Abstract

This study presents and elaborates a framework for considering the phenomenon and experience of the teacher intellectual. Over the past thirty years educational researchers have used a variety of approaches to enhance the status of teachers and teaching in the United States. These have included efforts to portray the teacher as playing any one of a number of roles presumably more prestigious than the unqualified term teacher would suggest. Researchers have represented the teacher variously as great teacher, effective teacher, professional, reflective practitioner, and transformative intellectual. I trace these separate representations of the teacher to a common substrate--the sociological literature on intellectuals and the American philosophical movement, classical pragmatism--and its fundamental preoccupation with the proper relationship between the life of the mind and the world of affairs. From these literatures I isolate a set of guiding parameters that circumscribe the term intellectual and subsequently use these parameters to examine and analyze case studies of two public high school teachers. I attempt to show the particular ways in which these two teachers share in the experience of intellectuals in the United States and to assess how successfully teaching allows these two teachers to resolve the tensions inherent in being an intellectual. I conclude with some general observations on efforts to enhance the status of teachers and on the use of terminology in educational research