about what sorts of effects and consequencesflow from acting in one way or
another; about the grounds on which one may and may not deal with children,
parents, colleagues in particular ways; about what sort of knowledge and what sort
of practices might engage and even excite children with learning; and so forth.?
Such sets of beliefs constitute educational theory, at least for that teacher.
If that is so, we are left with two particular questions. Thefirst concerns the
extent to which one teacher’s beliefs might be broadly held in common with those
of other teachers (or at least those working in the same school). Do such sets of
beliefs begin to constitute the kind of shared professional knowledge and under-
standing which might allow teachers to work in concert and develop professional
conversational communities rather than working as isolated individuals?
But the second question takes us beyond the social processes of the construction
of the professional knowledge of teachers to the intellectual ones. Whatever beliefs
teachers hold (and we all hold beliefs about education because we have all been
through it in some form) do notwe want these to besoundbeliefs in some sense?
Thus Oancea and Orchard ask:‘How can they [teachers] have confidence in the
quality of their pedagogical judgment and the soundness of their educational
beliefs?’( 2012 : 580). One route to establishing their soundness is to test them out in
the classroom and to see‘what works’. Another is to examine what wider sets of
evidence might indicate to be‘best practice’. But as we (and others) have pointed
out elsewhere‘what works’is parasitic upon‘what will count as working’(i.e. the
normative frame one brings to the assessment).
‘Best practice’is not discoverable by empirical investigation alone, but requires
the application of some values, of educational aims or principles. Search for the
‘soundness’of teachers beliefs leads us inexorably to the requirement that they are
rigorously examined not only by reference to their experiential or empirical bases, but
also by reference to their capacity to withstand critical argument, their amenability to
what Phillips ( 2007 ) calls‘intelligent argumentation’. Such rigour and criticality are
asine qua nonof the existence of the academy. But if the academy is to contribute to
teachers’professional knowledge, it has to engage with teachers in a professional
‘community of arguers’in which theory and practice both have their place.
While we have argued that many of the questions posed here are philosophical in
character, many might also be informed by empirical inquiry. In thefield of edu-
cation—and educational research—philosophical and empirical enquiry need to sit
alongside each other.
36.3 Philosophy as Teacher Education Research: Teacher
Educators’Engagement in Philosophical Work
Readers may be forgiven for assuming at this point that the philosopher who
researches teacher education is set apart from its practice. This is the way in which
the popular stereotype of philosophy plays out; as idealised, and potentially
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