Practice makes practice, or does it? The relationship between theory and practice in teacher education (original) (raw)
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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.
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O ur conversation arose from a chance remark about the everyday literacy teaching that we see in our work with teachers in schools. Yes, we see some fine examples of literacy instruction, a friend commented, where children are active, eager, intellectually engaged writers and readers. Regrettably, however, we do not see this often enough, which in the end limits the realization of children's potential as literate persons. As teachers of teachers, our work is at the heart of this matter, for our charge is the provision of resources in the form of knowledge, skill, and dispositions that help teachers teach literacy intelligently and well.
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This study examines the role that theory and practice play in the preparation of new teachers. It presents multilayered observational, anecdotal and performance data relating to a group of undergraduate “interns” in an urban elementary teacher education program. These data lend support to the hypothesis that the understanding by new teachers of the relationship between theory and practice influences (1) the way they position themselves as professionals,(2) the conceptual stance they take in developing curriculum and (3) the ...
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The crux of professional learning for educators is to empower others to construct meaningful understanding through educative experiences (Dewey, 1938). In order for teachers to use their knowledge to improve their teaching practice and to create educative experiences for others, they must first construct an understanding as learners themselves. This process of making meaning, as opposed to getting meaning, is dependent on teachers' opportunity to transact with texts, and is aided by communication with and support from a caring community of learners. We are three female teacher educators and program leaders representing special education, educational leadership and literacy education for a teaching-focused university in the Midwestern United States. We view ourselves as active meaning makers who can learn from our teacher education practices as "texts" which we can analyze and discuss with "critical friends" (LaBoskey, 2004, p. 819) through self-study methodology. We defined text in a broader sense to include the idea that lived experiences once textualized (Edge, 2011) could then be shared, interpreted, reinterpreted, and analyzed. Textualizing our lived experiences and studying them through collaborative selfstudy methodology, we have learned how to construct meaningful understating about our teaching practices. We have learned how to empower others-prospective teachers, practicing teachers, administrators, and colleagues to intentionally study their own lived experiences like texts. To guide our professional inquiry, we situated our self-study in transactional reading and learning theory (e.g.
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Focusing on three literature teachers who have lived with and through the changing representations of the discipline, this paper, an examination of the nature of inquiry in literature education, describes the multiple realities that such teachers must negotiate for themselves and their students. The paper discusses conceptions of reflective inquiry; the content and processes of inquiry; and kinds of inquiry, such as autobiographical inquiry, curriculum inquiry, pedagogical inquiry, and inquiry of possibility. The paper concludes with three essential principles that summarize the formulations, processes, and outcomes of the inquiry: (1) although practice as product is the observable act, teaching, as these teachers demonstrated, is a process; (2) working within the school culture may not determine, but does affect, teaAlers' images of possible and desirable teaching and learning; and (3) one common thread in the three teachers' motivation for inquiry was their need to confront the rapidly changing views of teaching and learning literature. A figure listing principles of curriculum planning and a figure listing critical questions in learning literature are included. Contains 110 references. (RS)
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