The Role of the Teacher, Real and Imagined (original) (raw)
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Pre-service teachers often have unrealistic expectations of teaching. They often create an inspiration/content dichotomy in which they expect relational activities to trump content delivery. Unchecked, these misaligned expectations can lead to practice shock, the disorienting and sometimes traumatic identity crisis that often occurs during the first year of teaching. Teacher preparation programs can use course-based reflective activities to provide structure and impetus for reevaluating expectations. This article studies the effects of these activities on two undergraduate pre-service teachers. Popular Hollywood teacher films were used to confront and challenge candidates’ expectations of teaching. An analytical framework based on Baudrillard’s (1995) simulacra provided an interpretive structure for revising expectations, and structured reflections and course assignments were used to assess candidates’ changing beliefs. Results suggest that the combination of teacher movies, an interpretive framework, and structured reflection has the potential to change candidates’ expectations of teaching.
Images of teachers in Hollywood cinema (Part 3)
The third part of this Dossier continues to explore how Hollywood cinema has portrayed teachers, both in their professional and in their private life, on the one hand, by reflecting society's beliefs and attitudes, and on the other hand, by helping to spread images of teachers which are often stereotyped and seldom consistent with the real situation and the contradictions of schools. Although focussed on American schools, the Dossier presents a series of criteria useful for reflecting on and discussing any school system and its teachers. - Parts 1 & 2 are also available at Academia.edu
Images of teachers in Hollywood cinema (Part 1)
A follow-up to the Dossier School at the movies: teaching and educational relationships, this new Dossier explores how Hollywood cinema has portrayed teachers, both in their professional and in their private life, on the one hand, by reflecting society's beliefs and attitudes, and on the other hand, by helping to spread images of teachers which are often stereotyped and seldom consistent with the real situation and the contradictions of schools. Although focussed on American schools, the Dossier presents a series of criteria useful for reflecting on and discussing any school system and its teachers.
Images of teachers in Hollywood cinema (Part 2)
The second part of this Dossier explores how Hollywood cinema has portrayed teachers, both in their professional and in their private life, on the one hand, by reflecting society's beliefs and attitudes, and on the other hand, by helping to spread images of teachers which are often stereotyped and seldom consistent with the real situation and the contradictions of schools. Although focussed on American schools, the Dossier presents a series of criteria useful for reflecting on and discussing any school system and its teachers.
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.
What does it mean to teach? Redifining the teacher in an era of misconception
International Journal of Progressive Education, 2018
It seems that in the mind of the public, teachers have come to be defined by what they solicit (protection in the form of a union) and what they fail to elicit (passing scores for students on standardized tests) as opposed to what it is they do, which is teach. This misinterpretation may very well arise from the lack of clarity in defining the practice of teaching. Using the emerging recognition of non-human animals as social transmitters of information to provide insight into what teaching is from an evolutionary perspective, this paper explores the inextricable link between biology and educational philosophy. Using Dewey's (1902, 1944, 1953) polymathic approach to investigating and understanding education as both a model and a foundation, this paper identifies nexus points between pedagogical theory, cognitive neuroscience, and ethology. The result is a redefinition of both the teacher and the act of teaching that has the potential to bring clarity to the purpose of a profession that has long suffered from public-and political-misperception.