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Effects Beyond Effectiveness: Teaching as a Performative Act

WARREN MARK LIEW National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University Singapore

ABSTRACT
This article develops the familiar metaphor of teaching as performance towards a denition of teaching as performative act, where words and actions aim to effect cognitive, affective, and behavioral changes in learners. To what extent, however, are the consequences of pedagogical actions commensurate with their intended effects? Can a science of effective teaching effectively delineate, ascertain, and predict the effects of teachers pedagogical practices? Through the lens of speech act theory, I argue that teaching consists of pedagogical perlocutionsspeech acts whose observed and unobserved effects on learners exceed authorial intention and scientic prediction. Attempts to subdue this excess of effects lend themselves to denitions of teacher effectiveness scripted by the instruments and institutions of scientically based research. I conclude by considering the ways in which these denitions of effects and effectiveness are themselves the performative effects of performance-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 scientic exposition. Drawing on speech act theory (Austin, 1962, 1979), I examine in particular the performative nature of teaching, as well as the performative operations of scientic discourse in research and policy on teacher effectiveness. By performative I refer to the ways in which words perform actions and produce effects beyond their referential content, a premise rst expounded in J. L. Austins (1962) lectures on How To Do Things With Words. At stake in my analysis is the proposition that pedagogical actions consist crucially of speech acts called perlocutions, so that the performative nature of teaching may be said to inhere in its consequences or perlocutionary effects. A theory of pedagogical perlocutions, then, contends that teaching inevitably engenders multiple effects on audiences, while inviting multiple interpretations of its effectiveness vis--vis its intended outcomes. Such
2013 by The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto Curriculum Inquiry 43:2 (2013) Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK doi: 10.1111/curi.12012

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consequential uncertainties, I argue, radically undermine the attempts of educational science to construct an assured knowledge base of teaching effects and teacher effectiveness. I begin by introducing the central idea of teaching as performative act, via a rehearsal of the metaphor of teaching as a performing art. Courting the philosophical insights of Austinian speech act theory, I present a critique of the limits of scientic positivism, with respect to programmatic attempts by educational researchers to establish a science of pedagogy. If pedagogy, as William James once asserted, consists in the art and science of teaching, then it is necessary to consider the extent to which science must collaborate with the arts and humanities to explicate the elusive quality of pedagogical performances. Espousing an incredulity toward metanarratives (Lyotard, 1984, p. xxiv), I proceed to examine the problems of interpretive subjectivity and causal indeterminacy surrounding the nature of pedagogical speech acts. This postmodern perspective yields, moreover, a political critique of the performative nature of scientically based research, particularly its complicity in the truth-making effects of performance-based teacher assessments. My aim, in conclusion, is to revisit the important contributions of humanities-oriented research in education (American Educational Research Association, 2009) toward a more critically reexive agenda in educational research.

TEACHING AS A PERFORMATIVE ACT Numerous scholars have expounded on the aesthetic dimensions of teaching (e.g., Eisner, 1983, 1998; Horne, 1917; James, 1899; Rubin, 1985; Schn, 1987), while several others have afrmed the analogical links 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 teacherartist performing in a classroom theater before a live audience of students. Like the theater actor, the teacher-as-performer assumes a stage persona, asserts stage presence, and communicates through verbal and nonverbal actions to engageeven educatethe hearts and minds of student-audiences. More than a public spectacle designed to entertain and enthrall, a pedagogical performance can be read as the ritual process of enacting a curriculum script, such as a lesson plan with specied learning outcomes. Drawing on this distinction between text and performance, we can broadly distinguish two types of pedagogical performance. The rst, often referred to as the lecture, consists of a monologic text written, prepared, often rehearsed, and delivered with minimal interruptions before a captive (or comatose) audience. The second, more demanding mode of pedagogy relies on a exible script jointly enacted by the teacher and

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her students. When students participate in a classroom discussion, they become co-performers at liberty to enact the play in an innite variety of ways, according to the contextual contingencies of live participation. In this scene, lesson plans, syllabus guidelines, and curriculum standards provide at best a exible template for action, insofar as a teachers actions and decisions are innitely susceptible to revision and reinterpretation in the midst of real-time interactions. In the absence of rules and formulaic scripts, dialogic pedagogies emerge through complex actions and interactions that are at once strategic and spontaneous, calculated and contingent. Here, the teachers role is to orchestrate that productive balance between repetition and improvisation, conformity and creativity, in concert with students as spect-actors in a live pedagogical performance. On stage and off stage, schoolteachers characteristically take on multiple professional identities: as classroom managers, caregivers, disciplinarians, counselors, curriculum planners, administrators, researchers, and social workers. As Charlotte Danielson (1996) writes, teaching consists of not one but several other professions, combining the skills of business management, human relations, and theater arts (p. 2). Within these recognizable roles, teachers enact multiple identities through an embodied repertoire of words, gestures, postures, facial expressions, and outward appearances. As social performers, teachers manage their own expressions, as well as the impressions of diverse audiences, in relation to a set of professional norms and cultural expectations. This dramaturgical labor of impression management (Goffman, 1959) entails, moreover, a form of cultural work, for to participate in the ritual practices of formal schooling is to enact the cultural norms that underpin these social institutions. Such cultural performancesto invoke a concept rst theorized in the work of anthropologists Milton Singer and Victor Turnersuggest that a performance act, interactional in nature and involving symbolic forms and live bodies, provides a way to constitute meaning and afrm individual and cultural values (Stern & Henderson, 1993, p. 3). Also contained within the framework of cultural performance are the motifs of critique and resistance. Building on this theme of resistance is a growing body of scholarship that theorizes teaching through the lenses of critical pedagogy and cultural studies. This work on critical performative pedagogy conceives of schools and classrooms as cultural sites, actively involved in the selective ordering and legitimation of specic forms of language, 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 liminal space for social activism and political interrogation, where students and teachers engage in critical reection and action on the possibilities for transformative interventions within and beyond the received curriculum (Garoian, 1999; McLaren, 1999; Pineau, 2002).

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I have attempted briey in these prefatory paragraphs to survey the central tenets of the performance metaphor as it relates to teaching and schooling, while gesturing toward a burgeoning body of scholarship known as Performance Studies.1 My chief aim at this juncture is to move beyond notions of theatrical, social, and cultural performance toward a theory of linguistic performativity, one that focuses on the power of language to produce what it names. The starting point for this exploration is a view of teaching as a rhetorical performance, that is, an art of persuasion involvingto adopt Kenneth Burkes (1950) classic denitionthe use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols (p. 43). Accordingly, teaching-as-performance is a symbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired, and transformed (Carey, 1988, p. 18). Reality as such is not simply relayed through referential symbols; rather, it is produced and constituted through these symbols. To elaborate on this philosophical argument, an overview of speech act theory is in order. TOWARDS A SPEECH ACT THEORY OF PEDAGOGICAL PERFORMATIVES In the William James Lectures at Harvard University in 1955, the English philosopher John Langshaw Austin initiated a theory of how human communicants do things with words through speech acts. According to Austins (1962) initial schema, any utterance or locution can be identied as either a constative or a performative. Constatives include all descriptive utterances, statements of fact, and denitions 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 delity. In contrast, performatives cannot be conventionally evaluated for their truth-value; performative utterances, such as naming, betrothing, sentencing, and confessing, do not so much describe a state of affairs as affect themthat is, they produce effects whereby the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action (Austin, 1962, p. 163). For example, the declaration, I pronounce you man and wife, uttered by an appointed authority in a particular ritual setting before a particular group of witnesses, effectively establishes a marriage. Such illocutionary performatives are to be distinguished by the apparent instantaneity of their appointed effects, facilitated by the presence of what Austin calls felicity conditions (p. 18). There at are least three primary components of a felicitous performative: (1) Convention: The speaker must be authorized by law or social convention to enact the authority invested in his words. (2) Intention: The speaker must sincerely intend what his words purport to carry out.

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(3) Interpretation: The addressee must understand and acknowledge what the speaker intends. Austin drew a further distinction between illocutionary and perlocutionary performatives. Unlike illocutionary acts, perlocutionary actssuch as amusing, deterring, confusing, convincing, and persuading ones audienceexact no immediate purchase on the responses of hearers. Unenforceable by social conventions, legal injunctions, or personal assumptions, perlocutionary utterances may produce consequences that are incongruent with the speakers intentions:
Saying something will often, or even normally, produce certain consequential effects upon the feelings, thoughts, or actions of the audience, or of the speaker, or of other persons: and it may be done with the design, intention, or purpose of producing them. . . . We shall call the performance of this kind, the performance of a perlocutionary act. (Austin, 1962, p. 101, my emphasis)

Certain and may gesture toward the tentative consequences of perlocutions. The act of persuading someone does not, for instance, guarantee that s/he will be persuaded, however persuasive ones words might technically be. In Judith Butlers (1997) summation, Whereas illocutionary acts proceed by way of conventions, perlocutionary acts proceed by way of consequences (p. 17). The division of conventions and consequences turns out, nonetheless, to be an inadequate litmus test.2 To cite one complication: Are illocutions not similarly motivated by the intention to produce certain effects on their audiences? For example, the illocutionary act of promising accomplished in the saying of I promise . . . seeks also to precipitate various consequences that include the addressees feelings of satisfaction or surprise, or his acting in ways that reect his faith in the speakers promise. Here, the question of potential and possible effects raises the problem of indeterminacy surrounding audience uptake. For if the illocutionary utterance of a warning is not interpreted by the addressee as such, then the warning would not have been effectively carried out. Consequently, The performance of an illocutionary act involves the securing of uptake; that is, it involves bringing about the understanding of the meaning and of the force of the locution (Austin, 1962, pp. 115116). Perlocutions appear likewise to require some such notion of uptake insofar as the addressee is expected to interpret the speakers intention accurately by responding appropriately. For example, an innocent joke secures no uptake if its hearer misconstrues it as an insult and proceeds to punch the joker in the face. Accordingly, Gu (1993) has argued that perlocutionary effects are predicated on the joint agency of Speaker and Hearer: the perlocutionary act cannot be said to be performed by S alone. It is a joint endeavor between S and H. It involves Ss performance of speech acts and Hs performance of response-acts (p. 422).

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In sum, intention, convention, and interpretation each play a necessary but insufcient role in securing the intended effect of uptake in both illocutionary and perlocutionary speech acts. Indeed, whether or not there exists a clear illocutionary/perlocutionary distinction remains an essentially contested issue. What I wish to propose for the purposes of this article is that all speech acts harbor a perlocutionary charge. Consequently, one might reasonably assert that the performative nature of pedagogy lies crucially in its deployment of perlocutionary acts. PEDAGOGICAL PERLOCUTIONS Committed to doing things with words, teachers do not merely trafc in constatives, that is, they do not simply represent and communicate ideas, knowledge, and information. Rather, teaching consists invariably of speech acts that seek to produce certain consequential effects upon the feelings, thoughts, or actions of the audience. It is not enough that a teachers utterances be understood; what she says should also bring about certain cognitive, affective, or behavioral changes in her students. The perlocutionary charge of teaching, then, consists precisely in its desire to generate desirable learning outcomes. Just as a teachers pedagogical intention is to cause students to learn, so learning is predicated on the perlocutionary nature of pedagogical practices. I call these practices pedagogical perlocutions. What might a simple example of a pedagogical perlocution look/sound like? Suppose that Professor X declares, All scientically based research is politically motivated, quoting a line from one of his course readings. In providing this piece of information (an illocutionary act), he intends also to provoke critical responses from his audience (a perlocutionary act). Considered in its pedagogical context, the professor can be said to have issued a performative speech act calculated to generate a variety of pedagogical effects: for example, to convince the audience, challenge their assumptions, invite demurrals, generate reection, elicit questions, and so on. What is crucial to note here is the range of actual and potential effects. Situated in the context-bound specicities of the communicative moment, the effects of any speech act are implicated in a plurality of audience interpretations. Multiple speech acts engender multiple meanings and effects, some of which imminently elude the intentions of the speaker/ teacher. This certainly appears to be the case when we consider that while speakers perform illocutionary acts for their intended audiences, they may also be inadvertently addressing other hearers or eavesdroppers (Clark & Carlson, 1982). The picture grows more complex when we acknowledge that 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 an equilateral triangle is 180 degrees (where the illocutionary force is rendered explicitly with the verbal indicators hereby and swear), can carry

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a different meaning if accompanied by an ironic grin. The force of any speech act, then, is not immanent in its linguistic form or propositional context, but is simultaneously inuenced by the communicative effects of nonverbal actions.3 On this preliminary account, perlocutionary acts can be seen as generative of any number of intended and unintended effects on both intended and unintended audiences. The same would apply to the performative nature of pedagogical acts. Indeed, that pedagogical perlocutions communicate more than the sum of their parts bears important implications for a predictive science of teaching, a point that this article will later explore. Without delving into the ner details of linguistic theory and scholarship for now, we can at least establish the essentially unruly nature of performative acts by honing in on three postulations with regard to perlocutions. These postulations have been referred to as the Multiplicity Thesis, the Innity 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 pedagogical perlocutions. Taken together, these perlocutionary theses nd expression in the gaps and silences between intention and interpretation, between the visible and the invisible, and between the ephemeral and the durable. There are, therefore, three fundamental difculties that an empirical account of teaching effects must grapple with: (1) Interpretive subjectivity: The successful uptake of an intended perlocutionary effect depends less on authorial intention than on
TABLE 1 Pedagogical Illustrations of Three Perlocutionary Theses Perlocutionary Thesis Multiplicity Thesis Proposition Saying something can produce multiple effects on multiple persons. A speech act can engender virtually limitless effects. Pedagogical Application Any pedagogical act engenders different effects on different learners. Any pedagogical act engenders potentially limitless effects on the same learner, from the immediate present to the unforeseeable future. Any pedagogical act engenders a multiplicity of intended and unintended effects.

Innity Thesis

Intention Irrelevance Thesis

A speakers intentions behind an utterance do not determine its perlocutionary effects.

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audience interpretation. A troubling implication is that a teachers good intentions, executed in the form of scientically based best practices, might nonetheless generate undesired effects. (2) Invisibility: Perlocutions lend themselves to a variety of cognitive, emotive, physical, or motor reexive effects (Gu, 1993), some of which consist of matter that the eye cannot descry. Changes in ones belief systems, for example, may go undetected under the scrutiny of formal 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 said to furnish the best indications of instructional effectiveness. An effective 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 temptation. Likewise, even the most highly qualied teacher would be hard-pressed to guarantee the durability of her students learning through the near and distant future. There lurks the possibility that any desired perlocutionary effect obtained under optimal learning conditions might still be dissipated by the intervening effects of untold presage, context, and process variables. Taken together, the triple threat of interpretive subjectivity, invisibility, and mutability exemplies the chronic instability of pedagogical perlocutions. Ungoverned by authorial intention and social convention, the effects of a perlocutionary act are contingent on a complex concatenation of variables that span the horizon of the seen, the unseen, and the unforeseen. To (mis)appropriate a theoretical trope in statistical analysis, pedagogical perlocutions suffer from effects sizes that are at once immeasurable and indeterminate. To speak of the perlocutionary nature of teaching is to acknowledge that the actual and potential effects of any set of pedagogical 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 perlocutionary effect. To acknowledge the perlocutionary nature of pedagogical performances, then, is to recognize that pedagogical effects are irreducible to a predictable schema of causality, conventionality, and intentionality. Teachers decidedly deliver more than they design. GRAPPLING WITH UNCERTAIN EFFECTS: SCIENTIFICALLY BASED RESEARCH ON TEACHING In the early 20th century, the American psychologist Edward Thorndike (1910) asserted that experimental research in educational psychology would culminate in a rigorous science of causal analysis:

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A complete science of psychology would tell every fact about everyones intellect and character and behavior, would tell the cause of every change in human nature, would tell the result which every educational forceevery act of every person that changed any other or the agent himselfwould have. (p. 6)

Thorndikes vision of Enlightenment rationality succeeded in inspiring generations of devotees. Since the turn of the century, educational researchers have looked expectantly to the possibility of reforming education into a precise science of causal relations (Lagemann, 1997; Roberts, 1968). Between 1999 and 2002, a series of federal laws in the United States were passed that aimed to raise the quality, credibility, and utility of educational research. The most notable of these was the Education Sciences Reform Act in 2002, which resulted in a federal mandate to promote scientically based research (SBR) under the guidance of the National Research Council. Written into the No Child Left Behind Act (U.S. Department of Education, 2010a), SBR is dened in part as research that involves the application of rigorous, systematic, and objective procedures to obtain reliable and valid knowledge relevant to education activities and programs (Section 9101[37]). Among its initiatives was the establishment of two expert online reference manuals for teachers, teacher educators, researchers, and policy makers: the Best Evidence Encyclopedia and the What Works Clearinghousethe latter hailed as a central and trusted source of scientic evidence for what works in education (U.S. Department of Education, 2010b). The academys redoubled search for what works in schools and classrooms belongs to a longer history of scientically based research programs. 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 in the study of teaching, process-product research is grounded in what Lee Shulman (1986) has called the correlative model of teaching effectiveness. Correlative conceptions of effective teaching propose that [t]hose practices or performances are effective that correlate with an outcome deemed desirable (Shulman, p. 54); their aim is to adduce evidence of stable causal or correlational links between effective pedagogies and their intended learning outcomes. Process-product studies embody SBRs positivist efforts to uncover and explain the determinate links among the contextual, intrapersonal, and interpersonal variables in any pedagogical equation. These variables encompass a bewildering multiplicity of processes and products. Drawing on the work of Harold Mitzel (1960), Michael Dunkin and Bruce Biddles (1974) schema usefully identies four species of variables involved in the pedagogical process:

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(1) Presage variables: These include the knowledge, beliefs, dispositions, and prior experiences teachers and students bring to the classroom. Other factors inuencing the learning process include the identity attributes of age, ethnicity, language, class, gender, sexual orientation, physical ability, etc. (2) Context variables: Also referred to as contingency factors, context variables belong to an expansive range of factors related to the school, the classroom, and the communityfor example, class size, composition, subject matter, curriculum design, conduct rules, physical setting, technology support, school leadership, parent involvement, etc. These encompass the physical, social, cultural, and institutional facts and factors that dene the situatedness of pedagogical events. (3) Process variables: These relate to the behaviors and interactions among teachers and students. Variables pertaining to teacher behaviors include how a teacher interprets the curriculum script, designs the lesson, conducts the ow and sequence of activities, communicates through verbal and nonverbal means, manages student behavior, interacts with students, and evaluates student performance. Pupil behaviors refer to how students conduct themselves in ways that reect and affect their attitudes, motivations, and abilities (i.e., presage variables). (4) Product variables: The products of instruction are the result of complex interactions among presage, context, and process variables. These learner outcomes can be differentiated between the affective (e.g., motivation, self-esteem, curiosity, compassion), the cognitive (e.g., ability to recall, comprehend, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate knowledge), and the behavioral (e.g., personal conduct, community service). Considered collectively, presage, context, process, and product variables elucidate the astonishing range of context-specic contingencies that surround all pedagogical perlocutions. Practically limitless in number and kind, these multiple variables participate in countless simultaneous and multidirectional interactions best characterized as volatile, indeterminate, and contingent.4 How these variables might nonetheless cohere in stable patterns of causality has been the focus of SBR. To what extent, then, have these paradigms of research succeeded in overcoming the skeptical claims of the multiplicity, innity, and intention-irrelevant theses? Can a science of 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 perlocution discoverable under the light of scientically based scrutiny? A troubling fact about teaching is that there is no established set of professional practices that have been proven to work independent of

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the particular actors involved and the particular time and place of the action (Labaree, 2004, p. 53). Even more troubling, perhaps, is that which lies beyond the particularities of the knowable. Indeed, there is reason to believe that the context specicities of any phenomenal event might even exceed the purview of known presage, context, and process variables. Drawing insights from the frontiers of science, Ralf St. Clair (2005) maintains that the universe of social phenomena is shot through with superunknowns:
The group of superunknowns includes factors of social relationships that cannot be dened, irrespective of advances in method or observationthey are fundamentally and categorically indenable. There are a number of reasons why this could be the case, such as the variations in human thinking or experience, or the essential impossibility of replicating contexts and encounters. (p. 446)

Recalcitrant to scientic prediction, superunknowns represent the contingent variables that positivist methodologies such as regression analysis conveniently relegate to the status of error terms or residuals. The real error, of course, is in construing all anomalies as annoying intrusions to be best ignored, on the assumption thatto invoke a politically charged analogythe majority must win. Philosophers, of course, have long meditated on the limits of reason and scientic rationality. As John Eisenberg (1992) has argued, this is a puzzle that nds currency beyond the humanities: The notion of a complete, self-sufcient, independent, objectively knowable order simply does not mesh with some of the most penetrating insights in mathematical logic, science, history and anthropology (p. 2). Human researchers are not omniscient creatures: the limits of scientic prescience are precisely the limits of human perception, cognition, and intention. While researchers are pushing the frontiers of educational science through complexity thinking, there remains in these complex equations the ineradicable presence of unknowns and superunknowns, which haunt process-product research with the lacuna of the unknowable. Despite the hopes espoused by the advocates of SBR, it would be remiss of educational researchers to ignore the claims of philosophical skepticism, which threaten in the nal analysis to subordinate all empirical investigations of complexity to the epistemological problem of uncertainty.5 Indeed, while a science of pedagogy aims to furnish determinable, evidence-based accounts of the determinate relations between perlocutionary causes and effects, the art of pedagogical performance offers to overturn 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 have argued, the crux of successful perlocutions lies in the cooperative transactions between the speakers intentions and the hearers interpretations. Insofar as interpretation cannot be ruled by authorial design and desire,

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the instability of uptake remains an ever-present threat to the felicity of a pedagogical performative. One might even regard the specter of indeterminacy as the inevitable meta-perlocutionary effect of language itself. It is a poststructuralist commonplace that meaning making through language, whether in speech or writing, entails a process that eludes nal destinations and denitionsa fact contingent on its embodied locations in diverse social, cultural, and psychological contexts. Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) contends that a radical plurality of intentions lies at the social heart of linguistic communication: language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of speakers intentions; it is populatedoverpopulatedwith the intentions of others (p. 294). Consequently, to subdue the effects of pedagogical perlocutions within a positivist straitjacket of determined intentions and determinable interpretations is to do violence to the natural life of pedagogical interactions. Such symbolic violence amounts to an attempt to exchange the living rationality of the spontaneously experienced with a reconstructed rationality derived from a theoretic (reconstructed) account of desirable (because more rational) practice (van Manen, 1982, p. 46). The educational scientist might, of course, protest that our postmodern anxieties are too much to bear. For to acknowledge the art of indeterminacy at the heart of teaching is to entertain the prospect that no known set of teacher knowledge, skills, and dispositions, combined with the right pedagogical approaches, techniques, and tools, can ever guarantee teacher effectiveness. Charged with good intentions, educational researchers, school leaders, and policy makers might well be justied in opposing the unsettling imputation of sciences ultimate futility. As one of four articles of faith in the National Research Councils (2002) report Scientic Research in Education states:
We assume that it is possible to describe the physical and social world scientically so that, for example, multiple observers can agree on what they see. Consequently, we reject the postmodernist school of thought when it posits that social science research can never generate objective or trustworthy knowledge. (p. 25)

Such hard-line pronouncements have provoked considerable scholarly debate within the academy,6 with humanities-oriented scholars reacting in particular to the uncritical rejection of postmodernisms capacity for selfreexivity. Indeed, to what ends might the modernist project of scientic rationality seek to question its own philosophical assumptions about the nature 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 SBRs faithful followers, a countervailing tradition of scholarship has set out to criticize the quality of education research, the intellectual credibility of educational researchers, and the status of the education academy in general (Kaestle, 1993; Koerner, 1963; Kramer, 1991; Labaree, 2004; The Teaching

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Commission, 2006). The most scathing criticisms have focused on the checkered achievements of educational science, with policy makers and government authorities lamenting the academys failure to establish a generalizable science of teacher effectiveness. Meanwhile, a growing body of research 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). Underpinning these studies is the view that uncertaintyapotheosized in the indeterminate links between pedagogical processes and products, between intents and outcomesis an irreducible certainty in teaching, one that ought to be embraced rather than eschewed. Relatedly, a rigorous science would seek out rather than rule out the implications of uncertainty for a deeper understanding of the nature of pedagogical perlocutions.

EFFECTIVENESS AS PERFORMATIVITY: CORRESPONDENCE MODELS OF PEDAGOGICAL EFFECTIVENESS To underscore the uncertain effects of pedagogical perlocutions, however, is not to undermine the institutions of teaching and learning. Teachers must teach and students must learn, as societies continue to participate in the ritual performances of formal schooling. While some of what teachers do in schools and classrooms might seem more conducive than others to achieving particular educational objectives, the precise scientic explanations for how and why these patterns obtain must, in the nal analysis, remain elusive. As I have argued, evaluations of effectiveness are highly contextual and situated, and the scientist can only do so much to unravel the hidden effects of a teachers pedagogical perlocutions. What remains to be unraveled are the ways in which potentially innite pedagogical effects are characteristically accommodated within an ofcial discourse of teacher effectiveness. Just as it is philosophically nave to ascribe certainty to the effectiveness of any pedagogical action, so it becomes necessary to understand the ways in which pedagogical effectiveness is variously interpreted, constituted, and negotiated. In his critique of a proposal by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Rodney Evans (2007) has argued:
The conceptual linchpin of the entire reform proposal thus rests on the ability to identify outstanding practitioners. . . . But the question of who qualies as best of the 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 a hierarchy 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 individuals subjective opinion. Analyzing students accounts of their classroom experiences, Parker Palmer

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(1998) concludes that it becomes impossible to claim that all good teachers use similar techniques: some lecture nonstop and others speak very little; some stay close to their material and others loose the imagination; some teach with the carrot and others with the stick (p. 10). Denitions of best practices vary according to culture, context, and audience. Researchers have shown that the specicities of culture, social context, and historical circumstance can determine whether the same pedagogical approach is effective or ineffective in achieving its intended outcomes (e.g., Luke, 2011; Neuman & Bekerman, 2000; Spizzica, 1997; Wong, 2004). The lesson to be drawn is that effective teaching can be enacted in diverse ways among diverse audiences under diverse cultural and contextual circumstances. Just as a play script lends itself to any number of performative interpretations, so, too, no pedagogical performance is bound by a generalizable script of teacher effectiveness. Admittedly, to acknowledge an innite variety of effective teaching practices raises the specter of relativism. Evidence-based prescriptions of what works work on the logic of xing evaluative standards for teacher effectiveness, so as to x the problem of uncertain perlocutionary effects sizes. To the extent that effectiveness criteria are potentially limitless in number and character, institutional authorities must differentiate between those that are more or less signicant, and upon these discriminations devise appropriate instruments to identify them. The linchpin of this reform movement is the correspondence model of teacher effectiveness (Shulman, 1986, p. 28), exemplied by the perennial efforts of policy makers to corral the sprawling meanings of teacher effectiveness under the codifying auspices of teacher competency checklists and performance rubrics. The codication of effective teaching and effective teachers entails normative choices about which effectiveness criteria ought to be included and excluded in the evaluative instruments used to select and certify highly qualied teachers. Over the last decade, the standards movement has sponsored various institutional efforts to establish performance standards based on the codication of best practices. Allied to this movement is the forensic task of decomposing the arts of effective teaching into its constitutive parts. An empirical case in point is the Enhanced Performance Management System (EPMS) adopted by the Singapore Ministry of Education as part of its teacher professionalization efforts (Ministry of Education, n.d.). A central administrative feature of the EPMS is that promotions, pay increments, and other performance-based incentives are awarded to teachers on the evidentiary basis of performance appraisals. The assessment instrument is a standardized Work Review protocol that documents and evaluates teachers competencies in relation to a slew of key performance indicators. Excerpted from the EPMSs Work Review form, Tables 2a and 2b enumerate the qualities, actions, and dispositions of effective teachers with respect to ve Competency Clusters, each cluster comprising a distinct suite of

TABLE 2A Performance Indicators of Teacher Competency in the Enhanced Performance Management System (Singapore Ministry of Education, n.d.) Competencies Performance Indicators

Competency Clusters

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(i) Shares values. (ii) Takes actions. (iii) Strives for the best possible provision. (iv) Encourages others to act in the best interest of the child. (v) Inuences policies, programmes, and procedures. 2. Cultivating Knowledge a) Subject Mastery: The drive to nd (i) Has knowledge in subject area and awareness of educational issues. out more and stay abreast of (ii) Keeps abreast with trends and developments in own subject area. developments in ones eld of (iii) Applies knowledge of trends and developments into lessons. excellence. (iv) Develops innovative approaches. (v) Provides thought leadership. b) Analytical Thinking: The ability to (i) Breaks down problems. think logically, break things down (ii) Sees basic relationships. and recognize cause and effect. (iii) Sees multiple relationships. (iv) Analyses complex problems. (v) Develops solutions to multi-dimensional problems. c) Initiative: The drive and ability to (i) Addresses current opportunities or problems. think ahead of the present and (ii) Acts decisively. act on future needs and (iii) Thinks and acts ahead. opportunities. (iv) Prepares for future opportunities. (v) Creates opportunities to achieve long-term payoffs. d) Teaching Creatively: The ability to (i) Uses routine methods. use creative techniques to help (ii) Appeals to interest. students learn. (iii) Uses a range of techniques. (iv) Teaches a range of concepts simultaneously. (v) Inspires learning beyond the curriculum.

1. Nurturing the Whole Child (Core Competency)

The passion and commitment to nurture the whole child.

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TABLE 2B Performance Indicators of Teacher Competency in the Enhanced Performance Management System (contd) Competencies a) Understanding the Environment: The ability to understand the wider Education Service and to positively use ones understanding of the school. b) Developing Others: The drive and ability to develop the capabilities of others and help them realize their full potential. Performance Indicators

Competency Cluster

3. Winning Hearts and Minds

4. Working With Others

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5. Knowing Self and Others

(i) Knows policies and procedures. (ii) Recognises organisational capabilities. (iii) Understands the rationale for existing policies. (iv) Applies understanding of school-related issues. (v) Applies understanding of socio-economic forces. (i) Provides suggestions. (ii) Gives guidance. (iii) Provides feedback and encouragement. (iv) Stretches potential. (v) Inuences professional development of others. a) Partnering Parents: The ability to (i) Keeps parents informed. work effectively with parents to (ii) Treats parents as partners. meet the needs of students. (iii) Encourages parental involvement. (iv) Works collaboratively with parents. (v) Builds long-term relationships with parents. b) Working in Teams: The ability to (i) Shares willingly. work with others to accomplish (ii) Expresses positive attitudes. shared goals. (iii) Learns from others. (iv) Encourages and empowers team. (v) Builds team commitment. a) Tuning Into Self: The ability to know ones strengths and limitations, and how they impact on ones performance and interactions with others. b) Personal Integrity: The quality of being honest and upright in character, in ones work and dealings with people. c) Understanding Others: The drive and ability to understand the thoughts, feelings, and concerns of others. d) Respecting Others: The underlying belief that individuals matter and deserve respect.

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performance descriptors. Collectively, these ve Competency Clusters command an impressive gamut of 45 performance indicators, which represent a comprehensive taxonomy of professional standards against which teachers performances can be accurately appraised. The burden of this evaluative project is the translation of pedagogical performances into a schema of observable behaviors, with the aim of rendering visible and tractable the range of duties and responsibilities that effective teachers are expected to perform. The meticulous enumeration of professional standards and expectations in the EPMS might be read as testimony to the avowedly high standards of teacher professionalism in Singapores education system. The more general implication here is that ofcial efforts to dene what counts as worthy performance require no less than a legitimation technique for evaluating teacher effectiveness in the name of teacher professionalization. Central to this bureaucratic mission is a methodology of selective construction. As Deborah Britzman (2003) explains, [c]ompartmentalisation denes the limits of relevancy; it brackets our denitions of context and content, and imposes measures of credibility that determine what we accept and reject as true and as false (p. 35). Seen through an Austinian lens, these models of professionalism function as constatives, statements that purport to represent what is true or false about the qualities of effective teaching and effective teachers. But the suspicion that all statements of fact depend ultimately on their ability to convince us of their facticity should give us pause. Disavowing his earlier distinction between constatives and performatives, Austin himself demonstrated that constative utterances are constituted precisely by the performative force of their truth effects. For example, one could be led to believe the assertion, Behold: This is the true Mona Lisa, even if the speaker were to be sincerely referring to a counterfeit of the original. Performatives, in this sense, operate beyond the normative bounds of justied true belief. The art of constative representation is itself a rhetorical act. Pegged to a scoreboard of ofcial criteria, the formal evaluation of a teachers performance purports to establish a valid correspondence between the truth about a teachers effectiveness and its discursive representation.7 But the summative score on a performance appraisal affords at best a selective denition of teacher effectiveness based on a selective account of the effects of a teachers pedagogical performances. As rhetorical testimonies to the truth of a teachers professional qualities and accomplishments, these standardized descriptors do not simply dene teacher effectiveness; they constitute effective teachers. Their performative effects reside less in their claims to truthfulness than in their power to constitute what counts as effective or ineffective.8 Objective descriptions of effective teaching are not so much authoritative statements of fact as performative statements that ratify their own scientic authority. On this view, the perlocutionary intention of teacher-competency dictionaries and

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pedagogical coding schemes is to grant legibility and legitimacy to a science of teacher effectiveness. Yet, such attempts to anatomize the nature about effective teaching do not demonstrably render it any more truthful or effective. As Richard Rorty (2000) maintains:
Just as you do not get on more intimate terms with the number 17 by discovering its square root, you do not get on more intimate terms with the table, closer to its intrinsic 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, or out of remote and disinterested relationships into more immediate and intense relationships. (p. 56)9

The rhetorical ruse of correspondence models, in effect, is to conate the discursive representation of effectiveness with its performance. To the extent that textual evidencein the form of performance rubrics, metrics, resumes, and portfoliosis taken as legitimating proof of a teachers effectiveness, such texts work to elide the distinction between representation and action, word and world. The script of a teachers performance becomes indistinguishable from the performance itself. Premised on their status as constatives, performance indices promise an unmediated view of the factsthe proverbial view from nowhere. Yet, performance indicators cannot but function rhetorically as terministic screens (Burke, 1966)articial lenses through which live pedagogical performances are observed, measured, and documented. Languagethe very stuff of which performance measures are madeis not a transparent medium of signication: as speech acts, they perform the very objects to which they refer. Scientic attempts to arrest the endless play of pedagogical effects are themselves the performative effects of the scientic enterprise, wherein the objects of analysis are reexively produced by the analysts objectives. Over and beyond its objective mission, scientically based researchers are thus committed to producing and authorizing the very discursive categories (e.g., best practices and performance standards) by which a teachers pedagogical effects and effectiveness are evaluated. Regulatory regimes of performance assessment assume the necessity of standardized evaluative criteria for teacher competency, the unquestioned assumption being that any teacher true to the profession ought to abide by the truths about effective teaching as spelt out by these appraisal instruments. Yet, as I have labored to demonstrate, pedagogical perlocutions inevitably exceed the descriptive and predictive capacities of performance rubrics, competency checklists, and appraisal indices. The main point here is that descriptors of teacher effectiveness rely ultimately on the perlocutionary force of their propositions: their aim is to convince practitioners and administrators of their construct validity by appealing not only to a professional consensus of researchers, school leaders, and policy makers, but also to the discourses of scientic rationality. A teachers professionalism

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denes and is dened by the constative functions of these evaluative instruments. In Michel Foucaults (1972) formulation, discourses are practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak (p. 205). Retroactively, to speak of best practices based on scientic evidence is to participate in the legitimation of a scientic discourse that gains authority precisely through the performative force of its own endorsement.

CONCLUSION This article has sought a critical perspective on scientic attempts to answer the questions: What are the effects of teaching? Can these effects be identied and ascertained according to a science of pedagogical effectiveness? Specically, I have argued that the paradigm of teaching as performance offers theoretical leverage for countering dominant modernist epistemologies in scientically based research in education. The premise for this argument is hardly new: Teaching is a supremely complex endeavor involving a bewildering constellation of causal factors, the observable (and nonobservable) effects of which are highly contextual and processual. What I have sought to accomplish is a strengthening of this premise from the vantage of philosophical linguistics. In so doing, I have positioned my article squarely within the paradigms of humanities-oriented research in education:
Woven into the fabric of humanities-oriented research in education, as in humanities-oriented research more generally, are various forms of criticism intended to problematize unrecognized assumptions, implications, and consequences of various kinds of educational practice, policy, and research, as well as to challenge what these approaches take for granted as beyond questioning. In this way, humanities-oriented research in education is often intended to foster dissonance and discomfort with conventional practice and, in some cases, to suggest alternatives. (American Educational Research Association, 2009, p. 482)

One source of dissonance and discomfort can be found in the theoretically informed notion of teaching as a performative act. Underpinning my argument is a denition of pedagogical perlocutionsspeech acts whose teacher-authored intent is to produce certain affective, cognitive, and behavioral effects on their student-audiences. Teaching is not only a performance; it is a performative act orchestrated to produce (un)certain effects on learners. At the core of this conception of pedagogical performativity is the aporetic nature of all pedagogical perlocutionsnamely, that teaching consists of the complex (inter)play of perlocutionary acts whose putative effects are practically impossible to pin down. Pedagogical perlocutions are potentially innite, sometimes invisible, often resistant to authorial intention, and always vulnerable to plural interpretations. It is this excess of possible effects that always already undermines the quest for generalizable accounts and generalized descriptions of teacher effectiveness.

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Drawing on the rich theoretical insights of Performance Studies, the metaphor of teaching as performance returns us to the processual, contextual, contingent, and transitory nature of pedagogical performances. No two live performances are identical. Iterations of the same script, featuring the same actors, costumes, dialogue, stage, script, score, and choreography, play to different audiences at different times and places, each pedagogical occasion a unique conguration of presage, context, process, and product variables. A performances ontological essence, then, lies in its temporal instantaneity, its irreducible irreproducibility in time and space. As Peggy Phelan (1993) contends, a performance vanishes in the very act of its unfolding:
Performances only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance. To the degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology. Performances being, like the ontology of subjectivity proposed here, becomes itself through disappearance.
(p. 146)

In Phelans view, the ontology of liveness imbues performance with the political power to evade representational regimes that threaten to codify and petrify its meanings. This point gains signicance when we consider how the act/art of teaching culminates in a live performance involving a live audiencea living event whose essence resists arrest by the static display of signs. A process of unfolding possibilities, the effects of any live performance exist in constant motion, settling at last into the unsettled permanence of spectators memories. Constituted in the immediacy of the moment, each pedagogical performance is a singular, irreplicable event, unrepresentable in its embodied ephemerality. As performance and performative act, teaching precedes and exceeds the exercise of symbolic control through prediction, generalization, and codication. Unfazed by the poststructuralist threat of indeterminacy, efforts by educational researchers to x the potential disjunction between desirable pedagogical practices and their desired effects answer to two paradigmatic conceptions of teacher effectiveness, which Lee Shulman (1986) has referred to as the correlative and correspondence models (p. 28). Correlative models, typied by the experimental and quasi-experimental designs of process-product research, articulate an Enlightenment narrative of progress, founded on the belief that a knowledge base of effective teaching exists, that lends itself to scientic experimentation, observation, and verication. Yet, this will to progress remains haunted by doubt: for to eradicate all uncertainty in the relations between perlocutionary causes and perlocutionary effects is to ignore the presence of unknown and unknowable effects hidden beyond the realms of the observable, the intentional, and the codiable.

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Ultimately, the challenge of ameliorating these uncertainties devolves to the work of correspondence models of teacher effectiveness. As instruments of professional accountability and control, such models seek to construct an anatomy of teacher effectiveness in the form of standardized checklists, rubrics, and descriptors by which teachers can be publicly evaluated. What counts as effective teaching, then, is what gets counted on the conversion tables of these discursive instruments. Applying the Austinian concept of performativity, I have argued that the objectication of effective teaching illustrates the ways in which scientic discourses work to create and authenticate, rather than simply delineate, the dening traits of teacher professionalism. Such discourses consist in the institutionalization of performance rubrics, indices, and checklists that purport to capture the essential properties of effective teaching and effective teachersproperties amenable to observation, validation, and codication under the auspices of scientically based research. Indeed, while science offers to atomize the objective components of pedagogical phenomena in all their social, cultural, and political complexity, [a] performance paradigm prevents the reication of culture into variables to be isolated, measured, and manipulated (Conquergood, 1989, p. 57). Underpinning the recommendations of the National Research Council is the belief that determinations of effectiveness are the professional preserve of those who know best. Correlative and correspondence models of teacher effectiveness alike derive their legitimacy from scientic experts elected to perform the task of constructing valid and reliable performance measures and standards. Teacher competency rubrics, performance certication measures, and the knowledge base of teaching are prime examples of effectiveness scripts authored by those authorized to adjudicate over such matters in the disinterested name of science. Within the political realm of scientically based policy making, the content validity of evidence-based models of teacher effectiveness is principally assured by their consensual validity within the scientic community; consequently, those who speak a different language outside this interpretive community (Fish, 1980) must struggle to be heard. Seldom, for example, are the subjective evaluations of students rigorously factored into schoolsanctioned indices of teacher effectiveness. The epistemic arrogance of evidence-based models of teacher effectiveness harbors a perlocutionary charge: teachers, researchers, and policy makers alike are called upon to enact and endorse these same strictures lest they be viewed as unprofessionally unscientic. Scientic attempts to resolve the problem of pedagogical performatives stem from performance anxieties brought about by performance pressures. At one level, the desire for certainty can be read as a response of righteous indignation to criticisms concerning the lack of utility, credibility, and scientic rigor in educational research. At the same time, the

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call for more effective science must be understood in the context of a climate of neoliberal accountability preoccupied with standards-driven, measurable outcomes on state expenditures (Luke, 2011). Within the global neoliberal order, Performance means effectiveness, an effectiveness that, in most cases, must be quantied for measurement and endlessly qualied for evaluation (McKenzie, 2001, p. 97). Today, the push for accountability through improved assessment instruments continues unabated. In the United States, for example, a new generation of performance-based teacher assessments, developed by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, relies on videotapes of teachers practice, examples of lessons and assessments, samples of student work, and analyses of student progress as evidence of teacher effectiveness (Darling-Hammond, 2001). Although more inclusive in their regard for multiple indicators of effectiveness, these performance-based assessments do not address, let alone overcome, the radical indeterminacy at the heart of perlocutionary effects. The lesson that I am drawing is by now axiomatic: Educational researchers must remain reexively skeptical of their own ideological investments in the positivist project of SBR (Howe, 2005; Schwandt, 2005; Walters, 2009). A politically astute rendition of SBR would require researchers to acknowledge the limits of what Ray McDermott and Kathleen Hall (2007) have wryly dubbed quantentative researcha probabilistic approach that, by denition and means of operationalization, allows conclusions through approximation, necessarily tentative, sometimes convincingly so, sometimes not, either way with results often useful to those in power (p. 13, my emphasis). Indeed, claims of scientic objectivity are themselves the modus operandi of power that legitimates itself on a selective consensus. Accordingly, a politically nave vision of SBR encourages, perhaps requires, construing social, political, and economic conditions as (xed) background variables, not factors to be investigated under the rubric of what works (or does not) (Howe, 2005, p. 242). Science in the service of what works becomes at worst an instrument of social surveillance and professional engineering, a means of exercising control over the performances of teachers and students. If utilitarian research betrays a xation on scientically based methods for xing the problem of indeterminacy, then the goal of critical scholarship is to unx the belief that one might, despite scientic evidence to the contrary, ignore the unseen, unforeseen, and unforeseeable effects of every performative act. Samuel Messicks (1989) notion of consequential validity urges humility on the part of scientists as they go about preaching the good news of sciences power to save education from its alleged state of disrepair. The unseen and intended effects of science are many and hidden, and those who employ its instruments must undertake an honest critical assessment of the consequential validity of their own performative endeavors.

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

NOTES
1. Born of the marriage between theater studies and cultural anthropology in the 1950s, Performance Studies has since grown into a mature eld of inquiry spanning the length and breadth of literary studies, cultural studies, media studies, 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 interdisciplinary reach, Performance Studies scholarship remains marginalized in the eld of educational studies. A thorough theoretical exposition of performance theories in relation to the study of teaching waits to be written. 2. Numerous critics have since expounded on the problems and ambiguities in Austins account of the illocution/perlocution distinction, a fuller account of which 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, one need only be reminded of the considerable individual and cultural variance in the gestural accompaniments of speech. That which Shoshana Felman (1983) refers to as the scandal of the speaking body gestures towards the communicative mischief that embodied nonverbal signiers can potentially discharge alongside the visible effects of pedagogical speech acts. To this complex scene one might add the observation that meanings and intentions can also be communicated wordlessly. For a review of theory and research on nonverbal communication, see Andersen (2007). 4. Over the last 3 decades, complexity thinking has emerged at the frontiers of scientic efforts to understand the seeming irregularities of complex natural and human phenomena. Also known as dynamical systems theory, complexity science seeks to understand the uncertain processes of pattern formation in complex, self-organizing, adaptive systems, while challenging standard depictions of linear causality and correlations in traditional positivist science (e.g., Davis & Sumara, 2006; Eidelson, 1997; Juarrero, 2000; Prigogine & Stengers, 1984). This scientic view of human social activity is one that resonates with the extraordinary complexity of pedagogical phenomena. To date, complexity science has made modest inroads into the mainstream of scientically based research on teaching and learning. 5. Philosophical skepticism, broadly construed, challenges the epistemologies of rationalism and empiricism, twin features of scientic positivism. Rationalists hold reason as the principal vehicle of true knowledge, the nal objects of which are assumed to be immutable and eternal. Empiricists emphasize experience and perception as the principal means of acquiring genuine knowledge of the world. Skeptical considerations, which I consider to be necessary for a reexive

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and rigorous educational science, argue that all knowledge arises from the contingent nature of perception, and are therefore susceptible to human error, delusion, and solipsism. A further examination of skepticism as it relates to questions of scientic uncertainty and indeterminacy is worth pursuing, although this gloss must sufce for now. 6. For collections of scholarly debates on the National Research Councils recommendations regarding scientically based research in education, see the special theme 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 College Record (2005, vol. 107, no.1). 7. Correspondence theories of truth belong to a long philosophical tradition dating back to Plato and Aristotle. Its central tenets were discussed in the writings of medieval thinkers like Aquinas and Ockham, developed through the modern period by the likes of Hume, Mill, Russell, Moore, and the later Wittgenstein, and formally elaborated by contemporary thinkers such as Gottlob Frege, Alfred Tarski, and Donald Davidson. Broadly speaking, the correspondence theory of truth posits that truth consists in a relation to reality: that truth is a relational property inhering in the correspondence between a specied set of properties and a specied set of observed characteristics or facts. Without entering into the intricacies of this philosophical trope, I have offered a rendition of correspondence that bears afnities 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 performance appraisal systems extend to teachers own performative fabrications of their professional achievements in the Work Review documents (Liew, 2012). What seems disturbing, if ironic, is that the linguistic performativity of performance appraisals furnishes a generative script by which teachers can perform excellently on paper under the pressure to perform. 9. This attack on traditional correspondence theories of truth is a familiar argument 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 veriable property to it; rather, it is to perform an illocutionary or perlocutionary speech act (e.g., to inform, to recommend, to advise, to examine).

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