Abstract
This essay takes as its starting point Kate Rousmaniere’s lastingly important book on the lives and work of New York school teachers in the 1920s, City Teachers: Teaching and School Reform in Historical Perspective. Rousmaniere shows how the absence of teachers’ voices from the historical record has meant that the history of the teaching profession has remained a sketchy and indistinct one. Using a combination of oral and documentary sources, Rousmaniere seeks to address a range of substantive questions through engaging a previously ‘silent’ teachers’ voice and restoring it to a legitimate and authentic historical importance. In so doing, Rousmaniere opens the way for a methodological consideration of another significant ‘silence’ within the history of education, namely that relating to methodological approach and procedure. In particular, her work invites more detailed comparative consideration of two distinctive forms of historical data – the written word, as engaged by documentary history, and the spoken word, as engaged by oral history. These are here considered in terms of the processes of historical interpretation, understood principally through the lens of Ricoeurian hermeneutics.
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Notes
- 1.
Dan C. Lortie (1975) Schoolteacher: A Sociological Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), viii.
- 2.
Kate Rousmaniere (1997) City Teachers: Teaching and School Reform in Historical Perspective (New York: Teachers College Press), 7–8: “(T)he primacy of each teacher’s individual classroom left this highly literate group little time to reflect on or document their work.” The voice of the classroom teacher appears only rarely in sustained prose testimonies such as that of Martha Mizell Puckett (2002) Memories of a Georgia Teacher: Fifty Years in the Classroom (Athens: University of Georgia Press).
- 3.
Grosvenor, I., Lawn, M., and Rousmaniere, K. (eds) (1999) Silences and Images: The Social History of the Classroom (New York: Peter Lang).
- 4.
Donald H. Parkerson and Jo Ann Parkerson (2001) Transitions in American Education: A Social History of Teaching (New York: RoutledgeFalmer), xiv.
- 5.
John L. Rury, review of Rousmaniere. Kate (1997) City Teachers: Teaching and School Reform in Historical Perspective. New York: Teachers College Press, Education Review, May 11, 1998.
- 6.
Rousmaniere, City Teachers, 55.
- 7.
Rousmaniere, City Teachers, 1.
- 8.
Rousmaniere, City Teachers, 8.
- 9.
Rousmaniere, City Teachers, 4.
- 10.
Rousmaniere, City Teachers, vii.
- 11.
Rousmaniere, City Teachers, 8.
- 12.
Kate Rousmaniere, “Historical Research” in Kathleen deMarrais and Stephen D. Lapan (2004) Foundations for Research: Methods of Inquiry in Education and the Social Sciences (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates), 33.
- 13.
G. R. Elton (1991) Return to Essentials: Some Reflections on the Present State of Historical Study (Cambridge: CUP), 29. Also see Niall Ferguson (2004), “Introduction” in J.H. Plumb. The Death of the Past (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), xxvii-xxix.
- 14.
Rousmaniere, ‘Historical Research’, 33.
- 15.
“Unlike many fields of history which are focussed primarily on the past, the history of education is also integrally related to the present.” Rousmaniere, “Historical Research,” 35. Also see Peter Cunningham “Structures and systems and bodies and things: historical research on primary schooling and its professional relevance” History of Education, 41:1, 2012, 73–86.
- 16.
Rousmaniere, City Teachers, viii.
- 17.
Rousmaniere, City Teachers, vii.
- 18.
Rousmaniere, City Teachers, viii.
- 19.
Rousmaniere, “Historical Research,” 35. Also see William Richardson, “History, education and audience,” in D. Crook and R. Aldrich (eds) History of Education for the Twenty-First Century (2000: Bedford Way Papers, Institute of Education), 17–35; William Richardson, “Historians and educationists: the history of education as a field of study in post-war England. Part II: 1972–1996,” History of Education 28:2, 109–41, 138; Richardson notes “the continuing working out of a range of institutional and professional tensions. At their heart is a long-standing and defining difference between the practice in England (and overseas) of academic historians who reconstruct the past in ways influenced by present concerns and of educationists who invoke the past in order to apply its lessons to present concerns.” In his commentary on the influential early writings of Larry Cuban, Edward Ducharme expressed such tensions as stark oppositions: “An activist, Cuban apparently cannot resist the reformer’s impulse when he should be fulfilling the historian’s task.” Edward R. Ducharme, “Past and Present: Teachers and Pedagogy 1890–1980,” Journal of Teacher Education 1989, 40:2, 61–3. Cuban would doubtless challenge the implication of this opposition for the task of historical interpretation, acknowledging the first element of Ducharme’s statement and rejecting the charge contained in the second, identifying himself as both “a reform-minded practitioner” and “a scholar dispassionately investigating and documenting classrooms, schools and districts…” Larry Cuban (2009) Hugging the Middle: How Teachers Teach in an Era of Testing and Accountability (New York: Teachers College Press), 68.
- 20.
Rousmaniere, “Historical Research,” 36: “the field of the history of education has always stood part-way between past and present, and for many educational historians the driving question of their research is simultaneously historical and contemporary.” Cuban associates this disciplinary dualism with the tensions of an insider–outsider binary; see Cuban (2009), 68. Also see Schuetz’s classic essay: Alfred Schuetz, “The Stranger: An Essay in Social Psychology,” American Journal of Psychology, 49:6, 1944, 499–507.
- 21.
Rousmaniere, City Teachers, vii.
- 22.
Cuban (2009), 68.
- 23.
See Doreen Massey (2005) For Space (London: Sage), 9. Space is “always under construction…space…is a product of relations-between, relations which have to be carried out…it is always in the process of being made. It is never finished; never closed. Perhaps we could imagine space as a simultaneity of stories-so-far.”
- 24.
Richard J. Altenbaugh “Introduction” in R.J. Altenbaugh (ed.) (1992), The Teacher’s Voice: A Social History of Teaching in Twentieth-century America (: The Falmer Press), 1.
- 25.
See the emblematic verse, “Fifty years a toiling teacher,” in the 1926 annual report of the Brooklyn Teachers’ Association. Rousmaniere, City Teachers, 40-1.
- 26.
Rousmaniere, City Teachers, 112. Also 133: “city teachers’ experiences at work have changed little over the decades…The recurrence of these problems should lead us to do more than shake our heads in amazement at the constancy of the ages.”
- 27.
“There is clearly a constant gulf between the context (the history of ideas) in which pedagogical innovations are rooted and the frequently conservative socio-historical context in which they have to be implemented.” Marc Depaepe, “Introduction” in M. Depaepe et al. (2000: Leuven University Press) Order in Progress: Everyday Educational Practice in Primary Schools – Belgium, 1880–1970, 12. Also see Rousmaniere, City Teachers, 112: “Historical studies of teaching have noted that no matter how many reformers propose pedagogical innovation, teachers’ classroom work seems invulnerable to change.”
- 28.
Rousmaniere, City Teachers, vii. Rousmaniere’s own subsequent summary of City Teachers is “A study of teachers in early-twentieth century New York City show(ing) how teachers developed their own work culture that served to buffer them from oppressive administrative rule and support them in their own definition of good work, even as it also mired teachers in conservatism, fear of change, and isolation from progressive reforms.” Rousmaniere, “Historical Research,” 40.
- 29.
Rousmaniere, City Teachers, 112. See also Gary McCulloch (2004) Documentary Research in Education, History and the Social Sciences (London: RoutledgeFalmer).
- 30.
Rousmaniere, City Teachers, 8.
- 31.
For examples of such work, see Asher Tropp (1957) The School Teachers: The Growth of the Teaching Profession in England and Wales from 1800 to the Present Day (London: Heinemann); P.H.J.H. Gosden (1972) The Evolution of a Profession: A Study of the Contribution of Teachers’ Associations to the Development of School Teaching as a Professional Occupation (London: Methuen).
- 32.
Rousmaniere, City Teachers, 28. Also see Peter Cunningham and Philip Gardner (2004) Becoming Teachers: texts and testimonies 1907–50 (: Woburn Press); Philip Gardner, “Teachers” in R. Aldrich (ed.) (2002) A Century of Education (Falmer), 117–39.
- 33.
Rousmaniere, City Teachers, 3.
- 34.
Rousmaniere, City Teachers, 2–4.
- 35.
Rousmaniere, City Teachers, 133.
- 36.
Rousmaniere, “Historical Research,” 41. Also see Harold Silver “Knowing and not knowing in the history of education,” History of Education, 21:1, 1992, 97–108.
- 37.
See Keith Jenkins (1995) On “What is History?” (London: Routledge); Roy Lowe, “Postmodernity and Historians of Education: A View from Britain” Paedagogica Historica, 32:2, 307–23.
- 38.
Rousmaniere, “Historical Research,” 33.
- 39.
Peter Burke (2001) Eyewitnessing; The Use of Images as Historical Evidence (London: Reaktion), 13; Paul Ricoeur (2004) Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 13.
- 40.
Rousmaniere, “Historical Research,” 44; “the types of sources used, and the way in which they are interpreted, have a lot to do with the types of questions asked, the theory relied upon, and the argument.” Rousmaniere, “Historical Research,” 45.
- 41.
Rousmaniere, “Historical Research,” 47.
- 42.
Rousmaniere, City Teachers, 112. See also Rousmaniere, “Historical Research,” 34, 40-1: “the very nature of historiography teaches us to question the notion of ultimate truths or objective facts.”
- 43.
Rousmaniere, “Historical Research,” 33.
- 44.
Rousmaniere, City Teachers, 8.
- 45.
Rousmaniere, “Historical Research,” 49.
- 46.
Paul Ricoeur (1991) “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as A Text,” in From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II (London: The Athlone Press), 144–67, 160. Also see John G. Gunnell (1998: Rowman and Littlefield), The Orders of Discourse: Philosophy, Social Science, and Politics, 160.
- 47.
Rousmaniere, “Historical Research,” 41; also see Grosvenor et al., Silences.
- 48.
For the last and greatest addition to this work, see Ricoeur, Memory.
- 49.
R. E. Palmer (1969) Hermeneutics (Evanston: Northwestern University Press), 13.
- 50.
P. H. Hutton, “Recent Scholarship on Memory and History,” The History Teacher, 33:4, 2000, 533–48, 545.
- 51.
J. D. Popkin (2005) History, Historians and Autobiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 37. Also see B. D. Smith, “Distanciation and Textual Interpretation,” Laval théologique et philosophique, 43:2, 1987, 205–16, 210.
- 52.
Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (1984), vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 3.
- 53.
Ricoeur, “Model,” 7. Also see Alan Munslow (2007) Narrative and History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), 2–4.
- 54.
Rousmaniere, City Teachers, 8.
- 55.
Rousmaniere, City Teachers, 7.
- 56.
Rousmaniere, City Teachers, 7.
- 57.
Rousmaniere, City Teachers, 7.
- 58.
George H. Taylor and Francis J. Mootz III, “Introduction” in F. J. Mootz III and G. H. Taylor (2011) Gadamer and Ricoeur: Critical Horizons for Contemporary Hermeneutics (London: Continuum), 1–3.
- 59.
Martyn Thompson, “Reception Theory and the Interpretation of Historical Meaning,” History and Theory, 32:3 1993, 248–72, 270.
- 60.
Ricoeur, “Model,” 157.
- 61.
Paul Ricoeur (1976) Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Forth Worth: The Texan Christian University Press), 32. Also see Ricoeur, Memory, 166: “Testimony is by origin oral. It is listened to, heard. The archive is written. It is read, consulted. In archives, the professional historian is a reader.”
- 62.
Plato (1995) Phaedrus, trans. A. Nehamas and P. Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett), 79–81.
- 63.
Ted Hopf “The Limits of Interpreting Evidence” in Richard Ned Lebow and Mark Irving Lichbach (eds) (2007) Theory and Evidence in Comparative Politics and International Relations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), 55–84, 62: ‘Once spoken or done, a social practice becomes the property of the audience.”
- 64.
Ricoeur (1976), 55, 76. Also see Martin Packer (2011) The Science of Qualitative Research (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 112–18; R. Harris, “How Does Writing Restructure Thought?” Language and Communication, 9:2/3 (1989), 99–106, 104.
- 65.
Smith, “Distanciation,” 211.
- 66.
D. M. Kaplan (2003) Ricoeur’s Critical Theory (Albany: SUNY), 35.
- 67.
Ricoeur, “Model,” 150.
- 68.
Packer, Science, 113. It is instructive to set Ricoeur’s hermeneutic approach alongside that of the intellectual historian Quentin Skinner, whose influential intentionalist histories dramatize Ricoeur’s distinction of reading “behind” or “in front of” the text; the significance of authorial intention is the major issue of contention here. See Philip Gardner, “Hermeneutics and History,” Discourse Studies, 13:5, 2011, 575–81, 579.
- 69.
Allan Bell, “Reconstructing Babel: Discourse analysis, hermeneutics and the Interpretive Arc” Discourse Studies, 13:5, 2011, 519–68.
- 70.
A. de Lima, “Any School Morning” The New Republic: Educational Section, vol. XL, no. 519 Part II (12 November 1924), 19–20.
- 71.
Rousmaniere, City Teachers, 127.
- 72.
Jane M. Bachnik, “Native Perspectives of Distance and Anthropological Perspectives of Distance” Anthropological Quarterly, 60:1, 1987, 25–34, 26.
- 73.
See Geoffrey Cubitt (2007) History and Memory (Manchester: MUP), 30: “Where the discourse of history poses the question of how the present can achieve knowledge of a past from which it is separated, the discourse of memory posits a more intimate or continuous connection between past experience and present consciousness.”
- 74.
Rousmaniere, City Teachers, 8.
- 75.
See Raphael Samuel “Perils of the Transcript,” in R. Perks and A. Thompson (eds) (1998) The Oral History Reader (London: Routledge), 389–92, 391: “The collector of the spoken word – of oral memory and tradition – is in a privileged position. He is the creator, in some sort, of his own archives, and he ought to interpret his duties accordingly.”
- 76.
Ricoeur, Memory, 53.
- 77.
Raphael Samuel (1994) Theatres of Memory, Volume I: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London: Verso), ix. Also J. Wertsch (2002) Voices of Collective Remembering (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 18–19.
- 78.
Ricoeur (1992) Oneself As Another (Chicago, University of Chicago Press), 140–63; Richard Kearney (2006) “Introduction: Ricoeur’s Philosophy of Translation” in Paul Ricoeur On Translation (London: Routledge); Penny Summerfield, “Culture and Composure: Creating Narratives of the Gendered Self in Oral History Interviews,” Cultural and Social History, 1:1 (2004), pp. 65–93; Alistair Thompson “Anzac Memories: Putting Popular Memory into Practice in Australia,” in R. Perks and A. Thomson (eds) The Oral History Reader (London: Routledge), 300–10; Peter Redman “The narrative formation of identity revisited: Narrative construction, agency and the unconscious,” Narrative Inquiry, 15:1 (2005), 25–44.
- 79.
David Carr (1986) Time, Narrative, and History (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press), 97.
- 80.
D. Mayer, quoted in Rousmaniere, City Teachers, 118.
- 81.
See A. Portelli (1991) The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany: SUNY), 15, 15. Also Cubitt, History, 87: For Portelli, ““The discrepancy between fact and memory ultimately enhances the value of the oral sources as historical documents”, for it is this discrepancy that gives us clues to the mental strategies by which those who are caught up in history make sense of their own experience and of the political and social conflicts that have moulded it.”
- 82.
A. Marsh, quoted in Rousmaniere, City Teachers, 87.
- 83.
See Ricoeur, Memory, 57: “The historian undertakes to “do history” (faire de l’histoire) just as each of us attempts to “remember” (faire memoire).”
- 84.
Alessandro Arcangeli (2012) Cultural History: An Introduction (Abingdon: Routledge), 6; Cunningham and Gardner, Becoming, 8.
- 85.
See, for example, the assembled collection of essays in Paedagogica Historica, 44:6, 2008. Special Issue: Focusing on Method; Martin Lawn (ed.) Modelling the Future: Exhibitions and the Materiality of Education (Oxford: Symposium Books); Martin Lawn and Ian Grosvenor (eds) (2005) Materialities of Schooling: design, technology, objects, routines (Oxford: Symposium Books); Depaepe et al. (2000) Order; Sol Cohen (1999) Challenging Orthodoxies: Toward a New Cultural History of Education (New York: Peter Lang); Braster, S., Grosvenor, I., & Maria del Mar del Pezo Andrés (Eds.). (2011). The black box of schooling: A cultural history of the classroom. New York: Peter Lang.
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Gardner, P. (2015). 5.2 Silences and Interpretations: Historical Approaches in Understanding Classroom Teachers from the Past. In: Smeyers, P., Bridges, D., Burbules, N., Griffiths, M. (eds) International Handbook of Interpretation in Educational Research. Springer International Handbooks of Education. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9282-0_43
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