Teacher education: notes towards a radical view (original) (raw)
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TEACHER EDUCATION IN THE CONFUSION OF OUR TIMES
There is little agreement in teacher education as to what counts as knowledge and how individuals come to be affected by ideas, people, and events in their world. Whereas teacher education seems to debate questions about the adequacy of its structures, it has forgotten its place in the world and its obligations to world making. However, teacher education has not yet grappled with a theory of knowledge that can analyze social fractures, profound social violence, decisions of disregard, and how from such devastations, psychological significance can be made. Returning to an earlier history and drawing upon philosophers who were also concerned with the relation between teacher education and social reparation, this article advocates for a view of teacher education that can tolerate existential and ontological difficulties, psychical complexities, and learning from history. If it is a truism that to teach, teachers must engage knowledge, it is also right to observe that as the new century unfolds, there is still little agreement in our field of teacher education as to which knowledge matters or even what might be the matter with knowledge. Nor is there much understanding regarding how those trying to teach actually learn from their practices, their students, or their incidental anxieties made from acquiring experience. We cannot agree on the length of the practicum, on whether the 19th-century apprentice model is still relevant, or even the future of schooling itself. Various learning taxonomies developed throughout this century try to settle these doubts; yet, however elaborated or simplified, the measures offered never seem adequate for the uncertainties of teaching and learning. It is difficult, then, to even find the subject of teacher education, so inundated is our field with the romance of cognitive styles, the rumblings of brain research, the idealization of information and standards, and the parade of new diagnoses of learning failures: attention deficit disorders, overstimulation, understimulation, and not enough Mozart. At the beginning of this new century, in the confusion of our times, we seem to have a better idea of all that we lack than we have a notion as to what makes understanding so difficult (Britzman, 1998), or even how we might think about the psychological significance of teacher education. We do know more about what holds education and teacher education back. There is the force of governmental interdictions, censoring both ideas and the personal lives of teachers and students. Our own definitions of professionalism preclude complications of selves and then ask for compliance and conformity. We have made great strides in emptying the curriculum from debating itself. Symptoms of these mala-dies can be observed: camera surveillance devises, weapon detectors, and corporate ID tags for students and teachers. Behind these symptoms is the stultifying dream of uniting the nation through a common curriculum made safe from any controversy. And then we are caught in a repetitive debate over whether schools and teacher education can or should be able to prevent eruptions of social violence. The old question of what schooling is for becomes utterly entangled with what it means to think
Commentary: The Question of Teacher Education
LEARNing Landscapes, 2014
Addressing Hannah Arendt’s call to prepare the next generation to "renew our common world," this essay questions how we can simultaneously share our world with students and encourage them to question it. Because teacher education is suffocating in the stipulations of "best practices" that blanket the ambiguity that makes it interesting, this essay explores the questions that make this work compelling. It considers the inhibitions that constrain agency and imagination in teaching, the narratives that collapse experience into predictable accounts delivered to satisfy rubrics and protocols, and turns to the work of poet and classicist, Anne Carson, for a sense of story that opens up experience instead of closing it down.
Challenging Policy, Rethinking Practice; or, Struggling for the Soul of Teacher Education
The Struggle for Teacher Education: International Perspectives on Teacher Education Governance and Reforms (Tom Are Trippestad, Anja Swennen & Tobias Werler [Eds.]) , 2017
Given the ongoing and escalating struggle for control of teacher education around the world, it is timely to re-assess the project of teacher education itself. This chapter reviews and critiques contemporary policy developments and debates in and about teacher education, and then introduces and explores a new and different perspective based on recent developments in practice theory and philosophy. The aim here is to present a richly reconceptualised understanding of teacher education as professional practice. Re-thinking and re-organising the field in accordance with an informed practice-theoretical view is proposed as an alternative to current hegemonic positions and as a means of settling arguments that appear overly invested in policy reform as the key solution to the challenges facing teacher education today and tomorrow. The chapter thus argues for a (different) practice turn in teacher education.
Theory and Research in Education, 2017
This feisty little book is a collection of papers prepared for a series of symposiums on teacher education held at various locations in the United Kingdom in 2011 and 2012. The philosophical perspectives on teacher education articulated here tend to operate in the long shadow cast by R.S. Peters, who argued that schooling should aim primarily at individual intellectual and moral cultivation and who assumed that teachers have something of a natural right to control the curriculum. The volume nonetheless presents a trove of insights into how the kind of critical and systematic reflection associated with philosophy might enhance our thinking about the goals, content, and structure of teacher education. For the purposes of this review, I will present just one nugget from each of the volume's nine chapters. Of course, the task of singling out the 'best ideas' from such a dense and heterogeneous collection of essays is hopelessly subjective and personal. Nevertheless, I hope it will give readers a sense of the value of this compilation.
Re-imagining teachers, reclaiming education
Teacher Plus, 2014
The proclamation of popular media is simple: there is a crisis in school education and it needs to be fixed. The sub-text that follows this proclamation is that teachers are responsible for this crisis and they need to be ‘fixed’. This idea has been projected so many times, in so many different ways that most of us have come to believe it to be true. Is it not true? Well, yes and no. Yes, there is a crisis in school education and it is one that has been looming large over us for a long time now. No, teachers are not solely responsible for this crisis. In fact, they are the victims of this crisis. The teacher has been made the target to deflect attention from the larger crisis in education. In contemporary times, the image of the teacher in popular imagination is based on parochial clichés that are fed to us through popular media and seem to be omnipresent. These clichés construct the teacher as being uninterested in teaching, unknowledgeable and ineffective. This image of the teacher serves two important purposes. Firstly, it provides society at large an option to transfer on to the teacher the blame for all its problems. Secondly, and more dangerously, it becomes the basis for exercising greater control over the teacher, turning her/him into an object of education reform. There is an urgent need for us to interrogate these images and for teachers to reclaim their space within education reform. Unless this happens the ideal of “education as the practice of freedom” will continue to evade us.
Critical possibilities for teacher education
Research in Education
This article reviews the limitations of critical pedagogy in programs of teacher education, as well as several approaches of critical pedagogy, and the author, to surpass these limitations. I ask: How can teacher education manifest as a radical force in the transformation of society and cultural relations in schools for the purpose of advancing social justice, the humanization of students, and the relevancy of education curriculum? Furthermore, how can teacher education do more to challenge the status quo of an uncritical, power-obsessed teaching force which reproduces relations of domination and subordination in school? Using historical as well as current research on the political developments influencing the role of critical pedagogy in programs of teacher education, I assert that although neoliberal mandates have restricted the prominence of this approach, teacher educators, teacher education program directors and administrators can exercise agency to promote critical pedagogical...
Teacher education: from education to teacher substance and practice
This article aims to reflect the trajectory of the teacher from the perspective of building and rebuilding the knowledge of the professional in education; it shows the teacher constituting the development of his knowledge-substance and knowledge-practice over the course of teacher performance, which makes each professional unique, though they consist of the same feelings and the same needs. These perspectives are made salient in the view of authors such as Tardif, Maués, and others. The methodological proposal used is naturalisticconstructive. This article deals with the difference between a mathematician and a Mathematics teacher, and highlights the aspects relevant to classroom practices in this discipline. The importance of practices that are reflective, critical and allied to theory is also highlighted. The characteristics pointed out in the text with respect to teacher education evidence the need for general cultural education, that is, the education of a "civilized man". This characteristic, when constructed, enables the Mathematics teacher to relate the content of this discipline to the daily situations of the student's life, thereby establishing the meaning of the discipline for the student.