SPONTANEITY IN THE CLASSROOM: A SYSTEMS VIEW OF TEACHERS' KNOWING-IN-ACTION (HIGH SCHOOL TEACHERS).

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The purpose of this study was two-fold: to suggest the central role the entire body (not just the brain) plays in teachers' spontaneous behavior, or “knowing-in-action,” and to begin an analysis of this behavior from a holistic, or systems, perspective. The study is important in that it recognizes the complexity of teaching, embracing the elements, such as intuition, caring, and emotion, that the traditional information processing model has overlooked.
The study was based on a process tracing methodology in which three female veteran high school teachers of freshmen—two in English and one in social studies—did stimulated recalls immediately after teaching four classes (which I had videotaped). The stimulated recalls revolved around the question of how each teacher knew what to do when she was behaving spontaneously, emphasizing the relationships she enacted with herself, the students, the subject matter, and the acts of teaching she engaged in. Analysis of the resultant transcripts showed that the three teachers' knowing-in-action involved thinking, certainly, but also attention/awareness, principles, emotions, maternal thinking/caring, love, faith, confidence, intuition, and aikido—all ways of knowing that rely primarily on the body (which includes the brain). The relationships the teachers enacted in the classroom were complex but crucial to understanding both the successful and disappointing experiences each teacher had in the classes I witnessed. Many of these experiences, I suggest, emerged from the “co-regulation,” or cooperative interaction, that took place moment-to-moment in the classroom: the experiences of control (or lack of it), different personae, authenticity, dilemmas, fun, and amusement, for example, occurred not because of any specific technique or action undertaken by a teacher but instead “emerged” from the classroom system as its members interacted. These classrooms, in fact, can be seen as complex systems that might function best at the “edge of chaos,” where they are energized enough to allow for creative emergence but not so much as to deteriorate into anarchy. This possibility invites a new way of thinking about teaching, one I explore briefly at the end of the study.