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AUTONOMY? OR RESPONSIBILITY? Barbara S. Stengel Department of Educational Foundations Millersville University

One has to read to the end of Alice Pitt’s dense article to understand what is really bothering her. There, for the first time, she refers to ‘‘the public’s anxieties over what it is that teachers do behind the closed doors of their classrooms,’’ and expresses concern over ‘‘the contemporary landscape that structures debate about what the Ontario Ministry of Education describes as public confidence in education.’’1 Educators, those professionals whose work is the driving force of schools, are not trusted. Their knowledge and expertise is disrespected; their autonomy is threatened. It is for this reason that Pitt and her colleagues are conducting an empirical study of the profession of teaching, of teachers’ perceptions of their influence, authority, and autonomy. And it is in one of the interviews conducted for that study that Pitt encounters a young teacher whose experience is emblematic of the conceptual and political ambiguity surrounding the very notion of autonomy. Pitt realizes that threats to autonomy and sources of disrespect arise within the profession as well as without. She sets out to consider the ‘‘impossible profession’’ of education, citing Immanuel Kant, Sigmund Freud, Cornelius Castoriadis, Hannah Arendt, and Deborah Britzman as her companions. What I find most helpful in Pitt’s essay is her insistence that affect cannot be separated from reason in any consideration of professional autonomy. What I find curious is her focus on autonomy as the critical concept for this consideration of the breakdown of professional life in teaching. These points structure the central part of my essay. But these points are subsidiary to questions about Pitt’s interpretation of a novice teacher’s experience of her own professional knowledge and how her colleagues receive her. So I begin and end this response with some thoughts about the case that anchors Pitt’s theorizing.

‘‘Unruly Exuberance’’ Meets ‘‘War Stories’’ Pitt’s problematic is personal and professional as well as philosophical. Like me, she is a teacher educator (though removed by several degrees). Preparing young people and older career changers to take on the responsibility of teaching in an environment fraught with skepticism about teachers’ qualifications and effectiveness is tough enough. Educating them to recognize the tenuous and ambiguous nature of this relational work in a wider world controlled by a continuing quest for cognitive certainty and a profound discomfort with affect-inspired ambiguity 1. Alice Pitt, ‘‘On Having One’s Chance: Autonomy as Education’s Limit,’’ in this volume, 15–16. This work will be cited in the text as HOC for all subsequent references. Volume 60 Number 1 EDUCATIONAL THEORY © 2010 Board of Trustees University of Illinois

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requires relational skill, intellectual standards, and affective agility. Encouraging them to respond to scarcity of resources and public support with creativity and dedication is draining. Helping them to anticipate and respond constructively to the often counterintuitive resistance of their more experienced colleagues for what it is — a frustration born of too much responsibility, too few resources, and too little respect — is a challenge to the professionalism you seek to encourage. And persisting in responsible teacher education in the face of the disdain with which much of the academic and business worlds view the field’s knowledge base and practice is, frankly, exhausting and a challenge to one’s sense of self. Pitt, the teacher educator and researcher, turns to Pitt, the philosopher, to ponder the play of autonomy with the young teacher quoted in the opening paragraphs as her provocateur. Is autonomy possible in this impossible profession? Who and what threaten the autonomy of teachers? And paradoxically, how does autonomy become a cage that itself limits teachers’ capacity to make substantive judgments? In her effort to answer these questions, Pitt carves a path through modern and contemporary views of education and autonomy. She lays out and then counters Kant’s mostly cognitivist view of education as enlightened judgment. She counters first with Freud’s psychoanalytic insertion of the play of individual instinct and affect, then with Castoriadis’s understanding that autonomy is both built on and fraught with psychical conflicts — between conservation and creation, between intellect and instinct, later with Arendt’s analysis of the breakdown of authority and the meaning of autonomy linked to natality, and finally with Britzman’s focus on the ‘‘hatred of learning’’ tied up in ‘‘painful emotional experience of helplessness, dependency, and frustration’’ (Britzman, quoted in HOC, 14). Because education involves — indeed, requires — ‘‘newness,’’ and newness is painful as well as productive, there can be no rich understanding of autonomy without recognition of and attention to the interaction of the cognitive and the affective. But her track through this philosophical and political thought is delimited by her particular concern, narrower even than the worry that the profession is disrespected from the outside. Pitt’s particular concern, captured in the interpreted experience of this new teacher (one who is ‘‘otherwise distinguished by a remarkable degree of sophistication of thought, confidence in her developing practice, and commitment to her professional responsibilities’’ [HOC, 2]), is the way the profession itself apparently does not welcome the ‘‘newness’’ — and opportunity for renewal — that the novice teacher brings. The profession, according to Castoriadis, those autonomous individuals who take responsibility for the creation of a community that devises the rules that it chooses to live by, has not found a mode of practice that gives the newcomer his or her ‘‘own chance at the new,’’ that is, to take BARBARA S. STENGEL is a Professor in the Department of Educational Foundations at Millersville University, Stayer Hall 424, 1 South George St., Millersville, PA 17551; e-mail . Her primary areas of scholarship are fear as a function of educational experience, ‘‘pedagogical responsibility’’ as a critical concept in understanding teaching and teacher education, and making the moral visible in American schooling.

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responsibility for the practice and the profession. This is not Kant’s ever-improving understanding, but something closer to Arendt’s recognition that natality breaks in relentlessly and Britzman’s recognition that the ‘‘break-in’’ hurts. A new teacher confronts her colleagues with her ‘‘unruly exuberance’’ and her colleagues offer ‘‘war stories’’ and tell her to ‘‘stop whining.’’ She feels utterly alone with an autonomy that she cannot enact. In Pitt’s interpretation, her colleagues have abandoned her to the disheartening nature of the autonomy they have created for themselves, a freedom reducible to whatever the teacher does in the classroom when the door is closed. The new teacher has come ‘‘armed with the latest theories and best practices that legitimate university-based teacher education’’ and finds herself in league with the school board who operates as an apparent threat to the freedom of teachers to act on their own judgment. I readily admit that Pitt’s interpretation matches how teachers often talk; it is common to hear teachers of varying talent and dedication refer to closing the door and doing what they know to be right professionally and pedagogically whatever the directive du jour. Still, I wonder sometimes if it is not a rhetorical device designed to help teachers keep an eye on the prize and off the institutional trappings that too often seem designed to impede rather than support professional judgment and action. I rarely fail to be impressed with the thought and thoughtfulness of classroom teachers when I can get them talking about themselves and their students and their learning together. But to do this, I typically have to cut away the rhetoric with which they protect themselves. This observation pushes me to think again about the new teacher and her colleagues. Are her colleagues abandoning her to a first-year ‘‘hazing’’ that has become a gateway to the profession? Are they unwilling to participate in preparing her ‘‘for the task of receiving the common world’’? Are they reluctant to learn the latest theories and best practices, prompted by the discomfort of learning that reminds oneself of one’s own helplessness? Maybe. But it is also possible that her colleagues are trying to teach her something, something clearly congruent with Pitt’s message about the limits of reason, the complex nature of autonomy, and, in Gert Biesta’s phrase, ‘‘the weakness of education.’’2 Perhaps their war stories are object lessons. Each teacher’s stories demonstrate the way he or she developed from novice to expert by trying something, undergoing the results, and then making sense of the link between one and the other. By doing this over and over and over again, one enters the profession repeatedly. Each effort remakes the profession and remakes the teacher as a professional. The point is not to abandon her to an autonomy that tests her and finds her wanting; the point is to direct her along the only path they can travel with her. It is a path of reflective practice. Others traveling the same path can provide a sense of support. Companions on the journey can offer each other suggestions, warnings, and, yes, ‘‘war stories,’’ but no one else can take a single step forward for any other one. 2. Gert Biesta, ‘‘The Weakness of Education,’’ in Philosophy of Education 2009, ed. Deborah Kerdeman (Champaign, Illinois: The Philosophy of Education Society, 2010, 354–362).

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The math teacher our novice initially misjudged is a case in point. Because he did not speak the language of the university-based teacher education program (and we do not know whether or not he knew the language, only that he did not speak it), and because he copied problems sheets (and offered them to her!), he was judged wanting, unprofessional. But our novice realized later (to her credit) that she was wrong. He was in fact a professional who acted consistently in the best interests of his students and with defensible educational and curricular goals clearly in view. There is another tension that affects an understanding of the new teacher’s comments about her experiences of autonomy. It is the unresolved relation between university-based teacher education and the profession’s location in a system of schooling not of its own making. While I accept wholeheartedly Pitt’s view that the profession is enlivened and improved when novices are welcomed with open arms, I believe she pays inadequate attention to the difficult transition from university student to public school teacher. Later, I return to this point.

Introducing Affect As noted previously, what I find most helpful in Pitt’s offering is her recognition that affect cannot be separated from reason in any consideration of autonomy. Her willingness to name and explore the role of emotion in the professional experience of autonomy offers a useful entry point (what she refers to as an ‘‘uncommon entry’’) into the dynamic she has in her sight. Her interest in the ‘‘breakdown of professional life’’ experienced by both novices and experts is tightly tied to conceptual analysis of autonomy but it is fueled by a focus on emotion as she struggles to understand and ameliorate not only the difficulties of the teacher’s first years of practice, but also the poverty of the profession. ‘‘Hopelessness and helplessness’’ are the markers of the breakdown, and no revitalization of the profession is possible unless these emotional experiences are taken seriously. She and her colleague researchers intentionally go looking for ‘‘emotional experiences,’’ grounded in complex relations. By invoking Freud, Castoriadis, and Britzman as guides, Pitt welcomes the careful consideration of emotion as revelatory of instinctual life. She notes that ‘‘education’s success requires that it be informed by Freud’s knowledge of instinctual life’’ (HOC, 7), while giving careful attention to Freud’s concern that strengthening the intellect through education, and thus domesticating instinct, may actually damage humanity’s prospects for survival. Freud did not propose an ‘‘emotional literacy’’ for schools, though he did acknowledge that psychoanalysis might benefit individual teachers and students. It is Castoriadis that helps Pitt bring reason and affect together when he articulates the tension between conservation and creativity. For Pitt, affect resides in the conceptual tension built into the experience of autonomy — an experience that juxtaposes the development (and legitimation) of specialized skills and knowledge with the individual will acting.

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Like Pitt, I want to emphasize the interplay of reason and affect in making sense of teaching as a profession, teachers’ practice, and individual teacher’s perceptions of both profession and practice. But I fear (!) that her reliance on emotion as unconscious and instinctual limits the reach of her analysis. The instinctual dimension of human affect cannot be ignored, but neither can the social and socially constructed impact of emotion as rooted in lived experience always integrating cognitive, affective, and behavioral facets.3 When Pitt supplements the conceptual, cognitive framing of autonomy with an instinctual, affective framing, she assumes — and maintains — a divide between thinking and feeling, despite her insistence that she is looking for a relational and transactional view of autonomy and authority that bridges thought and feeling. When Pitt conflates affect, feeling, and emotion, she conflates as well the voluntary and involuntary dimensions of her young teacher’s response and blurs the impact of social conditioning on the circuit of stimulus and response. And when she sidesteps the material and political conditions of both teacher education and schooling, she limits possible interpretations of her young teacher’s helplessness and hopelessness to those that blame members of the profession who do not adequately welcome her. So while I welcome Pitt’s analysis of the emotional element as an important step in understanding autonomy, I suggest that there is much more to say about the affective dimensions of the dilemma confronting the profession. I also wonder whether autonomy is the best conceptual vessel for conveying a resolution to that dilemma.

Can Autonomy Carry the Water? Return again to Pitt’s initial concern, at least as I understand it: the condition and status of the teaching profession. And note that her analysis of teaching as a profession is understandably linked to a notion — that is, autonomy — that is typically tied to activity that can be called professional. There is nothing curious about any of this, except that Pitt sets out to render a relational view of the teaching profession. As Pitt herself recounts, autonomy’s roots are not relational. To rely on autonomy as the pivot point defining a profession seems to me to tie theorizing about the profession to an atomistic framework that can only nod in the direction of the relational. I am not discounting the value of, for example, Castoriadis’s or Arendt’s reconceptualizing of autonomy. It is, after all, an important and often used term in 3. Sources for this kind of analysis can be found in John Dewey’s pragmatist theory of emotion. See, for example, John Dewey ‘‘The Theory of Emotion. (I) Emotional Attitudes’’ (1894), in John Dewey: The Early Works, 1882–1898, vol. 4, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), 152–169; and John Dewey, ‘‘The Theory of Emotion. (II) The Significance of Emotions’’ (1895), in John Dewey: The Early Works, 1882–1898, vol. 5, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), 169–188. Another source for this type of analysis is the neuroscientific perspective of Antonio Damasio. See, for example, Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (New York: Penguin Books, 1994); and Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Is: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (Orlando, Florida: Harcourt, 1999).

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Western political and social theory. I am only asking whether Pitt is best served by focusing on autonomy as the ‘‘water carrier’’ concept to deal with the problematic her novice teacher reveals. What do Pitt and her colleagues really want to know when they invite a new teacher to comment on autonomy and authority and influence? And what is the new teacher saying when she says that she has an autonomy that is terrifying and no ability to use it? Pitt seems to want to know whether the teacher feels like a professional, like someone worthy of the respect that (ideally) accompanies legitimate authority and able to act responsibly and responsively in light of funded knowledge. Autonomy (‘‘thinking for oneself in uncertain and complex situations in which judgment is more important than in routine circumstances’’ [HOC, 1]) focuses on just one side of relations of influence and authority. That is, it is a function of what the teacher intends and can do. Even with the addendum that autonomy is incomplete without the support that makes it possible to do what one intends, the term itself carries vestiges of a theoretical framework that Pitt seems to want to break out of. The new teacher’s answers suggest that she has freedom to do what she wants to when she closes the classroom door, but only at the price of abandonment by her peers. This abandonment deprives her of the support that enlivens autonomy. And her colleagues’ abandonment does not protect her from what she perceives as their judgment of her successes and failures. It is this abandonment that focuses Pitt’s concern. This is the unnoticed source of a serious breakdown of professional life in teaching, a breakdown marked by the helplessness and hopelessness of new teachers. In the end, Pitt’s concern with autonomy is leavened by an equally urgent concern with community, as her turning to Castoriadis makes clear. To rely on autonomy to bear the conceptual weight here seems counterproductive. I think Pitt’s real concern is professional responsibility understood as response, responsiveness, and accountability both within the profession and to the profession’s publics. She is unhappy with the way experienced teachers treat novices, that is, irresponsibly. As I think about what the new teacher and Pitt both perceive as abandonment, the concept of autonomy — even a reconstructed understanding of autonomy — does not point me toward any alternative modes of interaction. There is another complication with the use of autonomy as an organizing concept for this analysis and that is the nature of the practice of education. What ˆ are the limits of autonomy for professionals whose role and raison d’etre take shape within institutions that are public, political, and publicly funded? Or, put more simply and perhaps usefully for those pursuing the profession of teaching rather than the study of educational philosophy, What difference does it make that my teacherly focus ultimately is not and can never be my knowledge and performance but rather is my students’ growth (as defined by everybody but me)? Professional educators, employed in schools, are operating in a sociopolitical context that limits autonomy with a vengeance. The concept of autonomy had the power to reveal this problematic to Pitt, but I think not the power to resolve it. A concept like responsibility might take Pitt

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further, and there are some hints that Pitt knows this. She asks, What is the nature of — and possibility for — autonomy in a profession that has, by its very nature, alterity in its groundroot? For Pitt is not talking about any profession but about the profession of education. It is education that has alterity in its groundroot, as her theoretical companions make clear. So making use of autonomy as the central analytic concept to resolve the relational breakdown in the teaching profession seems, well, curious.

Welcoming the Newcomer I return now to what Pitt diagnoses as the profession’s difficulty in welcoming the newcomer. As Pitt suggests, newness is painful as well as productive. It is painful to experienced teachers as well as novices. But Pitt is intent on demonstrating that the newness that new teachers bring is productive for experienced teachers and for the profession as Castoriadis’s community of decision makers. If the profession is not remade with an eye toward welcoming newness, all teachers’ chances at participating in the risky work of renewing the worn or wearing out world are foreclosed. Pitt is right and her point bears emphasis. It is well worth the effort to build this understanding into the rules that construct and govern the community, rules that paradoxically both require and shape the autonomy of its members. Pitt does not take adequate account, I think, of the material and institutional realities of a new teacher’s transition from university student to school teacher. There seem to be two assumptions lurking here, captured in Pitt’s rendering of the new teacher’s ‘‘wish that others find her newly won knowledge useful in the renewal of their own’’ (HOC, 15). The first assumption is that the ‘‘newness’’ brought by new teachers arrives as an improved understanding of teaching in the form of the latest theories and research, held by university-based teacher educators and passed on to novices in the process of teacher education. The second is that novices enter the profession prepared to take on the responsibility that the current structure of schools allots them. Both assumptions seem problematic.

The Nature of the Newness What does the novice teacher bring to her colleagues, to the profession? Is it ‘‘newly won knowledge?’’ What is this newly won knowledge worth? Can it sustain the novice teacher? Does it constructively challenge the experienced one? It seems to me that the novice sparks the growth made possible through newness not with her answers, but with her questions. Pitt’s new teacher reveals a significant misunderstanding of the impossible project of education with its fundamental uncertainty that Pitt and Britzman shed light on. Is this a failure of her teacher education program? Yes, I think it is. It’s an understandable (though perhaps not defensible) failure within a system that substitutes best practice for student growth while itself operating within a system that substitutes standardized test scores for learning. Still, it reveals more about the self-referential viewpoint of teacher educators and teacher researchers than it does about the new teacher or about the profession

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she is entering. That teacher arrives with a not-yet-mature ability to interpret pedagogical challenges and respond with intellectual, emotional, and existential integrity. When her ‘‘newly won knowledge’’ does not sustain her, she asks for answers and her colleagues offer war stories that function as koans, as object lessons. The teachers I know are, by and large, more responsible than Pitt’s new teacher gives them credit for being. They recognize the need to welcome the new and do so wonderfully when the interpersonal, political, and material conditions of their position enable it. They ‘‘get’’ the tensions Pitt highlights so beautifully in her essay, though they do not always have the language (nor the familiarity with Kant and friends) to express what they know. And this too may be part of the problem and a further indictment of teacher education. Despite significant efforts to truly educate teachers, it remains the case that a teacher is trained to act without being educated to understand, to interpret. A fitting pedagogical response only takes shape in the light of accurate interpretation and understanding. The kind of understanding needed requires more than four years and more than acquaintance with the leading theories and results of educational research, however valuable the latter may be. On the one hand, it requires the kind of broad general education that prompts a person to make connections between and among persons, cultures, and the disciplines of inquiry and art. And here the university has something significant to offer, even though most extant teacher preparation programs shortchange or deemphasize the importance of a solid general education for teaching. On the other hand, an educator’s understanding is ultimately shaped by and in experience. And this a university-based teacher education rarely delivers, no matter how many early field experiences or what the shape of the teaching practicum. So the new teacher typically begins her professional career with ‘‘newly won knowledge’’ that is wildly imbalanced in favor of educational theory and research and against the wisdom of practice. The broad understanding of human experience and the deep appreciation for the teacher’s ways of knowing can only be developed as she pursues her career. Until that understanding and appreciation develop, her own misunderstanding of the ‘‘newness’’ she brings functions not as a reflective platform for responsible pedagogy but as an implied indictment of those who are pursuing responsible pedagogy on a daily basis. So the question is not so much one of welcoming the new into the profession as of bridging the gap between the profession’s ‘‘research and development’’ division and the profession’s ‘‘production’’ division. What kind of structure aids the new teacher’s transition from initial (and inevitably incomplete) training to full responsibility?

Learning to Be Usefully Wrong When and how does a new teacher become professional? One might answer that she is a professional by virtue of occupying a position of employment. After all, a new teacher generally has as much authority and autonomy on the first day of her career as she will on the last. But this formulation does not resolve any interesting questions. One might argue that she is a professional by virtue of her

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authoritative knowledge and her exercise of autonomy. But this is exactly the formulaic understanding of the profession that Pitt is calling into question. As an alternative, I propose that the new professional, the one who is prepared to take responsibility for the profession, is one who can determine and enact the fitting response to pedagogical, curricular, and professional challenges. This does not suggest that the new teacher’s enacted practice is always right; rather, it is always at least usefully wrong. Moreover, the new professional will have the courage to act forthrightly, knowing both that success is not guaranteed and that what counts as success may be a shifting target. What does this look like in action? Future teachers can be systematically encouraged to interpret what is going on, to brainstorm possible tactics, to test each in imagination, to respond in action, and to reflect and connect action and consequences in reframing new pedagogical habits. Of course, they can only interpret accurately if they know much about human nature; about the interplay of feeling, thought, and behavior; about learning theory; about child development; about schools as political systems; and about the politics of curricular possibility. They will brainstorm productively if they are familiar with the syntax and semantics of their field of study as well as with good teachers and their practice. They will test possibilities mentally if they have the time and are familiar with the research that reflects field-testing of similar efforts. They will respond in action if they have the courage to trust themselves — to do the right thing, or to do the quite possibly right or not-quite-right thing and learn from it. They will connect action and consequences if they have acquired the habit of doing so under our tutelage. These are the elements of powerful teacher education and development both in university preparation and within public school practice. And it should be clear from this description that these are habits of mind and knowledge that cannot be achieved in or limited to a short list of professional education classes or faculty development days. It should also be clear that this education does not end — but really just begins — when a student leaves the university to enter the profession. Return then to Pitt’s new teacher. She brings ‘‘newly won knowledge’’ and apparently confidence in what she knows, in what she has learned from her university mentors and teachers. But she is not yet a colleague to her fellow professionals. She is not one of them until she begins to ask educational and pedagogical questions and, in the company of her colleagues, to answer in action — even when the answer is wrong. She is professional as long as her answer is usefully wrong, that is, as long as the answer/action is subject to reflective critique on the way toward professional habit and further action. Teacher education enables the transition from university to P-12 classroom when future teachers recognize the value of being usefully wrong and cultivate the ability — cognitive, affective, and dispositional — to do so. It is in this way that we experienced professionals, both those in the university and those in the public schools, ‘‘prepare them in advance for the task of renewing the common world’’ (Arendt, quoted in HOC, 16). Pitt’s new teacher arrived thinking she brought answers rather than questions. She came out of school believing that she had ‘‘learned to teach’’ and was pulled

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up short by the reality of nearly unfettered ‘‘autonomy.’’ Ironically, she recognizes that her own answers failed her and is, at the same time, unhappy that her answers are not accepted by her new colleagues. I think it is possible that her new colleagues tried to answer her with illustrative cases and a habit of inquiry and she was not able to hear their response. This does highlight a significant problem with both teacher education and the contemporary structure of schooling. Neither is designed to maximize autonomy or responsibility by members of the teaching profession. In fact, neither is organized as if teaching were a profession. Neither relies significantly on the participation of the members of the profession in the preparation, transition, or professional action of teachers. Like Pitt, I want to take the emotional reality of teaching, the helplessness and hopelessness, seriously in any theory of the profession. But the best way to do this is not to focus on autonomy but to understand autonomy as a moment — with community — within responsibility.

Conclusion The educational path goes just so far but not all the way to autonomy, to Kant’s image of mature enlightenment. Reason has limits and education reveals them. To pursue education to its limit (striving for but never quite reaching autonomy) inevitably engages affect, forcing reason to move over in the resolution of the teaching profession’s breakdown. In the end, the problematic Pitt points to is an important one that commands the attention of those with a hand in teacher education and school leadership, but especially the attention of those who claim membership in the professional community of teachers. We know, anecdotally and empirically, that new teachers flourish only in communities with ‘‘integrated professional cultures.’’ In such communities, there is ‘‘frequent and reciprocal interaction among faculty members across experience levels,’’ new teachers’ needs as beginners are recognized, and all teachers, new and experienced, take shared responsibility for the school and its success.4 The focus, it seems to me, is not autonomy but the ability, the capacity, to respond: to each other, to one’s students and their parents, and to the public articulation of educational needs and goals. Pitt clearly calls us to acknowledge that reason alone cannot support responsibility, that is, the recognition of the ‘‘constitutive alterity’’ at the heart of any effort to educate. Neither, I think, can autonomy.

4. Susan Kardos and Susan Moore Johnson, ‘‘On Their Own and Presumed Expert: New Teachers’ Experiences with Their Colleagues,’’ Teachers College Record 109, no. 9 (2007): 2083–2106.