education theory shifted from the academy and academicians to the classroom and
practising teachers:
The rationale for involving teachers as researchers of their own practice is connected with
an aspiration to give them control over what is to count as knowledge about practice. As
action researchers, teachers are knowledge generators rather than appliers of knowledge
generated by outsiders. (Elliot 1991 : 133)Education theory was, then, what teachers—individually and collectively—worked
with and modified in the light of examined experience.
The point of this short historical review is to highlight the sort of debates which
have taken place and continue to take place about the sources for teachers’pro-
fessional knowledge, about what kind of theoretical foundations for their future
roles should feature in programmes of teacher education. Our argument is that these
debates are essentially philosophical in character and require on-going attention in
philosophical insight and argument.
The‘great thinkers’approach invites us to identify with and to model ourselves
on people who have developed both their thought and practice in the sphere of
education, offering perhaps challenging and even eccentric models. The‘disci-
plines’approach teaches us the importance of developing concepts that help us to
see what might otherwise have remained invisible in the school or classroom (how
long did it take us to‘see’racism or sexism in our classrooms?) and forms of
inquiry that enable us to look critically at a given set of beliefs and investigate the
unknown. It is difficult to see how‘teachers as researchers’can really examine their
classrooms without some of this conceptual apparatus or ethical direction.
Similarly, it is argued that‘reflective practice’requires us to have something to
reflect with as well as something to reflect on.
Philosophical considerations also underpin arguments about the relationship
between theory and practice...
36.2.3 How Should We Understand the Relationship
Between Theory and Practice?
Anyone who has been involved with the teaching of education theory will also be
familiar with the complaint that it is not relevant to practice, or at least that its
relevance is not made clear. In the UK this scepticism has led to the marginalisation
of educational theory even on the most common route into teaching, the 36 week
university-linked Postgraduate Certificate in Education. More radically, school-led
‘Qualified Teacher Status only’teacher training programmes have been promoted in
recent years, which prioritise direct immersion into schools so that research-based
and conceptual deliberation about principles virtually disappears. It represents the
victory of craft over theory.
But can teaching be a-theoretical? Surely any teacher has to work with some
guiding principles, with some beliefs about what (s)he should be trying to achieve;
546 D. Bridges et al.