Teaching: Art, Craft, or Science?

Perennial debates over the nature of teaching reach back into recorded history as far as Socrates and Confucius. We conceptualize teaching in different and even conflicting ways because we have different understandings of how we learn, of the purposes of that learning, and of the place of that learning in our bonds of community and political association. Our different concepts of teaching are thus pregnant with implications for how we organize our schools, and how we embed our schools in the larger society. They shape in vital ways our policy prescriptions for education. Like the subject of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, our notions of teaching contains multitudes.

In the modern era, the debates over teaching have increasingly focused on views that have seen teaching as an art, a craft or a science – different ways of conceiving of the intersection of knowledge and practice.

Our panelists include education scholars with rich bodies of research in support of different conceptions, and educational practitioners who have reflected deeply on the meaning of their own teaching practice.