Teaching and schooling : On the confluence and re-conception of discourses.

Teaching and schooling tend to elude consistent and integrated understanding.

Rather than carrying on one discourse bringing together the best of both teaching and schooling, we tend to carry on two separate discourses, one for teaching and another for schooling, with each discourse (i.e. teaching or schooling) making a distorted portrait of the other.

For example, in literature centered on schooling, we rarely find mention of the roots and offerings of teaching; rather, teaching is often portrayed as something like the instructional work of schooling personnel.

Likewise, in literature centered on teaching, school is often portrayed as a neutral to obstructive backdrop to the central work of teaching.

In order to move beyond these coupled monologues, or confluence of discourses, I turn to full-blooded accounts of teaching and schooling that retain a healthy complementary place for the other.

For the account of teaching, I build on the work of Alasdair Maclntyre's notions of practices and institutions to re-conceive teaching as a practice and school as an institution.

For the account of schooling, I build on the work of Megan Jessiman interpreting schooling as a cultural form parallel to other cultural forms articulated by Ernst Cassirer, such as religion, art, and language.

These re-conceptions position us to see robust accounts of teaching and schooling simultaneously, and to examine the relationship between teaching as a practice and schooling as a cultural form.

This in turn overcomes the confluence of the teaching and schooling discourses, and reveals teaching and schooling as interdependent and integrated partners.