Curi 12012

Effects Beyond Effectiveness: Teachingas a Performative Act

WARREN MARK LIEW

National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological UniversitySingapore

ABSTRACT

This article develops the familiar metaphor of teaching as performance towards adefinition of teaching as performative act, where words and actions aim to effectcognitive, affective, and behavioral changes in learners. To what extent, however,are the consequences of pedagogical actions commensurate with their intendedeffects? Can a science of “effective teaching” effectively delineate, ascertain, andpredict the effects of teachers’ pedagogical practices? Through the lens of speechact theory, I argue that teaching consists of pedagogical perlocutions—speech actswhose observed and unobserved effects on learners exceed authorial intention andscientific prediction. Attempts to subdue this excess of effects lend themselves todefinitions of teacher effectiveness scripted by the instruments and institutionsof scientifically based research. I conclude by considering the ways in which thesedefinitions of effects and effectiveness are themselves the performative effects ofperformance-based teacher assessment regimes.

INTRODUCTION

This article revisits the familiar claim that pedagogy, in all its complexity,demands to be understood as an art of performance that resists scientificexposition. Drawing on speech act theory (Austin, 1962, 1979), I examinein particular the performative nature of teaching, as well as the performa-tive operations of scientific discourse in research and policy on teachereffectiveness. By “performative” I refer to the ways in which words performactions and produce effects beyond their referential content, a premise firstexpounded in J. L. Austin’s (1962) lectures on How To Do Things With Words.At stake in my analysis is the proposition that pedagogical actions consistcrucially of speech acts called perlocutions, so that the performative natureof teaching may be said to inhere in its consequences or perlocutionaryeffects. A theory of pedagogical perlocutions, then, contends that teachinginevitably engenders multiple effects on audiences, while inviting multipleinterpretations of its “effectiveness” vis-à-vis its intended outcomes. Such

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© 2013 by The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of TorontoCurriculum Inquiry 43:2 (2013)Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington Road,Oxford OX4 2DQ, UKdoi: 10.1111/curi.12012

consequential uncertainties, I argue, radically undermine the attempts ofeducational science to construct an assured “knowledge base” of teachingeffects and teacher effectiveness.

I begin by introducing the central idea of teaching as performative act, viaa rehearsal of the metaphor of teaching as a performing art. Courting thephilosophical insights of Austinian speech act theory, I present a critique ofthe limits of scientific positivism, with respect to programmatic attempts byeducational researchers to establish a science of pedagogy. If pedagogy, asWilliam James once asserted, consists in “the art and science of teaching,”then it is necessary to consider the extent to which science must collaboratewith the arts and humanities to explicate the elusive quality of pedagogicalperformances. Espousing an “incredulity toward metanarratives” (Lyotard,1984, p. xxiv), I proceed to examine the problems of interpretive subjec-tivity and causal indeterminacy surrounding the nature of pedagogicalspeech acts. This postmodern perspective yields, moreover, a political cri-tique of the performative nature of scientifically based research, particu-larly its complicity in the “truth-making” effects of performance-basedteacher assessments. My aim, in conclusion, is to revisit the importantcontributions of “humanities-oriented research in education” (AmericanEducational Research Association, 2009) toward a more critically reflexiveagenda in educational research.

TEACHING AS A PERFORMATIVE ACT

Numerous scholars have expounded on the aesthetic dimensions ofteaching (e.g., Eisner, 1983, 1998; Horne, 1917; James, 1899; Rubin,1985; Schön, 1987), while several others have affirmed the analogicallinks between pedagogy and performance (Alexander, Anderson, &Gallegos, 2005; Dawe, 1984; Garoian, 1999; McLaren, 1999; Pineau, 1994;Prendergast, 2008; Sarason, 1999). Emerging center stage is the teacher-artist performing in a classroom theater before a live audience of stu-dents. Like the theater actor, the teacher-as-performer assumes a stagepersona, asserts stage presence, and communicates through verbal andnonverbal actions to engage—even educate—the hearts and minds ofstudent-audiences.

More than a public spectacle designed to entertain and enthrall, apedagogical performance can be read as the ritual process of enacting acurriculum script, such as a lesson plan with specified learning outcomes.Drawing on this distinction between text and performance, we canbroadly distinguish two types of pedagogical performance. The first, oftenreferred to as the “lecture,” consists of a monologic text written, pre-pared, often rehearsed, and delivered with minimal interruptions beforea captive (or comatose) audience. The second, more demanding modeof pedagogy relies on a flexible script jointly enacted by the teacher and

262 WARREN MARK LIEW

her students. When students participate in a classroom discussion, theybecome co-performers at liberty to enact the play in an infinite variety ofways, according to the contextual contingencies of live participation. Inthis scene, lesson plans, syllabus guidelines, and curriculum standardsprovide at best a flexible template for action, insofar as a teacher’sactions and decisions are infinitely susceptible to revision and reinterpre-tation in the midst of real-time interactions. In the absence of rulesand formulaic scripts, dialogic pedagogies emerge through complexactions and interactions that are at once strategic and spontaneous, cal-culated and contingent. Here, the teacher’s role is to orchestrate thatproductive balance between repetition and improvisation, conformity andcreativity, in concert with students as “spect-actors” in a live pedagogicalperformance.

On stage and off stage, schoolteachers characteristically take on multipleprofessional identities: as classroom managers, caregivers, disciplinarians,counselors, curriculum planners, administrators, researchers, and socialworkers. As Charlotte Danielson (1996) writes, teaching consists of “notone but several other professions, combining the skills of business manage-ment, human relations, and theater arts” (p. 2). Within these recognizableroles, teachers enact multiple identities through an embodied repertoire ofwords, gestures, postures, facial expressions, and outward appearances. Associal performers, teachers manage their own expressions, as well as theimpressions of diverse audiences, in relation to a set of professional normsand cultural expectations. This dramaturgical labor of “impressionmanagement” (Goffman, 1959) entails, moreover, a form of cultural work,for to participate in the ritual practices of formal schooling is to enactthe cultural norms that underpin these social institutions. Such culturalperformances—to invoke a concept first theorized in the work of anthropolo-gists Milton Singer and Victor Turner—suggest that “a performance act,interactional in nature and involving symbolic forms and live bodies, pro-vides a way to constitute meaning and affirm individual and cultural values”(Stern & Henderson, 1993, p. 3).

Also contained within the framework of cultural performance are themotifs of critique and resistance. Building on this theme of resistance is agrowing body of scholarship that theorizes teaching through the lenses ofcritical pedagogy and cultural studies. This work on critical performativepedagogy conceives of schools and classrooms as “cultural sites, activelyinvolved in the selective ordering and legitimation of specific forms oflanguage, reasoning, sociality, daily experience and style” (Giroux, 1999, p.xxiv). Critical of these processes of cultural legitimation and reproduction,critical performative pedagogy reimagines the classroom stage as a liminalspace for social activism and political interrogation, where students andteachers engage in critical reflection and action on the possibilities fortransformative interventions within and beyond the received curriculum(Garoian, 1999; McLaren, 1999; Pineau, 2002).

263TEACHING AS A PERFORMATIVE ACT

I have attempted briefly in these prefatory paragraphs to survey thecentral tenets of the performance metaphor as it relates to teaching andschooling, while gesturing toward a burgeoning body of scholarship knownas Performance Studies.1 My chief aim at this juncture is to move beyondnotions of theatrical, social, and cultural performance toward a theoryof linguistic performativity, one that focuses on the power of language toproduce what it names. The starting point for this exploration is a viewof teaching as a rhetorical performance, that is, an art of persuasioninvolving—to adopt Kenneth Burke’s (1950) classic definition—“the use oflanguage as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that bynature respond to symbols” (p. 43). Accordingly, teaching-as-performanceis “a symbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired,and transformed” (Carey, 1988, p. 18). “Reality” as such is not simplyrelayed through referential symbols; rather, it is produced and constitutedthrough these symbols. To elaborate on this philosophical argument, anoverview of speech act theory is in order.

TOWARDS A SPEECH ACT THEORY OFPEDAGOGICAL PERFORMATIVES

In the William James Lectures at Harvard University in 1955, the Englishphilosopher John Langshaw Austin initiated a theory of how human com-municants “do things with words” through speech acts. According to Austin’s(1962) initial schema, any utterance or “locution” can be identified aseither a constative or a performative. Constatives include all descriptive utter-ances, statements of fact, and definitions that purport to report, inform,and state (Searle, 1969). They function as propositional statements that,by referring to objects, facts, events, or states, may be judged to be “true” or“false” on the basis of their referential fidelity.

In contrast, performatives cannot be conventionally evaluated for theirtruth-value; performative utterances, such as naming, betrothing, sentenc-ing, and confessing, do not so much describe a state of affairs as affectthem—that is, they produce effects whereby “the issuing of the utterance is theperforming of an action” (Austin, 1962, p. 163). For example, the declara-tion, “I pronounce you man and wife,” uttered by an appointed authority ina particular ritual setting before a particular group of witnesses, effectivelyestablishes a marriage. Such illocutionary performatives are to be distin-guished by the apparent instantaneity of their appointed effects, facilitatedby the presence of what Austin calls “felicity conditions” (p. 18). There atare least three primary components of a felicitous performative:

(1) Convention: The speaker must be authorized by law or social con-vention to enact the authority invested in his words.

(2) Intention: The speaker must sincerely intend what his words purportto carry out.


(3) Interpretation: The addressee must understand and acknowledgewhat the speaker intends.

Austin drew a further distinction between illocutionary and perlocutionaryperformatives. Unlike illocutionary acts, perlocutionary acts—such as amusing,deterring, confusing, convincing, and persuading one’s audience—exactno immediate purchase on the responses of hearers. Unenforceable bysocial conventions, legal injunctions, or personal assumptions, perlocution-ary utterances may produce consequences that are incongruent with thespeaker’s intentions:

Saying something will often, or even normally, produce certain consequential effectsupon the feelings, thoughts, or actions of the audience, or of the speaker, or ofother persons: and it may be done with the design, intention, or purpose of pro-ducing them. . . . We shall call the performance of this kind, the performance of aperlocutionary act. (Austin, 1962, p. 101, my emphasis)

“Certain” and “may” gesture toward the tentative consequences of perlo-cutions. The act of persuading someone does not, for instance, guaranteethat s/he will be persuaded, however persuasive one’s words might techni-cally be. In Judith Butler’s (1997) summation, “Whereas illocutionary actsproceed by way of conventions, perlocutionary acts proceed by way of conse-quences” (p. 17).

The division of conventions and consequences turns out, nonetheless, tobe an inadequate litmus test.2 To cite one complication: Are illocutions notsimilarly motivated by the intention to produce certain effects on theiraudiences? For example, the illocutionary act of promising accomplishedin the saying of “I promise . . .” seeks also to precipitate various conse-quences that include the addressee’s feelings of satisfaction or surprise, orhis acting in ways that reflect his faith in the speaker’s promise. Here, thequestion of potential and possible effects raises the problem of indetermi-nacy surrounding audience “uptake.” For if the illocutionary utterance of awarning is not interpreted by the addressee as such, then the warningwould not have been effectively carried out. Consequently, “The perfor-mance of an illocutionary act involves the securing of uptake; that is, itinvolves bringing about the understanding of the meaning and of the forceof the locution” (Austin, 1962, pp. 115–116).

Perlocutions appear likewise to require some such notion of “uptake”insofar as the addressee is expected to interpret the speaker’s intentionaccurately by responding appropriately. For example, an innocent jokesecures no uptake if its hearer misconstrues it as an insult and proceeds topunch the joker in the face. Accordingly, Gu (1993) has argued thatperlocutionary effects are predicated on the joint agency of Speaker andHearer: “the perlocutionary act cannot be said to be performed by S alone.It is a joint endeavor between S and H. It involves S’s performance ofspeech acts and H’s performance of response-acts” (p. 422).


In sum, intention, convention, and interpretation each play a necessarybut insufficient role in securing the intended effect of uptake in both illocu-tionary and perlocutionary speech acts. Indeed, whether or not there existsa clear illocutionary/perlocutionary distinction remains an essentially con-tested issue. What I wish to propose for the purposes of this article is that allspeech acts harbor a perlocutionary charge. Consequently, one might rea-sonably assert that the performative nature of pedagogy lies crucially in itsdeployment of perlocutionary acts.

PEDAGOGICAL PERLOCUTIONS

Committed to “doing things with words,” teachers do not merely traffic inconstatives, that is, they do not simply represent and communicate ideas,knowledge, and information. Rather, teaching consists invariably of speechacts that seek to “produce certain consequential effects upon the feelings,thoughts, or actions of the audience.” It is not enough that a teacher’sutterances be understood; what she says should also bring about certaincognitive, affective, or behavioral changes in her students. The perlocu-tionary charge of teaching, then, consists precisely in its desire to generatedesirable learning outcomes. Just as a teacher’s pedagogical intention is tocause students to learn, so learning is predicated on the perlocutionarynature of pedagogical practices. I call these practices pedagogical perlocutions.

What might a simple example of a pedagogical perlocution look/soundlike? Suppose that Professor X declares, “All scientifically based research ispolitically motivated,” quoting a line from one of his course readings. Inproviding this piece of information (an illocutionary act), he intends also toprovoke critical responses from his audience (a perlocutionary act). Con-sidered in its pedagogical context, the professor can be said to have issueda performative speech act calculated to generate a variety of pedagogicaleffects: for example, to convince the audience, challenge their assumptions,invite demurrals, generate reflection, elicit questions, and so on.

What is crucial to note here is the range of actual and potential effects.Situated in the context-bound specificities of the communicative moment,the effects of any speech act are implicated in a plurality of audienceinterpretations. Multiple speech acts engender multiple meanings andeffects, some of which imminently elude the intentions of the speaker/teacher. This certainly appears to be the case when we consider that whilespeakers perform illocutionary acts for their intended audiences, they mayalso be inadvertently addressing other hearers or “eavesdroppers” (Clark &Carlson, 1982). The picture grows more complex when we acknowledgethat the same utterance, accompanied by different intonations, gestures,and facial expressions, may represent different speech acts. Even an“explicit” performative such as “I hereby swear that the sum of angles in anequilateral triangle is 180 degrees” (where the illocutionary force is ren-dered explicitly with the verbal indicators “hereby” and “swear”), can carry


a different meaning if accompanied by an ironic grin. The force of anyspeech act, then, is not immanent in its linguistic form or propositionalcontext, but is simultaneously influenced by the communicative effects ofnonverbal actions.3

On this preliminary account, perlocutionary acts can be seen as genera-tive of any number of intended and unintended effects on both intendedand unintended audiences. The same would apply to the performativenature of pedagogical acts. Indeed, that pedagogical perlocutions commu-nicate more than the sum of their parts bears important implications for apredictive science of teaching, a point that this article will later explore.Without delving into the finer details of linguistic theory and scholarshipfor now, we can at least establish the essentially unruly nature of performa-tive acts by honing in on three postulations with regard to perlocutions.These postulations have been referred to as the Multiplicity Thesis, theInfinity Thesis, and the Intention-Irrelevance Thesis (Bach & Harnish,1979; Gaines, 1979; Gu, 1993). Table 1 provides a summary of these theses,alongside parallel propositions regarding the nature of pedagogicalperlocutions.

Taken together, these perlocutionary theses find expression in the gapsand silences between intention and interpretation, between the visible andthe invisible, and between the ephemeral and the durable. There are,therefore, three fundamental difficulties that an empirical account ofteaching effects must grapple with:

(1) Interpretive subjectivity: The successful uptake of an intendedperlocutionary effect depends less on authorial intention than on

TABLE 1Pedagogical Illustrations of Three Perlocutionary Theses

Perlocutionary Thesis Proposition Pedagogical Application

Multiplicity Thesis Saying something canproduce multiple effectson multiple persons.

Any pedagogical actengenders differenteffects on differentlearners.

Infinity Thesis A speech act can engendervirtually limitless effects.

Any pedagogical actengenders potentiallylimitless effects on thesame learner, from theimmediate present tothe unforeseeablefuture.

Intention IrrelevanceThesis

A speaker’s intentionsbehind an utterancedo not determine itsperlocutionary effects.

Any pedagogical actengenders a multiplicityof intended andunintended effects.


audience interpretation. A troubling implication is that a teacher’sgood intentions, executed in the form of scientifically based “bestpractices,” might nonetheless generate undesired effects.

(2) Invisibility: Perlocutions lend themselves to a variety of cognitive,emotive, physical, or motor reflexive effects (Gu, 1993), some of whichconsist of matter that the eye cannot descry. Changes in one’s beliefsystems, for example, may go undetected under the scrutiny offormal assessments. Similarly, certain affective outcomes (e.g.,changes in moral perspectives, psychological states) elude the“objective” measures of standardized test instruments.

(3) Mutability: Learning outcomes that “stick” over time might be saidto furnish the best indications of instructional effectiveness. Aneffective lesson on the dangers of substance abuse, for example,should ensure that learners never willingly experiment with drugs.Yet, persuasive warnings do not guard against the threat of tempta-tion. Likewise, even the most “highly qualified” teacher would behard-pressed to guarantee the durability of her students’ learningthrough the near and distant future. There lurks the possibility thatany desired perlocutionary effect obtained under optimal learningconditions might still be dissipated by the intervening effects ofuntold presage, context, and process variables.

Taken together, the triple threat of interpretive subjectivity, invisibility,and mutability exemplifies the chronic instability of pedagogical perlocu-tions. Ungoverned by authorial intention and social convention, the effectsof a perlocutionary act are contingent on a complex concatenation ofvariables that span the horizon of the seen, the unseen, and the unfore-seen. To (mis)appropriate a theoretical trope in statistical analysis,pedagogical perlocutions suffer from “effects sizes” that are at once immea-surable and indeterminate. To speak of the perlocutionary nature of teachingis to acknowledge that the actual and potential effects of any set of peda-gogical acts are neither bound by intention nor founded on convention.Just as a locutionary act cannot be collapsed with its perlocutionary effects,so teaching as perlocutionary cause cannot be equated with learning as perlocu-tionary effect. To acknowledge the perlocutionary nature of pedagogical per-formances, then, is to recognize that pedagogical effects are irreducible toa predictable schema of causality, conventionality, and intentionality.Teachers decidedly deliver more than they design.

GRAPPLING WITH UNCERTAIN EFFECTS: SCIENTIFICALLY BASEDRESEARCH ON TEACHING

In the early 20th century, the American psychologist Edward Thorndike(1910) asserted that experimental research in educational psychologywould culminate in a rigorous science of causal analysis:


A complete science of psychology would tell every fact about everyone’s intellectand character and behavior, would tell the cause of every change in human nature,would tell the result which every educational force—every act of every person thatchanged any other or the agent himself—would have. (p. 6)

Thorndike’s vision of Enlightenment rationality succeeded in inspiringgenerations of devotees. Since the turn of the century, educationalresearchers have looked expectantly to the possibility of reforming educa-tion into a precise science of causal relations (Lagemann, 1997; Roberts,1968). Between 1999 and 2002, a series of federal laws in the United Stateswere passed that aimed to raise the quality, credibility, and utility of edu-cational research. The most notable of these was the Education SciencesReform Act in 2002, which resulted in a federal mandate to promote“scientifically based research” (SBR) under the guidance of the NationalResearch Council. Written into the No Child Left Behind Act (U.S. Depart-ment of Education, 2010a), SBR is defined in part as “research that involvesthe application of rigorous, systematic, and objective procedures to obtainreliable and valid knowledge relevant to education activities and programs”(Section 9101[37]). Among its initiatives was the establishment of twoexpert online reference manuals for teachers, teacher educators, research-ers, and policy makers: the Best Evidence Encyclopedia and the What WorksClearinghouse—the latter hailed as “a central and trusted source of scientificevidence for what works in education” (U.S. Department of Education,2010b).

The academy’s redoubled search for “what works” in schools and class-rooms belongs to a longer history of “scientifically based” research pro-grams. Among the most prominent of these were the “process-product”studies that began in earnest in the 1970s, in efforts to discover the links“between what teachers do in the classroom (the processes of teaching)and what happens to their students (the products of learning)” (Anderson,Evertson, & Brophy, 1979, p. 193). Still a dominant research paradigm inthe study of teaching, process-product research is grounded in what LeeShulman (1986) has called the “correlative model” of teaching effective-ness. Correlative conceptions of effective teaching propose that “[t]hosepractices or performances are effective that correlate with an outcomedeemed desirable” (Shulman, p. 54); their aim is to adduce evidence ofstable causal or correlational links between “effective” pedagogies and theirintended learning outcomes.

Process-product studies embody SBR’s positivist efforts to uncover andexplain the determinate links among the contextual, intrapersonal, andinterpersonal variables in any pedagogical equation. These variablesencompass a bewildering multiplicity of “processes” and “products.”Drawing on the work of Harold Mitzel (1960), Michael Dunkin and BruceBiddle’s (1974) schema usefully identifies four species of variables involvedin the pedagogical process:


(1) Presage variables: These include the knowledge, beliefs, dispositions,and prior experiences teachers and students bring to the classroom.Other factors influencing the learning process include the identityattributes of age, ethnicity, language, class, gender, sexual orienta-tion, physical ability, etc.

(2) Context variables: Also referred to as “contingency factors,” contextvariables belong to an expansive range of factors related to theschool, the classroom, and the community—for example, class size,composition, subject matter, curriculum design, conduct rules,physical setting, technology support, school leadership, parentinvolvement, etc. These encompass the physical, social, cultural,and institutional facts and factors that define the “situatedness” ofpedagogical events.

(3) Process variables: These relate to the behaviors and interactionsamong teachers and students. Variables pertaining to teacher behav-iors include how a teacher interprets the curriculum script, designsthe lesson, conducts the flow and sequence of activities, communi-cates through verbal and nonverbal means, manages student behav-ior, interacts with students, and evaluates student performance.Pupil behaviors refer to how students conduct themselves in ways thatreflect and affect their attitudes, motivations, and abilities (i.e.,“presage variables”).

(4) Product variables: The “products” of instruction are the result ofcomplex interactions among presage, context, and process vari-ables. These “learner outcomes” can be differentiated between theaffective (e.g., motivation, self-esteem, curiosity, compassion), thecognitive (e.g., ability to recall, comprehend, analyze, synthesize, andevaluate knowledge), and the behavioral (e.g., personal conduct,community service).

Considered collectively, presage, context, process, and product variables elu-cidate the astonishing range of context-specific contingencies that sur-round all pedagogical perlocutions. Practically limitless in number andkind, these multiple variables participate in countless simultaneous andmultidirectional interactions best characterized as volatile, indeterminate,and contingent.4 How these variables might nonetheless cohere in stablepatterns of causality has been the focus of SBR. To what extent, then, havethese paradigms of research succeeded in overcoming the skeptical claimsof the multiplicity, infinity, and intention-irrelevant theses? Can a scienceof pedagogical effectiveness succeed in identifying the “felicity conditions”under which certain pedagogical perlocutions might, with certainty,produce certain effects? Are there, in effect, generalizable laws of perlocu-tion discoverable under the light of scientifically based scrutiny?

“A troubling fact about teaching is that there is no established setof professional practices that have been proven to work independent of


the particular actors involved and the particular time and place of theaction” (Labaree, 2004, p. 53). Even more troubling, perhaps, is thatwhich lies beyond the particularities of the knowable. Indeed, there isreason to believe that the context specificities of any phenomenal eventmight even exceed the purview of known presage, context, and processvariables. Drawing insights from the frontiers of science, Ralf St. Clair(2005) maintains that the universe of social phenomena is shot throughwith “superunknowns”:

The group of superunknowns includes factors of social relationships that cannot bedefined, irrespective of advances in method or observation—they are fundamen-tally and categorically indefinable. There are a number of reasons why this could bethe case, such as the variations in human thinking or experience, or the essentialimpossibility of replicating contexts and encounters. (p. 446)

Recalcitrant to scientific prediction, “superunknowns” represent the con-tingent variables that positivist methodologies such as regression analysisconveniently relegate to the status of “error terms” or “residuals.” The realerror, of course, is in construing all anomalies as annoying intrusions tobe best ignored, on the assumption that—to invoke a politically chargedanalogy—the majority must win.

Philosophers, of course, have long meditated on the limits of reason andscientific rationality. As John Eisenberg (1992) has argued, this is a puzzlethat finds currency beyond the humanities: “The notion of a complete,self-sufficient, independent, objectively knowable order simply does notmesh with some of the most penetrating insights in mathematical logic,science, history and anthropology” (p. 2). Human researchers are notomniscient creatures: the limits of scientific prescience are precisely thelimits of human perception, cognition, and intention. While researchersare pushing the frontiers of educational science through complexity think-ing, there remains in these complex equations the ineradicable presenceof unknowns and superunknowns, which haunt process-product researchwith the lacuna of the unknowable. Despite the hopes espoused by theadvocates of SBR, it would be remiss of educational researchers to ignorethe claims of philosophical skepticism, which threaten in the final analysisto subordinate all empirical investigations of complexity to the epistemo-logical problem of uncertainty.5

Indeed, while a science of pedagogy aims to furnish determinable,“evidence-based” accounts of the determinate relations between perlocu-tionary causes and effects, the art of pedagogical performance offers tooverturn all such determinacies in the name of uncertainty and ambiguity.A view of teaching as a performative act highlights the contested, constructed,and context-dependent nature of pedagogical effectiveness. As I haveargued, the crux of successful perlocutions lies in the cooperative transac-tions between the speaker’s intentions and the hearer’s interpretations.Insofar as interpretation cannot be ruled by authorial design and desire,


the instability of “uptake” remains an ever-present threat to the “felicity” ofa pedagogical performative. One might even regard the specter of indeter-minacy as the inevitable meta-perlocutionary effect of language itself.

It is a poststructuralist commonplace that meaning making throughlanguage, whether in speech or writing, entails a process that eludes finaldestinations and definitions—a fact contingent on its embodied locationsin diverse social, cultural, and psychological contexts. Mikhail Bakhtin(1981) contends that a radical plurality of intentions lies at the social heartof linguistic communication: “language is not a neutral medium thatpasses freely and easily into the private property of speakers’ intentions;it is populated—overpopulated—with the intentions of others” (p. 294).Consequently, to subdue the effects of pedagogical perlocutions within apositivist straitjacket of determined intentions and determinable interpre-tations is to do violence to the natural life of pedagogical interactions. Suchsymbolic violence amounts to an “attempt to exchange the living rationalityof the spontaneously experienced with a reconstructed rationality derivedfrom a theoretic (reconstructed) account of desirable (because more ratio-nal) practice” (van Manen, 1982, p. 46).

The educational scientist might, of course, protest that our postmodernanxieties are too much to bear. For to acknowledge the art of indeterminacyat the heart of teaching is to entertain the prospect that no known setof teacher knowledge, skills, and dispositions, combined with the rightpedagogical approaches, techniques, and tools, can ever guarantee “teachereffectiveness.” Charged with good intentions, educational researchers,school leaders, and policy makers might well be justified in opposing theunsettling imputation of science’s ultimate futility. As one of four articles offaith in the National Research Council’s (2002) report Scientific Research inEducation states:

We assume that it is possible to describe the physical and social world scientificallyso that, for example, multiple observers can agree on what they see. Consequently,we reject the postmodernist school of thought when it posits that social scienceresearch can never generate objective or trustworthy knowledge. (p. 25)

Such hard-line pronouncements have provoked considerable scholarlydebate within the academy,6 with humanities-oriented scholars reacting inparticular to the uncritical rejection of postmodernism’s capacity for self-reflexivity. Indeed, to what ends might the modernist project of scientificrationality seek to question its own philosophical assumptions about thenature of “objective” and “trustworthy knowledge”?

The belief that science will prevail on the Day of Judgment remains,of course, to be seen. Despite the hopeful optimism of SBR’s faithfulfollowers, a countervailing tradition of scholarship has set out to criticizethe quality of education research, the intellectual credibility of educa-tional researchers, and the status of the education academy in general(Kaestle, 1993; Koerner, 1963; Kramer, 1991; Labaree, 2004; The Teaching


Commission, 2006). The most scathing criticisms have focused on thecheckered achievements of educational science, with policy makers andgovernment authorities lamenting the academy’s failure to establish a gen-eralizable science of teacher effectiveness. Meanwhile, a growing body ofresearch has further illuminated the uncertain nature of teacher learning,knowledge, and decision making (e.g., Floden & Buchmann, 1993;Helsing, 2007; McDonald, 1992; Munthe, 2003; Shulman, 2005). Under-pinning these studies is the view that uncertainty—apotheosized in theindeterminate links between pedagogical “processes” and “products,”between intents and outcomes—is an irreducible certainty in teaching, onethat ought to be embraced rather than eschewed. Relatedly, a rigorousscience would seek out rather than rule out the implications of uncertaintyfor a deeper understanding of the nature of pedagogical perlocutions.

EFFECTIVENESS AS PERFORMATIVITY: CORRESPONDENCEMODELS OF PEDAGOGICAL EFFECTIVENESS

To underscore the uncertain effects of pedagogical perlocutions, however,is not to undermine the institutions of teaching and learning. Teachersmust teach and students must learn, as societies continue to participate inthe ritual performances of formal schooling. While some of what teachersdo in schools and classrooms might seem more conducive than others toachieving particular educational objectives, the precise scientific explana-tions for how and why these patterns obtain must, in the final analysis,remain elusive. As I have argued, evaluations of effectiveness are highlycontextual and situated, and the scientist can only do so much to unravelthe hidden effects of a teacher’s pedagogical perlocutions. What remains tobe unraveled are the ways in which potentially infinite pedagogical effectsare characteristically accommodated within an official discourse of “teachereffectiveness.” Just as it is philosophically naïve to ascribe certainty to theeffectiveness of any pedagogical action, so it becomes necessary to under-stand the ways in which pedagogical effectiveness is variously interpreted,constituted, and negotiated.

In his critique of a proposal by the Carnegie Foundation for theAdvancement of Teaching, Rodney Evans (2007) has argued:

The conceptual linchpin of the entire reform proposal thus rests on the ability toidentify outstanding practitioners. . . . But the question of who qualifies as best ofthe best is specious and in many ways unanswerable. Best at what? Best for whom?Best under what set of circumstances? And so on. The notion of best presumes ahierarchy of agreed-upon talents and abilities and the ability to measure same,which . . . does not exist. (p. 554)

“Best” is, at best, a shared ideal, at worst, an individual’s subjective opinion.Analyzing students’ accounts of their classroom experiences, Parker Palmer


(1998) concludes that “it becomes impossible to claim that all good teachersuse similar techniques: some lecture nonstop and others speak very little;some stay close to their material and others loose the imagination; someteach with the carrot and others with the stick” (p. 10). Definitions of “bestpractices” vary according to culture, context, and audience. Researchershave shown that the specificities of culture, social context, and historicalcircumstance can determine whether the same pedagogical approach iseffective or ineffective in achieving its intended outcomes (e.g., Luke, 2011;Neuman & Bekerman, 2000; Spizzica, 1997; Wong, 2004). The lesson to bedrawn is that “effective” teaching can be enacted in diverse ways amongdiverse audiences under diverse cultural and contextual circumstances. Justas a play script lends itself to any number of performative interpretations,so, too, no pedagogical performance is bound by a generalizable script ofteacher effectiveness.

Admittedly, to acknowledge an infinite variety of effective teaching prac-tices raises the specter of relativism. Evidence-based prescriptions of “whatworks” work on the logic of “fixing” evaluative standards for teacher effec-tiveness, so as to fix the problem of uncertain perlocutionary “effects sizes.”To the extent that effectiveness criteria are potentially limitless in numberand character, institutional authorities must differentiate between thosethat are more or less significant, and upon these discriminations deviseappropriate instruments to identify them. The linchpin of this reformmovement is the “correspondence model” of teacher effectiveness(Shulman, 1986, p. 28), exemplified by the perennial efforts of policymakers to corral the sprawling meanings of “teacher effectiveness” underthe codifying auspices of teacher competency checklists and performancerubrics. The codification of effective teaching and effective teachers entailsnormative choices about which effectiveness criteria ought to be includedand excluded in the evaluative instruments used to select and certify“highly qualified” teachers.

Over the last decade, the standards movement has sponsored variousinstitutional efforts to establish performance standards based on the codi-fication of “best practices.” Allied to this movement is the forensic task ofdecomposing the arts of effective teaching into its constitutive parts. Anempirical case in point is the Enhanced Performance Management System(EPMS) adopted by the Singapore Ministry of Education as part of itsteacher professionalization efforts (Ministry of Education, n.d.). A centraladministrative feature of the EPMS is that promotions, pay increments, andother performance-based incentives are awarded to teachers on the eviden-tiary basis of performance appraisals. The assessment instrument is a stan-dardized “Work Review” protocol that documents and evaluates teachers’competencies in relation to a slew of “key performance indicators.”Excerpted from the EPMS’s Work Review form, Tables 2a and 2b enumer-ate the qualities, actions, and dispositions of effective teachers with respectto five “Competency Clusters,” each cluster comprising a distinct suite of


TA

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performance descriptors. Collectively, these five Competency Clusterscommand an impressive gamut of 45 “performance indicators,” whichrepresent a comprehensive taxonomy of professional standards againstwhich teachers’ performances can be “accurately” appraised. The burdenof this evaluative project is the translation of pedagogical performancesinto a schema of observable behaviors, with the aim of rendering visibleand tractable the range of duties and responsibilities that effective teachersare expected to perform.

The meticulous enumeration of professional standards and expectationsin the EPMS might be read as testimony to the avowedly high standards ofteacher professionalism in Singapore’s education system. The moregeneral implication here is that official efforts to define what counts asworthy performance require no less than a legitimation technique forevaluating teacher effectiveness in the name of teacher professionalization.Central to this bureaucratic mission is a methodology of selective construc-tion. As Deborah Britzman (2003) explains, “[c]ompartmentalisationdefines the limits of relevancy; it brackets our definitions of context andcontent, and imposes measures of credibility that determine what we acceptand reject as true and as false” (p. 35). Seen through an Austinian lens,these models of professionalism function as constatives, statements thatpurport to represent what is “true” or “false” about the qualities of effectiveteaching and effective teachers. But the suspicion that all statements of factdepend ultimately on their ability to convince us of their facticity shouldgive us pause. Disavowing his earlier distinction between constatives andperformatives, Austin himself demonstrated that constative utterances areconstituted precisely by the performative force of their “truth effects.” Forexample, one could be led to believe the assertion, “Behold: This is the trueMona Lisa,” even if the speaker were to be sincerely referring to a coun-terfeit of the original. Performatives, in this sense, operate beyond thenormative bounds of justified true belief. The art of constative representa-tion is itself a rhetorical act.

Pegged to a scoreboard of official criteria, the formal evaluation of ateacher’s performance purports to establish a valid correspondencebetween the “truth” about a teacher’s effectiveness and its discursive rep-resentation.7 But the summative score on a performance appraisal affordsat best a selective definition of teacher effectiveness based on a selectiveaccount of the effects of a teacher’s pedagogical performances. As rhetori-cal testimonies to the “truth” of a teacher’s professional qualities andaccomplishments, these standardized descriptors do not simply defineteacher effectiveness; they constitute effective teachers. Their performativeeffects reside less in their claims to truthfulness than in their power toconstitute what counts as effective or ineffective.8 “Objective” descriptionsof effective teaching are not so much authoritative statements of factas performative statements that ratify their own scientific authority. On thisview, the perlocutionary intention of teacher-competency dictionaries and


pedagogical coding schemes is to grant legibility and legitimacy to a scienceof teacher effectiveness. Yet, such attempts to anatomize the nature abouteffective teaching do not demonstrably render it any more truthful oreffective. As Richard Rorty (2000) maintains:

Just as you do not get on more intimate terms with the number 17 by discovering itssquare root, you do not get on more intimate terms with the table, closer to itsintrinsic nature, by hitting it than by looking at it or talking about it. All that hitting,or decomposing it into atoms, does is to enable you to relate it to a few more things.It does not take you out of language into fact, or out of appearance into reality, orout of remote and disinterested relationships into more immediate and intenserelationships. (p. 56)9

The rhetorical ruse of correspondence models, in effect, is to conflate thediscursive representation of effectiveness with its performance. To the extentthat textual evidence—in the form of performance rubrics, metrics,resumes, and portfolios—is taken as legitimating proof of a teacher’s effec-tiveness, such texts work to elide the distinction between representationand action, word and world. The script of a teacher’s performance becomesindistinguishable from the performance itself.

Premised on their status as constatives, performance indices promise anunmediated view of the facts—the proverbial “view from nowhere.” Yet,performance indicators cannot but function rhetorically as “terministicscreens” (Burke, 1966)—artificial lenses through which live pedagogicalperformances are observed, measured, and documented. Language—thevery stuff of which performance measures are made—is not a transparentmedium of signification: as speech acts, they perform the very objects towhich they refer. Scientific attempts to arrest the endless play of pedagogi-cal effects are themselves the performative effects of the scientific enterprise,wherein the objects of analysis are reflexively produced by the analyst’sobjectives. Over and beyond its objective mission, scientifically basedresearchers are thus committed to producing and authorizing the verydiscursive categories (e.g., “best practices” and “performance standards”)by which a teacher’s pedagogical effects and effectiveness are evaluated.

Regulatory regimes of performance assessment assume the necessity ofstandardized evaluative criteria for teacher competency, the unquestionedassumption being that any teacher true to the profession ought to abide bythe “truths” about effective teaching as spelt out by these appraisal instru-ments. Yet, as I have labored to demonstrate, pedagogical perlocutionsinevitably exceed the descriptive and predictive capacities of performancerubrics, competency checklists, and appraisal indices. The main point hereis that descriptors of teacher effectiveness rely ultimately on the perlocution-ary force of their propositions: their aim is to convince practitioners andadministrators of their construct validity by appealing not only to a profes-sional consensus of researchers, school leaders, and policy makers, butalso to the discourses of scientific rationality. A teacher’s professionalism


defines and is defined by the “constative” functions of these evaluativeinstruments. In Michel Foucault’s (1972) formulation, discourses are “prac-tices that systematically form the objects of which they speak” (p. 205).Retroactively, to speak of “best practices” based on “scientific evidence” is toparticipate in the legitimation of a scientific discourse that gains authorityprecisely through the performative force of its own endorsement.

CONCLUSION

This article has sought a critical perspective on scientific attempts to answerthe questions: What are the effects of teaching? Can these effects be iden-tified and ascertained according to a science of pedagogical effectiveness?Specifically, I have argued that the paradigm of teaching as performance offerstheoretical leverage for countering dominant modernist epistemologies inscientifically based research in education. The premise for this argument ishardly new: Teaching is a supremely complex endeavor involving a bewil-dering constellation of causal factors, the observable (and nonobservable)effects of which are highly contextual and processual. What I have soughtto accomplish is a strengthening of this premise from the vantage ofphilosophical linguistics. In so doing, I have positioned my article squarelywithin the paradigms of “humanities-oriented research in education”:

Woven into the fabric of humanities-oriented research in education, as inhumanities-oriented research more generally, are various forms of criticismintended to problematize unrecognized assumptions, implications, and conse-quences of various kinds of educational practice, policy, and research, as well as tochallenge what these approaches take for granted as beyond questioning. In thisway, humanities-oriented research in education is often intended to foster disso-nance and discomfort with conventional practice and, in some cases, to suggestalternatives. (American Educational Research Association, 2009, p. 482)

One source of “dissonance” and “discomfort” can be found in the theo-retically informed notion of teaching as a performative act. Underpinningmy argument is a definition of pedagogical perlocutions—speech acts whoseteacher-authored intent is to produce certain affective, cognitive, andbehavioral effects on their student-audiences. Teaching is not only a per-formance; it is a performative act orchestrated to produce (un)certain effectson learners. At the core of this conception of pedagogical performativity isthe aporetic nature of all pedagogical perlocutions—namely, that teachingconsists of the complex (inter)play of perlocutionary acts whose putativeeffects are practically impossible to pin down. Pedagogical perlocutions arepotentially infinite, sometimes invisible, often resistant to authorial inten-tion, and always vulnerable to plural interpretations. It is this excess ofpossible effects that always already undermines the quest for generalizableaccounts and generalized descriptions of teacher effectiveness.


Drawing on the rich theoretical insights of Performance Studies, themetaphor of teaching as performance returns us to the processual, contextual,contingent, and transitory nature of pedagogical performances. No two liveperformances are identical. Iterations of the same script, featuring thesame actors, costumes, dialogue, stage, script, score, and choreography,play to different audiences at different times and places, each pedagogicaloccasion a unique configuration of presage, context, process, and productvariables. A performance’s ontological essence, then, lies in its temporalinstantaneity, its irreducible irreproducibility in time and space. As PeggyPhelan (1993) contends, a performance vanishes in the very act of itsunfolding:

Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded,documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of rep-resentations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance. Tothe degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of reproductionit betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology. Performance’s being, likethe ontology of subjectivity proposed here, becomes itself through disappearance.(p. 146)

In Phelan’s view, the ontology of “liveness” imbues performance with thepolitical power to evade representational regimes that threaten to codifyand petrify its meanings. This point gains significance when we considerhow the act/art of teaching culminates in a live performance involving alive audience—a living event whose “essence” resists arrest by the staticdisplay of signs. A process of unfolding possibilities, the effects of any liveperformance exist in constant motion, settling at last into the unsettledpermanence of spectators’ memories. Constituted in the immediacy ofthe moment, each pedagogical performance is a singular, irreplicableevent, unrepresentable in its embodied ephemerality. As performanceand performative act, teaching precedes and exceeds the exercise of sym-bolic control through prediction, generalization, and codification.

Unfazed by the poststructuralist threat of indeterminacy, efforts by edu-cational researchers to “fix” the potential disjunction between desirablepedagogical practices and their desired effects answer to two paradigmaticconceptions of teacher effectiveness, which Lee Shulman (1986) hasreferred to as the “correlative” and “correspondence” models (p. 28).Correlative models, typified by the experimental and quasi-experimentaldesigns of process-product research, articulate an Enlightenment narrativeof progress, founded on the belief that a “knowledge base” of effectiveteaching exists, that lends itself to scientific experimentation, observation,and verification. Yet, this will to progress remains haunted by doubt: for toeradicate all uncertainty in the relations between perlocutionary causes andperlocutionary effects is to ignore the presence of unknown and unknow-able effects hidden beyond the realms of the observable, the intentional,and the codifiable.


Ultimately, the challenge of ameliorating these uncertainties devolvesto the work of “correspondence models” of teacher effectiveness. Asinstruments of professional accountability and control, such modelsseek to construct an anatomy of teacher effectiveness in the form of stan-dardized checklists, rubrics, and descriptors by which teachers can bepublicly evaluated. What counts as “effective” teaching, then, is what getscounted on the conversion tables of these discursive instruments. Apply-ing the Austinian concept of performativity, I have argued that the objec-tification of “effective teaching” illustrates the ways in which scientificdiscourses work to create and authenticate, rather than simply delineate,the defining traits of teacher professionalism. Such discourses consist inthe institutionalization of performance rubrics, indices, and checkliststhat purport to capture the “essential” properties of effective teachingand effective teachers—properties amenable to observation, validation,and codification under the auspices of scientifically based research.Indeed, while science offers to atomize the “objective” components ofpedagogical phenomena in all their social, cultural, and political com-plexity, “[a] performance paradigm prevents the reification of cultureinto variables to be isolated, measured, and manipulated” (Conquergood,1989, p. 57).

Underpinning the recommendations of the National Research Councilis the belief that determinations of “effectiveness” are the professionalpreserve of those who know best. Correlative and correspondence modelsof teacher effectiveness alike derive their legitimacy from scientific expertselected to perform the task of constructing valid and reliable performancemeasures and standards. Teacher competency rubrics, performance certi-fication measures, and the knowledge base of teaching are prime examplesof effectiveness scripts authored by those authorized to adjudicate oversuch matters in the disinterested name of science. Within the politicalrealm of scientifically based policy making, the content validity of“evidence-based” models of teacher effectiveness is principally assured bytheir consensual validity within the scientific community; consequently,those who speak a different language outside this “interpretive community”(Fish, 1980) must struggle to be heard. Seldom, for example, are thesubjective evaluations of students rigorously factored into school-sanctioned indices of teacher effectiveness. The epistemic arrogance of“evidence-based” models of teacher effectiveness harbors a perlocutionarycharge: teachers, researchers, and policy makers alike are called upon toenact and endorse these same strictures lest they be viewed as unprofes-sionally unscientific.

Scientific attempts to resolve the problem of pedagogical performa-tives stem from performance anxieties brought about by performancepressures. At one level, the desire for certainty can be read as a responseof righteous indignation to criticisms concerning the lack of utility, cred-ibility, and scientific rigor in educational research. At the same time, the


call for “more effective” science must be understood in the context of aclimate of neoliberal accountability preoccupied with standards-driven,measurable outcomes on state expenditures (Luke, 2011). Within theglobal neoliberal order, “Performance means effectiveness, an effective-ness that, in most cases, must be quantified for measurement and end-lessly qualified for evaluation” (McKenzie, 2001, p. 97). Today, the pushfor accountability through improved assessment instruments continuesunabated. In the United States, for example, a new generation of“performance-based” teacher assessments, developed by the NationalBoard for Professional Teaching Standards, relies on videotapes of teach-ers’ practice, examples of lessons and assessments, samples of studentwork, and analyses of student progress as evidence of teacher effective-ness (Darling-Hammond, 2001). Although more inclusive in their regardfor multiple indicators of effectiveness, these performance-based assess-ments do not address, let alone overcome, the radical indeterminacy atthe heart of perlocutionary effects.

The lesson that I am drawing is by now axiomatic: Educationalresearchers must remain reflexively skeptical of their own ideologicalinvestments in the positivist project of SBR (Howe, 2005; Schwandt, 2005;Walters, 2009). A politically astute rendition of SBR would requireresearchers to acknowledge the limits of what Ray McDermott and Kath-leen Hall (2007) have wryly dubbed quantentative research—“a probabilisticapproach that, by definition and means of operationalization, allows con-clusions through approximation, necessarily tentative, sometimes con-vincingly so, sometimes not, either way with results often useful to those inpower” (p. 13, my emphasis). Indeed, claims of scientific objectivity arethemselves the modus operandi of power that legitimates itself on a selec-tive consensus. Accordingly, a politically naïve vision of SBR “encourages,perhaps requires, construing social, political, and economic conditions as(fixed) background variables, not factors to be investigated under therubric of ‘what works’ (or does not)” (Howe, 2005, p. 242). Science inthe service of “what works” becomes at worst an instrument of social sur-veillance and professional engineering, a means of exercising controlover the performances of teachers and students. If utilitarian researchbetrays a fixation on “scientifically based” methods for fixing the problemof indeterminacy, then the goal of critical scholarship is to unfix thebelief that one might, despite scientific evidence to the contrary, ignorethe unseen, unforeseen, and unforeseeable effects of every performativeact. Samuel Messick’s (1989) notion of “consequential validity” urgeshumility on the part of scientists as they go about preaching the goodnews of science’s power to save education from its alleged state of disre-pair. The unseen and intended effects of science are many and hidden,and those who employ its instruments must undertake an honest criti-cal assessment of the consequential validity of their own performativeendeavors.


ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I am grateful to the editors and anonymous reviewers for their generousand incisive comments on an earlier version of this article.

NOTES

1. Born of the marriage between theater studies and cultural anthropology in the1950s, Performance Studies has since grown into a mature field of inquiryspanning the length and breadth of literary studies, cultural studies, mediastudies, communication studies, gender studies, queer theory, political theory,linguistics, philosophy, business, engineering, and even cognitive neuroscience(Carlson, 2004; McKenzie, 2001; Schechner, 2006). Despite its wide interdisci-plinary reach, Performance Studies scholarship remains marginalized in thefield of educational studies. A thorough theoretical exposition of performancetheories in relation to the study of teaching waits to be written.

2. Numerous critics have since expounded on the problems and ambiguities inAustin’s account of the illocution/perlocution distinction, a fuller account ofwhich is beyond the scope of this article. See, for example, Akhimien (2010),Campbell (1973), Cohen (1973), Davis (1979), Gaines (1979), Gu (1993),Hornsby (1994), Kurzon (1998), Marcu (2000), Searle (1969), and Strawson(1964).

3. In appreciation of the sheer complexity and variety of pedagogical actions, oneneed only be reminded of the considerable individual and cultural variance inthe gestural accompaniments of speech. That which Shoshana Felman (1983)refers to as “the scandal of the speaking body” gestures towards the communi-cative mischief that embodied nonverbal signifiers can potentially dischargealongside the visible effects of pedagogical speech acts. To this complex sceneone might add the observation that meanings and intentions can also be com-municated wordlessly. For a review of theory and research on nonverbal com-munication, see Andersen (2007).

4. Over the last 3 decades, “complexity thinking” has emerged at the frontiers ofscientific efforts to understand the seeming irregularities of complex natural andhuman phenomena. Also known as dynamical systems theory, complexity scienceseeks to understand the uncertain processes of pattern formation in complex,self-organizing, adaptive systems, while challenging standard depictions of linearcausality and correlations in traditional positivist science (e.g., Davis & Sumara,2006; Eidelson, 1997; Juarrero, 2000; Prigogine & Stengers, 1984). This scientificview of human social activity is one that resonates with the extraordinary com-plexity of pedagogical phenomena. To date, complexity science has mademodest inroads into the mainstream of scientifically based research on teachingand learning.

5. Philosophical skepticism, broadly construed, challenges the epistemologies ofrationalism and empiricism, twin features of scientific positivism. Rationalistshold reason as the principal vehicle of true knowledge, the final objects of whichare assumed to be immutable and eternal. Empiricists emphasize experienceand perception as the principal means of acquiring genuine knowledge of theworld. Skeptical considerations, which I consider to be necessary for a reflexive


and rigorous educational science, argue that all knowledge arises from thecontingent nature of perception, and are therefore susceptible to human error,delusion, and solipsism. A further examination of skepticism as it relates toquestions of scientific uncertainty and indeterminacy is worth pursuing,although this gloss must suffice for now.

6. For collections of scholarly debates on the National Research Council’s recom-mendations regarding scientifically based research in education, see the specialtheme issues of Educational Researcher (2002, vol. 31, no. 8), Educational Theory(2005, vol. 55, no. 3), Qualitative Inquiry (2004, vol. 10, no. 5), and Teachers CollegeRecord (2005, vol. 107, no.1).

7. Correspondence theories of truth belong to a long philosophical traditiondating back to Plato and Aristotle. Its central tenets were discussed in the writingsof medieval thinkers like Aquinas and Ockham, developed through the modernperiod by the likes of Hume, Mill, Russell, Moore, and the later Wittgenstein,and formally elaborated by contemporary thinkers such as Gottlob Frege, AlfredTarski, and Donald Davidson. Broadly speaking, the correspondence theory oftruth posits that truth consists in a relation to reality: that truth is a relationalproperty inhering in the “correspondence” between a specified set of propertiesand a specified set of observed characteristics or facts. Without entering into theintricacies of this philosophical trope, I have offered a rendition of “correspon-dence” that bears affinities with Austinian speech act theory so as to facilitate,without oversimplifying, the terms of my argument.

8. Elsewhere, I have argued that the performative effects of these performanceappraisal systems extend to teachers’ own performative “fabrications” of theirprofessional achievements in the Work Review documents (Liew, 2012). Whatseems disturbing, if ironic, is that the linguistic performativity of performanceappraisals furnishes a generative script by which teachers can perform excel-lently on paper under the pressure to perform.

9. This attack on traditional correspondence theories of truth is a familiar argu-ment from a particular strand of pragmatist philosophy. In contrast with James,Dewey, Peirce, Putnam, and Habermas, Rorty maintains that to elucidate the“truth” of a belief or theory is not to ascribe any verifiable property to it; rather,it is to perform an illocutionary or perlocutionary speech act (e.g., to inform, torecommend, to advise, to examine).

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