Elyse Eidman-Aadahl National Writing Project Elyse Eidman-Aadahl directs National Programs and Site Development for the National Writing Project (NWP) at the University of California, Berkeley. A former high school teacher and university teacher educator, she has led several national teacher learning networks and action research projects in the NWP and other organizations. In her commentary, Elyse Eidman-Aadahl speculates on the utility of the Making Teaching Public websites for teacher inquiry and learning, considering both the advantages of new digital tools for the 'capture' of specific aspects of teaching and the limitations for current community protocols for professional learning.

As a teacher, one finds the opportunities to study teaching directly by studying the work of other teachers are surprisingly rare. A short apprenticeship as a student teacher, occasional observations of senior colleagues or team colleagues, that was about it for me until the summer I attended a National Writing Project summer institute. It was in that institute, where every morning for 20 mornings we looked in depth at a case study of teaching presented by the teacher herself, that I first experienced a profession-based induction into the study of teaching, an induction that opened the door to teacher-research, professional learning communities, and tremendous personal learning.  Central to this process was that we worked as colleagues to prepare our own case, to look in depth at each other’s cases, and to reflect systematically across cases to build common knowledge, pose problems, and surface dilemmas. It was such a simple and powerful approach that it still surprises me that the experience of systematic study of practice by practitioners is so very rare in teachers’ lives.

The body of work which teachers are creating through the websites collected in this exhibition aim to advance teaching in just this way: by using new digital tools to expand access to the work of excellent practitioners. As a teacher-researcher and participant in teacher professional networks, I am interested in their potential for offering teachers more broadly the tools for their own study of practice. Can we use new technologies to expand opportunities for many educators to study teaching by directly studying the work of teachers, presented by teachers, shaped by teachers’ questions and arguing from teachers’ perceptions?  These websites open up intriguing possibilities, but also raise fundamental questions.

Representing teaching as intellectual work

Teachers who study teaching all need to wrestle with a fundamental issue: the act of ‘teaching’ itself is ephemeral. Of course, teaching leaves traces, creates artifacts like curriculum materials and student work: it lives in our memories and fuels our teaching stories. But fundamentally, practitioners who want to study teaching reflectively and critically feel as if we are always running after it, trying to capture it and hold it still so that it can be pondered awhile, taken apart, put back together, and compared with other cases. It’s a dilemma shared with other ‘performance artists’ – dancers, musicians, actors – who rely on various note-taking, recording, and representational schemes to capture performance and intention so that it can become an object of study. But at the same time we worry about how the capture reduces the phenomenon, even as it opens up the very possibility of understanding it in new ways.

These websites use new digital tools to tackle the problem of ‘capturing teaching’, incorporating digitized classroom and curriculum artifacts, audio and video, photography, and written documentation of events.   But the websites also say that these traces and recordings are insufficient without a sense of the teacher’s agency at work.   Artifacts and recordings are juxtaposed with reflection, commentary, and analysis in dense accumulations that honor the complexities teaching and of life in classrooms more generally.

In contrast to other forms for representing teaching, the websites offer intriguing advantages.  Unlike a workshop, they can be revisited again and again and studied at leisure.  Unlike an article, they incorporate multiple media and allow the viewer to move through in non-linear ways. By using new digital tools that allow for evermore complex and multilayered representations, these websites enable their practitioner-authors to “say” new things about practice. The tools themselves enact theorizing about particular dimensions of teaching – the hybridity, layeredness, and simultaneity of the experience of teaching -- dimensions teachers would struggle to convey in forms like narrative, articles, workshops. And they allow the viewer to construct his understanding actively and individually by the choices he makes as he navigates through an extraordinarily thick, highly compressed soup of idea and image.

But when we look at these sites, we aren’t actually looking at teaching.  We are looking at an argument about teaching – or an argument for one vision of what teaching is: complex, multifaceted, multidirectional, individually achieved, driven by intentions that are rational and knowable, evidenced in the specifics of curriculum and student work, more intellectual than intuitive, more linguistic than physical, more theory-driven than tradition-bound. (As the saying goes, “interesting, if true.”)  This argument for teaching as intellectual work is embedded as much in the tools and designs of the websites, in the genre itself, as anything else. These are rhetorical forms appropriate to a kind of intellectual/professional vision that they are, at the same time, attempting to create.

Representing a profession to itself

So what about the overall project of representing teaching as complex intellectual work – to the profession itself?  (An idea I am partial to.)  Seeing these websites as part of such a project raises three questions for me:

1) Does the collection of the websites stand alone, or is there something they don’t do by themselves, something that requires a different surround?

The websites don’t, actually, enable their own use.  It is hard to imagine that large numbers of teachers will find and then interact with these complex and consuming websites on their own.  They demand significant commitments of time from their viewers – they don’t give themselves up easily.  Despite their 24/7 online accessibility, they run the risk of ‘sitting on a library shelf” like many other resources for the teaching profession. Representations of teaching make teaching available for study, but don’t organize the study itself.

My guess is that teachers who find them will typically encounter them as part of other face-to-face or facilitated processes like “the professional development course”, “the graduate course,” or “the teacher network study group.”   Much of what we do in teacher professional networks could be understood as managing social processes for engaging teachers in the study of teaching. Formal protocols, little traditions, small group processes for talking, writing, and reflecting on teaching come to define what it means to be in a network. Engaging colleagues in these activities is not easy work. We share a work environment that provides little time or space for reflection and may even treat it with suspicion, where the daily grind threatens to overwhelm teacher and student alike.  In the face of this, active and engaging social processes are required to create the human space for study.  The websites themselves don’t create social processes; they serve as resources to those who do.

2) Can these exhibitions serve as resources to these efforts?

Currently, most of the social processes that engage teachers in learning are face-to-face and performative. Even those conducted online are typically facilitated to support a community experience.  How a complex digital representation fits within such social practices is an interesting question. For example: a teacher-viewer of one of these websites will effectively exploit the potential of the medium by following her own interests through the threads of the site. How does a process that repays individual interest so effectively play in a larger group setting? How do groups collectively decide how to interrogate something as complex as these representations? Are the digital tools and the learning environment well matched, or should one drive the other? If someone – say a professional development facilitator -- chooses to take a piece out of the representation and lead a group through it in some way, has the representation been reduced? Do we lose the simultaneity/hybridity that the medium can express when we dismantle its complexity? Or, should the collection itself be enhanced or re-designed based on the assumption that most people encounter it through some process of social mediation?  Should the collection be indexed and curated according to the uses these outside actors envision? How should the collection manage the purposes and intentions of these mediators relative to the purposes of the teacher-creators themselves?

In studying this exhibition in relation to the argument for teaching as a intellectual, professional activity, I am caught between two powerful images:  1) the museum exhibit, where each website is an individual work of art and where the mediator is a docent who helps the appreciative visitor understand the richness and depth of the collection, and 2) the supplemental resource or text book which finds its greatest utility in how it is shaped to fit its context of use.  The latter will help the work of these teacher-creators circulate, but will also take it away from them.  Which is more important in the professionalization project? 

3) Who should be archived in this way?

Finally, if our interest is in using new digital tools is to enable professional learning for teachers, we must consider who gets the opportunity to represent their practice in these ways.  Is the collection intended to portray images of ‘elite’ practice by ‘exemplary’ practitioners?  Or is the aspiration more democratic: strong practice by garden-variety good teachers?  This is a critical issue for the teacher community which has an ambivalent relationship to forms of individual recognition.  The ambivalence is exacerbated by the paucity of representations of teaching overall (opportunities are so few, and teachers are so many) and by the significant investment of time and resource needed to support representations as complex as these.  How does one get noticed?  Invited? Supported?  With greater investment come more care in selection and review and perhaps more authority for the representation, and a harder decision about who and what to invest in.

The other alternative is to follow the lead of, say, Wikipedia.  Perhaps creating a website about one’s practice represents a learning opportunity that should be widely distributed? If so, we will need new, improved, easy to use tools that dramatically reduce the investment in creation. The KEEP project is investing in building and distributing these tools more broadly, and in the world at large teachers are as able as anyone else to take up tools like blogs, podcasts, and websites to put their teaching lives online.

Every teacher potentially a creator – a blogosphere of teaching? Of course, this won’t ensure the work will be viewed or read or understood.  It won’t surround the creator with critical friends on the way to production. It won’t ensure that sense is made or that quality surfaces. For that we will need to turn our attention away from the representations, impressive as they are, and work on the very different challenges of keeping and creating teacher professional community.