Becoming a Student of Teaching

Linking Knowledge Production and Practice

Robert V. Bullough, Andrew Gitlin, Colleen Ballerion Cohen, Richard Wilk, Beverly Stoeltje

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136696848
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This new edition of a very successful book offers an innovative teaching methodology that place the teacher's own biography and life experiences at the center of teacher education. By asking students to explore their own systems of meaning and the associated contexts, especially school contexts, the author encourages them to contemplate issues of power that are vital to thinking about the teacher's role, as well as educational practices and purposes.

1

Getting Oriented

Context and Perspectives

We have been educators for over twenty-five years: first as teachers, later as teacher educators. We worked together for many years at the University of Utah. Over the years we have sought to challenge traditional approaches to teacher education as training and to develop programs and practices that maximize beginning teachers’ control over their own professional development. The secondary teacher education program within which we first worked together was disjointed, fragmented, and confusing. Training was the program’s aim: Based on a delivery conception of teaching, emphasis was placed on learning and practicing discrete skills, and programmatically public and private theories were clearly separated. Public theory was privileged over private theory in knowledge production. By “public theory” we mean expert talk—the substance of academic discourse, including concepts, generalizations, models, and ways of making meaning (see Griffiths & Tann, 1992). In contrast, private theory is grounded experientially and is represented by personal, idiosyncratic, biographically embedded, and often implicit assumptions and beliefs by which individuals make life meaningful. These theories, the private ones, are embedded in what Korthagen and Kessels (1999) describe as “gestalts,” “holistic perceptions guiding behavior” (p. 9).

Methods courses were disconnected from curriculum courses, and both were separated from practice teaching. Similarly, educational foundations courses, and their concern for the aims of education, were unrelated to methods courses and their emphasis on means. Moreover, students were strangers to one another and dropped into and out of the program at their convenience. Who these people were was of no special consequence to the program or to those who taught within it. Like the students, professors drifted in and out of the courses and felt little connection to the program. Students complained loudly about content duplication and superficiality; about the kind, quality, and quantity of field experiences offered; and perhaps more than anything, about not feeling cared for. No one on the faculty was responsible for the individual student and for seeing that he or she was making reasonable progress toward certification. Student complaints were hard to ignore, especially since they were frequent and loud enough to convince the dean’s office that something was amiss and in need of fixing. But what to do about them?

A change in the program would necessitate a change in faculty roles, and under the best of circumstances, this is difficult to achieve even when there is widespread student dissatisfaction. Program fragmentation, after all, plays to professors’ desires for autonomy and independence. In response to growing dissatisfaction, the faculty began meeting to explore the situation in order to improve it. Some faculty members understood the problem as simply a matter of providing better integration of methods courses with fieldwork and of improving the quality of student advising; no shift in orientation or change in structure was required. From this viewpoint, all that was needed was for faculty members to share course syllabi and come to some agreement about who would teach which topics and for the student-advising office to shape up and do a better job.

Others had a different view of the problem, a more structural and philosophical view. Separate courses taught by faculty members who rotated through them and felt no deep commitment to them would inevitably give rise to problems of duplication and, perhaps, of superficiality. From this viewpoint, occasional meetings within which syllabi were shared would do little to change the situation and nothing at all to bridge the gulf separating public and private theories about teaching or educational aims from means. Moreover, when both students and faculty members drop into and out of courses, it is unreasonable to expect that caring relationships with students would consistently develop, and caring relationships, some thought, were central to effective advising and teaching. Teaching is a relationship, a way of being with and relating to others, and not merely an expression of having mastered a set of content-related delivery skills. And advising is a matter not just of dispensing information in a timely fashion but of building trust, of talking and problem-solving together. Some sort of fundamental change in program structure and orientation was needed.

Eventually, faculty members agreed to experiment with a cohort organization, an attempt to create the “shared ordeal” (Lortie, 1975) that would help students see themselves as part of the teaching profession. Since that time, the early 1980s, the cohort idea has caught on in teacher education (see Wideen, Mayer-Smith, & Moon, 1998). For a full academic year a team of two professors (later this changed to a professor and a teaching associate because of limited resources) would be responsible for planning, teaching, and coordinating a large portion of the certification work of a group of twenty-five students. This included general methods courses and curriculum courses, which met for six hours during the first semester (or two terms), and student teaching, which included a weekly seminar. Moreover, within the cohort organization, professors would do much of the advising that had formerly been done by the advisement office. The courses leading up to practice teaching were to involve significant fieldwork, and to this end the students were to be placed in a school early in the year and continue to work within it throughout the year. Eventually, some of these schools became professional development schools (Holmes Group, 1990), where practicing teachers are specially educated to serve as mentors for student and beginning teachers and study their practice, but this is getting ahead of the story (see Bullough et al., 1997).

We supported this proposal and nudged it along, although we worried about the amount of time and energy that the change would demand of us. Soon, we found ourselves assigned to our first group of students, and with this assignment we faced a daunting problem. Being responsible for such a large portion of a program, and having students for an entire academic year, meant that we would be teaching new courses that required of us the development of new areas of skill and understanding; even when we had previously taught the content, a different approach or organization was needed. As we discovered, our relationships to students would also dramatically change. Despite these fears, however, we recognized that the structure would allow us to experiment with different approaches to teacher education. For instance, for the first time in our careers it became possible, at least in principle, to introduce a theoretical concept, such as the implicit or “hidden curriculum,” have students work with the concept in a field site, return to campus for further exploration of the concept, and then, as the students gained experience, return to it later in the year and in different ways. Moreover, it allowed for practice to produce theory and theorizing as students returned to campus with burning questions that arose from their work in the schools. Through this change in program structure we could better link public and private theories and the study of aims and educational means.

A Shared Perspective on Education

At this point in the story, we need to step back for a moment and share a bit of our biographies. Although attending different graduate schools (Ohio State and Wisconsin), we were both deeply influenced by work being done in critical theory in education, a theory that directed our attention to the relationship between schools and the social priorities and inequalities that characterize capitalism. We thought of public education as an extremely important avenue for furthering social and economic justice, but believed the institution—its organization and traditions—stunted this potential. We understood schools as factories, driven by class interests and infused with the values of a technocracy: control and efficiency, the handmaidens of training. We thought of teachers as oppressed workers, trapped, victims of an oppressive and alienating system. Indeed, much of our early research reflects this view (Bullough, Goldstein, & Holt, 1984; Gitlin, 1983).

Our focus, then, was primarily on institutional critique. We sought to identify the ways in which schooling constrained teachers’ actions and student learning, not the ways in which schools could enable their development or the ways in which teachers could shape the institution and create a culture within the classroom and school to achieve their purposes and build desired relationships with students. Not surprisingly, we often found the beginning and practicing teachers who sat in our classes interested but largely disconnected from our analysis of schooling. Our project, and the public theories we presented, was not their project; being well-trained students, they mastered our discourse to give it back to us but, apparently unaffected, often left us to engage in their lives’ work as though they had never been in our classes.

A Reconsideration

Reenter the cohort: Imagine yourself for a moment in our shoes, being assigned to work with a group of twenty-five preservice teacher education students for an entire academic year, good students who genuinely wanted to become teachers. Now, imagine having as your central professional message that schools are lousy places to work, young people alienated, and the curriculum fundamentally and perhaps fatally flawed! True or not, a year is a long time to endure such fare, and perhaps even a longer time to push it. What the cohort organization did was force us to reconsider our professional agendas, our aims and our theories in relationship to our students’ theories and their aim to become teachers and to succeed in the short run in practice teaching and in the long run as teachers. In our work at the university, the question for us was (and still is): How could we develop encounters with teacher education content and theory that would help our students achieve their goals and simultaneously enable us to achieve our aims that they become critically minded educators?

Our dilemma was softened a bit by developments within critical theory and education that led to an attack on correspondence theory (Apple, 1979a). Correspondence theory, representing a rather vulgar, deterministic Marxism, suggested that schooling reproduced social inequality by corresponding with the inequalities of the larger society and, by implication, that persons do as contexts allow them to do; consciousness follows context as day follows night. In this view, human agency was a delusion, a liberal’s foolish fantasy. The attack on correspondence theories brought with it a message of hope that rang true to our experience: Persons frequently act in surprising and unpredictable ways. Often they resist institutional pressures to conform, and with their resistance comes the possibility for institutional change and, therefore, hope for school reform. This turn was reflected in our own work as we conducted studies and worked with teachers who, in various ways, exercised their agency and seemed to make school a better place for their students as a result (Bullough & Gitlin, 1985; Bullough, Gitlin, & Goldstein, 1984). Importantly, we came to recognize that resistance is often grounded in private theory and in powerful beliefs about self as teacher contrary to those that are institutionally preferred. Potentially, then, teacher education could play a part in school transformation, and critical theory could serve as a lens for focusing our work as long as it was seen in relation to the private theories held by students. Biography and history need to be linked (see Mills, 1959).

Our study of the writings of Jürgen Habermas (1971; 1975) also proved important to our development. We found compelling his vigorous criticism of instrumental reason, the kind of reason that reduces human beings to numbers; the universe to a giant, grinding machine, and education to training. But unlike a good many critical theorists, Habermas moved beyond critique. He recognized in the innate ability and desire of humans to relate to one another through language a means for generating a social and political ideal worth striving for: communication without domination. He explored the conditions needed for communication to proceed fruitfully and explicated some of the ways in which communication is distorted, often intentionally for strategic reasons as when we manipulate our friends to get our way and to set aside their own interests. His ideal, albeit utopian, got us thinking about teaching in ways we had never thought of before and sharpened our awareness of the negative influence of the assumptions of training on our students’ development as teachers. We recognized that as a relationship teaching always involved unequal distributions of power between teachers and students, but began to explore the ways in which we might minimize domination through conversation and dialogue (see Bullough, 1994; Gitlin, 1990). More broadly, we began to think of learning to teach in terms of engaging our students in the critical and communal study of their own thinking and practice and of linking this study to public theories about institutional power and education.

Working with the cohort groups and getting to know, respect, and enjoy our students also played an important part in nudging along our development. For the most part, they were very able and interesting people—adults—who brought with them a commitment to, as many of them often have said, “make things better.” Generally they came to teaching with a lively service ethic; many were called to teach (Stokes, 1997). One could not work with such people and still hold strongly to the view that their actions were merely reproductive of social and economic inequalities, that they were only pawns in a cruel social charade. To incorporate our growing appreciation of the importance of agency in institutional life, we eventually organized our practice within the cohort around the dialectical and dynamic relationship of self and context. We focused on self because of its connection to knowledge production (private theories) and agency. We came to think of our students as moral-political agents about to assume positions of power and authority. We focused on context because critical theory had helped us understand how contexts often direct teacher behavior in ways that run counter to their deepest values and obscure institutionally accepted roles and relationships. Individualism and conservativism result where teachers withdraw into the safety of their own classrooms and classes to find security and a sense of self-worth.

As our thinking evolved, so did our practice; as our practice evolved, so did our thinking about preservice teacher education. We encountered many frustrations. Perhaps the most important frustration came as a result of watching much of our work “wash out” during student teaching and the first year of teaching. It appeared as though, once our students became “real” teachers, they forgot or simply discarded much that we had “taught” (see Bullough, 1989; Bullough, Knowles, & Crow, 1992). We wanted our students to become producers of knowledge and, through the process, students of the practice and politics of schooling. We saw little evidence to suggest that our aims were being met. Survival and the desire to obtain a positive teaching evaluation or to fit into a department consumed many of our students during practice teaching and later during their first year of teaching, just as trainers who emphasize apprenticeships long claimed. Recognizing this problem as partially related to a student teaching format that was a holdover from our program when training was the central aim, we changed student teaching from full to half time teaching so that additional time was available for reflection, for thinking carefully and communally about practice. This helped, but the problem persisted. We came to realize that no matter how hard we worked within preservice teacher education or how many adjustments we made in practice teaching, the problem would continue until preservice teacher education was linked to in-service teacher education and both challenged training assumptions.

A serious limitation of training is that it permits the dropping off of newly certified teachers at the school’s doorstep as though the knowledge about teaching that has been poured over their heads makes them a teacher. Our students, we realized, needed ongoing support after certification to continue their exploration of self and context, particularly when the results of this exploration produced tension between institutionally favored roles and relationships and personally valued ones. Thus, our rather limited initial vision of teacher education as a group enterprise defined by cohort membership expanded beyond the confines of preservice teacher education. We found ourselves supporting efforts at “simultaneous renewal,” as Goodlad characterizes the challenge, of teacher education and schooling (see Goodlad, 1994). The conclusion cannot be avoided or ignored: Teacher education is never ending, and the creation of a vital community is central not only to educational renewal but also to individual teacher development. Indeed, continuous teacher development and creating the institutional conditions needed to support that development are the essence of educational renewal (Bullough & Baughman, 1997; Gitlin, Bringhurst, Burns, Cooley, Myers, Price, Russell, & Tiess, 1992; Sarason, 1990).

Five Core Assumptions

For the most part, Becoming a Student of Teaching presents the results of a kind of informed trial and error approach to teacher education, but this tells only a part of the story. We have not worked within an institutional or intellectual vacuum, and, in our case, we have been fortunate. Within the cohorts we have enjoyed remarkable freedom. Our students have not only tolerated our sometimes crazy ideas but also—through interviews, questionnaires, and other means—have given useful feedback on our work that has greatly assisted our efforts (see Bullough with Stokes, 1994; Bullough, 1997b; Gitlin et al., 1999). Being students of our practice, we have taken this feedback seriously.

Through the years of experimenting and of testing our hunches, along with our reading about and study of teacher education, we have come to a few conclusions about how to make teacher education more educative. We stand by them, although we realize that with time and increased experience adjustments will likely be necessary, as is indicated by the changes we have made from the first to the second edition. They have taken the form of five interrelated assumptions that we believe, when taken together, offer an alternative to narrow training conceptions of learning to teach and whose echoes resound on every page of Becoming a Student of Teaching. The first assumption is that certification signals only the beginning of teacher education, not its ending. Ultimately, preservice must be joined to ongoing in-service teacher education. The second assumption is that because work contexts both enable and limit human development, they need to be carefully studied and criticized. In this critical engagement with context, the student’s own experience of schooling plays a central role. The third assumption is that our conceptions of ourselves as teachers are grounded biographically and experientially. If teacher education is to make a strong, positive difference in development, it must start with biography and find ways to identify, clarify, articulate, and criticize the assumptions—the personal theories and their surrounding gestalts—about teaching, learning, students, and education embedded within it. Public and private theories must converse. The conversation needs to take place in the space between history and biography. The fourth assumption is that reflection, systematic inquiry, is a central and crucial element in making teacher education educational. The aim of reflection is to influence the grounds upon which teachers make decisions, including those made instantaneously in the thick of teaching. The fifth and last proposition has two parts: (1) Given that teache...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1. Getting Oriented
• Section 1. Preservice Teacher Education
• Section 2. In-Service Teacher Education
• Appendix: Notes to Teacher Educators
• Bibliography
• Index