Teaching as a social practice

This article follows up on a focus in current educational research on teachers as important actors for children's learning and well-being, but it questions a linear relationship between learning and teaching and addresses the question “what is teaching in practice?” The theoretical background for this approach is the concept of social practice as presented by (among others) Dreier, Lave, Axel and Juul Jensen, and a critical psychological understanding of subjectivity (Holzkamp, Dreier). By focusing on teachers’ conduct of everyday teaching, the paper provides possibilities to learn about what it means to teach. The main point of the article is that seeing social practice as a condition for teaching is misleading because teaching is a social practice. Instead of believing that teachers must ‘consider social conditions’ in order to teach, we must grasp teaching as a social practice that is inevitably part of what else goes on in everyday school life. The analysis to be presented is based on participant observations in two Danish schools, and on interviews with four teachers over a period of two years.