Phlogiston and pedagogy
Joseph Priestley was one of the great scientists of the 18th century. He is associated with many discoveries. He explained carbonation, paving the way for Coca-Cola. He discovered the use of indiarubber as a pencil eraser. But Priestley is most famously associated with the discovery of oxygen. He described his discovery in these terms: I have discovered an air five or six times as good as common air.
When Priestley discovered oxygen, he called it ‘dephlogisticated air’. This was because he understood his discovery in terms of the prevailing hypothesis regarding combustion, known as ‘phlogiston theory’. Phlogiston theory holds that all flammable materials contain phlogiston, a substance without colour, odour, taste, or weight, that is given off in burning. ‘Phlogisticated’ substances are those that contain phlogiston and, on being burned, are ‘dephlogisticated’. The theory received strong support throughout a large part of the 18th century, until it was refuted by the work of Lavoisier, prompted by Priestley, who revealed the true nature of combustion.
So Priestley’s discovery of the ‘air five or six times as good as common air’, which became known as oxygen, paved the way for the overthrow of the phlogiston theory. Despite this, Priestley never gave up phlogiston. To his death in 1804, three decades after his discovery and Lavoisier’s related work, he continued to mount public argument in support of phlogiston.
All areas of human life, including education, are subject to phlogisticated thinking, which is the tendency to explain difficult phenomena by inventing a mysterious explanatory substance. Phlogiston is alive and well everywhere. And, like Priestley, we find it hard to separate phlogiston from oxygen. In our discussions of teaching and learning, pedagogy usually plays the part of phlogiston. When we don’t know why students are failing to learn, we blame pedagogy. When we look for improvements in outcomes, we look to pedagogy. Pedagogy is the colourless, odourless, tasteless, weightless substance that explains all the things we can’t explain.
Pedagogy’s role as the contemporary educational form of phlogiston is assisted by the many prescriptions for pedagogy which live in the rarefied upper atmospheres of our discourse. We have been beguiled by pedagogical theory abstracted from all contact with the earth. The implication of much phlogiston pedagogy theory is that you can succeed as a teacher only if you adopt the 12 rules of correct pedagogy. But if you use the 12 most approved and desirable kinds of teaching in your classroom and your students don’t learn, you failed. There has been a tendency in recent years to talk about teaching and learning as if they were one concept: we try to engage in ‘good teaching and learning’. Surprise! You can engage in good teaching without learning occurring. And some learning occurs in the presence of bad teaching. Pedagogy is like surgery. It is a human practice that is shaped by the humans who practise it. You can’t learn it from a book, or by sitting in a seminar for half a day, or by following a set of generic rules. Good pedagogy requires sustained attention to what produces student learning in a specific content domain, with a given group of students and a particular teacher. You can only learn about it by watching others do it, practising it yourself under close supervision and feedback, and eventually being licensed to fly solo through the dephlogisticated air.
Bruce Wilson
topEQ Winter 2003 © Curriculum Corporation