Why Theory Matters
by Dorian Love
There is a common-sense notion amongst teachers that teaching is an art, not a science, and that theory does not matter. My guess is that few teachers read theory, not beyond their years in teacher-training colleges at any rate, and that even those that do, seldom find an application for what they read. Generally speaking then, teaching practice is informed by a little bit of reading at college, and by how those teachers were themselves educated. This notion that teaching is an art, and that theory is useless in the real classroom, is very strong, especially in South African schools.
In many ways I sympathise with this notion. In South Africa, teacher training was dominated, until recently by fundamental pedagogics, a pseudo-science which served political rather than educational ends. Strongly theoretical in approach, its multiple flaws allowed, even encouraged, an anti-theoreticalism to flourish. In the English-speaking colleges a kind of wishy-washy liberalism which eschewed theory predominated. In English teaching, the triumph of the Communicative Approach, with its focus on context, the student and creating meaning hardly provides a strong theoretical approach. When comapred with the Audio-Lingual method, for example, the Communicative Approach appears anti-scientific.
Then again, if one surveys the theory of language teaching, there is no over-arching theory of teaching that teachers could apply, even if they wanted to. As practitioners, we all know that there is not even a single method or approach for teaching English, for example, which works for all students at all times. In a very real sense then, those that argue that teaching is an art are right, in the sense that even where teachers use theory to inform their practice, why they choose this or that approach is very much dependent upon intuition. One would wish that some research informed one's decisions, but generally speaking, I doubt we as teachers can explain why we use group-work with one class and role-play with another, except that one class seems to thrive better on certain techniques, and not on others. Our reasons are pretty much based on gut-feel.
Is it all a matter of gut-feel then? Does theory not matter? Far from it. I am not arguing that we even need an over-arching theory before we can enter a classroom, even if there were one. I am not arguing that we should not be eclectic in our approach. Indeed the research seems to support eclecticism. I am not even arguing that there is no place for intuition. What I am arguing for, is that we need to think about what we do as teachers, should read as much as we can, should do our own research as much as possible, and should feed our guts with informed opinions if we are going to rely on them so much.
Next month, the series starts with a look at the question, is there a best method?
