The role of theoretical knowledge in professional growth

professionals is theoretical knowledge, to which I turn in the next section.

He wonders if the suggestions that come about as a result of research and within theoretical frameworks could be too “clean” for teachers, who

“operate with untidiness [….] Their experience of this gives them insight into classrooms, but also makes them resistant to solutions that try to make them tidy”.

Lawes (2003: 22) also addressed this issue and lamented the marginality of theory in teacher education and attributed this undesirable situation to “the new orthodoxy of reflective practice”, so that today “practice has become theory” (italics in original). In this sense what research offers to teachers would seem useless from the practical perspective of the teachers as practitioners⁴⁴. According to Wallace (1991: 11), the notorious dichotomy between theory and practice is a consequence of the applied science model and of the fact that empirical science and “the most ‘scientific’ method” for foreign language teaching, namely, (the audio-lingual method) have failed to account for basic learning problems: despite vast amount of research, “the most intractable professional problems remain”.

Why do theory and practice not go hand in hand? People have their own theories that affect their behaviour, even if they are only partly aware of them. This suggests that theories are linked to our meaning systems and our world views. Eraut (1994: 76) observes that theory is the term we use when we distance ourselves from ideas that we for some reason do not appropriate as our own:

“It is only when ideas have not yet been integrated into people’s thinking and conversation that they get labelled as ‘theoretical’. For practitioners, theoretical ideas are the ideas they do not use or think they do not use”.

If we follow his reasoning, every time that we as teachers interpret or explain actions and experiences, and give a meaning in context, we theorise, we construct a theory. Therefore, I am inclined to believe that every teacher has one implicit or explicit theory. Our own previous school experiences, readings or ideas circulating in the press or in everyday conversations, all influence teachers’ theories. This seems an interesting view of the term “theory”, because it recognises the psychological dimension of teachers’ rejection of theory and also lead us to suppose that when teachers reject theories it is not because they are anti-theory, but because they may already have one, namely, their own personal theory about language learning and teaching.

From the positions on theory examined so far it is not clear what role theory can play in the development of teachers. There is disagreement as to how theory can be useful for teachers’

professional development. Some skepticism (Stern 1983: 23-4) has been expressed about its effects on teacher professional development. Kagan (1992: 163) doubts that theory can mean

44 With regard to this cf. Lawes 2003 and Kagan 1992 later in this section.

anything to teachers:

One might begin to question whether formal theory is relevant to teachers at any point in their professional development. A growing body of literature suggests that even the most seasoned and expert teachers build informal, contextual, highly personal theories from their own experiences.

Her scepticism about the significance of theory for the professional growth of teachers is due to the fact that teachers seem to draw on their own informal personal theories derived from experience and not from scientific accounts, so that “classroom teaching appears to be a peculiar form of self-expression” (ibid. 164). Appel (2000: 291) found that those teachers who consistently followed a didactic theory, could verbalise their decisions, principles and concepts; where these terms were missing, the strategies were episodic. However, he warns us about the limits of theory for practice. In his account of how language teachers cope with the dilemmas of teaching, he analysed which aspects of theoretical knowledge about language teaching carry over into teachers’ "Erfahrungswissen" (the construct that he coins to refer to the practical knowledge of teachers) and found that it depended on how the concepts make sense to the teachers in the context of concrete teaching situations and of personal prior experiences and values. The consequence was that the teachers in his study seemed to have an understanding of theoretical concepts different from the academic setting in which they appeared, as in the case of communicative language teaching. This would be fine, he argues (ibid. 290-291), because ultimately the role of the language teacher has often been seen as that of an “applier” of scientific theories, but the teachers misunderstood concepts or rejected exercises belonging to the communicative teaching repertoire. Interestingly, this also happened when the teaching conception of the teachers corresponded to the communicative approach, which means that teachers partially and arbitrarily take over, apply and adopt theoretical concepts and pedagogical theories. Appel (ibid. 274) states that the contribution of theory to teachers is meant to be orientational but discloses that it has a subordinate role for teachers.

The random nature of teachers' relationship with theory is also reported in Smith (1996: 207-8) who investigated whether teachers’ decisions were consistent with theoretical ideas about planning and instruction. She found that teachers select from theoretical ideas those aspects which correlate with their personal beliefs, and modify them in ways that are consistent with their beliefs about teaching/learning (ibid. 214). This resonates with Lawes (2003: 24) who reports that theory is useless to trainees who have often criticised their training courses for being “too theoretical” (cf. also Kagan 1992: 141; 144).

What stands out here is the notorious gap between theory and practice. It surfaced, for example, in communicative language teaching as a “research-development-and-diffusion

approach” (Clark 1987 quoted in Appel 2000: 18) which spread from a centre towards the periphery (ibid. 18) and was faced with the problem that the necessary conditions to implement this innovation were not optimal. The same gap between certain innovative theoretical approaches and classroom practice is observed by Newby (2003: 40). Although he recognises the role of theory as important, teacher education fails in his opinion to provide the necessary theoretical basis, which is essential if teachers are to carry out a critical dialogue with principles.

The scepticism about the effects of theory on language teachers is somewhat of a surprise if we take a look at relevant models of teachers’ professional development. In many accounts of professional competence, theoretical knowledge plays an important role. In his reflective model, Wallace (1991) includes theoretical knowledge (which he calls ‘received knowledge’) as one of the crucial elements that contribute to professional competence. Shulman (1986:

10), too, recognises the importance of research-based knowledge for teaching. He conceptualises theory as an important component of pedagogical content knowledge, one of the three categories that he proposed in order to illustrate what is meant by "teacher’s content knowledge":

Such research-based knowledge, an important component of the pedagogical understanding of subject matter, should be included at the heart of our definition of needed pedagogical knowledge.

One possible procedure that helps overcome the dichotomy between theory and practice is offered by those who approach this issue as a matter of development and of gradual appropriation on the part of the teachers. As Calderhead & Gates (1993: 9) suggest, theory becomes part of the process of learning to teach and “the use of public knowledge such as research evidence and academic theories” indicates advanced stages of development. In this sense, the exposure to theory maintains its importance for professional growth. It is exactly this act of engaging with theory that Klippel (2006: 276) has emphasised as inherent to language teaching:

Der intensive Dialog zwischen Praxis und Theorie, zwischen tatsächlichen Lehr/Lernprozessen und deren Erforschung, zwischen praktischer Gestaltung von Unterricht und Unterrichtsmaterialien und deren wissenschaftlicher Fundierung ist für die Fremdsprachendidaktik konstitutiv.

Similarly, Newby (2003: 33) puts forward theory as critical for teacher development:

It is not the new theories themselves but the dialogue with them which moves us forward.

This accords with Stern’s (1983: 35) claim of the necessity for language teachers to have a sound theoretical framework and to engage in theoretical reflections, “if language teaching is to be a truly professional enterprise”.

That the move to higher professional developmental stages is bound to theoretical knowledge is a significant result that emerged in Tsui’s (2003) study. Examining the differences between novice and expert teachers, she found that a critical indicator of expertise was not teaching experience, but the way knowledge is developed by the teachers. As Tsui (2003: 247) argues, theoretical knowledge is not a separate domain for the expert teachers, who are “able to theorize the knowledge generated by their practical experience as a teacher and to

“practicalize” theoretical knowledge”. In a similar vein, Borko & Putnam (1995: 58) claim that change in teaching may require growth in teachers’ conceptions of knowledge. It is teachers’ interest in theory that is one of the features which distinguishes restricted professionality from extended professionality⁴⁵ (Hoyle 1980: 49-50). If we, as does Day (1999: 22), interpret extended professionalism as “the ability and the willingness to problematise the consolidated practices” through the incorporation of theory in practice, then this ability is a matter of development.

The developmental aspect of theory appropriation on the part of the teachers is particularly emphasised in Johnson (2009: 64). She takes over Vygotsky’s (1962) distinction between everyday-concepts and scientific-concepts and applies it to L2 teacher professional development. The everyday-concepts are explained as the beliefs grounded in our instructional histories as learners and the scientific-concepts as those formulated in our professional discourse community and defined in formal theories. As Johnson clarifies (ibid.

64), the professional development of L2 teachers becomes a gradual acquisition process of building upon teachers’ everyday concepts up to understanding scientific concepts, in a dialectic relationship between the two⁴⁶: each is acquired in relation to the other. The scientific concepts serve to mediate for teachers in the advancement of their cognitive abilities and in the creation of the „zone of proximal development“ which enables learners to progress (Johnson 2009: 20).

In summary, theory seems to be an important element that can foster teacher professional development. Many argue that if teachers are to make changes, they must acquire richer theoretical knowledge of their subject matter and of pedagogy (Johnson 2009; Tsui 2003;

Lawes 2003 to quote a few), although this is not always supported in practice (Appel 2000,

45 In the former, the professionalism of the teachers is intuitive and based on experience rather than theory, whereas in the latter, the teachers are concerned with locating their teaching in a broader context, evaluating their work systematically, and are interested in theory and involved in various professional activities (Hoyle 1980: 49).

46 Also Kumaravadivelu (1999: 3-4) speaks of the relation between theory and practice as “mutually informing”.

for example). It may be too simplistic, however, to view theory as the central factor, but it certainly is of considerable importance in the growth of professional competence.

From the perspective of teachers as learners, theoretical knowledge can be a hindrance but it appears to be a prerequisite for moving towards higher development stages. What all the considerations above also indicate is, in my view, that first, – in analogy to learners’ learning – the basic relationship between teachers and theoretical knowledge has dramatically changed and second, theory is a matter of progressive appropriation, adaption to demands and transformation on the part of teachers. Theory requires the teachers to make their own conceptualisation of language learning and teaching, of themselves, and of their roles. This brings the discussion to the last issue under review, namely the studies that specifically have a focused perspective on teachers as learners and on teachers' learning.