More conscientious look at teachers’ praxis: A culminative balance

Abstract

Enacted in any pedagogy is the tension between what teachers know and what they can do. Long has been written about the head starts of teacher empowerment in education, but less has been dealt with the possibility of the notion. The paper attempting to achieve a culminative balance between teachers' praxis and phrones claims that education is per se political; thus, its pedagogy is hardly bottom-up. Furthermore, the present writers assert though education, in Iran, is culturally-bound, no one can claim the teachers are not potential to employ the pedagogy hidden in a variety of educational perspectives inspired by different philosophical underpinnings. To achieve this end, teacher education should aim at achieving a balance between what teachers know and what they can do. On the necessity of culminative balance, it is worth mentioning that teachers' praxis will remain barren if it is not well supported with theoretical background. In fact, praxis, per se, is concerned with a give-and-take link between thought and action—between theorizing practice and practicing theory. As Freire (1985, cited in Monchinski, 2008) warns “cut-off from practice theory becomes a simple verbalism and separated from theory is nothing but blind activism” (pp. 1-2). Moreover, the present writers compatible with several scholars (e.g., Gholami & Mirzaei, 2013) claim that the traces of postmodernism in Iran has been the real reason of many breakthroughs in all fields of science and technology in which Iran cannot be an exception.