Teaching Social Foundations of Education

Contexts, Theories, and Issues

Dan W. Butin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135608316
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book, the first comprehensive, critical examination of the theory and pedagogy of the field of social foundations of education and its relevance and role within teacher education: *Articulates central questions in the field--such as "What is social foundations?"; "Is there a social foundations canon?"; "Is it possible to teach for social justice?"; "What is student resistance?";*Explores the limits and possibilities of teaching social foundations of education;*Provides strong arguments for the continued relevance of the discipline for teacher education;*Features a variety of clearly presented, theoretically grounded models for teaching social foundations within teacher education programs--including aesthetic education, critical theory, and eco-justice perspectives, the use of community-based oral histories, and experiential learning activities;*Provides concrete examples, actual syllabi, and a host of additional resources to help faculty teach, publish, and do research; and*Proposes new directions for research and dialogue within the field.This volume is an ideal entrance into the field for graduate students, junior faculty, and professors from other areas of education who are teaching in the social foundations field for the first time.

Part I

Defining and Contextualizing Social Foundations

Chapter 1

Social Foundations, Teaching Standards, and the Future of Teacher Preparation

Steve Tozer and Debra Miretzky

A new libertarianism has developed on the right, a point of view hostile to social spending and inimical to proposals for social justice and a welfare state. Radical critiques of public education have subsided as financial support has decreased. Schools are being directed to focus upon discrete “competencies,” on basic skills. The focal preoccupations are with efficiency, with accountability in terms of what is measurable. There is continual talk of behavioral engineering, of the values of management expertise. Less and less attention than ever is paid to emancipatory thinking or any type of critique. Technology and the free enterprise system are ascribed an implacable reality, along with explanations that legitimate them, even in economic decline. The most obvious concerns are with economic survival, with “making it,” in the face of unemployment, inflation, oil crises, and presumably inexorable decay. Hopelessness is expressed; there is a grim cynicism with respect to possibilities of reform. (1978, p. 57)

With few revisions, Maxine Greene’s description of the social context of schooling could be written about conditions in the United States today.¹ First published in Educational Studies in 1976 as “Challenging Mystification: Educational Foundations in Dark Times,” the article addressed the need for teacher educators to respond critically to their political-economic environment.² Greene urged educators to confront the “mystification” of lived experiences that were distorted and tamed by the efforts of the powerful to protect and justify their privilege:

The responsibility for critical understanding of the language of functional rationality, its premises, its origins, its distortions falls heavily on the educator. Perhaps it falls most heavily on the foundations specialist in teacher education, since he/she is distinctively obligated to equip teachers-to-be to reflect critically upon and identify themselves with respect to a formalized world …. There must be efforts made to reflect critically on the numerous modes of masking what is happening in our society—the numerous modes of mystifying, of keeping people still. (1976, p. 19)

Clearly, this is not the language that dominates contemporary teacher education reform. Social foundations educators are caught between two powerful and competing movements, neither of them very compatible with the historically critical traditions of social foundations research and teaching. One of these movements is the standards-based movement in pre-K–12 teaching, with its emphasis on standardized achievement tests, curricular alignment with state and national standards, and professional teaching standards (Darling-Hammond & Snyder, 2000). The opposing position is a market-driven orientation that emphasizes the deregulation of teacher preparation and the elimination of the “monopoly” of colleges and universities on teacher certification programs (Ballou & Podgursky, 1999, 2000). As Cochran-Smith and Fries described it, the agendas of both movements are “driven by ideas, ideals, values, and assumptions about the purposes of schooling, the social and economic future of the nation, and the role of public education in a democratic society” (2001, p. 3), and both movements seek to assert legitimacy through their use of evidentiary, political, and accountability claims. Although these two camps are at war with one another in state and national policy arenas, they both largely ignore social foundations of education as an essential part of teacher preparation programs.

This recent turn of events is serious business for social foundations educators. On the deregulators’ side, alternative routes to certification and “fast tracks to teaching” seek to reduce teacher education coursework to an absolute minimum. Advocates embrace the view that subject-matter knowledge and classroom experience are the most effective combination to produce teachers. The opposing standards movement is driven by outcomes measures, both for teacher candidates and for students, that offer little attention to social foundations of education in the teacher preparation curriculum. In the absence of a compelling case for the foundations, it is a fairly safe bet that the curricular space for social foundations coursework will be in jeopardy in many states. The politics of the matter are such that quoting Maxine Greene, no matter how passionately one might agree with her position, will not likely communicate to most policymakers and even many teacher educators why social foundations of education should be studied. Moreover, our students will ask, as they have asked for decades, “How will coursework in the foundations of education make me a better teacher?” Increasingly, in this period of standards-based, assessment-driven professional preparation, they can also ask, “How will this course help me on the standards-based teacher certification exam in my state?”

In sum: How do social foundations teachers represent to themselves and others the distinctive contribution their field can make to the professional preparation and development of teachers and school leaders in an era that appears inhospitable to foundations coursework in the professional curriculum?

Social Foundations in Historical Perspective

We have found that the best way to understand the distinctive contribution that social foundations can make to professional preparation is to examine the historical origins of social foundations instruction. Before the 1930s, if teacher and administrator candidates took foundations courses, they tended to be of two kinds. One was single-discipline coursework such as philosophy of education, history of education, or sociology of education. Scholars like R. M. MacIver in sociology, Elwood Cubberley in history, and W. H. Kilpatrick in philosophy used the lenses of the social sciences and humanities to study and teach about education in cultural context. The other kind of foundations course at the turn of the century used a different meaning of foundations: more akin to “fundamentals” or “basics.” Thus, New Jersey State Normal School Professor Levi Seely’s 1901 book The Foundations of Education was really an introduction to teaching practice, rather than an effort to use foundational disciplines to study school and society.

In 1934, however, George S. Counts published The Social Foundations of Education, which focused not on teaching or schools at all, but on the cultural base, or foundations, on which education must rest in any context. The opening words of his introduction signaled his perspective:

The historical record shows that education is always a function of time, place, and circumstance. In its basic philosophy, its social objective, and its program of instruction, it inevitably reflects in varying proportion the experiences, the condition, and the hopes, fears, and aspirations of a particular people or cultural group at a particular point in history …. While the biological inheritance of the race presumably remains practically unchanged from age to age and thus gives a certain stability to the learning process, education as a whole is always relative, at least in fundamental parts, to some concrete and evolving social situation. (p. 1)

And in the United States, for Counts, educational objectives and programs of instruction had to take account of the democratic inheritance of the nation, especially because that promise had been imperfectly kept. He began chapter 1 with the words, “The highest and most characteristic ethical expression of the genius of the American people is the ideal of democracy” (p. 9). He then went on to say:

The point is at once conceded that the history of the United States has been marked by many contrary influences and tendencies. The legions of democracy, not infrequently battered and leaderless, have always had to fight for their existence; and the ideal has often been confused with the reality. (p. 11)

For Counts, then, students of education needed to study the cultural substrata on which all educational processes must ultimately rest. This meaning, not foundations as the fundamentals or basics of education, permeates the 1934 volume. The book found a welcome audience among his colleagues at Teachers College, Columbia. In fact, they had influenced his thinking. Beginning in 1928–1929, a multidisciplinary group of faculty at Teachers College had begun to meet regularly to examine the social contexts of educational ideals and practices. Three participants in that discussion group who subsequently wrote about that experience went on to write very similar accounts, each different in emphasis and particulars. Harold Rugg (1952), Kenneth D. Benne (1974, 1984, as described in footnote), and R. Freeman Butts (1993) wrote about the origins of the Social Foundations Division at Teachers College, Columbia, in this period, but we quote at some length from Benne, as this piece of private correspondence has not previously been published as completely.

I know rather accurately the origins of “educational foundations” instruction at Teacher College, Columbia U. The first semester of the yearlong educational foundations course, Ed200Fa, was focused on issues of social policy in their bearing on “educational” policy and programs. (Ed200Fb was more individually oriented, dealing with psychological issues of human development in their bearing on controverted questions of curriculum, guidance and school administration.)

About the time of the depression of 1929 …. Professor W. H. Kilpatrick instituted a discussion group. Its members came from various disciplinary backgrounds—Kilpatrick, [Bruce] Raup and [John] Childs philosophy, [George] Counts and [Edmund de S.] Brunner sociology, Harold Clark economics, Goodwin Watson social psychology, Harold Rugg the arts, Jesse Newlon educational administration and political science. They met periodically—not less than once a month, sometimes more often. They had no fixed agenda—questions of foundering economy, a socio-economic crisis, intense political controversy—which were current and had a bearing, so they believed, on the task, orientation and policies of education.

They came to believe that all teachers should become students of the issues of contemporary society and culture and of the relations of these issues to questions of educational aims, methods, and programs. They also believed that a cross-disciplinary approach was conducive to adequate treatment of these issues.

In keeping with this thinking, they brought the psychological, sociological, economic, historical, and philosophical professors together into a division of educational foundations ….

It was the same group (Kilpatrick’s) which hatched the idea of the radical educational journal, The Social Frontier. It was probably at its greatest height in 1936 when I went to Teachers College. We used it frequently in Social Foundations courses (Ed 200F). (Benne to Tozer, 1984)³

Rugg’s earlier account confirmed Benne’s, although he indicates the discussion group began in 1928. He noted the cultural context, that, as we later note, seems regularly to attend key turning points in the evolution of the social foundations field.

In the long run, the formation of the Teachers College Discussion Group may prove to be one of the chief contributions of this period. They rediscovered the prior role of the art of disciplined conversation in the cooperative building of a theory and a program of education for a culture in crisis. (p. 515)

One of the major outcomes of the Kilpatrick discussion group was that it devised a two-semester curriculum, culminating in Readings in the Foundations of Education, for which Rugg served as lead editor (1941). The Counts and the Rugg volumes shared a common approach to foundational study in professional preparation: They sought to provide a critical, cross-disciplinary study of education, including schooling, as a cultural process grounded in the social institutions, processes, and ideals that characterize particular cultures. It was critical in its explicit effort to test social and educational institutions and processes against democratic ideals. This critical, cross-disciplinary view of social foundations of education, not the “introduction to teaching” approach, marked the development of the field from the 1940s onward, and it led to the founding of the American Educational Studies Association (AESA) in the 1960s and the Council of Learned Societies in Education (CLSE) in the 1970s.

The turning points in the history of the development of the field are tied to historical moments when social inequities and instrumental rationality were ascendant. The social foundations movement originated when the Great Depression had ravaged the nation and teacher preparation was still locked in a social transmission model that Rugg called “the Conforming Way.” In the late 1960s the American Educational Studies Association was founded amidst a tension between the forces of social protest and a conservative techno-rationalist school reform movement symbolized in the work of James B. Conant. And when Maxine Greene wrote her remarks cited earlier in this chapter, the competency-based teacher education movement threatened to take over teacher preparation entirely.

Partly in response to the behaviorism of the competency-based movement, foundations organizations had by 1978 published the Standards for Academic and Professional Instruction in Foundations of Education, Educational Studies, and Educational Policy Studies. The sponsoring organization for the Standards, the Council of Learned Societies in Education, changed its name in 2000 to the Council for Social Foundations of Education to communicate its mission more accurately. Through 2003–2004, it has been the official voice of some 20 social foundations organizations (e.g., History of Education Society, Philosophy of Education Society, AESA) in the governing structure of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE).

The CSFE Standards, like the Foundations Division at Teachers College in the 1930s, presents an explicit rationale for the role of social foundations in the professional preparation of educators: that social foundations uses the lenses of the social sciences and humanities to help teacher candidates develop “interpretive, normative, and critical perspectives on education” and that such perspectives are important to interpreting educational practice in cultural context. The knowledge, skills, and dispositions indicated in the Standards are those that help teachers develop the sociocultural understandings, critical skills, and habits of mind to interpret and critically evaluate educational aims, practices, and problems in their institutional and cultural context (Tozer, 1993; Tozer & Avcioglu, 2001). The Standards were revised in 1996, partly in response to the professional standards-based movement in teacher preparation.

A Persistent Tension: Curricular Purposes versus Curricular Space

Before leaving this brief historical overview of the social foundations of education, one other tension must be noted: between efforts to articulate the distinctive role of the foundations and the effort to minimize that role in the curriculum. This is not a new phenomenon, as Butts told us in his account of the 1949–1950 academic year at Teachers College, during his tenure as department chair. This little-remarked passage is worth quoting at length.

Aside from the competition for staffing in a resurgent college blessed with the enrollment booms of the late 1940s and guided by the strong leadership of Dean Caswell, the movement to dilute the eight-point [credit] requirement in the foundations fields for the M.A. degree was already under way. First, certain other courses in the Department could be substituted at will for the 200F without our permission. Then a college-wide committee appointed by Dean Caswell and dominated by members of Division IV (Instruction) got the faculty to approve general courses in administration, guidance, and curriculum in place of two points of foundations courses …. This creeping dilution and ultimately virtual defeat of the foundations requirement are among my principal regrets. I think I did my best to counteract the trend, but I never quite succeeded. I have always felt guilty about this.

It’s ironical, too, because the whole department turned to and devoted twenty-four two-hour meetings to reexamining the foundations idea and the role of the Department in the College and formulating guidelines for the future policy, program, and personnel of the Department. This was a genuine joint project, hammered out in lively department meetings … over the academic year of 1949–1950 …. I’m actually very proud of the documents that emerged by May, 1950. I believe they are still basically sound …. “The task of educational foundations centers upon a basic and comprehensive study of the culture and of human behavior as these are related to the total educational enterprise. It assumes that every member of the educational profession should have a fundamental understanding of the relations of education to the deepest values, traditions, and conflicts in society and to the basic characteristics of human behavior …. The foundations process … is one which (1) deals with questions of educational direction, policy, and action in areas of unresolved problems in the culture, in such way (2) that every available, pertinent, and scholarly resource is brought authentically into the effort, (3) with a definite view to attaining the greatest possible personal commitment to democratic beliefs, purposes, and goals, and (4) to extending the effort to gain the maximum possible community of understanding, purpose, and commitment. It need hardly be said that this is an effort to make a discipline of the democratic process, particularly as this becomes the concern of educators in a democracy. (Butts, 1993, pp. 23–24)

Even while social foundations coursework at Teachers College was being articulated in terms of a cross-disciplinary study of culture and behavior that emphasized the ideals and practices of democratic life, its curricular space was being squeezed. We should not be surprised to see that same tension today, played out under n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• About the Contributors
• Part I: Defining and Contextualizing Social Foundations
• Part II: Models of Social Foundations Practice
• Part III: Developing Teacher Educators with/in Social Foundations
• Part IV: Social Foundations and the Engagement of Contested Positions
• Appendix: Course Syllabi
• Author Index
• Subject Index