Thoughts on the use of concepts and language: Teaching as a craft and its connotations

To understand policy, its discourse, and its interpretation by practitioners, and the researcher analysing it we arguably need to engage with the concept of language, or how language is used to communicate ideas and thoughts. This also extends to understanding science, evidence, and ideas of how we should for example educate people or how we should use evidence to inform policy and politics. This blog post first presents an example of the importance of coming to terms on language, before briefly discussing the power of connotations and the pit-falls of cross-cultural communication.

The importance of language, is two-faced in the sciences, it pertains to how we can analyse empirical material and structure conceptual thought, and communicate our ideas to others under the auspice that language is communication and without communication we do not share thoguht. As such, language is a social construction that ensures all communication pertains only to social reality as observed by the communicator in the instance of communicating a thought.

To exemplify the possible implications of language on conceptualizations of the teacher and how sentiments may be articulated differently, we may look to the English word “craft” that has garnered much attention since Michael Gove made a statement on teaching being a craft in 2009. In the wake of Gove’s statements, many academics were outraged and attacked the statement without much qualification as to what was the problem (how Gove used the word to equate teaching with “apprenticeship models” so the issue was perhaps with “apprenticeship”, but for cultural reasons expressed as outrage at “craft”), which is interesting in light of Robin Alexander’s reasoning as to why teaching is a craft and not an “art” or a “science”. Alexander, using a completely different take on “craft”, believes teaching to be a craft precisely because it is at the intersection of both art and science, in the sense that it has a scientific foundation but is dynamic and “artful” in its application in a classroom, traits he equates with a craft. Here then we see one word, which can be constructed to mean vastly different things, and that is also made up of other concepts (art and science) to create different inherent truths as to what it is. Moreover, this serves as an example of the cognitive difficulties we may encounter when the political use and academic use of a word are miss-aligned. Furthermore, such miss-alignment between author and reader, speaker and listener is also more common than one may think (for a myriad of reasons such as bias, strong connotations, or a failure to adequately historicise a text). Thus it is important to come to terms with an author (here reading differs from dialogue) where the reader must understand how the author has used a word such as a political or research concept (e.g. Craft) to be able to partake in the discourse and analyse, critique, and learn from a text (see Adler & Van Doren's 1972 book "How to read a book" for a more extensive discussion on this topic). We may also take note of how this entails understanding the speaker, but also that you are discussing with the words of the speaker not the person. Therefore, who said something is important for understanding what is meant, but not important for the validity of the statement. One would want to avoid ad hominem after all. In other words, the analysis must go beyond the words themselves, and attempt to understand both their intended use and their reception, which may have led to a change in wording (but not substance) in subsequent policies.

The importance of connotations and concepts in a culturally diverse world is well illustrated by one of my former lecturers Daniel Tröhler who wrote: “Many of the participants at the OECD conference in 1968 had already met a half a year earlier in Rome at a first informal meeting to discuss the problems of the future. At this meeting, a dispute over the notion of “system” broke out. Although no details are available, we know that the French participants defended connotations of their concept of système, whereas the Anglophone participants advocated for connotations of their own concept of system. Disagreement between these two parties was so strong that the conference ended with no result, despite the excellent quality of the wine, as Peccei reports with regret. The planners of the harmonious globe could not even agree to harmonize their core concepts.” (Tröhler 2014b p.8, my emphasis added).

For instance, what is it a teacher does, who are teachers, and so on are often taken for granted constructs (concepts) with their own inherent truths. A teacher for example is (using the English language as illustrator) someone who teaches, whose occupation it is to instruct, thus inherently a teacher instructs someone of something, a rather unambiguous word as defined. The same holds for the French “enseignant”, but the French language also incorporates other words such as “maître” which means either the same as “enseignant” in a primary school or a master of someone or something, arguably more ambiguous and less easy to defined through an inherent linguistic truth, unless it is equated to mastery over students or a classroom in which sense it is more defined than “enseignant”, or "institutrice" that only pertains to “instruct”. These linguistic differences also extend to a separation between levels of education, with the maître or institutrice being a primary teacher, and a professeur de college for “middle schools” and professeur de lycée for upper secondary teachers, creating inherent linguistic separations between “types” of teachers.[1] This is of central importance if we recognise that language may (or not, this is a debatable point) reflect the society that made it (here it is also important to see language as a context dependent process, ever evolving across time and place).[2] An example of language reflecting society in practice (should it not be coincidence) would be the use of the masculine form in French when addressing five women and one man, or the use of institutrice or maître/maîtresse for primary teachers and professeur de l’école/lycée for secondary teachers (the latter example itself illustrates differences between English and French in regards to denoting a “teacher”). Moreover, we may think of arguments over “labels” of concepts in academia, with their own connotations and taken for granted linguistic truths, that differ across contexts.

Therefore, a word must be understood in its context and the meaning granted to it by the speaker and his audience. For example, should the intended audience see the word “craft” as a problem, then it is a problem, however should a non-intended audience see it as a problem then it is not, while it is also the audiences responsibility to try to understand the intent of the speaker. Thus, if the use of “craft” was intended as a positive remark on teachers, it should be seen as such, rather than reading something into it that is not inherently there. Should it be intended as an attack on academia, while recognising teachers professional knowledge, then it should be seen as such.

These examples serve as an illustration as to how words have socially constructed inherent truths (a teacher teaches because that is inherent in the conceptualization and use of the word teacher), but also connotations, that are contextual, and relate to how individuals react when faced with words.

Connotations are also why synonyms are not of an exact similar meaning in terms of communication, and why the same word can be said to not be the same either dependent on both the context it was used it and the people involved in communication (author – reader, speaker –listener, actor-observer).

With that in mind, we should also recognise that words can be appropriated and have their meanings changed by actors engaged in discussion, as a means of controlling an argument or moving the shared understanding (the meaning of the words) towards their own preferences. Here we see the difference between communication tout court and discussion. Thus, all words are to an extent socially constructed concepts, they mean something and that meaning has inherent truths and differs based on both speaker and listener.

[1] In English, one can say a (school) teacher is a teacher (in a school) is a teacher (of children), that is not possible the same way in France for example through the use of the word “maître” or professeur. Also note the use of the word “professor” from middle school and up in France, a word that is only used at a higher education (university) level in English.

[2] In Spanish, another Latin-origin language, teacher is “maestro” or “maestra” depending on the gender, or profesor – profesora de escuela, similar to French but with less variation and the added gender differentiation that only appears for “institutrice” in French. Thus, we may perhaps also talk of language as historical constructs that can be seen in relation to the Roman Empire, the Germanic tribes and so on and so forth.