Parts of a disagreeable, hastily-written essay of mine:
Theories of curriculum and of teaching and learning cannot, alone, tell us what and how to teach, because questions of what and how to teach arise in concrete situations loaded with concrete particulars of time, place, person and circumstance. Theory, on the other hand, contains little of such concrete particulars. Theory achieves its theoretical character, its order, system, economy, and, above all, its very generality only by abstraction from such particulars, by omitting much of them.
- Joseph J. Schwab
Perhaps as a way to summarily conclude, I shall suggest a way out of this paradox. There is no need to demolish the current system or indoctrinate vast numbers of teachers so that they might become reflective; it is, by its nature, impossible! All of us, as Macdonald says, are critical realists in our sanest moments. The first step is to recognise the teachers as individuals and allow them to freely interpret the curriculum. This, to me, is the most glaring omission in the system. Each of us grapples with reality and knowledge in a way so as to extract meaning and comprehension, and this is our greatest resource as educators. I find that, in my most difficult moments as a teacher, I always return to personal narratives to illustrate my point. I return to the roots of my logical, rational conclusions, and construct an elaborate perspective from scratch that my students are able to understand, and usually after I demolish it all so that they might see that there is more than one way of understanding even the most basic of scientific propositions. I give them context, because, just as in a literary text, even in science, context is everything, and show them that context is not just the anatomy of a heart, but also the history of its discovery, the social implications of this knowledge, and much, much more.
The system demands that we trivialise our personal journeys and deliver curriculum using chosen tools and techniques. We should select teachers not for what they know but how they know it; their ability to apply knowledge critically and expound on their chosen field. It still perplexes me how, for all subjects, we regularly invite professionals and experts to come in and speak to students, and we place them on pedestals. The teacher is relegated to being a conduit because of his or her lack of knowledge. The reality is, I think, that it is acceptable to have a teacher who is bad at speaking in public, but not to have one who does not have his facts right. Teachers should be given the confidence and critical awareness of their own learning and thinking, and to use their own narratives to teach, in their own fields. They should be able to combine universal narratives with their own histories and insights to deliver curriculum.
The difficulty then lies in recruitment and human resource management, not in impossibly abstract theories to be forced down the throats of hapless educators as paradigms or initiatives. This, I think, is possible, and we would then have a nation of hermeutically-emancipated, liberated, people.