teaching and the interpretation of texts

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TEACHING AND THE INTERPRETATION OF TEXTS Hunter McEwan

College of Education University of Hawaii at Manoa

THE CONTINUITY OF TEACHING WITH REFLECTIVE HUMAN ACTION

The inclination to view teaching as a specialized form of thought and action is typical of a good deal of recent philosophy and research on teaching. Powerful motives exist in our society to privilege the teacher as a specialist and a professional of sorts. Teachers, it is argued, if they deserve to be counted in the ranks of the professions, must possess a unique blend of knowledge and thought that marks them as experts in ways that are distinct from informed lay persons and other groups who claim professional status as a result of their own claim to a specific area of expertise. In this article, I shall argue that this assumption is wrong. Indeed, my aim is to demonstrate the continuity in thought and action between teaching and the business of leading a life in informed ways. My view is that teaching is an interpretive activity that is motivated by concern for students as human beings.

However, in making this claim, I wish to avoid a potential misunderstanding. I am not arguing that teaching is essentially connected with interpretation, nor that teaching can be distinguished from other activities by appeal to a form or method of interpretation. On the contrary, my argument is that teaching is interpretive because it is directed, as are similar forms of communicative action, to the clarification of meaning. Thus, it is in virtue of its aims rather than its methods that teaching is interpretive. This point, I believe, can be brought out more clearly by considering an example.

Imagine the following situation, so typical of classroom instruction: A teacher is planning to teach a lesson, say, on the subject of metaphor. The problem is how to teach it, given the current level of understanding of the students and their degree of interest in the topic. What words can the teacher use to introduce the topic? What activities can the students engage in! What do they know of the topic already? How thoroughly should the topic be explored? How can it be related to other lessons and other subjects? This predicament of how to teach something to someone is faced by teachers on a day-to-day, almost hour-to-hour basis. It is typical both of planningand instruction, or to use a parallel set of terms, of proactive and enactive decision making. In fact, it appears that it is so typical of teaching that it may be taken as illustrative of the kind of problem solving that lies at the heart of teaching anddefines it as an activity. But it would be a mistake to jump to this conclusion without some kind of justification, for the very same predicament seems characteristic of any number of communicative activities. For instance, the same problem arises in connection with any attempt to get one's meaning across. How should the doctor communicate her diagnosis to the patient? How should the biologist present his

EDUCATIONAL THEORY / Winter 1992 / Volume 42 / Number 1 0 1992 Board of Trustees / University of Illinois

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research results? How should the politician convey her agenda to the electorate? How should the general brief the press? Indeed, it would seem that far from being a specialized area of expertise, there is a good deal of pedagogy in any presentation of knowledge or belief, and very few similarities in the manner of thought required to accomplish these tasks. I wish to reflect upon the significance of understanding teaching in this wider sense: that it is about making something clear to a specific audience, and that this task is not the exclusive business of those who call themselves teachers.

Of course, it is no surprise to find that educational philosophers and researchers are more interested in how teaching professionals, as opposed to “non-specialists,” solve the problem of how to teach their subject. Apart of this task has thereforebeen devoted to identifying the way of thinking that is “unique” to teaching and the distinctive features of teacher knowledge. Lee Shulman, for example, adopts this approach in his conceptual work on the knowledge base of teaching.’ But the same theme underlies a great deal of what philosophy of teaching has been trying to do with the concept of ‘teaching’ for the past few decades; that is, define its true nature.2 Teachers, so the theory goes, develop a repertoire of “pedagogic content knowledge,” which is aproduct of their pedagogic reasoning. Pedagogic content knowledge is different from other forms of content knowledge or “content knowledge per se” because it represents a blending of content and pedag~gy.~ This synthesizing capability of teachers supposedly lies at the heart of teachers’ thinking. “Pedagogic content knowledge is the category most likely to distinguish the understanding of the content specialist from that of the pedag~gue.”~

The initial plausibility of this distinction comes from our common sense view that content can be “packaged for consumption” in many different ways. But it is one thing torecognizevarietyin theways that subject matter canbe taught andquite another to claim a formal difference between the content knowledge of teachers and others. Of course, the very language that we use to talk about teaching, scholarship, and knowledge seems to embody a distinction between what teachers know about their subject versus what scholars know, and what teachers know versus what informed lay persons know. However, the distinctions implicit in our current linguistic practices represent earlier theoretical commitments that are out of date. The view, for example, that privileges scholarly representations over alternative

1. See Lee S. Shulman, “Those Who Understand; Knowledge Growth in Teaching,” Educational Researcher 15, no. 2 (1986): 4-14; ”Paradigms and Research Programs for the Study of Teaching,” in Handbook of Research on Teaching, ed. M. Wittrock [New York: Macmillan, 1986), 3-36; and “Knowledge and Teaching: Foundations of the New Reform,” Harvard Educational Review 57, no. 1 (1987): 1-22.

2. I discuss the essentialist program in the philosophy of teaching in more detail in Hunter McEwan, “Teaching Acts: An Unfinished Story,” Philosophy of Education 1990 [Normal, 111.: Philosophy of Education Society, 1990), 190-98.

3 . Shulman, ”Those Who Understand,” 9. 4. Shulman, ”Knowledge and Teaching,” 8

HUNTER McEWAN is Assistant Professor in the Dcpartrnent of Curriculum and Instruction, College of Education, at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1776 University Avenue, Honolulu, HA 96822. His primary areas of scholarship are English education and the philosophy of teaching.

MCEWAN Teaching and Interpretation 61

representations is based on a discredited objectivist account of kn~wledge.~ There- fore, we cannot appeal to ordinary usage to justify a specifically pedagogic way of knowing content. It may nevertheless be the case, as Jerome Bruner points out, that

the structure of any domain of knowledge may be characterized in three ways, each affecting the ability of thc learner to master it: the mode ofrepresentation in which it is put, its economy, and its effective power. Mode, economy, and power vary in relation to different ages, to different “styles” among learners, and to different subject mattem6

But it is one thing to describe how knowledge varies in relation to learners and subject matters and another to prescribe its form in a theory of instruction. And to extend this point a little further, even though knowledge may take various forms, it would be rash to conclude that one form is a specifically pedagogic form: Bruner, in fact does not claim that mode, economy, and power vary according to different teaching situations.

Given these considerations, it may be useful to ask if it is really necessary to make a distinction in kind between the subject matter knowledge of teachers and the subject matter knowledge of other people. Why should it be important that teachers should think differently about content? One reason is that the ideal of a unique knowledge base bestows professional legitimacy on teaching.’ Teachers are professionals because they know something that others do not. Shulman’sview is that they are specialists in the art of blending content and pedagogy. It is not enough that teachers should know their subject; they should know it in a certain way.

I do not wish, in this paper, to enter into the prickly and, I believe, rather emotional debate about whether the occupation of teaching either is or ought to be counted among the professions. However, I do wish to argue against the idea that teaching requires a capacity to reason in ways that other activities do not. First, I think that it is very limiting to think of teaching in this way. There are more things to teaching than are dreamed of in the theories of educational philosophers and researchers. Second, no occupational group or profession holds a monopoly on teaching, because it is practiced in all sorts of situations and circumstances.

John Dewey makes a valuable point about teaching that, I think, captures its fundamental connection with human concerns rather than mere occupational ones. “The educator,” he claims, “more than the member of any other profession is concerned to have a long look ahead.”E Teaching, we should say, is supervenient on other occupational concerns. Thus, when the doctor extends her interest in the patient beyond her responsibility as a physician, and shows a concern for the patient as a person and not just as someone with this or that sort of illness or disorder, she finds herself in the relation of teacher to patient and no longer simply as a physician.

Dewey makes his distinction between teachers and other professionals as one

5. Hunter McEwan and Barry Bull, ”The Pedagogic Nature of Subject Matter Knowledge: The Community of Teaching and Scholarship,” American Educational Research /ourno1 28, no. 2 (1991). 6. Jerome Bruner, Toward a Theory of Instruction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978),44.

7. Shulman, “Knowledge and Teaching,” 3-4. 8. John Dewey, Experience and Education [New York: Collier Macmillan, 1963), 75-76.

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between long term and short term interest in theperson, client, orpatient. But I think that this distinction can be made more effectively if we see that teachers are concerned about the person as a whole and not just with some feature of their being or health. Thus, the supervenient nature of teaching captures its essential moral nature and incorporates what Carol Gilligan calls “an ethics of care.”9

The supervenient quality of teaching, the fact that it goes beyond more limited occupational concerns to embrace a caring relationship and an interest in the education of others, shows that teaching is not specific to one group of specialists with ownership of a special knowledge base. Teachlng is something we all do, and in widely varying circumstances. This, too, is part of our common sense wisdom about teaching. Teaching is a pervasive activity.’* It is something the parent does with the infant, the priest with the parishioner, the writer with the reading public, and the scholar with fellow researchers.

This argument, I think, helps to counter a habit of thought amongst philosophers and researchers that teaching is something that is done by those whose occupation it is to teach. It demonstrates clearly that the kind of thinking that we do when we teach has affinities with the common practice of getting our meaning across and is not confined to just those practices that are conducted in the rather artificial atmosphere of the classroom. And further, it helps to explain what sets teaching apart as an activity- the aim of making something clear to someone because we care that they should understand and not from any other motive, such as self-interest or the desire to persuade.

But i f classroom teachers have not cornered the market on the knowledge base of teaching, in what terms can teaching be discussed? What is teaching? Let me return to the problem with which I introduced this essay. The problem as I characterized it is one of meaning: How should I get my point across? How shall I explain this to others? What should I do in order to get them to understand me? The problem is one that is encountered in any number of circumstances. It arises when we confront something whose meaning is obscure or unclear. The answer is to clarify the meaning by putting it in terms that we can understand. Such clarification of meaning involves interpretation, and this is the theme that I wish to explore: that in order to understand teaching in all its diversity, we should understand it, in part, as an interpretive endeavor. But, as the supervenient argument suggests, it is what motivates interpretation - concern for the student as a whole - that distinguishes teaching from other activities. 1 am using “interpretation,” of course, in the sense that it is used in hermeneutics: “the study of the operations of the understanding in their relation to the interpretation of texts.”i1 As Charles Taylor defines it, interpre-

9. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women‘s Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 19821, 63.

10. Margaret Buchmann, “Teaching Knowledge: The Lights that Teachers Live By,” Oxford Review o f Education 13, no. 2 j1987): 151-64. 11. Paul Ricouer, “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text,” Understonding and Social Inquiry ed. F.R. Dallniayr andT.A. McCarthy (Notre Dame: Universityof Notre Dame Press, 1977), 316-34.


tation is “an attempt to make clear, to make sense of an object of study.”12 My point, then, is that teaching and interpreting are not just similar, they are the same thing in so far as teaching is a rational enterprise that arises from the demand to make meaning clear.

Concern with meaning as a basic category of thought, language, and action is part of what Daniel Bell (1984) refers to as a “turn to interpretati~n.’”~ Broadly speaking, the turn to interpretation is part of a wide-spread movement within the scholarly and research community, a “paradigm shift, to use a popular phrase, that is changing the way that social scientific research is conducted. This movement rejects reductive philosophizing, foundationalist epistemology, and scientism. It is critical of the influential tradition that directs social scientists to understand human action, institutions, and practices in the same terms that scientists understand physical phenomena. The basic categories of interpretive studies are quite different from mainstream science. The result of this change has been a shift in the way that research on teaching is conducted.14 Although the turn to interpretation may be of more immediate significance for how we should study teaching, it is also important for how we should conceive of teaching, because conceptual matters are inseparable from empirical ones.15

But an additional point is worth making in this connection. The turn to interpretation has not just brought about a change in how we conceive of knowledge; it has also begun to influence the way we view the application of knowledge. The linear, technological model that makes a rigid distinction between theory and practice, research and action, scholarship and teaching, and knowing and doing is no longer the only acceptable one. Instead, interpretive approaches to research suggest a more interactive or holistic model in which theory and practice are internally related. The breakdown of the technological model of knowledge application in teaching, of the researcher as knower and the teacher as doer, indicates that a more fruitful understanding of teaching will come about by conceiving of teaching as a part of a general theory of meaningful human action, and not by reduction to physical or machine functional states.

INTERPRETATION AND THE IDEA OF TEXT

What is the spur to interpretive thought in teaching? What is its source as a procedure? It arises out of the perplexities of learners, the questions that they ask, their lack of knowledge, and their perception of their needs and difficulties. Teachers

12. Charles Taylor, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” Understanding and Social Inquiry, ed. F.R. Dallmayr and T.A. McCarthy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 19771, 101-31. 13. “The turn to interpretation, in the broadest cultural sense, signifies the turn of the social science - or of those practitioners of this art - from the models of the natural sciences and their modes of inquiry, to the humanities.” Daniel Bell, ”The Turn to Interpretation,” Partisan Review 5 (1984): 215-19. 14. See Frederick Erickson, “Qualitative Methods in Research on Teaching,” Handbook of Research on Teaching, ed. M. Wittrock (New York Macmillan, 1986), 119-61.

15. Quine’s attack on the analytic-synthetic dstinction has helped us to see that within a system of belief the conceptual and the empirical are related. See W.V.O. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” in From a Logical Point of View 2nd ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1961 I, 20-46.

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may respond by simplifying material, by making appropriate selections, by planning learning activities, by reorganizing content, by fashioning and creating crehble illustrations, by exploiting new analogies, and by inventing judicious problems and examples. The ability of teachers to deploy such a large variety of strategies arises out of a quite extraordinary capacity in human beings to interpret and reinterpret symbol systems for particular audiences.

But what is interpretation? What is this capacity to make meaning and clarify meaning, and why can it be accomplished in so many ways?

Interpretation aims to clarify the meaning of something that is obscure to a particular audience. There are three identifying features of interpretation: something is unclear, there are procedures to be followed to attain greater clarity, and there is an audience for whom the new account is created.16 Thus, for example, the interpret- ers of obscure documents aim to translate them into terms that can be more widely understood; in a similar fashion, teachers aim to bring understanding to a topic when it resists earlier attempts to be learned.

The idea of a text is therefore essential to our understanding of teaching and interpreting because it is in texts that meaning resides. But not all objects possess meaning. It is a characteristic of the creations of human communities. Sticks and stones do not, in themselves, possess meaning, unless one holds something like an animistic or pantheistic conception of the universe and allow inanimate things to possess significance.” But this is not the sense that we are using “meaning” here. Meaning is a property of texts, and texts are more than just written documents. Human actions and practices, social institutions, cultural artifacts, and the products of artistic creation can also to be considered as texts, or text-analogues, that are open to being read.ls

Two MODES OF INTERPRETING

On the face of it, the act of interpreting texts, which is closely connected with the study of literary works, is not very different from teaching. To be sure, literary critics do not always work in classrooms, but this makes their work no less aimed at the edification of their readers. In a similar fashion, teachers are often placed by their students in the role of commentator and appealed to for clarification of the text under study. This sense of ”making something clear to someone” by standing in the position of a go-between or messenger is, in fact, one of the original meanings of the word “interpret.” Hermeneutics, which is the discipline that is centrally concerned with interpretation, aims at the discovery and application of methods that make the meaning of obscure texts more clear. Of course, the hermeneutic notion of a text is not limited to printed material. The concept “text,” as I have indicated, is now understood in a very wide sense: social practices and institutions, cultural products, indeed anything that is created as a result of human action and reflection can be

16. Taylor, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man.” 17. Charles Taylor describes this feature of the premodern conception of meaning as an ”ontic logos.” See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Harvard University PressJ. 18. Ricouer, ”The Model of the Text,” and Taylor, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man.”


regarded as a text to be read and interpreted. In a manner of speaking, anything may be a text if it possesses a text-like, symbolic or semiotic structure. How, then, does one go about interpreting something for someone? At this point it will be useful, indeed essential, to distinguish between interpretation that goes on in the background and in the foreground. Background interpretations are subconscious, precon- scious, or tacit processes:

The interpretations of perception are going on in the background of our attention, not in the foreground. When you perceive a table, or a dog, or a cat, you are not free to perceive it in the usual way . . . because you are not free to suspend your own language or your practical interests.lY

As this form of interpretation suggests, we are never free to suspend our capacity for interpretation. It is fundamental to the way that we exist in the world. In this sense interpretation is an ontological category, a way of being as well as a way of understanding.

Foreground interpretation, on the other hand, is deliberative. It is conscious in origin, though it may become, through practice, an automated process and part of our tacit knowledge. Foreground interpretation is a “form of research”;20 a method of approaching a problem so that our thoughts are guided by conscious choices. To the degree that teaching is reflective rather than under the direction of our subconscious, it is interpretive in the second sense. But teaching also involves interpretation in the first sense. Because of this, it is not possible to give an account of teaching in terms of purely logical operations or in terms of deliberative choices.

CHARACTERISTICS OF INTERPRETING AND TEACHING What is it, then, to interpret something consciously for someone, and why

should it apply to teaching? There are three characteristic features of foreground interpretati0n.l’ First, there must be something that is to be interpreted: a text or something sufficiently like a text that it might require to haveits meaning made clear to someone. Does this condition fit teaching? On a straightforward reading of the word “text” it is obviously true, Teachers often teach texts and teach from texts with the aim of making their meaning clear to students: Moby Dick, for example, or An Introduction to World History. But what about teachers who never use a book, or teachers when they are not teaching from a book? Are these counterexamples to the condition that there must be a text to interpret? The answer is that the notion of a text can be quite simply extended to cover these apparent counterexamples. Hermeneutics, as I have already pointed out, broadens the scope of what can be regarded as a text by revealing the textual characteristics of any symbolic structure, whatsoever; thus the range of application of the act of interpreting is more extensive than documents and literary texts. Human action as a whole and the products of human action can be “read” like texts because they have meaning, or symbolic structure, and yield interpretations that may make their meaning clearer. For the

19. Graeme Nicholson, Seeing and Reading [New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1984), 7 20. &id., 2 21. A full account of this approach to an understanding of hermeneutical interpretation can be found at the beginning of Charles Taylor’s ”Interpretation and the Sciences of Man.”

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teacher, the curriculum, as practice or document, also may justly be regarded as a text because it too possesses the structural and symbolic qualities that require it to be interpreted from time to time.22

A second condition of foreground interpretation is that meaning and its expression can be separated, not absolutely but relatively. That is, it must be possible to express something like the same meaning in a number of different ways. If a text represents one expression of meaning, and if an audience does not understand the meaning as it is expressed, then it must be possible to find other words or actions to make the meaning clear. In pedagogic terms, without the distinction between meaning and expression, teachers would have no alternative way of explaining ideas or demonstrating practices. Teaching, under these circumstances, would become a merely repetitive task. There would be only one way of expressing a meaning and, therefore, teachers would simply have to repeat themselves until their students somehow caught on. Teachers do not work that way: they experiment with their explanations. They try things out one way, and if that fails, they choose new strategies to make their meaning clearer.

The third condition of foreground interpretation is that it must be for someone. It is not enough that the interpretation is of a text, and that its meaning is capable of various forms of expression. Interpretations must be addressed to specific audiences in ways that they can understand. Thus, the notion that there is one correct, or true interpretation of a text must be rejected in favor of a standard that ties interpretations to particular audiences as well as to subject matter. The entire business of a standard, canonical, or authoritative interpretation is as much out of place in teaching as it is in literary studies. A more appropriate way of looking at the problem would be to recognize that interpretations vary as the audience and context vary. The value of looking at things in this way is that it emphasizes the importance to teaching of difference- of students’ multiple levels of understanding, and of their diverse backgrounds and shifting interests. This approach runs counter to the view held by some people that the business of teaching is to convey the one right interpretation. But the commitment to Truth in interpretation would remove the task of the teacher from the realm of the interpreter to that of the knowledge transmitter, whose task is not to think but to tell students what other people think. Interpretation, rather, promotes the idea of a ”fusion of horizons” between the level of understanding of the learner and the new meaning expressed by the teacher.23 A new integration of meaning is the accomplishment of successful teaching, a new understanding that is more than just a synthesis of content and pedagogy because it is productive of something new.

To summarize, teaching is interpretive in the following way: in order to make something clear to students, teachers frequently find ways of expressing meanings

22. The workof TedT. Aokipresents a textualapproach to the evaluationandunderstanding of curriculum. SeeTedT. Aoki, ed., Curriculum Evnluation in a NewKey (Vancouver: Centre for the Study of Curriculum and Instruction, University of British Columbia, 1978). 23. Hans 6. Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. C . Barden and J, Cummings (New York: Seabury Press, 1975).


in alternative ways so that the new understanding merges with and extends what each student already knows on the subject.

CONCLUSION

A number of important conclusions can be deduced from this view of teaching that serve to reconceptualize the role of the teacher and point to some salient features that may be of interest to researchers.

In the first place, Shulman has referred to the dearth of research on teachers’ knowledge of their subjects as the “missing paradigm” in research on teaching.24 An interpretive perspective reinforces the position that some researchers have taken on the kind of thinking that teachers use in bringing about what Shulman refers to as ”the wisdom of practice.N25 In addition, an interpretive view accomplishes this task without falling into the epistemological trap, as Shulman does, of having to make a formal distinction between content knowledge and pedagogic content knowledge.26 Teaching and interpreting involve a cycle of meaning constructions that have no beginning and no end. This is the pedagogic version of the hermeneutic circle; each text that a teacher teaches is already an interpretation of an earlier text, each act of making meaning clear is an act of reinterpretation. At no point can we break free of the circle and grasp hold of a form of knowledge that is uninfluenced by pedagogic concerns.

As I suggested earlier in the paper, interpretive teaching leads to a more humane view of the role of the teacher. Teacher education programs, in the absence of a view of teacher thinking that links it to the rich mental life that human beings evince in their capacity to interpret texts, have tended to be dominated by the applied science model of teaching. The technological or mechanistic mind set that gives priority to following a blueprint designed by outside experts and supported by educational research denies teachers the opportunity to control the means of communicating content. But the teacher is uniquelyplaced to interpret the content for students. The diversity of possible interpretations guarantees this autonomy. Anyone who is unfamiliar with the students would fail to anticipate the factors, both cognitive and affective, that are important to a particular learning context. Through personal knowledge of students - their interests, knowledge, attitudes, and aptitudes - teachers are in the best position to interpret content effectively.

Of course, the power of the teacher to interpret meaning for students may be even more effectively achieved by empowering students to acquire skill in interpreting texts for themselves. In this way, autonomy passes on from teacher to individual students and enables them to satisfy their own desire for clarity of meaning and understanding.”

24. Shulman, “Paradigms and Research Programs in the Study of Teaching.” 25. Shulman, ”Knowledge and Teaching,” 11.

26. McEwan and Bull, ”The Pedagogic Nature of Subject Matter Knowledge.”

27. I wish to thank the anonymous reviewer who helped me see this important point.

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A further consequence of an interpretive view of teaching is that it points to the need for a rhetoric of instruction, a rhetoric that helps to explain how expressions of subject matter derive their power. What teachers teach is part of a discourse that involves the production of new texts in place of old texts. As Robert Scholes has recently argued, texts have power.28 By coming to understand the workings of teachers' texts - the things they say and do, the scripts they follow - and how teachers exploit this power in the classroom, we will learn more about the how of teaching.

A rhetoric of teaching has important implications for teacher education. It implies that there is a learnable art to the ways that teachers present content to their student audiences. But, in addition, if teaching involves the production of textuality as well as its clarification, the opportunity is present for teachers to come to a critical awareness of their own interpretations.

Finally, the conception of teaching as interpreting provides an alternative to the seemingly endless conflict between those who think that teaching ought to be student-centered and those who believe it should be content-centered. Interpreta- tion suggests a middle way: a way that achieves a rapprochement between the demand for content and the needs of students. The teacher, in effect, is the agent of this reconciliation of opposing viewpoints. Thus, teaching is interactive; it involves student, subject, and teacher in a sort of transaction that springs from the teacher's desire to make something clear and the learner's demand for intelligibility. Teaching is interactive because of the power that teachers share with human beings in general: the capacity to reinterpret texts and make them meaningful for particular people.

The hypothetical problem posed at the beginning of this article asked about how teachers go about teaching something to someone. The situation calls for flexibility of thought, not theunreflective repetition of a standard explanation. Teachers are not parts or cogs in a large machine that requires obedience to exact standards and formal argument. Teaching is deliberative, but not with the machine-Like precision of an automated system. It is a gentle art that needs to be understood in the same way that other arts are understood: by a search for new meanings and clarity of thought rather than technical conformity to objective standards of practice. Aristotle has observed that, "It is a mark of the educated man and proof of his culture that in every subject he looks for only so much precision as its nature permit^."^^ The conflation of teaching with precisionist accounts that make appeal to logical exactitude has been too persistent and too encompassing. To see teaching as an interpretive performance is to restore it to the human sphere of reflective action.

28. Robert Scholes, Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English (New Haven: Yak University Press, 1985).

29. See The Ethics of Aristotle: The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. J.A.K. Thomson (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1955).

teaching and the interpretation of texts

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