How Do We Think about Our Craft? MAXINE GREENE Teachers College, Columbia University To speak of craft is to presume a knowledge of a certain range of skills and proficiencies. It is to imagine an educated capacity to attain a desired end-in- view or to bring about a desired result. Where teachers are concerned, the end- in-view has to do with student learning; the desired result has to do with the “match” between what students have learned and what their teachers believe they have taught. We differ considerably among ourselves, of course, on the ends we actually have in mind and on the degree to which they can be predefined. Some of us focus on measurable competencies; others, on the process of coming to know, or on “knowing how” rather than “knowing that.” Some of us confine our attention to the cognitive domain; others try to cultivate imaginative capacities as well as cognitive ones; still others place equal stress on the affective domain. Many of us are uncertain about how much of our craft we have learned and about how much “comes naturally.” We wonder how much of our understanding can be put into words. How much of what we do is purely habitual and routinized? To what degree are choice and imagination involved? Is there a frame of reference to which most of us refer, what has been called “procedural lore”?1 How often, in any case, do we reflect on what we are doing, given our incessant involvement in the activity of teaching, maintaining order, meeting needs, making plans? To ask how we think about our craft is not to ask what we know about it. Following Hannah Arendt, I would describe thinking as a “soundless dialogue,“2 an internalized dialogue through which (as it were) we talk things over with ourselves. In order to engage in it, we have to “stop and think”; and, inevitably, it interrupts ordinary activities. To proceed unthinkingly is to be caught in the flux of things, to be “caught up” in dailyness, in the sequences of tasks and routines. Of course we have to proceed that way a good deal of the time, but there should be moments when we deliberately try to draw meaning out of particular incidents and experiences. This requires a pause, a conscious effort to shake free of what Virginia Woolf called “the nondescript cotton wool” of daily life.3 She associated such moments of awareness with “moments of being”: and she knew how rare they are in any given day and how necessary for the development of a sense of potency, of vital being in the world. Thinking about our craft often brings conscience to bear on the actions we Volume 86. Number 1. Fall 1984 0161-4681/84/8601/055$1.25/0 56 Teachers College Record undertake in the course of our work. This is not surprising, since the capacity to think about what we are doing involves an attentiveness that overcomes distancing and neutrality. John Dewey once described mind as a way of paying attention, as “care in the sense of solicitude-as well as active looking after things that need to be tended. “4 To take care in this sense is to consider the value of what we are trying to accomplish in our classrooms. It may be to try to justify our interventions in the lives of our students, especially those whose lived experience is markedly different from our own. It may be to reconcile our desires to free them to pursue meanings with our equally strong desires to mold them, to shape them in accord with some mainstream or “middle-class” model of what we conceive to be personhood. How do we argue the worth of separating students from their backgrounds, what we may consider their “enclaves”? How do we justify stimulating and encouraging certain individuals, while providing only minimal support for others? How do we justify provoking some to move beyond where they are, while approv- ing others who just about reach their grade level in the work assigned? To bring conscience to bear is not only to ponder the purposes of what we do, although surely it is that as well. It is not only to ponder the meanings of the “worthwhile” encounters we are expected to make possible for the young.5 It is to take the time for reflectiveness about ourselves and our relation to that segment of the human world in which we do our work. For all the fact that we pursue our projects within what sometimes appear as concentric circles of influence and opinion (the cultures of the school, the school district, the surrounding public, the state and federal governments), we live most of our working lives in particular situations, understood in large part by means of what Clifford Geertz calls “local knowledge.“6 We are persons with identifiable vantage points and modes of being, simply because we engage in the action called teaching; and, although we can hope for some reciprocity between ourselves and persons in different worlds, with different projects, what we do profoundly affects what we see and how we are. Our consciousness of craft (our singular craft) may be most acute, for example, when we are endeavoring to enable students to decode a short story in a way that will release them into new ways of apprehending and, at once, equip them to do justice to fictionality and other literary norms. This is one of multiple occasions of trying to empower young persons to make their own kinds of sense and, at once, live up to standards of “correctness” or efficacy. We need but think of preparing students to devise and test hypotheses in a chemistry laboratory, or to read the historical record in a manner that gives rise to an explanation of some past event. Any person who teaches understands what it means to feel oneself to be an “authority” with respect to what one is trying to teach. For Peters, this means communicating the idea that the teacher is engaged in something worth doing, something exciting having to do with certain spheres of knowledge and skill. Behind them, Peters Thinking about Our Craft 57 writes, “stands the notion that there is a right and a wrong way of doing things, that some things are true and others false, and that it matters desperately what is done and said. “7 Most of us realize, however, that our authority or authoritativeness is likely to be acknowledged by our students only when they need help in becoming, in pursuing what they desire to pursue. “The child,” says Donald Vandenberg, “constitutes the authority of the teacher.“8 When our words open up possibilities for the child, he means, when they are felt to contribute somehow to the child’s ongoing explorations (or inquiries, or investigations), they are accepted as authoritative. Those of us who view ourselves as teachers rather than trainers know in a very particular way that what we offer-and even what we demand-has to connect with student interest and need and concern. Students have, in some sense, to consent to what we are communicating; they have to choose to acknowledge it as somehow relevant to their own sense-making. And then they have to try it out, with all the risk of error that entails, for themselves. “The craft of teaching has a number of aspects,” writes Herbert Kohl. “It relates to the organization of content and the structuring of space and time so that learning will be fostered.“9 He speaks of the need to understandstudents’ levels of sophistication and learning styles; and he associates with “teaching sensibility” a knowledge of how to help diverse students “focus their energy on learning and growth.” This may involve a variety of ways of addressing them, of provoking them to attend to the matter at hand. Where young children are concerned, it may require us to play with, indeed to reorganize our knowledge of the subject matter so as to increase the area of contact between that subject matter and the children’s minds. “And you reorganize it,” David Hawkins once wrote, “according to a different principle than that of textbook. By spreading way out, by making many parts of the logically organized subject matter accessible to the already established means of knowing, and interests and commitments of the learner, you greatly increase the probability and the rate of learning in that subject matter.“10 In the case of older students, we are more likely to stay close to what we believe to be a logical organization of the subject matter, to lay stress on the principles fundamental to the discipline. Here, too, however, there is the possibility of seeking alternative processes for marshaling what Howard Gardner calls “intelligences”11 in the pursuit of educational goals. He has been describing the multiple intelligences or the range of know-hows of which human beings are capable; and it may be that ways can be found, even in the course of initiating students into the same discipline or symbol system, of establishing contact through the activation of different sorts of potential. Most people, of course, come to know the fundamentals of history through the use of linguistic and logical intelligences; but it is at least conceivable that some can be brought to understanding through the exercise of personal or literary or even spatial intelligence. The same may be true of literature or sociology or 58 Teachers College Record even physics. The crucial point is to focus energies in such a fashion that different students, taking different paths, are enabled to learn theappropriate language or notation or symbol system.