CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS

This section presents analytical commentaries that address issues and problems in
language teacher education. Each commentary situates and analyzes a specific
problem within appropriate literature and research and offers concrete recommendations for language teacher education.

Why Best Practice Is Not Good Enough

JULIAN EDGE and KEITH RICHARDS
Aston University

The editors of this volume assert that accounts of properly justified

and fully contextualised responses to actual teaching (and teacher
education) situations provide a valuable resource for professional development. We identify fully with this assertion and with the editors stated
intention to give such reports more attention than has previously been
the case in TESOL Quarterly.
Our concern in this piece is to take this position further by arguing
that the concept of best practice is an illegitimate importation from an
inappropriate paradigm and that its use threatens to undermine the very
values that its proponents espouse.

A CRITIQUE
To understand why this transfer of terminology is unacceptable, the
use of the term best practice needs to be considered within a rationalist
paradigm, in which, for all practical purposes, procedures are precisely
specifiable and outcomes predictable. To take a practical example, when
new procedures for diagnosing a specific illness become available, it is
essential to disseminate these as quickly and as widely as possible to
members of the medical profession so that they can be implemented.
The same might apply, in an organisational context, to a way of
processing certain types of application or of producing particular
products. Applications of best practice can be clearly described and
offered as models for fellow professionals who wish to improve the
quality of their service.
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The assumptions behind this use of the term are that there exists, at
any one time, a best way of achieving clearly identifiable ends and that
this best way can be made generally available. The process involved is
straightforward:
1. Discovery: Research and practice lead to the discovery of new and
more effective ways of doing things.
2. Dissemination: Because best practice is also the most professionally
effective practice, it is vital that all practitioners should be made
aware of it as quickly as possible.
3. Delivery: Practitioners make appropriate changes to their current
practice for the benefit of those to whom the service is delivered.
The implementation of best practice in varied professional contexts
may involve minor contextual adjustments, but these are incidental to
what is best. However, in an educational environment, and especially one
as diverse as TESOL, the importation of the term represents a dangerous
distortion of its professional significance. In a world where teacher
educators struggle every day with the complexities and conundrums of
the educative process, the talismanic power of sanctified product represents a threat to our developmental well-being. There are at least three
areas in which the delusional potential of this concept can be identified
as it affects teacher education.

Practice and Theory

The traditional, rationalist theory/application discourse has not served
teaching well (Clarke, 1994). Nor do teacher educators improve the
quality of that discourse simply by focusing on specific contexts (Prabhu,
1990)arguments about how many angels dance on the head of a pin
are not made any more relevant by casting them in the context of
particular pins. Characterising individual accounts of practice as best
undermines the status of particular understanding by holding out the
prospect of general application. The struggle to translate (general)
theory into (individual) practice subtly mutates into an even more
procrustean struggle to transfer (ideal) practice into different situations.
The terminology of division has changed, but the gulf remains. The
definition of best practice in this special-topic issue expressly excludes
such simplistic modelling, but the term can easily be misinterpreted, and
it is a part of our responsibility as teacher educators to develop
terminology that will function in society at large.
At the same time, teacher educators need to recognise the dangers of
seeming to conclude that theory is somehow irrelevant to the day-to-day
business of teaching. In Britain, for example, the decoupling of teacher
education from higher education is already under way (Evans, 1997), a
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response that backs down from the very real challenge of exploring and
resolving a theory/practice dynamic.

Practice and People

By emphasising the status of particular practices, best practice
downplays the importance of the individuals concerned. Teacher educators are then stuck with the idea of best teaching being external to
teachers rather than being the individually determined best-next-step for
each teacher. Furthermore, only the successful voices, the paragons that
exist on the page, are heard, and their presence in this form can serve as
much to undermine the confidence of teachers as to encourage them.
Dialogues of doubt can be at least as important as the dictates of success,
for whereas the former hold out the prospect of development for the
sake of improvement, the latter imply that the destination is already
decided. The best is the enemy of the good.

Practice and Power

Any sense of alienation that teachers may feel is likely to be exacerbated if those in power exploit the coercive potential of best practice.
The greatest danger of such a position is that, like ritual magic, it is not
open to challenge: Best practice is by definition best, so any failure to
achieve it arises not as a result of flaws in its own constitution but because
the correct procedures are not being followed or the teacher has the
wrong attitude. The vision that we are trying to counterbalance is the
following, put forward by Elmore (1996) in answer to the question of
how localised best practice can be disseminated:
One promising approach . . . is to create strong professional and social
normative structures for good teaching practice that are external to individual teachers and their immediate working environment, and to provide a
basis for evaluating how many teachers are approximating good practice at
what level of competence. (p. 18)

This scenario is well known to us. Unchecked, it leads to the deskilling of teachers, who are seen as the technicians responsible for
learning-delivery systems. It leads to the distancing of teacher education
from higher education, as teachers are called on to learn their delivery
skills on the job. It leads to the establishment of orthodoxies suitable to
educations political masters. It leads to the assessment of teachers by
administrators with checklists on processes they do not understand. And
it leads to a disillusioned body of teachers, divided from the society they
set out to serve and disenfranchised in terms of their own professional
development.
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AN ALTERNATIVE VISION
Our critique of best practice requires a constructive response; this is
what we now attempt to provide.

Theorising Practice
A fundamental break from a restrictive theory/practice discourse can
be brought about by encouraging teachers to investigate, and thereby
better to understand, their own current practice, constrained and
inspired as it is, in and by its own context. As teachers, we shall expect to
articulate in each instance just why it is that
particular practices are seen as appropriate in the pursuance of
locally formulated goals,
local goals have been formulated in the way that they have,
the social situation that led to the formulation of these goals can be
improved by pursuing these goals, and not others, in these ways, and
pedagogic understanding in general is furthered by pursuing these
goals, and not others, in these ways.
To the extent that teachers investigations lead them to question any of
the above assertions, their theorised practice will develop in response to
their increased awareness, just as educational theory will develop in
order to account for the findings of socially and pedagogically aware
practice.
Emergent praxis. We thus see the essence of good teaching to lie in its
continuingly emergent nature: never completely formalised or normalised,
always responding to another cycle of action and observation, reflection,
planning, and further action, through which the very nature of practice
is theorised. A more convenient term for this theorised practice might be
praxis, which Carr and Kemmis (1986) define as informed, committed
action (p. 190). And one way to become involved in praxis is through
some version of action research:
a form of self-reflective inquiry undertaken by participants in social situations
in order to improve the rationality and justice of their own practices, their
understandings of these practices, and the situations in which these practices
are carried out. (Carr & Kemmis, 1986, p. 162)

Educational practice that involves a conceptual and research element is

demonstrably empowering to its practitioners. A recent example of such
work in TESOL is provided by Hales (1997), whose data-based investigations led to improvement in his work on language awareness with his
teacher trainees.
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Building theory. We have emphasised so far the importance of praxis

(theorised practice) in its context of operation, but we would not wish to
ignore the importance of praxis to the building of educational theory.
The local understandings that emerge through praxis will present
problems for those who wish to work toward the building of generalised
pedagogic theory (see Edge & Richards, 1998). But this very reversal of
responsibility serves only to illuminate the unsatisfactory nature of the
status quo as far as current theory-building and research procedures are
concerned. In Guba and Lincolns (1982) terms, we need to work
towards developing a paradigm that is sensitive to real world conditions,
rather than manipulating those conditions to meet the arbitrary design
requirements of a paradigm (p. 234). The issue, ultimately, is one of
educational quality, and the path to this, as Somekh (1993) recognises,
must find its way through the lived world of teachers own educational
practice:
Because quality in educational research resides in its ability to explore,
resonate with, explicate and improve practice, I would argue that all educational research must have at least an action research component to achieve
quality. (p. 32)

Educational research that does not arise from educational practice is

sterile. In illuminating contrast to this, we would cite Hancock (1997) as
an example of how pedagogically motivated investigation can lead to
significant contributions to the description and explanation of linguistic
interaction itself.

Praxis and Teacher Development

Our version of theorised practice does not allow for the concept of
best practice as an abstraction in the absence of particular teachers and
learners in specific contexts. The development of pedagogic practice,
therefore, is indivisibly tied in with the personal and professional
development of teachers. This may sound an easy proposition to put
forward in the context of a professional journals world of discourse, but
we are far from its implementation in the lived world of teacher
education.

TEACHER EDUCATION PRAXIS

Although it may seem redundant to make the point, teacher education is most importantly a form of teaching. For the reasons sketched
necessarily briefly above, we find best practice equally insidious whether
imported into teacher education or other forms of teaching. Its particular danger in teacher education is the negative potential of what Argyris
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and Schn (1974) identify as double-loop learning, in that our students are
always affected by what we do as well as by what we say. Our forms of
teacher education, including our resolution of theory/practice relationships and our views of how teaching develops, will inevitably inform the
teachers who learn from us and with us.
The challenge to teacher educators is first and foremost to acknowledge their own privileged role in the educational system. If praxis is to
make sense, it must make sense here. Teacher educators need to engage
in a style of teacher education in which their own development as
teachers is a recurrent focus of attention, as it is explored and furthered
by teacher educators themselves in collaboration with their colleagues
and their teacher-students (Edge, 1995; Mann & Willis, 1996; Richards,
1995).
This process provides, in one sense, the research base of teacher
education via what Elliott (1993) has called second-order action research. In
another sense, it helps teacher educators demonstrate as developing
professionals their continuing determination to meet the challenge that
Gore (1991) spells out so compellingly with regard to investigative
approaches to teaching:
If we argue that we do not have time [for adopting such approaches], can we
blame teachers for not adopting them as part of their teaching? If we argue
that teaching is not a priority among the many academic tasks before us, can
we justify our location in teacher education? (p. 254)

CONCLUSION
We believe that important elements of the future of educational
practice and theory lie in the development of praxis, the theorised
practice of specific situations. The documentation of praxis is central to
its continuation, and this documentation will also provide a valuable
resource for the professional development of future teachers and
teacher educators.
Although the concept of best practice appears initially attractive,
inasmuch as its reporting gives some voice to the participants of actual
situations, we fear that it is, in fact, a blind alley. It helps keep in place
distinctions in the field (e.g., conceptual analysis, research, practice) that
are themselves unhelpful, while also leaving teacher educators open to
misunderstandings in their communication with the political forces and
wider societies that they serve.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to express our thanks to participants on the MSc and PhD programs
with which we are involved, most particularly Tom Hales and Mark Hancock, whose
work we have cited in this paper; also to the editors of this collection, who have stuck
with our contribution through various recensions.

THE AUTHORS
Keith Richards is Director of Studies of the Language Studies Unit (LSU) at Aston
University, where Julian Edge also teaches. Most of their work is on the distancelearning MSc in TESOL/TESP program and on Astons distance-learning doctoral
program, in which Keith coordinates a special-interest group in the analysis of
spoken interaction, and Julian one on teacher development.

REFERENCES
Argyris, C., & Schn, D. (1974). Theory in practice: Increasing practical effectiveness. San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Carr, W., & Kemmis, S. (1986). Becoming critical. Lewes, England: Falmer Press.
Clarke, M. (1994). The dysfunctions of the theory/practice discourse. TESOL
Quarterly, 28, 926.
Edge, J. (1995). Taking responsibility for appropriate methods. In R. Budd (Ed.),
Appropriate methodology. The Journal (TESOL-France), 2, 3951.
Edge, J. & Richards, K. (1998). May I see your warrant, please?Justifying outcomes
in qualitative research. Applied Linguistics, 19, 334356.
Elliott, J. (1993). Professional education and the idea of a practical educational
science. In J. Elliott (Ed.), Reconstructing teacher education (pp. 6585). Lewes,
England: Falmer Press.
Elmore, R. (1996). Getting to scale with good educational practice. Harvard
Educational Review, 66, 126.
Evans, L. (1997). Making an epistemological case for a continued role in initial
teacher education: The challenge for higher education in England and Wales.
Higher Education Review, 30, 2036.
Gore, J. (1991). Practising what we preach: Action research and the supervision of
student teachers. In B. Tabachnich & R. Zeichner (Eds.), Issues and practices in
inquiry-oriented teacher education (pp. 253272). Lewes, England: Falmer Press.
Guba, E. G., & Lincoln, Y. S. (1982). Epistemological and methodological bases of
naturalistic inquiry. Educational Communication and Technology Journal, 30, 233
252.
Hales, T. (1997). Exploring data-driven language awareness. ELT Journal, 51, 217
223.
Hancock, M. (1997). Behind classroom code-switching: Layering and language
choice in L2 learner interaction. TESOL Quarterly, 31, 217235.
Mann, S., & Willis, J. (1996, April). The role of feedback in DL teacher education. Paper
presented at the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign
Language Conference, Keele, England.
Prabhu, N. S. (1990). There is no best methodWhy? TESOL Quarterly, 24, 161176.
Richards, K. (1995). Direction and debate in distance materials for teacher development. In R. Howard & I. M. McGrath (Eds.), Distance education for language teachers
(pp. 142160). Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters.
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Somekh, B. (1993). Quality in educational research: The contribution of classroom

teachers. In J. Edge & K. Richards (Eds.), Teachers develop teachers research (pp. 26
38). Oxford: Heinemann.

Changing Lives in Changing Times: Preservice

Teacher Education in Postapartheid South Africa
MICHAEL SAMUEL
University of Durban-Westville

This conceptual analysis addresses some of the challenges of preparing English language teachers during the reconstruction and development of the South African education system in the postapartheid society
(after 1994). The legacy of the apartheid education system and its impact
on language teaching and learning are the backdrop to the policy
initiatives promulgated in 1997. The article describes what it means to
educate teachers in a transforming society. The response to the problems
of apartheid school education is to develop teachers who can view
themselves critically as products of separatist ideologies within the school
and the society and as agents for the achievement of new, liberating
ideologies of teaching and learning languages within their (future)
classrooms. In this way, teacher education can contribute to the renewal
of the education system and the society in general.

THE BAGGAGE
The infamous apartheid ideology of the former South African state
has received numerous condemnations internationally. The countrys
education system was clearly designed to fuel the apartheid conceptions
of the racial, cultural, and linguistic supremacy of the controllers of
legislative power and was characterised by designs to provide unequal
and iniquitous education to different races. Amongst pupils it bred
narrow and distorted conceptions of self-identity, about relations with
individuals outside ones defined cultural and racial group, and about
the boundaries of ones culture. Most pupils (Black and White) had
almost no personal communication with pupils from other racial groups.
These political designs had the following consequences for language
teaching and learning within the schooling system.
1. The apartheid regime legislated the L1s of the White minority
(approximately 13% of the total population) as the only official
languages of the country. This afforded an elevated status to English
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