argument about the professionalisation of academic work that conceptualisesthe relationship between disciplines – in positive terms – as ‘envy’ and it is to theidea of discipline envy that I turn in the next section.
Discipline envy and the development of productive intellectual energy
In Academic Instincts (2001), Garber offers a series of arguments about the futureof the academic profession and academic work, especially in the humanities. Shesurveys discussions of interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity, related histories ofthe ‘professional’ and the ‘amateur’, and the relations between academics and thepublic. Garber talks about fields, disciplines and the way they work to distinguishthemselves:
…a field differentiates itself from, but also desires to become, its nearest neighbour,whether at the edges of the academy (the professional wants to become an amateurand vice versa), among the disciplines (each one covets its neighbour’s insights), orwithin the disciplines (each one attempts to create a new language specific to all itsobjects, but longs for a universal language understood by all). (2001, ix)
Garber quotes Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to illustrate whatshe regards as typical, libidinal disciplinary movements in the academy: ‘Everyonewants a seat at the table. But whose table is it?’ (2001, 59). In her elaboration of‘discipline envy’, she distinguishes envy from jealousy and aligns her sense of theword with older, more positive connotations (a ‘desire to equal another’) and withthe French envie – a ‘wish, desire, longing: enthusiasm’ (60). For Garber, disciplineenvy is normal and inevitable and very old:
It’s the wish, on the part of an academic discipline, to model itself on, or borrowfrom, or appropriate the terms and vocabulary and authority figures of another disci-pline. (62)
Garber4 uses the example of her own discipline and institutional home, LiteraryStudies, to illustrate discipline envy in action. It is a Literary Studies where Hegel,Kant, Marx, Freud, Lacan, Klein and Derrida are key texts and where the disciplinerecognises its obligations to keep a-pace with broader intellectual movements insociety and to use these shared intellectual resources in turn to contribute back tothese movements. It’s not an argument so much about positioning within the disci-pline but about the relation of the discipline to other disciplines, to new ideas and
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social movements and to an increasingly informed public sphere. The outward-look-ing and intellectually ambitious character of Garber’s idea of discipline envy seemsto me a radically different prospect from the essentially inward-looking nature ofthe ‘disciplines’ argument. Garber’s envy poses perceived loss and limit as motive –after Freud, someone else is supposed to possess ‘the real thing’ in comparison toone’s lesser resources – rather than denoting mere introspective jealousy and sor-row. Garber’s discipline is a set of practices directed towards a shared intellectualgoal and distinguishable from doctrine, which, etymologically, has been ‘more con-cerned with abstract theory’. Envy is therefore what keeps disciplines alive, allowsfor conceptual growth and enables the object of shared intellectual activity continu-ally to transform itself. Discipline envy is intellectual desire directed at the evolu-tion of a set of disciplinary practices. For Garber, it is this space between envy andobject, the ‘space of disciplinary desire’, that we call ‘theory’:
And this is why theory always in a sense fails; for when it succeeds, it ceases to betheory and becomes fact or doctrine. (2001, 90)
I have been arguing that discipline envy is a better idea for thinking through thedevelopment of a discipline such as Education – and the field of teacher education,in particular – than thinking of the ‘disciplines’ as ghostly agents of higher authori-ties with a declining material presence. In the final section, to imagine how disci-pline envy might stimulate the development of teacher education – and particularlywith reference to the intellectual resources of philosophy – I look to the past andthe work of James Britton, one of a small group of highly influential teacher educa-tors working at London University from the 1950s on.
Experience, words and mind: James Britton and the intellectual project ofteacher education
James Britton worked in teacher education at the Institute of Education from 1954to 1970 and thereafter at Goldsmith’s College. He is well-known as the person whointroduced English teachers to the work of Lev Vygotsky, following the first transla-tion of Thought and Language by the MIT Press in 1962; but his substantive focuswas the teaching and learning of English in schools. He is further known forground-breaking studies in language and learning and the development of writingamong school-age children, funded in part by the Schools Council and subjectteaching associations. He worked with hundreds of teachers on PGCE courses andthe highly distinguished diploma courses possessed by many of the subsequentleaders in the field. He was also a leading member of the Bullock committee thatproduced the report A Language for Life (Department of Education and Science1975), generally regarded as the most significant post-war policy document in thefield of English teaching and with a wider significance for the whole system.Indeed, the report remains highly distinctive as a piece of policy with its carefullydetailed argument and its references to a wide range of philosophical, psychologi-cal, sociological and literary sources. The key chapter (and the one that continuesto have significance wider than English) – Chapter 4 ‘Language and learning’ – isprefaced with an epigraph from Georges Gusdorf, a philosopher who helped to sub-stantiate Britton’s earlier work on language and learning, and the role of languagein shaping our experience of the world, including our ethics:
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Man interposes a network of words between the world and himself, and therebybecomes the master of the world. (Department of Education and Science 1975, 47)
Britton’s great project, in my view, was teaching, and he worked to expand it from‘methods’ and ‘instruction’, just as his contemporary Douglas Barnes enlarged cur-riculum from ‘content’. Britton’s teaching saw the student and the teacher – asevolving persons-in-context – engaged in a joint enterprise and he carefully distin-guished his own line of thinking from ‘child-centredness’. For Britton, it was child-and-adult-centredness and the context was changing as the interaction of learnerand more expert evolved.
Taking just one essay by Britton, it is possible to see the depth of intellectualenquiry at work over an extended period of activity. ‘Shaping at the point of utter-ance’ (Britton 1982) addresses fundamental problems of teaching (but also rhetori-cal, psychological and philosophical): spontaneous invention – the relation betweenthe formulation of ideas and language – the question ‘how do we know what we’regoing to say (or write) before we say it?’ – the relation between speech and writing.‘Shaping …’ is grounded in a seminal empirical study of the development of chil-dren’s writing between the ages of 11 and 18 (Britton et al. 1975), a study that hashad impact internationally inside and outside Education. In this essay, however,Britton shows how psychological and psycholinguistic resources from D.W. Har-ding and Kenneth Lashley; the philosophy of Eugene Gendlin and Michael Polanyi;insights from the North American field of Composition and Rhetoric donated byJanet Emig, Sondra Perl and Mike Rose; the German Romantic poet and dramatistVon Kleist; all are synthesised in Britton’s argument that not only must teachingallow space for the exercise of the individual learner’s creative agency, but that theproduction of discourse relies on simultaneous processes of spontaneous shapingand spontaneous interpretation of the world around us. A generation of schoolteachers and university lecturers in education learned a way of thinking about lan-guage from Britton and his colleagues, a way of thinking that has been built onworld-wide (e.g. in the US National Writing Project).
Two philosophers in particular were influential on Britton’s work, as seen in ref-erences to their work almost throughout his writing career, and explicitly in thebrief afterword to his Language and Learning, first published in 1970: SuzanneLanger and Michael Polanyi.5 Langer’s work encouraged Britton to address thehuman need to symbolise and therefore question the separation of the cognitivefrom the affective. Through Langer, Britton was able to offer an account of lan-guage as an art that allowed the exploration of ‘language and learning’ to resist nar-rowly utilitarian goals. Polanyi, among other things, gave Britton the concepts ofsubsidiary (of specific words and structures employed) and focal awareness (ofmeaning, audience, object) to describe the writing process, to emphasise the impor-tance of the guiding and motivating power of focal awareness – and the risks ofdoing otherwise:
By concentrating on his fingers … a pianist can paralyse himself; the motions of hisfingers no longer bear then on the music performed, they have lost their meaning.(Polanyi 1969, cited in Britton 1982)
The question of Education as a discipline was also of interest to Britton from thepreface to the first edition of Language and Learning in 1970 through to an essay
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he wrote for an American collection in the field of Composition and Rhetoric in1992, two years before he died. Britton’s own view was somewhat different frommy argument here. I think he shared the understanding of disciplines, ‘properly con-stituted’, as ‘dynamic, moveable entities, difficult, even impossible to pin downlong enough for the process of definition to get underway’ (Britton 1992, 47); inother words, as domains of knowledge whose discourses carry power and authoritybut also offer their practitioners a ‘gain in control’ (Moffett 1968) and evolve, blendand break away to create productive intellectual energy in a field of practice. I thinkBritton also saw the ‘disciplines’, in the sense used by Furlong and Lawn, as aretreat from Education, and specifically as a way out of the complexity of what isgoing on in schools and classrooms. The hope he expressed was for a ‘pre-disci-plinary theory’ of Education, one that drew on ‘psychology, sociology, linguisticsbut is none of these, a theory that remains close to the observed phenomenon ofteaching’ (Britton 1992, 47). Britton wanted to assert Education’s concrete closenessto practice as a strength in contrast to the ways in which practitioners of other disci-plines presented their work as the pursuit of ever higher altitudes of abstraction.
For me, there is a contradiction in his argument, however, in that the kind of‘consistent, corporate and cumulative activity’ (Britton 1992, 49) he associates withdisciplinary development is just the sort of activity he argued for in relation to Edu-cation and which he himself demonstrated throughout his career. I think his use ofthe prefix in ‘predisciplinary’ suggests a forward movement, acknowledging hiswork as a move forward in the development of the Education discipline and thegrowth of our knowledge of teaching. When Britton was professionally active, therewere great opportunities for the further development of ‘pre-disciplinary’ theory,opportunities associated with organisations such as the Schools Council, subjectteaching associations such as the London Association for the Teaching of English,publishers like Penguin, who produced mass-market paperbacks on Educational top-ics, and a very different cultural identity for the teacher and the profession as awhole. In the years since, it would be something of an understatement to say thatwe have lost momentum on the kind of project for Education – and for teacher edu-cation specifically – that Britton had in mind.
I didn’t know Britton, so I am not being nostalgic from a personal standpoint,as critics might suggest Furlong and Lawn are on the ‘disciplines’ position. But mysense of him – having read him for 20 years – is of someone hungry for ideas,envious (in Garber’s formulation) of intellectual resources that he could put to workin improving teaching, teacher education and, especially, the work of English inschools. Intellectually ambitious, grounded in the practices of classrooms in Londonschools, Britton and his colleagues set a continuing challenge for all of us whowork in the field of teacher education.
Concluding remarks: living with ghosts
Over the last two years, I have been engaged, with colleagues, in a study of thework of teacher education, funded in part by ESCalate, a now abolished subjectcentre of the UK Higher Education Academy (Ellis et al. 2011). We have studiedadvertisements and job descriptions for higher education-based teacher educatorpositions, interviewed heads of department and worked with a small sample of tea-cher educators around England and Scotland, looking at how they spend their time,their practice and how they talk about their work. It has been a study that has elic-
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ited great admiration and great sadness on our part as researchers – admiration forthe expertise, humanity and commitment of the people we have worked with; sad-ness about the material conditions of their work, the restrictions on their desires forthe future, and the way they have been positioned institutionally (in one caselabelled with a colour to denote a lower grade researcher). Fewer than half of thejob descriptions we analysed made any mention of research; most of them talkedabout ‘delivering training’; heads of department either claimed teacher educatorswere ‘different’ from every other class of academic worker or maintained they hadto do the academic work and the teacher education (seen as separate categories).The defining characteristic of the practical activities of initial (pre-service) teachereducation seemed to be something we called ‘relationship maintenance’: trying tokeep schools and mentors happy; trying to support bewildered or anxious studentteachers; trying to keep up a public face of ‘high quality provision’, as Ofstedwould define it in England. In practice, this meant teacher educators spent most oftheir time on the phone, answering emails, having meetings, driving around andgenerally negotiating a highly complex and fairly fragile network of professionaland personal relationships.
So I share Furlong and Lawn’s general concern about the state we’re in, withoutagreeing either with the terms of their argument or their conclusion. I am doubtfulthat reasserting the post-Robbins ‘disciplines’ position will re-invigorate Educationdepartments in a way that I would recognise as re-invigoration. Rather, the ‘disci-plines’ position seems more an argument for the systematic intellectual evacuationof Education and a retreat to the margins, where the professors of ‘disciplines’ maygain some capitalising, prepositional perspective on it. Some (certainly not all) ofthe advocates of the ‘disciplines’ position are also caught in a double-bind, as I seeit: many of them have presided over the situation they are lamenting as senior pro-fessors. For whatever reasons (even good, pragmatic ones), they have participatedin the audit culture, preserved a little intellectual space for ‘disciplinarians’ andallowed the majority of academic workers in Education departments (that ‘engineroom’ of teacher educators) to become proletarianised under the weight of increas-ingly excessive policy surveillance and market competition. And if, indeed, therehas been a ‘proliferation of professors’ of Education, it is the professoriate that hassigned the peer reviews and allowed this situation to develop.
Essentially, this ‘disciplines’ position, whether in terms of philosophy, sociology,psychology or history, is about 50 years old. Within this 50 year period there areexceptionally strong examples of intellectual work outside these selected disciplines,in Education, as there were before the Robbins report. The discipline of Educationhas had wide and productive relations with other disciplines and there have beenperiods of significant growth and expansion in terms of ideas and the developmentof its practices. The period during which Britton worked at the University of Lon-don is one good example of the productive energy that can be released by whatGarber calls ‘envy’ when it is put to work for the improvement of disciplinary prac-tices. Certainly, a little discipline envy would be good for teacher education nowand into the future but is only likely to be successful so long as the conditions arecreated for teacher educators to realise these possibilities.
The protagonist of A Christmas Carol is Ebenezer Scrooge, an economicallysuccessful merchant who lives an impoverished life in human terms. The ghosts thathaunt him, under one interpretation, are manifestations of his unconscious in crisisfrom which he is, finally, able to learn, to break away from his former conscious-
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ness and to live a better life. From this perspective, Scrooge desires the ghosts; theyreflect a need. They are not external agents of higher authorities with a materialpresence; they are projections of a perceived absence and, as Kenway notes, emergeto provoke ‘fresh thinking’ (Kenway 2007, 6). At the end of the novella, Scroogeis shown his gravestone by the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. Terrified, he cries:
‘I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strivewithin me. I will not shut out the lessons they teach.’ (Dickens 1843/1965, 53)
Living with ghosts leads to a crisis that provides Scrooge with the prospect of agood life and meaningful work in community with those around him; he is trans-formed. I hope teacher education can learn from its own past and work with itsown ghosts to build a meaningful future in the discipline of Education.
Notes1. In my experience, this equation of philosophy with thinking and reasoning is increas-
ingly true in schools that have adopted the Philosophy for Children methods, where chil-dren are said to be ‘doing philosophy’ when they ask questions and give reasons.I don’t believe this situation is down to philosophy, I should add, but is more a reflec-tion on the current climate of talk, of spoken interaction, in classrooms.
2. Kris Gutiérrez, recently president of the American Educational Research Association, ispursuing this line of development in her current work on a ‘human science’ of education(Gutiérrez 2011).
3. ‘“The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, andmoaning as they went…”’ (Dickens 1843, cited in Furling and Lawn 2011, 1). Kenwayuses the literary reference for a rather different purpose, after Derrida and Marx(Kenway 2007).
4. Garber is ‘the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English and Visual and EnvironmentalStudies at Harvard University, and Chair of the Committee on Dramatic Arts’ – a nice,embodied illustration of her own argument. (Her office is in the English department.)
5. It would be inaccurate to give the impression that Britton drew mainly on the philoso-phers. One of the most persistent figures in his writing is the psychologist George Kelly,whose work, in part, challenged the logical claims of particular versions of philosophyand psychology: ‘Man does not always think logically. Some take this as a serious mis-fortune. But I doubt that it is. If there is a misfortune I think it more likely resides inthe fact that, so far, the canons of logic have failed to capture all the ingenuities of man,and perhaps also in the fact that so many men have abandoned their ingenuities in orderto think “logically” and irresponsibly’ (Kelly 1969, 114, cited in Britton 1970, 278).
Notes on contributorViv Ellis teaches in the Department of Education at the University of Oxford and the Centrefor Educational Research at Bergen University College in Norway.
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