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How Do We Think about Our Craft
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Greene, Maxine |
| Copyright Year | 1984 |
| Abstract | 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-inview or to bring about a desired result. Where teachers are concerned, the endin-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 |
| Starting Page | 55 |
| Ending Page | 67 |
| Page Count | 13 |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Volume Number | 86 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://maxinegreene.org/uploads/library/how_we_think_craft.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
