Bridging the Divides: The Need for a Pragmatic Semiotics of Teacher Knowledge Research

BRIDGING THE DIVIDES: THE NEED FOR A PRAGMATIC SEMIOTICS OF

TEACHER KNOWLEDGE RESEARCH

Jerry Rosiek and Becky Atkinson

In this essay, we consider four approaches to research on teacher knowledge: the

scholarship of teaching, action research and teacher research, narrative inquiry,

and critical-cultural teacher research. Similarities and differences among these four

approaches are highlighted. The most salient difference lies in the way each ap-

proach identifies different discourses as sources of distortion in teacher knowledge

research. Although some divergence within a field of study can be a valuable source

of debate and dialogue, we believe the differences identified here risk dividing the

field of teacher knowledge research in unproductive ways. What is needed, we pro-

pose, is a semiotic theory that acknowledges the way teacher knowledge is irredu-

cibly mediated by multiple discourses while preserving a commitment to the idea

that individual teachers’ experiences can be a source of novel and useful knowl-

edge. We examine two semiotic theories — French poststructuralism and Charles

Sanders Peirce’s pragmatic semiotics — and critically assess how they might facili-

tate more constructive dialogue among differing conceptions of teachers’ knowl-

edge research.

BRIDGING THE DIVIDES: THE NEED FOR A PRAGMATICSEMIOTICS OF TEACHER KNOWLEDGE RESEARCH

Jerry Rosiek

College of Education

University of Alabama

Becky Atkinson

Department of Teacher Education

Samford University

Over the past twenty-five years a research movement has emerged that seeks

to bridge the gap between educational theory and practice by taking seriously the

intellectual dimension of the practical work of teaching. This work includes, but is

not limited to, research on teachers’ practical knowledge, craft knowledge, personal

practical knowledge, and wisdom of practice, as well as teacher research, action re-

search, and the scholarship of teaching.1 Researchers contributing to this literature

ask questions about the content, production, epistemology, and representation of

teachers’ practical knowledge.2 In a short span of time this movement has made a

lasting impact on teacher education research and practice.3 Teachers are increas-

ingly seen as professionals who must be prepared to be reflective practitioners, who

engage in inquiry that informs their teaching practice, and who occasionally publish

original research on their teaching that can inform other teachers’ practice.

There is considerable diversity within this new area of educational scholar-

ship. Differences of opinion exist about the epistemological and ideological frame-

works appropriate for research on the work of teaching, about the content of

teacher knowledge, and about who most appropriately should produce research on

1. Several of these specific areas of research will be addressed in detail subsequently. Some examples ofteacher knowledge research include Pamela Grossman, The Making of a Teacher: Teacher Knowledgeand Teacher Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 1990); Gaea Leinhardt, ‘‘Capturing CraftKnowledge in Teaching,’’ Educational Researcher 19, no. 2 (1990): 18–25; Lee Shulman, The Wisdom ofPractice: Essays on Teaching, Learning, and Learning to Teach, ed. Suzanne Wilson (San Francisco:Jossey-Bass, 2004); Susan Noffke, ‘‘The Work and Workplace of Teachers in Action Research,’’ Teachingand Teacher Education 8, no. 1 (1992): 15–29; Mary Taylor Huber and Sherwyn Morreale, eds., Dis-ciplinary Styles in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: Exploring Common Ground (Washington,D.C.: American Association for Higher Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement ofTeaching, 2002); Pat Hutchings, ed., Ethics of Inquiry: Issues in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learn-ing (Menlo Park, California: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 2002).

2. See, for example, Grossman, The Making of a Teacher; Deborah Ball, ‘‘Teacher Learning and theMathematics Reforms: What We Think We Know and What We Need to Learn,’’ Phi Delta Kappan 77,no. 7 (1996): 500–508; Jean Clandinin and Michael Connelly, Narrative Inquiry (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000); Marilyn Cochran-Smith and Susan Lytle, ‘‘Relationships of Knowledge and Practice: TeacherLearning in Communities,’’ Review of Research in Education 24 (1999): 251–307; and GaryFenstermacher, ‘‘The Knower and Known,’’ Review of Research in Education 20 (1994): 3–56.

3. Linda Darling-Hammond, ‘‘The Right to Learn and the Advancement of Teaching: Research Policyand Practice for Democratic Education,’’ Educational Researcher 25, no. 6 (1996): 5–19; and Leinhardt,‘‘Capturing Craft Knowledge in Teaching.’’

EDUCATIONAL THEORY j Volume 55 j Number 4 j 2005� 2005 Board of Trustees j University of Illinois

421

teachers’ practical work. Such differences of opinion within a field of study can be

constructive when they stimulate dialogue. However, if the differences run so deep

that they inspire polarization, they can inhibit dialogue and weaken a field of

study. This diversity of approaches to teacher knowledge research, and its implica-

tions for the future of the field, is the central concern of this essay.

MULTIPLE VIEWS OF TEACHER KNOWLEDGE

Here we will consider four approaches to research on teacher knowledge: the

scholarship of teaching, action research and teacher research, narrative inquiry,

and critical-cultural teacher research. Researchers working within these traditions

share a great deal in common. They all seek a research practice grounded in a

respect for the intellectual work of teaching, and all are concerned about the way

professional and cultural discourses can distort teachers’ thinking and practice.

These approaches differ, however, in their opinions about which social dis-

courses are sources of distortion to research on teaching practice. Whereas one ap-

proach is concerned with avoiding the taint of individual bias and local

provincialism, another is concerned that university discourses mute teachers’

voices; yet another is concerned that the professional discourses suppress the per-

sonal aspect of teaching; and another is concerned that taken-for-granted cultural

values prevent teachers from seeing the full implications of their practice. Often

these divergent views appear to be mutually exclusive. For example, either you be-

lieve that research on teachers’ knowledge needs to be guided by the insights and

norms of university-based research, or you believe teachers’ inquiries are better off

without such an influence.

These differences, in our view, threaten to divide the field in unproductive

ways. To avoid this threat, we need a semiotic theory that acknowledges the way

in which teacher knowledge is irreducibly mediated by multiple discourses while

preserving a commitment to the idea that individual teachers’ experiences can be

a source of novel and useful knowledge. In the remainder of this essay we examine

more closely the teacher knowledge literature and elaborate the potential bene-

fits of a semiotic theory of teacher knowledge. We then examine two semiotic

theories — French poststructuralism and Charles Sanders Peirce’s pragmatic semi-

otics — and critically assess how they might facilitate more constructive dialogue

between differing conceptions of teachers’ knowledge research.

DISCOURSE AND TEACHER KNOWLEDGE

Discourse, as we use the term here, refers to systems of symbols, signs, and

meanings through which a particular topic or issue is understood by a given social

group. Following Michel Foucault, John Dewey, and Mikhail Bakhtin, among

JERRY ROSIEK is Associate Professor in the College of Education at the University of Alabama, Box870231, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487; e-mail \[email protected][. His primary areas of scholarship areteacher knowledge research, qualitative research methods, and cultural foundations of education.

BECKYATKINSON is Assistant Professor in the Department of Teacher Education at Samford University,800 Lakeshore Dr., Birmingham, AL 35226; e-mail\[email protected][. Her primary areas of schol-arship are teacher knowledge research, teacher education, pragmatic semiotics, and narrative research.

E D U C A T I O N A L T H E O R Y VOLUME 55 j NUMBER 4 j 2005422

others, we are convinced that professional and cultural discourses shape not just

the way teachers describe their experiences but the way they have those experien-

ces as well.4 Professional discourses shape teachers’ beliefs about curriculum and

pedagogy.5 Broad cultural discourses provide the means by which gender, race, eth-

nicity, class, sexuality, and (dis)ability distinctions are made, and these distinctions

in turn shape the way students and teachers respond to one another.6

For our purposes, we may think of this in terms of an ongoing cycle of practi-

cal action and reflection. Teachers have experiences in the classroom. Various cul-

tural and professional discourses that have been internalized by teachers mediate

their interpretation of these classroom experiences. These interpretations either

modify or reinforce the lenses through which teachers have subsequent classroom

experiences. These various cultural and professional discourses also provide teach-

ers a common vocabulary they can use to represent their classroom experiences to

other educators. Whether those representations are oral or written, whether they

are recorded in a personal journal, shared with a colleague, or published in a na-

tionally circulated journal, the conceptual vocabulary of teachers’ professional and

cultural discourses both enables and constrains what they can say to each other

about their practice.

These basic observations provide a starting place for our discussion of the me-

diating effects of various discourses on teacher knowledge research. In order to

refine this analysis we will look at the specific features of four contemporary theo-

ries about teachers’ knowledge.

THE SCHOLARSHIP OF TEACHING

Speaking of the intellectual richness of teachers’ practical experience, Lee

Shulman has commented that

practitioners simply know a great deal that they have never even tried to articulate. A majorportion of the educational agenda for the coming decades will be to collect, collate, and inter-pret the practical knowledge of teachers for the purpose of establishing a case literature andcodifying its principles, precedents, and parables.7

Shulman goes on to develop a vision for how respect for the intellectual work of

teaching might be enacted by teacher education scholars. He calls for the estab-

lishment of a knowledge base that documents teachers’ practical insights and

makes them available for dissemination.

Central to this conception of research on teachers’ knowledge is the idea that

teacher knowledge claims should be made public and subjected to critical peer

4. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. ColinGordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980); John Dewey, The Philosophy of John Dewey, ed. JohnJ. McDermott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973); and Sue Vice, Introducing Bakhtin(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997).

5. Thomas Popkewitz, Struggling for the Soul: The Politics of Schooling and the Construction of theTeacher (New York: Teachers College Press, 1998).

6. Herve Varenne and Ray McDermott, Successful Failure (Boulder, Colorado: Westview, 1997).

7. Lee Shulman, ‘‘Knowledge and Teaching: Foundations of the New Reform,’’ Harvard EducationReview 57, no. 1 (1987): 8.

ROSIEK AND ATKINSON Bridging the Divides 423

review. Shulman describes this mode of inquiry, which he calls the ‘‘the scholar-

ship of teaching,’’ as follows:

We develop a scholarship of teaching when our work as teachers becomes public, peer re-viewed and critiqued, and exchanged with other members of our community, so they, in turn,can build on our work. These are all the qualities of scholarship.8

The newly established Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning pro-

vides several illustrations of this approach to teacher knowledge research. For ex-

ample, in her article ‘‘Do Students Want to Be Active?’’ Donna Qualters describes

her experience of making the transition from lecture-style teaching to a more stu-

dent-centered pedagogy.9 The article was inspired by Qualters’s observation that

the transition was a challenge not only for her, but also for her college-age stu-

dents. She published her practical insights about this experience in a peer reviewed

journal article and drew upon case survey data and qualitative data analysis to pro-

vide supporting evidence for her analysis.

Underlying this model is the assumption that teachers’ personal understanding

of their classroom experience must be transformed in some way in order to be circu-

lated publicly as knowledge. Teachers’ insights, like anyone’s, can be flawed by per-

sonal bias or provincialism. Identifying the parts of a teacher’s understanding that

might be useful to others requires translating these insights into a publicly accessi-

ble form — such as a case study, a journal article, or a Web page. These representa-

tions are in turn submitted for critical review to determine whether they will be

included in a formal knowledge base for teacher education. Both processes, the writ-

ten representation and the review, involve discursive mediation. The language,

style, and content parameters to which the public representation of teacher knowl-

edge must conform in order to be published operate as filters on teacher knowledge

in this model of research. Ultimately, this model rests on the expectation that a peer

review process will help establish a trusted source of practical teaching knowledge

that will inform other teachers’ practice and perhaps inspire further inquiry.

ACTION RESEARCH AND TEACHER RESEARCH

A second and very different conception of research on teacher knowledge has

been forwarded by educational researchers who are interested in the process more

than the product of teachers’ inquiry. These scholars regard the imposition of the

norms of university research on teacher inquiries with suspicion. In their influen-

tial book, Inside Outside: Teacher Research and Knowledge, Marilyn Cochran-

Smith and Susan Lytle write,

Regarding teacher researchasamere imitationofuniversity research isnotuseful andisultimatelycondescending..[I]t is more useful to consider teacher research its own genre, not entirely differ-ent fromother typesof systematic inquiry into teaching,yetwithsomequitedistinctive features.10

8. Lee Shulman, ‘‘From Minsk to Pinsk: Why a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning?’’ Journal of Schol-arship of Teaching and Learning 1, no. 1 (2000): 50.

9. Donna Qualters, ‘‘Do Students Want to Be Active?’’ Journal of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning2, no. 1 (2001): 51–60.

10. Marilyn Cochran-Smith and Susan Lytle, eds., Inside Outside: Teacher Research and Knowledge(New York: Teachers College Press, 1993), 10.


Their alternative conception of research traces its roots to the tradition of

action research started by Kurt Lewin. He described action research as ‘‘compa-

rative research on various forms of social action, and research leading to social

action.’’11 Applied to education, action research has assumed many different

forms.12 Teachers’ ‘‘action research’’ may be published for a general audience or

may be shared within a local community.13 As Susan Noffke observes, however,

‘‘For a large portion of action research efforts.the major focus is on the personal

knowledge or theorizing of teachers.’’14 Whatever its intended audience, this

research seeks its validation in the way the inquiry transforms teachers’ actual

practice.

In a brief narrative included in Inside Outside, teacher Judy Buchanan

provides an example of this kind of practice-centered inquiry. She reports on her

decision to examine her teaching of writing: ‘‘I realized that I had been developing

for several years a rationale for my classroom practice with fourth-graders

and their writing.’’15 She did not feel, however, that her approach served all stu-

dents equally well. Working in collaboration with other teachers in her com-

munity, Buchanan chose to systematically examine the writing of one particular

student who seemed to be struggling: ‘‘Through looking closely at his work and

reflecting with others, I found some new ways to support his learning in the

classroom.’’16

Cochran-Smith and Lytle suggest that research like Buchanan’s generates

‘‘local knowledge’’ that ‘‘foregrounds the processes, not the products, of knowledge

construction as they are expressed in and integrated with daily life in schools and

classrooms.’’17 Challenges arising from their classroom experiences motivate

teachers’ inquiries. These inquiries are, in turn, primarily intended to inform the

practice of the teacher conducting the inquiry. Note that although teachers’

inquiries are not directed by university discourses in this model of research, these

inquiries are still mediated by more general professional and cultural discourses

that shape an individual teacher’s thinking.

NARRATIVE INQUIRY

A third conception of research on teacher knowledge emphasizes the narra-

tive structure of teachers’ thinking. Over the past two decades Jean Clandinin

and Michael Connelly have undertaken a program of empirical research that

11. Kurt Lewin, Resolving Social Conflicts (New York: Harper, 1948), 202–203.

12. Susan Noffke, ‘‘Professional, Personal, and Political Dimensions of Action Research,’’ Review of Re-search and Education 22 (1997): 305–343.

13. Cochran-Smith and Lytle, Inside Outside.

14. Noffke, ‘‘Professional, Personal, and Political Dimensions of Action Research,’’ 318.

15. Judy Buchanan, ‘‘Listening to Voices,’’ in Inside Outside, eds. Cochran-Smith and Lytle, 216.

16. Ibid.

17. Cochran-Smith and Lytle, ‘‘Relationships of Knowledge and Practice,’’ 292.


documents the way teachers understand and communicate their experiences

through stories.18 Reflecting on the development of this research, they observed,

as our work progressed, we came to see teacher knowledge in terms of narrative life history, asstoried life compositions. These stories, these narratives of experience, are both personal —reflecting a person’s life history — and social — reflecting the milieu, the contexts in whichteachers live.19

Clandinin and Connelly offer the term ‘‘personal practical knowledge’’ to describe

the narrative understanding they see guiding teachers’ practice. This knowledge is

conceived of broadly as ‘‘that body of convictions and meanings, conscious or

unconscious, that have arisen from experience (intimate, social, and traditional)

and that are expressed in a person’s practices.’’20 They use the term ‘‘practical

knowledge landscapes’’ to describe how this understanding is shaped by the con-

texts in which teachers work.

Clandinin and Connelly identify three genres of teacher narratives of practice —

secret stories, cover stories, and sacred stories — each of which is characteristi-

cally found within a different professional knowledge landscape. ‘‘Secret stories’’

refer to teachers’ narrative understanding of students and events experienced

in the privacy of their classrooms. ‘‘Cover stories’’ emerge when teachers use the

language of professional communities to represent their experience in terms of

unit plans, assessment strategies, and learning objectives. ‘‘Sacred stories’’ are

high-status narratives in the form of theoretical knowledge ‘‘packaged for teachers

in textbooks, curriculum materials, and professional development workshops.’’21

Like Cochran-Smith and Lytle, Clandinin and Connelly are skeptical about

the value of establishing a knowledge ‘‘base’’ of practical insights for teacher edu-

cation purposes. Their findings, they argue, reveal that teachers’ practical knowl-

edge is too dependent on context to lend itself to such programs of dissemination.

As an alternative, they propose designing programs of teacher education that help

teachers (re)construct the narratives that shape their teaching. Teachers, they sug-

gest, need to learn to recognize the different levels at which their teaching is

‘‘storied,’’ and to ‘‘re-story’’ that experience through careful reflection.22

In Shaping a Professional Identity, Connelly and Clandinin provide several ex-

amples of this kind of narrative inquiry.23 In one of these, Karen Whelan describes

her investment in the personal conferences she used to keep parents informed

about students’ progress. She recounts feeling conflicted when her administration

18. See, for example, Jean Clandinin and Michael Connelly, Narrative Inquiry (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000); and Michael Connelly and Jean Clandinin, Shaping a Professional Identity (New York:Teachers College Press, 1999).

19. Connelly and Clandinin, Shaping a Professional Identity, 2–3.

20. Jean Clandinin and Michael Connelly, Teachers’ Professional Knowledge Landscapes (New York:Teachers College Press, 1995), 7.

21. Jean Clandinin and Michael Connelly, ‘‘Teachers’ Professional Knowledge Landscapes: TeacherStories,’’ Educational Researcher 25, no. 3 (1996): 25.

22. Clandinin and Connelly,Narrative Inquiry.

23. Connelly and Clandinin, Shaping a Professional Identity, 9–82, 135–170.


strongly urged the faculty to send home written progress reports instead: ‘‘Hearing

those from the outside placing little value in my voice and in what I have come to

know as a teacher, enabled me to journey back over my teaching experience and

discover the messages embedded within my stories as a teacher on shifting school

landscapes.’’24 Using the conception of narrative inquiry provided by Clandinin and

Connelly’s theories, she is able to distinguish between the secret story of her class-

room practical knowledge, the professional cover stories about the progress reports

she was being compelled to use, and the sacred story of the proper relation between

parents, administration, and teachers.

In this third model of teacher knowledge and teacher inquiry, teachers’

personal experience of the classroom takes on meaning in a professional knowl-

edge landscape in which three different layers of narrative mediate teachers’ under-

standing of their practice. The ultimate meaning of teachers’ experience is formed

as teachers’ reflections on their experience are ‘‘funneled’’ through these levels of

narrative and back into their practice. Working through the tension and interplay

among the levels requires teachers to actively ‘‘re-story’’ their experience.

Clandinin and Connelly’s theory goes further than the previous models in its

treatment of social influences on teachers’ experience. Although they do not use

the term discourse centrally, it is possible to read their concepts of ‘‘cover stories’’

and ‘‘sacred stories’’ as discourse communities. They are concerned with ensuring

that the knowledge embedded in teachers’ secret stories does not become totally

obscured and displaced by official discourses about teaching.

CRITICAL-CULTURALTEACHER RESEARCH

The final conception of teacher practical knowledge research that we examine

has been forwarded by scholars influenced by the fields of critical theory and cul-

tural studies.25 Taking a lead from Louis Althusser, who stated that ‘‘there is no

practice except by and in ideology,’’ this tradition emphasizes the importance of

teachers’ awareness of the ideologies that shape teaching practice.26 Focusing on

issues of educational and social inequity, this approach asks how we can prepare

teachers to promote social justice.

Like the previously reviewed conceptions of teacher knowledge research, writ-

ers in this tradition emphasize the need to give more respect to the intellectual

work teaching requires. Unlike the previous models, however, these writers make

critical interrogation of taken-for-granted cultural and ideological frameworks that

shape schooling experience the cornerstone of their idea of teacher knowledge.

According to this view, the teacher education scholarship has traditionally been

artificially limited because it focuses primarily on the means but not the ends of

education. Action research, teacher research, and narrative inquiry, on the other

24. Ibid., 31.

25. See, for example, Popkewitz, Struggling for the Soul; and Henry Giroux, Pedagogy and the Politics ofHope: Theory, Culture, and Schooling (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1997).

26. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy (New York: Monthly Review, 1971), 86.


hand, risk overemphasizing activity at the individual scale and ignoring the struc-

tural and cultural dimensions of teaching. Susan Noffke comments on how action

research can fall short of these more critical goals:

One critique of action research, particularly that in the teacher research model, has drawn at-tention to the limited ways in which issues of social justice have been addressed. Despite con-cern with social issues and even social transformation on the part of academics writing aboutaction research, there have been few examples of practitioners engaged in efforts to link theirpractices with efforts focused on gender and racial inequality.27

The difference here is one of emphasis. Critical-cultural teacher educators af-

firm the need for teacher inquiry that extends the traditional teacher education

curriculum. Daniel Liston and Ken Zeichner observe that ‘‘in schools of education

we frequently teach what the sociology or philosophy of education has to say

about schooling, but we tend to teach it as sociologists or philosophers, not as

teachers struggling with crucial and highly controversial issues.’’28 Teachers, Lis-

ton and Zeichner suggest, need to form reflective communities in which they ex-

tend their foundational education by examining ‘‘contextual issues of schooling to

enable ourselves and students to articulate our ideas, beliefs, theories, and feelings

about those issues.’’29 But whereas advocates of action research are often concerned

with protecting teachers’ inquiries from undue influence by university discourses,

critical-cultural researchers frequently take the view that effectively promoting

social justice in schools requires exposure to critical theory, feminist scholarship,

and cultural studies scholarship.

In their book Culture and Teaching, Liston and Zeichner provide several case

studies exemplifying the need for critical education that enables responsive teach-

ing. In one of these, Anna, a European-American teacher, is concerned about the

future of a Latina student named Estella. Anna decides to visit Estella’s parents

personally to tell them how impressive Estella is. Her conversation with Estella’s

parents begins in a warm and friendly manner but turns colder when she suggests

that Estella could aspire to a different kind of life, one that would begin with a

Gifted and Talented program and might lead to college. Anna leaves feeling as if

the parents resented her recommendation. More experienced teachers commenting

on the case observed that Anna took for granted that the family would share her as-

pirations for Estella. Several commented that Anna did not sufficiently appreciate

the differences between her own culture and ‘‘Hispanic culture, or migrant worker

culture, or the particular culture and attitudes of Estella’s home.’’30

Critical-cultural teacher educators are primarily concerned about the influence

of hegemonic cultural and professional discourses that rationalize an inequitable

status quo. These discourses provide the boundaries within which most teachers

think, defining what counts as ‘‘knowledge’’ and ‘‘good practice’’ in educational

27. Noffke, ‘‘Professional, Personal, and Political Dimensions of Action Research,’’ 330.

28. Daniel Liston and Ken Zeichner, Culture and Teaching (Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum,1996), xi.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid., 13.


settings. Teachers whose understanding of their classrooms is mediated by these

discourses end up teaching in ways that reproduce societal injustices.

What is needed, according to these scholars, is teacher education that introdu-

ces teachers to critical counterhegemonic educational discourses. Such discourses

are often pushed to the margins of public debates about education and are most

frequently encountered in university settings. According to this view of teacher

education, when a teacher is introduced to counterhegemonic discourses, they

become aware of different interpretations of the effects of education, and this

opens the door for conceiving a different kind of teaching practice. Without such

an encounter, teachers are condemned simply to reproduce existing cultural ar-

rangements, often without knowing that they are doing so.

SHARED AFFIRMATIONS AND MUTUAL CRITIQUES

The research programs just reviewed share in common an emphasis on honor-

ing teaching practice and on improving it through closer examination of teachers’

practical knowledge and work. Each model, in our opinion, is persuasive. They all

articulate important ways in which the intellectual work of teaching deserves re-

spect and provide specific implications for how teacher education programs and

policy might enact that respect.

Each model is also persuasive, in our opinion, in its critique (whether implicit,

explicit, or both) of the other models. Advocates for a scholarship of teaching, for

example, assume that a check is needed on the biases and provincial excesses of in-

dividual teacher reflection. They suggest that critical peer review processes, such

as those used by university scholars, can provide this check. Conversely, action re-

search and teacher research advocates critique the potentially distorting influence

of peer review processes. Such reviews, it is feared, would impose the priorities

of university research on teachers’ inquiries, thereby silencing many concerns and

insights arising from teaching practice. Similarly, advocates of narrative inquiry

are concerned that public discourses in the form of ‘‘sacred stories’’ and ‘‘cover

stories’’ may marginalize the ‘‘secret stories’’ grounded in teachers’ personal class-

room experience. Scholars taking a critical-cultural approach to teacher education

find the other three models to be insufficiently critical of the way ideology and cul-

tural discourses influence conceptions of teachers’ practice.

A FRAMEWORK FOR A COMMON CONVERSATION

How then do we make sense of the value we find in the way each of these pro-

grams of research affirms respect for teacher knowledge and the merit we see in

their critiques of one another? First, we observe a similarity in the affirmations just

described: each of the models of teacher knowledge research privileges a certain

discourse as the best source of teacher knowledge free from unnecessary distortion.

The identification of this privileged discourse then defines the process of research

the model recommends. We also observe a similarity in the critiques: each model

challenges the others’ conceptions of a privileged teacher knowledge dis-

course. One model’s source of authentic teacher knowledge is another’s source of

distortion and bias.


Ultimately, we find the critiques developed by the various models to be

more persuasive than their efforts to identify a single privileged source of teacher

knowledge. While each of these programs of research provides valuable insights,

none of these insights escape the influence of mediating discourses. This leads us

to the conclusion that all the possible sources of teacher knowledge — local com-

munities of inquiry, personal narratives, academic peer review processes, reflec-

tion on teaching after critical-cultural consciousness raising — are constituted by

discourses that compromise, mediate, and introduce bias.

This condition presents both an opportunity and a challenge to teacher knowl-

edge research. It reveals an opportunity to better articulate the commonalities

among these different schools of thought. If no single approach to teacher knowledge

research can claim exclusive access to a process by which teacher knowledge can be

best identified, then the conversation shifts from who has the right view of teacher

knowledge to what are the relations among an array of approaches to developing and

honoring teacher knowledge. The challenge is that articulating these relations will

require a deeper theorization of teacher knowledge inquiry, one that can frame a

comparison of the epistemologies underlying the different research programs.

We want to be clear here. We are not looking for a theoretical framework that

resolves the different views discussed into a single harmonious program of re-

search. We believe the differences are real and potentially generative of valuable

discussion. Currently, however, that generative discussion happens too rarely in

teacher education scholarship. We want a theoretical framework that, where

needed, highlights the differences among these approaches to research in a more

constructive fashion. We want clearer arguments between teachers and teacher

educators about the nature of teaching practice.

What is needed, then, is a theory that can frame a conversation about teacher

knowledge research with the understanding that all inquiry is mediated through

professional and cultural discourses. The study of the mediating effect of socially

produced signs and discourses on human thinking is the field of semiotics. In

the remainder of this essay, we explore the options for developing a semiotics of

teacher knowledge research. We begin by examining the most widely cited

semiotic theory in the social sciences, French poststructuralism. After pointing out

where this theory falls short for our purposes, we then turn to the pragmatic semi-

otics of Charles Sanders Peirce.

FRENCH POSTSTRUCTURALISM AND TEACHER KNOWLEDGE RESEARCH

French poststructuralism traces its conceptual roots to Ferdinand de

Saussure’s dyadic model of linguistic meaning, a model that challenges Aristoteli-

an notions of one-to-one correspondence between a word and its object.31 He used

the term ‘‘signifier’’ to denote a linguistic sign, such as ‘‘dog,’’ and ‘‘signified’’ to de-

note the actual object (see Figure 1). Prior to Saussure, linguists sought to identify

31. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, eds. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye incollaboration with Albert Riedlinger, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966).


historical poetic connections between words and their referents. Saussure denied

the necessity of any such poetic origins. Instead, he emphasized the arbitrary

nature of the relation between words and their objects.

According to Saussure, the stable meaning of the signifier is achieved, not by

an essential connection to its object, but through a conventional system of recog-

nizable differences from other signifiers. What is signified by the word ‘‘dog’’ is dif-

ferent from what is signified by the words ‘‘dot’’ and ‘‘bog.’’ Saussure called the

stable systems of differences ‘‘structures’’ and for that reason those who employ

his basic theory of signs are often called ‘‘structuralists.’’

‘‘Poststructuralism’’ refers to a wide variety of theories that build upon

Saussure’s work, a complete review of which is beyond the scope of this essay.

One common feature of these theories is relevant to our discussion, however. Post-

structuralists take Saussure’s notion of the arbitrary relation between the signifier

and the signified to its logical end by applying it to scholarly writing itself. Jacques

Derrida exemplified this move when he pointed out that the idea of ‘‘structure’’ is

itself part of a linguistically produced binary opposition between ‘‘structure’’ and

‘‘chaos.’’32 Therefore, he argued, the idea of ‘‘structure’’ cannot function as an

extradiscursive guarantor of the stability of meaning. Any attempt to identify such

a guarantor for meaning, according to Derrida, mistakenly posits a ‘‘metaphysics of

presence,’’ a transcendental reality that is by definition always outside the reach of

language but that we nonetheless keep reaching for in order to authorize our repre-

sentations of the world. Failing always to represent the unrepresentable, all of

Western thought and philosophy falls back upon what Derrida called ‘‘supple-

ments,’’ infinite chains of signs and arguments that rhetorically assuage this lack.

Relating this to our discussion of teaching practice, it could be said that when con-

temporary teacher knowledge theorists privilege a certain source of teacher insight

as closer to the ‘‘real’’ practice of teaching, they are engaging in a metaphysics of

presence. These claims, however, can never reach an unmediated truth of teaching

practice, so the argument can never be resolved.

Michel Foucault’s poststructuralism appropriates Saussure’s semiology in a

different fashion, expanding its scope and implications considerably.33 He treats

Figure 1

32. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns HopkinsUniversity, 1974).

33. Foucault, Power/Knowledge.


whole cultural and professional discourses as Saussure treats individual signifiers,

as having an arbitrary relation to the objects of their analysis. These discourses

simultaneously define what counts as knowledge and constitute the human sub-

jects that do the ‘‘knowing.’’ Under these conditions no metaphysics of presence

could guarantee the conclusions of a disciplined inquiry because the methods by

which conclusions are reached are themselves contingent cultural productions.

According to Foucault, the meaning produced by our inquiries remains stable be-

cause disciplinary discourses are constituted by historically contingent power rela-

tions that distribute and naturalize the influence of various interests within a

culture. Insofar as those interests remain in a stable configuration, the objects and

outcomes of inquiries — areas of knowledge — remain stable. The implication for

the study of teaching is that the deliberation of individual teachers is ultimately of

little significance, being an ‘‘effect of power, and at the same time,.the element of

its articulation.’’34 Herein lies the problem with using poststructuralist theory as a

framework for teacher knowledge research. Its emphasis on the way signs mediate

all processes of inquiry provides a conceptual vocabulary for thinking about the

way professional and cultural discourses mediate teachers’ inquiries. However, the

emphasis on the arbitrary nature of the relationship between signifiers and signi-

fieds, and by extension between disciplinary discourses and their objects of inquiry,

leads to a nominalism that reduces individual experience merely to what macro-

social discourses make of it. Although many aspects of teaching experience may, in

fact, be conditioned by professional and cultural discourses, the stronger claim that

this accounts for all that is significant in teacher experience makes using post-

structuralist theory to frame discussions about teacher knowledge research prob-

lematic for two reasons.

First, at a logical level, the presumption that all signifiers have an arbitrary re-

lation to the things they signify is questionable at best. This view of semiotics,

taken as an article of faith by most poststructuralists,35 is based on an ex-

trapolation of the characteristics of linguistic signs to all other signifying activity.

Saussure himself, however, acknowledged that there are signs that do not operate

like language, but he chose not to analyze them.36 Without a sound defense of a

general arbitrariness in the sign relation, the complete collapse of individual expe-

rience into social dynamics is not possible.37

34. Ibid., 98.

35. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 49; and John Sheriff, The Fate of Meaning: Charles Peirce, Structural-ism, and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 32–50.

36. See, for example, Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 68: ‘‘One remark in passing: when semi-ology becomes organized as a science, the question will arise whether or not it properly includes modesof expression based on completely natural signs, such as pantomime. Supposing that the new sciencewelcomes them, its main concern will still be the whole group of systems grounded on the arbitrarinessof the sign..Signs that are wholly arbitrary realize better than the others the ideal of the semiologicalprocess; that is why language, the most complex and universal of all systems of expression, is also themost characteristic; in this sense linguistics can become the master-pattern for all branches of semiologyalthough language is only one particular semiological system.’’

37. Thomas Short, ‘‘Interpreting Peirce’s Interpretant,’’ Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 32,no. 4 (1996): 488–541; and Sheriff, The Fate of Meaning, 44–49.


Second, at a practical level, poststructuralism provides few tools for analyzing

and enhancing individual human agency within social dynamics. In Decon-

struction and the Interest of Theory, Christopher Norris observes,

It is ‘‘hard to comprehend how the subject [in Foucault] could achieve any degree of autonomy,given the extent to which, on Foucault’s own submission, this freedom is necessarily shaped orconstrained by existing structures of regulative control’’.If schools, the state, the corporation,and even language itself control us in ways more subtle than we typically see or conceptualize,then how are we to resist, or resist successfully?38

The purpose of teacher knowledge research is to generate knowledge from class-

room experience that enhances the ability of teachers to do a number of things,

from teaching algebra well to preparing students to be agents of social transforma-

tion. A theory that drastically minimizes our ability to learn from our experiences

would seem ill suited for such an enterprise.

PEIRCE’S SEMIOTIC THEORY

If the Saussurean tradition of semiotics were the only model available to us,

then the project of developing a semiotics of teacher knowledge would be at an im-

passe. Fortunately, however, there is another major tradition in semiotics, the

semiotic theory of Charles Sanders Peirce. This model is currently experiencing a

renaissance of interest in a variety of disciplines.39

Peirce trained as a chemist and a mathematician, not as a linguist. As a result,

he was not as inclined to make linguistic signs the sole model for semiotic activity.

Instead, he focused on providing a philosophically sound account of scientific inquiry

that did not overstate its metaphysical claims. This emphasis on inquiry instead of

communication as the primary semiotic activity led Peirce to pay more attention to

how human communities learn from their experience. Even before Saussure gave his

original lectures on dyadic semiology, Peirce developed a triadic theory of semiotics

that incorporates human experience as a component of sign activity. He proposed

that the sign is composed of three elements (see Figure 2): the representamen as sig-

nifier, the object as signified, and the interpretant as the sign created in the mind of a

person experiencing the sign that brings the other two into relation.40

According to Peirce, ‘‘A sign.is something that stands to somebody for some-

thing in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody.’’41 Vincent Colapietro

suggests that the interpretant be thought of as the ‘‘impact of the sign on some

other; it is that which the sign qua sign generates.’’42 Peirce’s inclusion of the

38. Christopher Norris, Deconstruction and the Interest of Theory (Norman: University of OklahomaPress, 1989), 9.

39. Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana UniversityPress, 1984), 1–11; and Francxois Tochon, ‘‘Semiotic Consciousness in Education,’’ International Journalof Applied Semiotics 3, no. 2 (2000): 3–8.

40. Charles Sanders Peirce, Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler (New York: DoverPublications, 1955), 99.

41. Ibid., 99.

42. Vincent Colapietro, Peirce’s Approach to the Self: A Semiotic Perspective on Human Subjectivity(Albany: SUNY Press, 1989), 57.


‘‘interpretant’’ as a third term acknowledges the critical importance of a human in-

terpreter in semiotic activity, something Saussure’s theory does not do.

Peirce’s theory was intended as a tonic for unjustifiable metaphysical assump-

tions in Western philosophy. He insisted on the irreducibly mediated nature of all

knowledge claims and, like Derrida, saw signs deriving meaning from other signs

in a process of infinite semiosis. Furthermore, like Foucault, Peirce emphasized

the social nature of knowledge production, claiming that knowledge claims exist

only in communities of inquiry. Unlike the poststructuralists, however, Peirce did

not believe that the meaning of a sign arises only from the mediation of other arbi-

trary signs, nor did he believe that the content of knowledge claims comes entirely

from the activities of communities of inquiry. Peirce’s is a realist semiotics that

maintains there is extradiscursive content in semiotic activity manifested in prac-

tical human activity. According to Kory Sorrell,

Peirce.claims that we may have knowledge of the nature of the real — as it is, independent ofhow we prefer to think of it. Notice that this is not the same as claiming that we can knowthings in themselves, in the sense of ‘‘as they are, apart from our experience (which is itself aform of mediation) of the real.’’

The difference between the two is that in Peirce’s approach, knowledge of the real emergesfrom the mediation of the experiences of members of the community with the real, whereas theother proposes that knowledge of the real, independently of forms of mediation, is possible.43

This extradiscursive content in semiosis manifests itself through the interpretant

in Peirce’s system. Here we can begin to see how this theory of meaning might be

Figure 2

43. Kory S. Sorrell, Representative Practices (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 11.


useful to teacher knowledge researchers. This realism is encountered not through

some privileged procedure that provides validating access to an extrahuman reality,

but through embodied lived experience. For Peirce, the beginning and ending point

of all inquiry is in habits of being, thinking, and doing that guide practical human ac-

tivity.

A MULTIPLICITY OF SIGNS

To explain how Peirce’s theory accomplishes this practical realism, we need to

review briefly his three ontological categories, which he considers necessary to any

theoryof signs.Hecalls thesecategoriesFirstness, Secondness, andThirdness. Firstness

is quality— ‘‘the immediatenonconceptual givenof sense experience’’ experiencednot

as thought, but as feeling.44 Peirce describes quality as existing as a possibility without

a referent of any sort. Therefore, we never encounter Firstness alone; it is only in-

ferred from encounters with concrete objects, such as the redness of a stop sign or the

loudness of a siren. Positing a separate order of being called ‘‘quality’’ is necessary in

order to explain how different objects share the same quality. Redness, for example,

exists as a possibility independent of any specific red object.

Secondness consists in materially felt opposition, a sense of difference, ‘‘that

which insists upon forcing its way to recognition as something other than the mind’s

creation.’’45 It refers to ‘‘the immediate nonconceptual experience of the dynamic in-

teraction of two things,’’ the recognition of brute physical reality.46 Secondness, for

Peirce, consists of qualities materially instantiated, something actually happening or

being felt. Secondness is immediate and has no temporal dimension. Thirdness, on

the other hand, is pattern and regularity encountered only over time as ‘‘conscious-

ness of a process.’’47 We apprehend Thirdness through a ‘‘synthetic consciousness,

binding time together, sense of learning, thought.’’48 Thirdness is inferred from the

continuity of the qualities (Firstness) found in brute experience (Secondness).

By breaking the ontology of human experience out into these three elements,

Peirce was able to develop a theory of meaning based not on one generic concep-

tion of a sign but on several kinds of signs. All signs participate in all three levels

of being, according to Peirce, but they participate in different ways. At the most

basic level, Peirce offered three categories of signs: Iconic, Indexical, and Symbolic

signs. Iconic signs are signs in which a representamen shares qualities (Firstness)

with its object, as in a photograph. Indexical signs are signs in which the represen-

tamen and object are bound by the relation of physical causation (Secondness),

as in the weathervane that points in the direction indicated by the wind or the

thermometer that indicates the effect of its surroundings on the mercury inside of

44. Sheriff, The Fate of Meaning, 68.

45. Peirce, Philosophical Writings of Peirce, 79.

46. Sheriff, The Fate of Meaning, 68.

47. Peirce, Philosophical Writings of Peirce, 70.

48. Sheriff, The Fate of Meaning, 64. Here Sheriff is paraphrasing Peirce; see Charles Sanders Peirce, TheCollected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 1, eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge,Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1931), 377.


it. Notice that for both iconic and indexical signs, the relationship between the

representamen (signifier) and the object (signified) is not arbitrary. The formation

of an interpretant in the mind of an observer does not rely solely on a habit of con-

ventional interpretation, but on actual shared qualities or causal relations connect-

ing the signifier and signified.

The third type of sign for Peirce consists of symbolic signs, representamens

whose relation to their object is one of arbitrary convention. Symbolic interpretants

are formed in the mind of an observer exclusively through the prior existence of

enculturated habits of interpretation (Thirdness) that Peirce called the ‘‘ground’’ but

that today we might call ‘‘discourse.’’ Human language is the most notable example

of this kind of sign. This third category of Peirce’s system corresponds more or less

to Saussure’s entire theory of signs. In it, we can see the possibility for an endless

play of signification emphasized by poststructuralists. From a Peircean view, how-

ever, accounts of meaning that rely only on the symbolic dimension of semiosis ‘‘are

too narrow since they focus upon discourse to the neglect of artifacts and conduct —

upon assertive judgments to the disregard of exhibitive and active judgments.’’49

PEIRCE’S THEORY AND TEACHER KNOWLEDGE RESEARCH

As we have presented it, the field of teacher knowledge research is in need of a

metatheory that accomplishes two things: (1) it must honor teachers’ lived practi-

cal experience as a potential source of novel and significant knowledge, and (2) it

must highlight the irreducibly mediated nature of all representations of teacher

knowledge and thus demonstrate that no single approach to teacher inquiry

can claim a final authority. The nonarbitrary sources of semiotic significance in

Peirce’s theory enable it to accomplish both.

Regarding the first need, Peirce’s focus on habits of interpretation as the

ground of knowledge, and on the practical effects of these habits as the only feed-

back we ultimately have for our representations of the world, enable his theory to

honor teachers’ practical experience as a source of knowledge. A modified version

of Figure 2 will help clarify this point (see Figure 3).

Note that Peirce’s conception of sign activity allows the possibility of an ontolog-

ical relation between the sign and signifier that goes beyond Saussurean arbitrariness

(‘‘A’’). However, that relation is never directly experienced by an observer. In fact, the

character of these relations can only be logically inferred after careful inquiry. What

the observer has first and foremost is a phenomenological encounter with representa-

mens and objects of experience. Anticipating the work of Thomas Kuhn, Peirce main-

tained that there is no encounter with the world not already mediated by preexisting

habits of interpretation, what he called the ‘‘ground’’ of interpretation (‘‘B’’) and Kuhn

called theory-laden observation.50 These interpretations guide our interactions (‘‘C’’)

with the world of experience, which in turn precipitate consequences. These

49. Colapietro, Peirce’s Approach to the Self, 24.

50. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1996).


consequences must be interpreted again as representamens that either reinforce or

force transformation of our preexisting habits of interpretation.

In this ongoing cycle of activity and semiosis, the consequences are real in a

robust sense — that is, they often resist our expectations. This realism does not

underwrite a narrow conception of truth, however. It promises no final validation

of a one-to-one relation between our representations and a world beyond human

experience. On the other hand, it does help us avoid a nominalism that would re-

duce all representations of teaching to socialized convention, a condition in which

research on teaching becomes nothing more than a rhetorical contest between dif-

ferent professional discourses. Respect for teachers’ practical experience as a

source of unique knowledge means committing to the idea that there is some part

of the reality of teaching that teachers have access to in their daily practice that is

not available through other means of inquiry. Peirce’s mediated realism can serve

this purpose. In it, the difference between a teacher’s expectations and classroom

reality is encountered at a phenomenal level, as brute existence that manifests un-

expected qualities of experience which require interpretation. This interpretation

has no source of validation but through continued experience of some kind.

‘‘Experience’’ is of course a broad term. Peirce’s is a general theory of inquiry

that applies to all aspects of human life, from the most disciplined research to the

most inchoate hunches. Some inquiry can be teased out into nearly pure forms:

logic and conceptual critique is carried out at the level of symbolic signs; experi-

mental science at the level of indexical signs; and artistic exploration at the level

Figure 3


of iconic signs. So practical classroom insights can and should inspire more tradi-

tionally disciplined forms of inquiry. Ultimately, however, the products of these

more specialized forms of inquiry must find their ways back into the practical

affairs of the community, where meaning manifests in its fully integrated multi-

plicity. At the very least, this theoretical framework would permit research on

educators’ practical knowledge to be seen as an indispensable part of the full cycle

of conception and validation in educational research.

Regarding the second requirement for teacher knowledge research, the fact that

Peirce’s theory is a semiotic analysis addresses the need to highlight the irreducibly

mediated nature of all representations of teacher knowledge. The previous invocation

of realism, however, may seem to threaten a reversion to a naıvete about representa-

tion. It might seem to support debates about an exclusive access to the ‘‘real’’ reality

of teaching that we have said we are concerned to avoid. This is not the case.

The reality of lived teaching experience is rendered significant in Peirce’s sys-

tem because some of the signifiers that inform inquiry are encountered firsthand.

The immediate existence (Secondness) of classroom experience provides phenom-

enological encounters with qualities (Firstness) which may not occur to us as pos-

sibilities except through that immediate experience. What we do with those

possibilities, however, depends on the cultural and professional discourses we use

to articulate these possibilities with the rest of our lives. Returning to the previous

examples of nonarbitrary signs, a photograph is recognizable because of the qual-

ities it shares with its object (an iconic sign), and a weathervane informs us

because it has a physically causal relationship with the wind (an indexical sign).

No sign stands alone, however. And in the fullness of human activity, a photo-

graph or a weathervane has no functional significance without being embedded in

a larger system of meaning — memory, history, culture, and the like, most of

which is composed of symbolic sign activity. Therefore, all complex forms of

understanding — such as the understanding that enables teaching practice — are

irreducibly mediated to some degree by socialized convention.

This means that although teachers have unique access to some semiotic sour-

ces of meaning, their insights do not escape enculturation. Additionally, all teacher

knowledge claims expressed in language are mediated by enculturated habits. Thus

there can be no final access to an authentic reality of teaching outside of discursive

mediation that can ultimately guarantee the meaning of knowledge claims. This

recognition enables Peirce’s theory to provide a level epistemological playing field

for comparing and contrasting different versions of teacher knowledge theory.

Peircewas not a teacher knowledge theorist, and thus any application of hiswork

to this topic involves some extrapolation. It requires no great stretch, however, to see

the connections between his theories and the various approaches to teacher knowl-

edge research reviewed previously. For example, Peirce emphasized that there could

be no knowledge without a community of inquiry that shares habits of representa-

tion and a history of past inquiry. This aspect of his work clearly supports a scholar-

ship of teaching that employs processes of publication and critical peer review to


establish a knowledge base of teachers’ practical insights. Peirce’s theories also lend

support to the claims made by the action research and teacher research movements

that the conventions of academic peer review are not innocent. These academic

norms provide a background of habits of interpretations that must be recognized as

contingent historical productions which limit as well as enable teachers’ ability to

recognize the educational possibilities within their own classrooms. Peirce was con-

cerned to highlight the role of communal habits in knowledge generation precisely so

the limitations of those habits could be made the subject of critical review.

When advocates of narrative inquiry speak of teachers ‘‘storying’’ their experi-

ence, they are not just speaking about teachers’ being able to communicate.51 They

are making an ontological argument about how teachers craft their personal habits

of being. Poststructuralist literary criticism, while providing sophisticated tools

for analyzing the cultural sources of teachers’ narratives, would reject such onto-

logical claims as naıvely succumbing to a ‘‘metaphysics of presence.’’ Peirce’s semi-

otics, however, makes ontological commitments. It regards knowledge as a

collection of interpretive habits constituted by both cultural discourses and personal

lived experience.52 Finally, Peirce’s view that the formation of interpretants is made

possible by a preexisting ground of interpretive habits into which we are socialized

lends credence to the calls by critical-cultural teacher researchers for critical inter-

rogation of the social conditions that enable and constrain teachers’ inquiries.

Notice that this does not resolve the theoretical tensions among these areas of

study. The arguments about whether a peer reviewed knowledge base can enhance

teaching practice better than a tradition of teacher inquiry divorced from univer-

sity discourses, or about whether teachers’ insights are so conditioned by hegem-

onic ideologies that exposure to critical theory is a necessary precondition for

genuine inquiry, retain their urgency. What has changed is the grounds upon

which such arguments can be made. Lacking the ability to claim a more authentic

insight into the practical reality of teaching, teacher practical knowledge theorists

would be required to trace out the possible consequences of the habits of interpre-

tation upon which they rely for inquiry. For example, in some cases a teacher in-

terested in the use of cooperative group learning in a mathematics class might

benefit from examining case studies by other teachers on the same topic. Such

reading could lay the groundwork for new habits of understanding student cogni-

tion that enhance the teacher’s practice. In another context, emphasis on subject-

matter learning in a peer reviewed case literature might serve to distract from the

intricacies of a teacher’s personal relationship with a troubled student and thus

weaken habits of interaction that sustain and build such personal relations.

A more personal and less public form of inquiry and reflection may be called for

here to enhance these relationship-building habits. In still another context, the

teacher’s interest in improving mathematics performance may be driven by low

51. Clandinin and Connelly, ‘‘Teachers’ Professional Knowledge’’; and Clandinin and Connelly, Narra-tive Inquiry.

52. Sheriff, The Fate of Meaning, 52–89; Short, ‘‘Interpreting Peirce’s Interpretant,’’ 488–541; Sorrell,Representative Practices, 9–29.


scores on mandatory standardized tests in his or her school. However, these tests

may be poorly designed, focused on low-level thinking skills, and imposed as part of

a reactionary politics of accountability that is not grounded in sound educational

research. In this circumstance examining a case literature focused on improving

techniques of teaching specific subject-matter content might reinforce a teacher’s

blindness to the social and institutional constraints on his or her work with chil-

dren. This problem requires an external challenge to habits of thought focused

only on technique — the type of challenge effectively posed by contemporary crit-

ical theorists of education. Finally, those teachers with well-established habits of

tracking the macro-social constraints on their teaching might become preoccupied

with such constraints and fail to see the way certain technical adjustments in their

teaching could incrementally, but significantly, enhance their students’ learning.

Of course, more than one of these examples could describe the same instance

of teaching. What is important is that each type of teacher knowledge research is

presented as a source of habits of interpretation that can both enhance and limit

teaching practice. A pragmatic semiotic approach to teacher knowledge inquiry

makes this simultaneous enablement and constraint explicit. Such an approach

offers what we call a practical reflexivity — a disciplined recognition that claims

to practical knowledge are both realistic and discursively contingent.

MORE BESIDES: MODES OF REPRESENTATION

If the only thing Peirce’s pragmatic semiotics provided to the field of teacher

knowledge research was this practical reflexivity, then we would argue that its

value is wholly justified. However, Peirce’s triadic semiotics also provides a frame-

work for more refined thinking about modes of representation used in teacher

knowledge research. In particular, his conception of inquiry has three basic

kinds of products: rhemes, dicent signs, and arguments. Rhemes are essentially

representations intended to evoke a sense of possible qualities of life (Firstness),

such as visual art, music, and literature. Dicent signs are representations grounded

in actual existences and indexical relations (Secondness), such as experimental sci-

ence or naturalistic description. Arguments are assertions that depend on the for-

mal properties of symbol systems (Thirdness) for their warrant, and they include

logic, semiotics, and some critical inquiry. As a pragmatist, Peirce saw all pro-

cesses of inquiry as receiving their final validation in the way they transformed

the possibilities and lived qualities of human experience. All three forms of in-

quiry were considered necessary for this process of transformation. The influence

of this more robust conception of the products of human inquiry can be seen

through the whole history of pragmatic philosophy, from William James’s

Varieties of Religious Experience, to John Dewey’s Art as Experience, to Richard

Rorty’s claim that all philosophy is another form of literature, to Stanley Fish’s

reader-response theory of literary criticism.53

53. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Modern Library, 1936); JohnDewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigee, 1934); Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (NewYork: Penguin, 2000); and Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Com-munities (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1980).


Applied to teacher education research, this would mean judging the ultimate

merit of representations of teacher knowledge not just in terms of their logical or

empirical soundness, but also in terms of the way they might influence human ex-

perience at the level of material Secondness and qualitative Firstness. This pro-

vides the beginnings of a critical framework for thinking about the use of narrative

representations favored by many teacher knowledge researchers. It focuses atten-

tion on many interesting questions about these representations: If case study nar-

ratives are attempting to describe dispassionately the contextual embeddedness of

teachers’ thinking, then which kinds of contexts are being featured and to what

end? If the narratives are to be aesthetically crafted and emotionally evocative,

then what ends does the craftsmanship and evocation seek? If the practical trans-

formation of teachers’ experience is the end of teacher practical knowledge re-

search, then do the merits of a research representation lie in the representation

itself or in the response teachers have upon reading it? What kind of interpretive

habits are needed by an individual teacher or a community of teacher inquirers in

order to make narrative representations of teaching substantively transformative

of practice?

SO WHY GO TO THE TROUBLE?

Much more could be said about Peirce’s philosophy here. Certainly those ex-

perts in Peirce’s work will find this limited treatment of his relatively complicated

concepts somewhat frustrating. Our project, however, is not to fully explicate

Peirce’s philosophy but to highlight the potential value of his work for teacher

education scholars.

Why should teacher education scholars — most of whom are not familiar with

the language of semiotics — trouble themselves with Peirce’s difficult vocabulary?

First, we are not suggesting that mastery of Peircean semiotics is a necessary pre-

requisite for anyone who would conduct teacher knowledge research. We offer it

for those occasions when different approaches to teacher knowledge research seem

to be in conflict and reflection on the philosophical underpinnings of these differ-

ent approaches becomes necessary.

At the outset of this essay, we highlighted our concern that teacher knowledge

research is currently at an impasse. Different schools of thought have emerged,

each privileging a certain kind of discourse as the optimal source of representa-

tions of teacher knowledge and offering rationales meant to diminish the signifi-

cance of the others. Under these conditions, critical exchange among these

different approaches to teacher knowledge research can settle into well-worn

scripts. This is counterproductive and should be unacceptable. Although the theo-

retical traditions from which these approaches arise have long, independent histor-

ies and can stand on their own, teaching practice happens at the intersection

of their interests. Teachers are always simultaneously dealing with the technical

aspects of their craft, the personal dimension of their work, the aspects of their

work that fit within professional discourses, the aspects of their work that cannot

be articulated through professional discourses, and the political contexts in which


teaching takes place. Any conception of teachers’ practical knowledge that dis-

misses or systematically ignores entire dimensions of this work is, to put it

bluntly, not practical.

Teacher knowledge research should aspire to an approach to inquiry that inte-

grates its attention to these multiple facets of teaching experience. This requires

adopting a vocabulary through which habits of privileging one discourse about

teacher knowledge above others can be disrupted and dialogue among the various

camps refreshed. Peircean pragmatic semiotics provides a conceptual vocabulary

that can enable such communication. In addition, it provides conceptual tools for

thinking more critically and inclusively about the kinds of representations used

in teacher knowledge research. Such benefits seem more than worth the struggle

associated with learning the conceptual vocabulary of semiotics.


Bridging the Divides: The Need for a Pragmatic Semiotics of Teacher Knowledge Research

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