Coteaching, as Colearning, is Praxis

Paper presented at the 1999 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Montréal, Québec.

All correspondence concerning this paper should be addressed to Wolff-Michael Roth, Lansdowne Professor, Applied Cognitive Science, Faculty of Education, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, V8W 3N4, Canada.
Email: mroth@uvic.ca
Tel: 1-250-721-7885
FAX: 1-250-721-7767

In this study, we report on our learning as we engaged in a four-month experience of coteaching a water unit in a Grade 7 classroom. Working at each other's elbows, in praxis, provided many opportunities to learn together: teaching and about teaching. We use two examples, learning to ask productive questions and struggling to enact an orderly curriculum to show how coteaching affords colearning, and how the lack of coteaching leads to struggling. Our work also suggests that coteaching allows for a mode of learning that is not captured by Schön's notions of reflection-in-practice and reflection-on-practice. We conclude that coteaching, as colearning, is praxis.
 

The action of the practical sense is a kind of necessary coincidence. . . between an habitus and a field: she who embodies the structures of the world immediately finds herself at home without deliberation; she enacts, without thinking about it, the things to do; and she produces, `comme il faut,' programs of action pointillistically inscribed in the situation in and as objective possibilities and urgencies which orient her practice without being constituted in terms of norms and imperatives, clearly separated by and for a consciousness and will. (Bourdieu, 1997, p. 171, our translation and adaptation)

Traditional cognitive theories of information processing led to conceptions of teacher preparation in which knowledge about teaching and subject matter was first transferred to (or constructed by) the preservice (or inservice) teacher to be applied later in praxis, first during the practicum and subsequently during the regular teaching job. However, science teacher educators have long found that although a particular student teacher may be able to talk about practice very well, in the remove from practice, watching him reveals that he is far from competent practice (Roth, 1998c). Traditional psychologically-oriented research thematised this gap as a deficit, an individual problem that interferes with preservice teachers' application of knowledge previously acquired (or constructed) but not applied in the practice of teaching. "Experts," on the other hand, are said not have these deficits and novice-expert research focuses on the "superior" reasoning or skills to which those have to aspire who do not "have" them. One of the fundamental problems with such arguments is that it confounds abilities with experience: Experts' abilities are seldom separated from their familiarity with their field, contexts and problems, and experience of participating in a set of practices. In our work regarding the competencies in science and science teaching, we take a different tack by focusing on coparticipation in the practices of interest: With respect to science teaching, we are interested in what teachers can learn when they coteach, that is, when they work at another teacher's elbows. We are interested in coteaching, which is a coparticipation in the ongoing work practices of teachers because of the beneficial effects coparticipation has shown in other fields of practice. The purpose of our paper is to highlight the affordances of coteaching to colearning and the constraints to learning when a beginning teacher has to learn an aspect of her practice in a non-coteaching mode.
 

A considerably body of research on everyday practices--including mathematics in the workplace (e.g., Lave 1988), everyday scientific laboratory work (e.g., Jordan & Lynch, 1993), and sociological research (Bourdieu, 1992)--shows that what makes practitioners competent is not so much the knowledge they acquired in formal institutions or from books but the knowledgeability which they come to embody by coparticipating with competent others in a community of practice. This knowledgeability, although difficult if not impossible to thematise, lies at the heart of competent praxis in the way described by Bourdieu in the opening quote. For example, much of the research on everyday mathematics shows that performance on everyday mathematics-involving tasks is not only much higher than that on paper and pencil, school-like tasks, but that it does not significantly correlate with years of schooling. However, years of participating in the everyday mathematics-related practices--preparing dairy shipments, calculating the cost of orders, figuring best buys, calculating street corner bets, making profit selling candy in street markets, etc.--is related to competence and performance. Thus, coparticipation in practice appears to be a teaching-learning environment that allows people to become competent (Lave, 1996). However, whereas coparticipation is a prevalent form of learning in many domains--becoming a pilot, Mayan midwife, carpenter, street vendor, bank teller, physicist, and so forth--educators generally do not make use of this mode of professional production and reproduction. A closer look at a special case of learning by coparticipating provides us with lenses to look at science teaching. We focus on this example because it illustrates how coparticipation leads to teaching and learning even in cases when they are not thematised (as it occurs in formal institutions of teaching and learning). In this case, teaching and learning are invisible, akin to Bourdieu's (1992) pedagogy of silence, yet latently present, in the lived world of the coparticipants. To us, Becoming-a-Mayan-midwife is such an important and powerful referent for theorising "learning to teach" because it derives from a context in which neither teaching nor learning are thematised.
 

A well documented example of learning by coparticipating, in praxis, is that of becoming a Mayan midwife (Jordan, 1987, 1989). A young Mayan girl, especially when she lives in a family where there is already a midwife, "absorbs" the essence of midwifery in the process of growing up and in the course of her life span. She is familiar with the activities of a midwife, the kinds of stories people tell who come to her, the kinds of herbs and other remedies are to be collected. As a child, sitting in the back of the room, she hears the stories told of difficult births and sees prenatal massages being given. Later, when she is a little older, she may be passing massages, running errands, and getting needed supplies. After she has had a child herself, she might accompany the midwife on a visit, doing the kinds of things other women have done to her during labour. When she finally decides to become a midwife herself, she begins to pay more attention to the ongoing activities. She also takes on more and more of the workload of the experienced midwife she has been accompanying, beginning with the routine aspects of birthing and ending with the culturally most significant aspect of birth, the birth of the placenta.

Here, learning is not relegated to a routinised and institutionalised passage of information from designated authorities to designated learners as an individual moves through a factory-like education system. Rather, the driving force of Mayan midwifery apprenticeship is the work of preparing for birth and bringing-forth children. Rather than preparing for real life and faking the real thing, an individual becomes a midwife by coparticipating in legitimate peripheral and increasing ways in useful and necessary tasks. At the core of learning by coparticipating therefore is primarily the embodiment of that discourse which is required for getting the job done rather than developing a discourse about the practice. Jordan (1987), who apprenticed to a Mayan midwife, made two remarkable observations. First, she found it difficult if not impossible to specify exactly how she was taught, and whatever she received in instruction came from a midwife doing her job rather than from a teacher doing teaching. Second, because the apprentices' performance was driven by the work, there was little praise and blame, for they are unnecessary in a context where success and failure are obvious and go without saying. In many cases, the learner is the evaluator rather than the expert/teacher. We believe that there are valuable lessons to be learned from this extended example for learning to teach.
 

Although it has been suggested that learning to teach in school contexts has potential for teacher preparation (e.g., Joyce & Clift, 1984), very little has been done to understand what (science) teachers can learn when they coteach with a peer. After having conducted several studies of teachers teaching together (Masciotra & Roth, 1998; Roth, 1998a, 1998b, 1998c; Roth, Bowen, Boyd, & Boutonné, 1998), we think that coteaching provides for a mode of teaching and learning, a pedagogy which leaves teaching and learning invisible, that characterises the appropriation of complex practices from tailoring to nuclear physics, from midwifery to biochemical analysis, or from everyday mathematics in a dairy factory to research in sociology.

Traditionally, the term team teaching was used to refer to the situation where two or more teachers work together in the same classroom. We prefer the notion of coteaching over team teaching because it makes salient certain issues closer to our phenomenological commitments. Coteaching foregrounds the individual who coparticipates in a collective activity, whereas team teaching highlights the collective work of a group which, according to Durkheim, is an irreducible phenomenon in its own right. Coteaching is consistent with the symmetry between Self and Another, whereas the notion of team teaching has a strong social over individual slant. A literature review of team (peer) teaching turns up very little and virtually nothing about the forms of learning that might accrue from working together in a science classroom. One exception comes from our own work in an elementary school where resident teachers cotaught with former teachers who had turned to curriculum development and university teaching (e.g., Roth, 1998a, 1998b, 1998c).

In these studies, three kinds of teacher learning became apparent: learning-in-practice, learning to talk about (or theorise) practice, and learning by attempting to put theory (propositional knowledge) into practice. First, coparticipating teachers learned from each other as they taught, side by side, when there was little time out for reflecting (in or on practice). Coparticipation in ongoing activity, understanding, teaching, and learning were intricately bound up with each other. Coteaching, as colearning, is praxis: that is, they are constituted by understanding, a partial and open-ended process, and by coparticipation in ongoing activity. Second, coparticipating teachers began to articulate practices as they watched videotapes, debriefed their lessons with observers, or talked among themselves about teaching episodes; in this way, they linked their teaching to propositional knowledge which they were faintly aware of, but which had not affected their practice. Finally, there were situations when the two teachers attempted to implement theoretically derived precepts, such as achieving equal learning opportunities for boys and girls. Here, they found themselves bound up in trying to find a balance of apparently competing precepts; they had to learn about the practical adequacy of generalisations to their own teaching practices.
 

Our study was conducted in one of the Grade 7 classes of a local middle school where we cotaught a 4-month unit on water including, as topics, physical properties of water, water cycle, and ecology of a watershed.
 

[Nadely :] At the time, I was a preservice teacher with a bachelors degree in child and youth care in the process of completing my 2-year teacher preparation program. I had taught in this class for a 6-week period during the previous term to complete the student teaching requirement of my program. Now I had returned to the class to complete her 4-month internship with Cam, the regular mathematics and science teacher of the Grade 7 class.

[Michael:] I had become familiar with the school and several of its teachers who wanted to participate in a project centring around the computer-mediated formation of learning communities. Cam was one of the teachers who had agreed to participate, but when the time was ready to begin the study, Nadely had begun her internship. Despite the surprising change in situation, and despite some anxieties on Nadely's part, we agreed to work together. At the time, I had 18 years of teaching experience, most of them at the middle through high school levels; as a department head of science, I had brought about a school-based teacher enhancement program and taught preservice elementary and secondary science teachers.

As the unit developed, we cotaught this water unit bringing together each others' ideas, taking them as the starting point for further activities, questioning, and whole-class conversations. In this class, there were 27 students (15 male, 12 female) five of whom designated as "special needs students." Developmentally, the students seemed to be far apart, some boys and girls having more the appearance of young adults (about 6 feet tall), others looking more like grade 5 students. During the 4-month unit, we not only cotaught many lessons but planned lessons, debriefed, and reflected together on teaching and learning in the classroom. On some activities, we worked more closely together, others we conducted individually. During the first 2 months, we focused largely on the physical and chemical properties of water, whereas the second half was almost exclusively devoted to a stream study in one of the local watersheds. Nine children later presented the data collected during class as part of an open house organised by a local activist group that seeks to raise the entire community's environmental awareness and practices which impact on the watershed (e.g., fertilisation, management of run off water, irrigation, stream bed changes). During this second part, two scientist-environmentalists and one water technician assisted us in conducting data collection at three sites in the creek.

The entire 4-month unit was captured on videotape using two cameras; on occasion, we used remote microphones and audiotapes to record all conversations between Michael and the students during student-centred activities. After each lesson, we debriefed the classroom events. We video- or audio-taped the sessions with Nadely, though she did not attend all of these debriefings with the other team members (Michael Bowen and Sylvie Boutonné) being constrained by additional demands of her role in the school (coaching, supervising, etc.). We frequently met for planning the unit, watching and reflecting about teaching episodes showing either Michael or Nadely. For example, our entire team observed and analysed a video clip that shows Michael with one group of students who had built a model of water from variously-sized marshmallows, toothpicks, and string. We used this tape as a starting point for recurrent conversations about pedagogy, particularly our respective questioning techniques. We also kept daily research notes which, with all the course related artefacts produced by Nadely, the children, and Michael (e.g., tests, overhead transparencies, curriculum planning documents, photos), entered the data base (as HTML-coded, web browser accessible documents).

Our understandings of coteaching and colearning as praxis arise from data analyses that are grounded in hermeneutic phenomenology (Ricoeur, 1990, 1991). Hermeneutic phenomenology is concerned with understanding lived situations and recognises the interdependence of two different interpretive movements. First, hermeneutic, explanation-seeking practices involve critical and informed interpretation. Hermeneutics, concerned with explication, demands a critical distancing of Self from itself and makes use of theoretically-informed but historically-contingent discourses. Second, phenomenological understanding emerges from lived experience of being-in-the-world. It is largely communicated by means of narratives in everyday language, representations that render our immediate worlds by default (i.e., as salient in our activities and available through our familiar language). Whereas the hermeneutic arc of our interpretation his highly reflective and distancing, its phenomenological counterpart comes from being-in-the-world which precedes all reflection, although always communicated by means of some sign system (i.e., vernacular).
Methodologically, we attend to the hermeneutical task by enacting the criteria of credibility, dependability, and confirmability of qualitative research (Guba & Lincoln, 1989) which arise from our prolonged engagement, persistent observation, peer debriefing, progressive subjectivity (process of monitoring developing understandings), and member checks. We use our theoretical apparatus as a way of ordering our experience in existing ways. But we use our own, lived and shared experience of coteaching in this classroom to arrive at phenomenological understandings and use narrative forms for communicating these understandings.
 

Coteaching, that is, practising `at the elbow' of another teacher, affords many opportunities of learning in practice whatever the respective levels of experience and competence. Nadely had identified questioning strategies as one area in which she wanted to improve her practice. Questioning therefore became one of the foci of this action research project. With respect to questioning, conducting whole-class conversations, and planning science lessons, Michael was the more experienced teacher. Another important topic for our discussions was discipline. Here, because of his visitor status and because he knew the students much less than Nadely (who also taught mathematics and did home room duties), Michael was not in the position to deal with these situations in a way he might have done in other contexts. Because the regular teacher of the class was mostly absent, Nadely did not have a counterpart, which constrained the amount she could learn during those four months with respect to classroom control and discipline. Michael, too, by reflecting on lessons that did not work, learned in these situations as he came to understand the role of our bodies in teaching and learning to teach, and the role of literally embodied knowledge. We discuss these examples, questioning and discipline as positive and negative paradigm cases for coteaching and colearning as praxis.
 

Noting Differences in Questioning

The clip notably illustrates that Michael asked questions without immediately ratifying students' responses; three of the four students in the group responded before the next question; and the questions were open-ended so that there was more than one correct response. Michael continued to question students, asking for clarifications and justifications, and thereby helping students to develop their physical science discourse in public and part of the overall activity. While Michael was questioning, Nadely was relieved for a moment of the pressures to act in real time and with no time out, and therefore had a moment to reflect, as the action unfolded, as coteacher, and therefore in action, about what was happening. Almost without transition, she then moved from the reflective moment on Michael's interactions with another group, and begins questioning a group on her own. It was in such moments that Nadely constructed differences between her own and Michael's ways of questioning. We therefore chose asking productive questions as one aspect for an increased focus of our collective work.
 

Coteaching, as Praxis

As he asked the question, Michael did not have to think. When Bill suggested that salt was needed to make the light come on, Michael spontaneously asked the question what would happen if the two open leads were pushed into the salt. Without reflecting, the student suggestion had opened an inquiry into the question whether salt is conductive. Of course, after the fact Michael can explain that he knows salt is conductive, and that the conductivity comes from the dissociation of salt molecule NaCl into the two ions Na⁺ and Cl^-. The salt molecule itself is not conductive, and therefore he would not expect that the light would come on. Furthermore, students have already seen that water did not conduct electricity (at least not well enough for the light to come on) because only one tenth of one millionth of water molecules H₂O are dissociated, that is, in ionic form (H⁺, OH^-) which makes them conductive. Therefore, there is an opportunity that students would experience a cognitive conflict which makes them think about the question why neither salt nor water appear conductive, but a mixture of the two would be. Much as Bourdieu (1997) suggested in the opening quote, Michael embodies the structures of the chemistry and physics, finding himself at home without deliberation whatever students suggested. He enacted, without thinking about it, the questions to ask; and he produced, `comme il faut,' questions which existed as objective possibilities that oriented his practice.

Nadely's relation to the questions was different. Having time out from leading the whole-class conversation, she could reflect, but without loosing track of the ongoing activity. That is, she reflected as the activity evolved. But because all reflection requires an object, which is always an object different from the acting subject, she had to be able to extract herself from the ongoing action. Yet she reflected on the action without, nevertheless, having the time required for the reflection-on-action described by Schön (1987). Only when we sat together watching the videoclip of such episodes, we did have the time to truly reflect-on-action.

After we had watched the video clip for the questioning strategies, Nadely reflected on the interactions between Michael and the students and compared them to what she had observed on a video recorded earlier in the unit featuring her own questioning of students.
 

[Nadely:] I was noticing that you are asking them, `What does this mean?,' `Can you tell me about X?', `What is it?,' `Why is this like this?,' and `How do you know that it is like this?' rather than just say, `Yeah, you're right' or `No, you're wrong. This is it.'

Explaining Questioning

[Michael:] I think for me it is sort of important to listen. Because I know from experience that I could tell students something and they accept it. They might or might not accept it, but certainly not really understand it. So what I try to do is listen and then question, `How do you know?', listen and then question, `How can we find out.'

Increasing Questioning Competencies

Nadely is in the process of introducing the unit on ecology and asks students what they do associate with the term "ecology." Michael is standing in the back watching. A few kids shout out: bugs, animals, plants, ecosystems. Tony is the next one in line.
 

Tony: It's a big circle of life. Nadely: So, a circle of life? What do you mean by this? Tony: Some things connect to some things, and other things connect to other things, and they all keep feeding, keep each other alive. Nadely: So connections? Tony: Well, chains. It is hard to explain, but, if there is one kind of animal, like, there is plants, right, there is plants, and then there is herbivores Nadely: STEPHEN! (1.5) ENOUGH! (1.3) I don't have the patience today, do you understand? (3.3) Tony: and then there is herbivores eating the plants. And then there is carnivores that eat the herbivores, and it goes on and on. But if one of them is taken away, then they all die. Because without them, without the plants, the herbivores would be gone, and without the herbivores, the carnivores would be all dead. Nadely: You have all of these big words, herbivores and carnivores, can you tell us what they all mean? Tony: Yeah, herbivores means that they eat plants, and carnivore means that they eat meat.

[Michael:] Nadely's questioning has changed so much since the beginning. It is amazing how questioning has become part of her being-in-the-classroom. She doesn't accept Tony's answer, but asks him to elaborate. When he used words that she thought others might not understand, she follows up and makes him provide an explanation for each term. Nadely is going to be a great teacher/

Episodes such as this evidence the tremendous development in Nadely's questioning over the four month period. As Michael's ongoing reflections illustrate, Nadely now allows conversations to emerge in which students do not just provide single word answers, but scaffolds the emergence of elaborative scientific discourse to occur. Tony's initial response was "circle of life." Yet this fragment tells little about Tony's competence in talking about ecosystems. By asking him to explain, she provided an opportunity for Tony to elaborate on his notion of circle of life. Nadely sensed that some of the concepts that appeared in Tony's talk may have not made much sense to others in the classroom. On the spot, and without having to think about what to ask next, she followed up asking for interpretants of the terms, that is, for other terms that elaborate the relationship between the original terms and their referents (Roth, Masciotra, & Bowen, 1998).

The episode also shows how continuing problems with discipline mediated the whole-class interactions. Whereas there were no remarkable incidences while the students did field work in the creek, or during the follow-up period when they analysed their data and inspected the captured organisms, other lessons, particularly whole-class sessions where disrupted in various ways. Thus, whereas classifications of practices into subject matter knowledge, subject matter pedagogical knowledge, and general pedagogical knowledge (Shulman, 1987) may be useful for analysing teaching practice through reflection-on-action, they are less useful for understanding the complexities of the ongoing classroom where all three types of knowledge are enacted at the same time and mediate each other. Thus, a discipline problem mediates (interferes with) subject matter pedagogy, and perceived subject matter competence may lead to classrooms without discipline problems ever arising (as it frequently happens with mathematics and physics classes). In the present situation, shouting Stephen's name, and explaining her low tolerance levels for the day, followed by a long (in conversational terms) period of complete silence provided the necessary context for Tony to continue. However, dealing with the students' attention and discipline was not always an easy matter in this class. The following section shows how the absence of a peer with competence in dealing with this class made the appropriation of practices related to classroom control exceedingly difficult.

Scene from the Classroom

Over the 18 years of his teaching, Michael has developed a sense for dealing with students in the here an now of the classroom, especially in his classrooms. However, this experience is also a source of prejudices (in the sense of pre-judgements that ground all of our perceptions [Heidegger, 1977]) evidenced in Michael's initial (but silent) reaction to Nadely's action. Nadely currently being in charge, Michael could let past images rise which, because of their emotional intensity, gave him instantly a different perspective on Nadely's actions. Many of our conversations topicalised the behaviour-related problems in this class.
 

Teaching, as Learning, Without a Peer

[Nadely:] I felt like just thrown into it right away. I think Cam just wanted to throw me in there and have me figure out what worked and what didn't work. I find that frustrating that I didn't have any modelling because I know there's other ways, I know there's other things out there and I know that it works but I haven't seen it.

An earlier study had shown how classroom interactions and the nature of discourse changed with Michael's positioning in respect to the class and the focal artefacts (Roth & McGinn, 1996). That is, without reflecting, Michael had positioned himself such that students who interrupted the lesson quieted down, inattentive students were drawn back into the conversations, and locus of the conversations changed from groups of students in one area of the classroom to those in another. In this classroom, Nadely was more at home than Michael who felt more as a visitor than a resident teacher. Thus, although Michael was more senior in terms of his understanding of subject matter and subject matter pedagogy, he felt junior to Nadely in this classroom with respect to disciplinary issues and silently expected her to deal with any issues arising. Without a coteaching peer who could have played the part Michael did with respect to questioning, Nadely (and in a lesser sense Michael) had to manage by stumbling through.

Learning in Situation: Particulars

[Nadely:] Well I think, I think that it's just the here and now. It's easy to think of, `Well somebody does this to me then I follow this and this and this.' But every situation is so different and every student is so different. I mean for me, as far as classroom control, it has just all been trial and error; that is, learning as I went along finding what works or what doesn't work. I mean, this class is the way this class is because of the individuals that are in there.

[Nadely:] With Tory, what I found worked was when I wasn't always down pounding him, being on his back, and asking to speak to him in the hallway, at lunch time, or after school. He finally took a step back. I found that when I did that with Tory, it really worked and he just sort of did his thing. When he needs help he asks for help. He did not feel like he was being singled out as the one that was in the wrong all the time.

[Michael:] After having completed my Ph.D., I returned to the secondary classroom for a three-year period. I soon realised that while my statistics-based research provided broad generalisations, they were useless for me as a teacher who was dealing with specific students, having specific problems, on specific days, and during specific periods in their lives. The unexplained variations, error variance, in my statistical work were the very things that were important in the classroom. What I needed to act appropriately (tactfully) was the knowledge of the particulars, in each situation, whereas the grant narratives of educational research often did violence to the individuals involved.

Changing Practices by Reflecting on Action with Others

[Nadely:] I've talked a lot to the other teachers that work with this group, about how they deal with them, because they have so many problems. We all just sort of talk about what we are doing and when it is not working. But I know that one of the teachers right now is just keeping track of things and is just writing down their names and then, there's this process that they go through and it seems to be working but it only works for so long.

We conclude our coteaching experience by noting that coparticipation shows great potential for preservice and inservice teacher development. By working alongside an experienced teacher--rather than just being observed on occasions by sponsoring teacher and university supervisor--the preservice teacher experienced and participated in praxis in addition to having the opportunity to engage with experienced teachers in reflection-on-action and in curriculum planning. Experienced teachers also learn by working alongside another teacher even an inexperienced one. Every instant that the Other asks an unexpected question, deals with a situation differently than he would have done, becomes an opportunity to embody new ways, for reflecting in action on possible consequences, and reflecting on action on possible means for organising lessons in a different way. As another experienced teacher in a similar coteaching project pointed out, two months of coteaching a unit on engineering for elementary students improved her teaching more than it would have had she "taken three university courses" (Roth, 1998b).

When both of us felt ill at ease, such as with respect to discipline, our learning was constrained. In this case, it might have helped us tremendously to coteach with Cam who seemed in his element when it came to organising this class for, and to capture their attention during, whole-class activities. In Nadely's teaching, and without the experience of coparticipating with a more experienced teacher, her learning was constrained and involved a great deal of trial and error search and testing of ways of controlling the class. In Michael's case, coteaching with Cam may likely have provided more opportunities for all students to coparticipate in, and therefore colearn from, the ongoing conversations related to the physical, biological, and environmental properties of water. What might have happened can be seen in the following episode recorded in another Grade 7 class in the same school where Michael cotaught his first lesson with Loretta a few days after Nadely had finished her internship.
 

[Vignette:] After a several student suggestions about how to measure to stream speed, Michael had asked students what they would do if they had 1 meter for floating the various objects they had suggested given that the time measurement might not be that accurate. Jamie proposed to conduct 5 or 6 measurements, two girls suggested that they had the same idea. Brett then commented that a student should go into the creek and push the object. Loretta intervened: "Brett, I want really appropriate answers or you won't go with us to the creek. One way or the other, you decide." Ken, who had turned around agreeingly grinning at Brett, turned back to the front. After a 4 second pause during which nobody spoke, Michael continued his questioning, "What can we do to make the comparisons between the two sampling sites fair?"

Coteaching may therefore be an ideal vehicle not only for professional training but also for inservice teacher professional development. One can easily envision inservice efforts in which one competent science teacher coteaches with about three elementary teachers at a time. Such coteaching would come with an additional benefit in that it overcomes the often deleterious effects of professional isolation which relegates teachers to "their" classrooms with few opportunities to coparticipate with peers as part of doing their work.

Where might this tremendous learning from? and Why do we learn so much by coparticipating in ongoing practices with others who already have some familiarity of the situation? Phenomenologically-oriented educators such as van Manen (1994, 1995) suggest that it is because we find ourselves first of all in a world to which we belong, physically and socially, and in which we cannot but participate, that we are subsequently able, to set up objects in opposition to ourselves, objects that we reclaim as knowable. There is consequently no self-understanding that is not mediated by signs, symbols, and texts. Because of the fundamental condition of existence, being-in-the-world, the way we normally exist and act in our world, we should not separate and individualise competence as silent and implicit knowledge, theories enclosed by our skulls. Rather, when we are interacting with students, then we are part of this classroom, filled with these students, at this time, teaching this subject matter, on this day.

Because teaching is so embodied and tied to our experience of being-in-the-classroom, it comes as no surprise that learning to teach requires the personal experience of teaching in classrooms. By coteaching, beginning teachers can observe and imitate the more seasoned peer, how he walks about the classroom, calls on students, waits, feels confident, deals with a difficult situation always right then and there. The student teacher learns with her body to feel confident about asking questions, to call on students, to wait, and to deal with different answers coming from the students. This confidence is not an affective aspect of one's knowing, it is active knowledgeability itself, knowing what to do or say, and what to avoid doing and saying. As other studies have also shown (e.g., Roth, 1998b), this knowledgeability is a form of embodied knowing acquired in praxis. The present study shows that such knowledgeability comes to be embodied with much greater ease through coteaching, which is colearning, in praxis.

We conclude by suggesting that the study of teaching praxis needs to be sensitive to the experiential quality of practical knowledge, an acknowledgement that much of the instant knowing, enacting in real time issues from one's body and immediate world (van Manen, 1995). Our work with and as teachers allows us to evolve understandings from the continuous interplay of (a) critical and rigorous inquiry in the tradition of an hermeneutics of text and action which is informed by past research on teaching and (b) understanding that arises from being-in-the-classroom and enacting caring relationships with Others (students) in the act of teaching. Our ongoing work suggests that coteaching affords tremendous learning experiences not only for preservice teachers but also for practising school and university teachers trying to understand the lifeworlds of teaching and trajectories of competencies in these lifeworlds.
 

This work was made possible in part by Grant 410-96-0681 (to WMR) from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Our thanks go to G. Michael Bowen and Sylvie Boutonné for their help during lesson preparations, data collection, and data interpretation.
 

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