Handbook of Research on Teacher Education

Enduring Questions in Changing Contexts

Marilyn Cochran-Smith, Sharon Feiman-Nemser, D. John McIntyre, Kelly E. Demers, Marilyn Cochran-Smith, Sharon Feiman-Nemser, D. John McIntyre, Kelly E. Demers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781135618322
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Co-Published by Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group and the Association of Teacher Educators.

The Handbook of Research on Teacher Education was initiated to ferment change in education based on solid evidence. The publication of the First Edition was a signal event in 1990. While the preparation of educators was then – and continues to be – the topic of substantial discussion, there did not exist a codification of the best that was known at the time about teacher education. Reflecting the needs of educators today, the Third Edition takes a new approach to achieving the same purpose. Beyond simply conceptualizing the broad landscape of teacher education and providing comprehensive reviews of the latest research for major domains of practice, this edition:

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• stimulates a broad conversation about foundational issues

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• brings multiple perspectives to bear

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• provides new specificity to topics that have been undifferentiated in the past

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• includes diverse voices in the conversation.

The Editors, with an Advisory Board, identified nine foundational issues and translated them into a set of focal questions:

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• What's the Point?: The Purposes of Teacher Education

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• What Should Teachers Know? Teacher Capacities: Knowledge, Beliefs, Skills, and Commitments

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• Where Should Teachers Be Taught? Settings and Roles in Teacher Education

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• Who Teaches? Who Should Teach? Teacher Recruitment, Selection, and Retention

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• Does Difference Make a Difference? Diversity and Teacher Education

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• How Do People Learn to Teach?

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• Who's in Charge? Authority in Teacher Education
  
• How Do We Know What We Know? Research and Teacher Education
  
• What Good is Teacher Education? The Place of Teacher Education in Teachers' Education.

The Association of Teacher Educators (ATE) is an individual membership organization devoted solely to the improvement of teacher education both for school-based and post secondary teacher educators. For more information on our organization and publications, please visit: www.ate1.org

Part 1

What’s the point?

The purposes of teacher education

Editor: David T. Hansen

Part 1

Framing chapters

1 Introduction

Why educate teachers?

David T. Hansen

Teachers College, Columbia University

Every philosophy of teacher education presupposes underlying assumptions about teaching and education. These assumptions are not easy to keep in view. As every seasoned teacher educator can attest, the work is all-encompassing, sometimes exhaustively so. The press of time, of building programs, of dealing with bureaucracies, of endless meetings with collaborators, of countless hours with candidates, of getting from one school to another, of applying for grants, and more, can make philosophical reflection seem like a remote luxury, perhaps for sabbatical or a weekend retreat. Moreover, the politicized environment surrounding teacher education generates anxiety, anger, distraction, and confusion. The environment places relentless pressure on teacher educators to showcase and defend their work, however experimental and in transition it may properly be (because dedicated teacher educators, like good teachers everywhere, are constantly seeking to improve their work, it often has an experimental character). This pressure can lead teacher educators to dig in their heels and dogmatically cling to particular values and aims, rather than to subject them to ongoing criticism and judgment. All of these factors militate against calm, tenacious, and honest reflection on purpose.

Even in settled moments it is not easy to return to one’s philosophical starting points. And yet, this kind of inquiry can be a source of immense intellectual satisfaction and personal growth. On the one hand, it can trigger fresh, revitalized thinking for programs, policies, and practices. On the other hand, it can spin out new and stronger threads for the fabric of one’s work as a teacher educator. The effort to philosophize makes it possible to articulate why teacher education is worthwhile. It positions teacher educators to gauge whether their views and values have matured over time. Such inquiry makes it possible to consider alternative outlooks, an experience that in itself can have significant consequences for educational thought and action.

The goal of this section of the handbook is to undertake an intellectual excavation. The authors of the chapters that follow identify bedrock values that underlie the stated purposes of teacher education most prominently in circulation today. The authors also describe additional values, outlooks, and programmatic approaches that might be of service to teacher educators as they ponder their reasons for being. All three authors are philosophers of education who have played sometimes intensive roles in the practical work of teacher education. As they elucidate concepts and ideas, they aspire to be critical, clear, and analytic. Their concerns and values will be apparent, even as they seek to keep open to question their own assumptions and those that characterize the current ethos in teacher education.

In Chapter 2, I discuss the educational values of (1) preparation for productive life, (2) academic learning, (3) human development, and (4) social justice, with the latter sometimes associated with multiculturalism, at others with civic and democratic education. I identify core meanings that advocates perceive in these values, and I raise questions about them. To provide philosophical assistance in criticizing them, I sketch two alternative standpoints for assessing the purposes of teacher education. They are what can be called “public interest” and “the cultivation of personhood” (or individuality). The chapter concludes with suggestions on how to sustain a critical dialogue about purpose in a climate where, to many, the issue has long been settled in favor of one value or another. Because no previous handbook of research on teacher education has addressed the question of purpose in a direct or systematic way, I write in the form of an essay, hoping to sketch perspectives that can propel future reflection and research.

Emily Robertson, in Chapter 3, examines the relation between teacher education and democracy. She takes as her context several interlocking circumstances: the evident decline in democratic participation in the United States, pressures to standardize curriculum and teaching through broad testing schemes, questions about the worthiness of schools of education to house teacher education, growing interest in civic education on the part of higher education institutions, and what she and many critics characterize as a polarized political and educational discourse in the nation. She asks: What dispositions and abilities can strengthen a genuinely democratic way of life? What roles can education, including teacher education, play in developing them? In response, Robertson focuses on how schools can assist the young to develop the arts of deliberation, negotiation, and activism in the name of justice and freedom. She addresses how teacher education can help new teachers grasp and teach these arts. (These tools can also be useful to teacher educators themselves as they debate purpose and substance in their programs.) Robertson concludes that schools of education can prepare good teachers capable of fulfilling this democratic purpose only if they sustain meaningful autonomy from centers of societal power, which might otherwise coopt teacher preparation in pursuit of their own particular ends.

In Chapter 4, Hugh Sockett describes four models of the epistemic and moral purposes of teacher education. Sockett takes as a point of departure conceptions of a profession, and raises questions about the appropriateness and likelihood of school-teaching becoming a full-blown profession. He examines the often conflicting claims about the knowledge base in teacher education. With this discussion in hand, Sockett elucidates four models of teacher preparation which he calls (1) the scholar-professional, (2) the nurturer-professional, (3) the clinician-professional, and (4) the moral agent-professional. Each harbors a distinctive moral and epistemological standpoint, such that each, as he shows, is both a model of practice and a model for practice. Sockett deploys his analysis of the models to underscore the fact that diversity of outlook continues to prevail both within and outside the teacher education community. As such, debate about the purposes and substance of teacher education, rather than consensus, will likely continue far into the future.

The inclusion and structure of the three chapters mirrors the aims of this section of the handbook. I hope my lead-off chapter helps readers come to grips with their most fundamental beliefs and convictions, as well as their deepest doubts and questions, about the purposes of teacher education. Emily Robertson seeks to shed light on the thorny and urgent issue of the place of teacher education in a society that purports to be democratic. Hugh Sockett foregrounds the epistemological and moral aspects of teacher preparation not only because it is timely to do so given contemporary discourse on teacher education, but also to illuminate what it means to speak of teacher education rather than, say, merely job training as if teaching were a mode of rote skill work.

These core chapters are followed by four readings selected to provide an intellectual, aesthetic, and ethical backdrop to this section of the handbook. They are written by, respectively, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jane Addams, W. E. B. Du Bois, and John Dewey. From an intellectual point of view, the readings demonstrate that questions about the purposes of education have been around for a long time because they are unavoidable, challenging, and inviting. In aesthetic terms, the readings illuminate how shriveled and dry conceptions of education can become if they are divorced from what renders life beautiful and meaningful. The readings provide an ethical backdrop because virtually every sentence in them addresses the reader, asking her or him to confront questions about value and purpose in education. Put another way, the readings cannot be heard if approached solely through an historical or sociological lens. Those lenses categorize the texts before they have even been opened, putting them in their (or a) place rather than considering the fresh voice they provide if one seeks to listen.

In “The American Scholar,” an address at Harvard College given in 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson fashions a provocative image of what it means to be an educator in a new society that has not yet “found” its identity (a condition that some might say continues to describe the United States). Such an educator takes seriously his or her mind and its powers to think, imagine, and question. For Emerson, this posture is requisite for taking seriously the minds of others. An educator does not pre-judge self or others, but rather arrives at or reaches a judgment after inquiry, reflection, and communication. The teacher and scholar also is a person immersed in the richest curriculum available, which constantly pushes him or her to expand horizons and perspectives. Emerson illustrates his argument by spotlighting reading. He contends that reading should constitute not merely the acquisition of information but should also be a formative experience in its own right. Reading should show the teacher and scholar the tremendous range and depth of human accomplishment across time, even as it demonstrates the many challenges in living. As a consequence, reading should compel the teacher and scholar onward, and outward, to realize as fully as possible his or her unique talents and bent. This experience positions the individual to assist others in what Emerson regards as the great and boundless human adventure of education. For Emerson, education should support every person’s entry to a life of purpose and meaning rather than to one of subservience, whether the latter be to a class, a geographic region, an idea, or an idol.

W. E. B. Du Bois’s tale, “Of the Coming of John,” published in 1903 in his The Souls of Black Folk, is at once a story of the costs of racism and of the dangers of education. A young black man, John, leaves his southern town to obtain an education in the north. After nearly failing because of youthful frivolity, he reverses course and succeeds brilliantly as a student. The consequences are both beautiful and devastating. On the one hand, John perceives how miraculous and magnificent are the accomplishments of humanity in realms such as art, science, and literature. He has an Emersonian insight into his own unfathomable potential to create and be a purposive being. On the other hand, he also sees how unjust his society has become under the pressure of racism and its associated social, political, economic, and educational inequities. At one and the same time, John experiences inexpressible joy and indescribable despair. His newly won vision is dangerous both to a racist social order and to his own community’s self-containment, and he becomes a foreigner to both. In between the lines of this story, Du Bois seconds Emerson’s call for an education in meaning for all persons, and also indicates that political, economic, and social change must accompany such a call for it to become a reality. At the same time, Du Bois leaves on the table the idea that genuine education will generate confusion, doubt, and suffering as much as their opposites. He asks, in effect, whether teachers (and their teachers) can accept this condition or whether they will seek safety and consolation by adopting a one-sided view of what is entailed in becoming educated.

Jane Addams advances a complementary view in her essay, “Socialized Education,” published in 1910 in her book about the settlement house movement, Twenty Years at Hull-House. Addams’ view of education fuses the values of individual development and community enrichment. She and her colleagues treat every immigrant who crosses the threshold of the settlement house as a unique, unprecedented being, but also as a person who can go on to share his or her educational experiences with others. It becomes an informally understood obligation for residents and immigrants alike that to receive positions one to give. Through a myriad of examples in this essay and throughout her book, Addams describes an education in and for the arts of communication and meaningful interaction with other people. “Socialized education” points to a merger of academic, trade, and civic education, as the immigrant children and adults participate in the comprehensive programs she and her colleagues tirelessly create and reconstruct. But the term suggests more than this, as a brief analogy with an idea from John Dewey will illustrate. Dewey highlights the need to “psychologize” subject matter if the young are to grasp its logic. They cannot immediately perceive knowledge in the same way an experienced scholar or teacher does. Knowledge must first be connected with their experience (see Chapter 2 in this section). On her part, Addams emphasizes the need to “socialize” the subject matter of both school and life in order to render it into something other than merely a personal possession. She grants a necessary space for solitude and private self-cultivation. But their fruitfulness is immensely enriched through a generous social and public life (and vice versa), however modest in scale it may be.

In the final selection, on “The Need for a Philosophy of Education” published in 1934, Dewey argues that in a rapidly changing world educators must be ever vigilant and ever articulate about their aims and methods. They must wed flexibility with principle, adaptability with conviction, and experimentation with commitment. A democratic way of life calls for these and associated dispositions precisely because such a life refuses to predetermine peoples’ destinies. For Dewey, education in modern times carries a special burden: to make available to all children and youth, on a regular basis, genuine educational opportunities. This unending task requires both excellent preparation of educators and consistent social, economic, and political support from society. At the same time, in accepting this burden educators experience a special democratic grace. More than most other groups and individuals in society, they have the privileged opportunity to engage in a systematic educational relationship with children, youth, adults, and their peers. They can bear witness to democratic transformation every day, if by “transformation” is meant the expansion and enrichment of communication between people however small in scale when compared to the social whole.

These cursory summaries illustrate why the readings remain fresh even as their influence has percolated through culture up to the present moment. They challenge the dominance of theory in approaches to reading, whether of books, persons, or events. The four figures would understand the claim that each of them could be read historically, as subject to particular influences, pressures, values, precedents, and so forth that in an a priori fashion are taken to determine the boundaries of thought and expressivity. They would understand the notion that each could be read as the embodiment of a particular gendered, raced, classed, and otherwise sociologically bounded standpoint or location. In a marvelous way, however, the four figures question the privileging of any perspective that presumes to hold “the key” to “the right way” to read the world. Through a variety of tropes and viewpoints, they dramatize the question of what degrees of freedom human beings enjoy to be creative in the very midst of psychological and social pushes and pulls. These and other factors account for why their work remains young, and for why it provides an appropriate backdrop for a fundamental inquiry into the purposes of teacher education. (For a detailed and closely related examination of the readings as a set, see Hansen et al., in press.)

The concluding portion of Part 1 of the handbook features commentaries by Michael Apple, John Goodlad, and Vanessa Siddle Walker. As editor, I invited them to serve as commentators because of their lengthy and varied experience as scholars, and because of their long-standing concern for education. Apple has examined ways in which the structures and ideologies of a capitalist political economy interface with the workings of the educational system. Goodlad has undertaken extensive studies of the functioning of teaching, schooling, and teacher education. Walker has researched in depth the education of blacks during the historical period of de jure segregation in the United States. In asking these scholars to comment, I also believed they would offer contrasting perspectives on the question of purpose in teacher education. They have fulfilled that expectation.

The core chapters, reading selections, and commentaries underscore the idea that education is a value-laden endeavor. Every curriculum and every mode of instruction embodies a judgment that this is important to learn and this is the way to teach it. This expression of judgment holds for the most advanced doctoral study and it holds for the most bare-bones job preparation program. The unavoidable presence of values in all educational work ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1 What’s the Point?
• Part 2 What Should Teachers Know?
• Part 3 Where Should Teachers be Taught?
• Part 4 Who Teaches? Who Should Teach?
• Part 5 Does Difference Make a Difference?
• Part 6 How do People Learn to Teach?
• Part 7 Who’s in Charge?
• Part 8 How do we Know what we Know?
• Part 9 What Good is Teacher Education?
• Name index
• Subject index