RESEARCH
The question of whether teaching is an art, craft or a science is, I believe, too narrow. Teaching is a part of the discipline of education, but it is by no means all of it. So I would like to reframe the question as: ‘Education: art, craft or science?’
My case is that the art, craft and science of education are all forms of practice. As such they share some common ground and some areas of difference. Influenced by the work of Aristotle, Dewey (1916, 1933) argues that life forms and practices are the foundations of experience and learning. Following
Dewey, Dunne (2005, pp. 152- 153) offers a definition of practice worthy of careful consideration: “A coherent and invariably quite complex set of
activities and tasks that has evolved co-operatively and cumulatively over time. It is alive in the community, who
REFERENCES
• Biesta, G. (2010) Good Education in an Age of Measurement: Ethics, Politics, Democracy. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. • Carr, W. (1995) For Education: Towards Critical Educational Enquiry. Buckingham: Open University Press. • Carr, W. (1987) ‘What is an Educational Practice?’, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 21, No. 2, 1 pp. 63-175. • Dewey, J. (1933) How We Think. Boston: Heath. • Dewey, J.(1916) Democracy and Education. New York: MacMillan. • Dunne, J. (2005) ‘What’s the Good of Education’. In Carr, W. (ed.) The RoutledgeFalmer Reader in Philosophy of Education.
16 ISSUE 34 • WINTER 2018 inTUITION
RESEARCH
SE ARCHARCH
‘Let’s ask if education, not just teaching, is an art, craft or science’
In the third in our series discussing the question, ‘Teaching: art, craft or science?’, Professor Maggie Gregson argues that the question should be reframed as teaching is a part of the discipline of education.
are its insiders (i.e. genuine practitioners), and it stays alive only so long as they sustain a commitment to creatively develop and extend it – sometimes by shifts which may at the time seem dramatic or even subversive.”
Carr (1995) shares a similar view of practice and argues that the value and meaning of a practice is not self-disclosing but constructed. Lipman (2003) draws attention to how, in acquiring a practice or a craft, we learn how others think and have thought, and how they have gone about this form of life or practice before us. Sennett (2012) observes that we make the way we live together through concrete practices and that these say a lot about the human condition. For Sennett, this includes our need and ability to co-operate with each other so that we can do together what we cannot do on our own. From the perspectives of the above authors, the range of ‘practice’ includes art, craft and science. Indeed Dunne cites a number of examples from the fields of art, craft and science, as various as “…cabinet-making, physics, farming, chess, computer-programming, metal-work, history, rearing a family, music-making, drama- production, soccer and weaving”.
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