TEACHER AS KNOWER AND LEARNER - REFLECTIONS ON SITUATED KNOWLEDGE IN SCIENCE TEACHING

I argue from an understanding of current feminist philosophy that a te acher's practice reflects changing experiences, knowledge, values, and identities, and a such can be productively thought of as a site for l earning as much as a site for expounding upon what is known. This sugg ests a vision for what constitutes effective practice different from t hat commonly held in science. I argue that praxis proceeds from the pe rsonal epistemological standpoints of the teacher (defined as standpoi nt theory). This knowledge is only partially applicable to particular situations in the classroom. The hallmark of feminist pedagogy, if con ceptualized as derivative from standpoint theory, is to ''take everyda y life as problematic'' (Smith, 1991, p. 88). Implicit in such a conce ptualization is that pedagogy starts from an explicit recognition of e veryday life and both builds from and questions that beginning. This i s true for students and also for the teacher, and is the root of my cl aim that through teaching, the teacher becomes a learner. The immediat e circumstances in which teaching occurs present different and unique qualities from those in which the teacher's knowledge and value were c reated. As a teacher, I am therefore continuously confronted with the inadequacy of my knowledge. The circumstances and children's activitie s tell me that I need to do things differently. In this situation, the act of teaching as an assertion of knowing becomes a recognition of n ot-knowing. Teaching becomes an occasion for learning about subject ma tter, children, and self. I recount an example of teaching in a first- grade classroom to give this argument substance. This story is an exam ple from my own teaching in which parallels between scientific theoriz ing and storytelling are drawn and capitalized upon as a vehicle for c ritical thinking in science. This became an occasion for reflecting up on the appropriateness of those values because of the multicultural qu alities of the classroom.