Conference Agenda

Arguments for and against conceptions of teaching as a science or form of technicism have often focused on the relevance of experimental evidence and issue of purpose in education (Biesta, 2023). However, these debates have largely omitted an analysis of the wider socio-economic context in which education and teaching have been and continue to be significantly shaped and understood. This paper aims to provide this broader contextual analysis, explaining how a technicist logic in schooling and teaching emerged during the Industrial Revolution, how it is being repurposed in light of recent changes and predictions about the world of work, and the importance of reconceiving teaching as a form of artistry.

Systems of mass schooling first emerged in Western Europe following the initial phases of the Industrial Revolution. To meet the imperative of supplying a disciplined industrial workforce the purpose and curriculum of schools focused on preparing students for jobs (Kliebard, 1999). The establishment of mass schooling during the Industrial era led to the consolidation of certain institutional habits, norms, and eventually unspoken rules. By employing standardised ways of organising students into age-based groups, dividing knowledge into separate subjects, using self-contained classrooms with one teacher setting out tasks, and awarding grades as evidence of learning, a logic of schooling and teaching became taken for granted and functions without conscious awareness of it (Tyack & Cuban, 1995). This logic has remained broadly stable for over a century, with teaching innovations tending to fade out or become hybridised within existing structures (Tyack & Cuban, 1995). Sometimes referred to as technicism (Biesta, 2023), the prevailing logic of mass schooling and teaching tends toward the standardised production of specific learning outcomes.

As technologies have advanced and changes have occurred in the world of work, the technicist logic of schooling remains but is shifting focus. New conceptions of the world of work, including one termed the Fourth Industrial Revolution, highlight the growing capacity of artificial intelligence and mobile robotics technologies to perform increasing numbers of routine as well as non-routine job tasks (Frey & Osborne, 2017). Occupations containing more non-routine tasks requiring creativity, social intelligence, and other domain-general skills are thought to be less susceptible to automation (Frey & Osborne, 2017). Proposed educational responses to this predicted new work imperative place less emphasis on specific learning outcomes and instead aim to impart students with general skills and dispositions for learning itself (Doucet et al., 2018). Education policies are increasingly reflecting a repurposed technicist logic directed towards the production of general or meta-level learning outcomes, such as learning-to-learn (OECD, 2019).

Through the ongoing application of a technicist logic, creating conditions for standardisation and predictability, schools and teachers have encountered problems. Similar to the experience of factory workers on a fast moving assembly line, an automaticity and detachment from one’s craft quickly sets in (Shepard, 1977). Rather than fostering a highly conscious, imaginative engagement with the complex unfolding in the classroom, conditions in favour of automaticity leaves the teacher less flexible to respond to the ever-changing circumstances, distinct purposes, and diverse human subjects that characterise educational encounters. Moreover, an emphasis on evidence-based approaches in education policy creates counterproductive outcome expectations based on the misleading assumption that experimentally derived teaching approaches will reliably produce a desired learning outcome (Thomas, 2021). Rather than being an autonomous agent capable of professional judgement, the teacher becomes a technician who administers prescribed interventions (Biesta, 2023). To provide a conceptual remedy to these problems, a typology of artistry in teaching is proposed. This typology includes the art of imaginative observation, art of purposive evocation, art of relational accessibility, and art of contextualised judgement.

The last few decades have seen growing interest in the field of disciplinary aesthetics. Loosely, this can be defined as the ways in which aesthetic judgements, feelings and emotions are expressed or experienced in specific curriculum areas (Wickman et al., 2022). The development of disciplinary aesthetics can be seen as a component of a wider ‘affective turn’ in education: the growing recognition of the importance of affect and emotion as central to educational experience (Zembylas, 2021). The study of aesthetics, while historically rooted in those areas typically affiliated with ‘beauty’, primarily art, drama and the natural world (e.g. Ulrich, 1983), has expanded to explore a broad range of disciplinary subjects including mathematics and science (e.g. Wickman et al., 2022). However, there is currently no substantive research examining the aesthetics of learning about grammar.

Within the broad area of language, aesthetic theory has typically been preoccupied with the forms of or reactions to language: for example, the aesthetic engagement with literary works as a reader (e.g. Stockwell, 2009), or the language of literature in contrast to everyday language, either in general or in the works of ‘great writers’. Analyses also exist of the ways in which some languages or language groups use grammar for aesthetic purposes (e.g. Williams, 2019), and of the individual features of ‘beauty’ in words and/or sounds (e.g. Crystal, 1995). However, there is no work dealing specifically with the aesthetic dimensions of developing explicit knowledge of first language grammar, or of metalinguistic learning in general (which could be about first or other languages). In this paper we therefore consider this area of learning from a disciplinary aesthetics perspective.

Our interest in the aesthetic dimension of learning explicit grammar knowledge arose from our experiences teaching English grammar to student teachers who were preparing to deliver the National Curriculum (DfE, 2013) in primary schools in England. This curriculum contains a significant amount of explicit grammar terminology (e.g. fronted adverbial, prepositional phrase) which primary school teachers are required to teach to pupils aged 5-11. The inclusion of this terminology represented a fairly radical change to education in England after the decline of formal grammar education in the 1960s (Hudson and Walmsley, 2005), and our research initially explored how student teachers might respond to the challenge of mastering (and then teaching) a range of grammatical terms and related concepts that many of them had never encountered. What was most striking to us during this project was the fact that the students expressed strong emotional reactions when learning about the structure of their native grammar. Crucially, many of these reactions seemed to be of a distinctly aesthetic nature.

Within this paper, we speculate as to why the kind of learning that students engaged with within these grammar lessons, might lead to strong affective responses like those that we observed. We argue that explicit grammar learning has a particular potential to evoke aesthetic experience due to its role as a mediator between procedural and declarative knowledge. We suggest that by facilitating the transformation from knowhow to knowledge, grammar learning has the potential to generate cognitive consonance, experienced as an aesthetic-epistemic feeling of fittingness. The analysis draws parallels between the characteristics of grammar and the properties of entities more traditionally conceived to be aesthetic (such as art works and performances). We note that meta-linguistic labels (grammar terms), like art (Consoli, 2014), provide concrete tokens which facilitate virtual models, supporting the transition from ‘automatism’ to ‘conscious reflection’. We conclude by exploring the implications for the field of disciplinary aesthetics and for developing pedagogies which maximise the aesthetic potential of grammar.