Motivation matters: the role of teacher education research in responding to long-standing problems (original) (raw)

Neither naïve nor nihilistic: researching for teacher education

Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 2016

As the incoming editors of the Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, we open this edition by extending our sincere and heartfelt appreciation to the previous Editorial Team and, as well, to the ATEA Executive they worked with. Under the leadership of Joce Nuttall and Susan Edwards, the journal has continued to play a vital role in fostering, supporting and disseminating research of the highest quality. This research has, in turn, made a significant contribution to the way we think about diverse and diversifying fields of educational activity: within and beyond schools, universities and other formal educational settings. It need hardly be said that this is important work. Teacher education in Australia and internationally remains under close scrutiny (and we use the term teacher education here in its broadest sense, to refer to all parts of a teacher's education whether it takes place in schools, universities or elsewhere and regardless of whether it occurs before or after graduation). Those who work with/in this complex field are regularly called upon to defend the quality and outcomes of our work: to justify decisions, defend actions and share the basis of our conclusions and the outcomes of our research. This is as it should be. While we now negotiate a seemingly endless period of critical analysis and external commentary, it is vital that we stay focused on our key responsibility: not simply to respond to questions raised by others, but to lead the scrutiny of all our practices and the research by which they are underpinned. Our work, in this area, is critical and not because policymakers deem it so. Decades and decades of large-scale and fine-grained research has shown that educational settings are not, and never have been, neutral, safe or fair. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians. First Nations Peoples. Migrants, displaced peoples, refugees. Socio-economics, gender and language. Place of birth, cultural background, family groups and family structure. Geographical location. Religion, sexuality and disability. This is more than a list of convenient key terms we can employ to categorise our research. Individually and in combination these differences matter, both in educational settings, and in day-today life. They shape pathways, experiences and short-and long-term educational outcomes. Detailed knowledge of the lifelong and life-wide consequences of good and bad educational experiences has seen teacher educators repeatedly commit to the pursuit of education characterised by excellence and equity. In the current complex political and social climate, this work, we argue, requires a willingness for teacher educators to serve as our own sternest critics: to continually evaluate our successes, to always acknowledge our failures, and to commit, year in, year out, to education as the practice of freedom.

Critical Issues in the Curriculum of Teacher Education Programs

1991

Teacher education programs rarely help teachers develop those attitudes and skills that will enable them to identify and speak out for that which they know and value. This research reports on a preservice program based on the assumption that by systematically requiring teachers both to reflect on their own practice and to seek out and respond to the reflections of other teachers, teacher education programs can help teachers develop their own professional voice and that of their colleagues. This paper describes the evolution of ne researcher's own voice and the theoretical considerations irom which the research emerges. These considerations relate to the social context of teaching-the structure of the school, the culture of teachers, and the concept of teaching as gendered labor. In addition, the paper discusses a preservice curriculum designed and implemented in response to the perceived need for teacher education programs to help teachers develop a professional voice and the methodology through which the response to this curriculum was studied. The data indicate that the development of a teachers' voice can be enhanced by appropriate teacher education curriculum and methodology. Implications for teacher education are discussed. Thirty-one references are listed.

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.

Teacher Research and Gender Equity. Occasional Paper No. 143

1992

This paper examines the teacher research movement from feminist perspectives of achieving gender equity and social change in schools. The paper presents the personal experiences of two middle-class, Caucasian, women professors and teacher educators in their 40s, in a dialogue between the two. The paper discusses the complex role of women's values, rela':ions, multiple identities, and political imperatives and their effects on educational research to improve students' educational opportunities. It examines how the issues of choice, opportunity, equal access, P.nd equity can limit visions of what teacher research might addrefis and enact within agendas for school reform and change, by defining them only in relation to already established male structures and practices. The paper argues that teacher research should question how roles as teachers, students, parents, or administrators are socially constructed in multiple ways, some of which involve gender. The paper concludes that such points of understanding as gender, class, race, or age are all in dynamic relationship to each other, to changing frameworks for work and life, and to the journey toward the "freedom of inclusion." (Contains 25 references.) (JDD) University and has been the recipient of major federal grants. Funding for IRT projects is currently received from the U.S. Department of Education, Michigan State University, and other agencies and foundations. IRT scholars have conducted major research projects aimed at improving classroom teaching, including studies of classroom management strategies, student socialization, the diagnosis and remediation of reading difficulties, and school policies. IRT researchers have also been examining the teaching of specific school subjects such as reading, writing, general mathematics, and science and are seeking to understand how factors inside as well as outside the classroom affect teachers. In addition to curriculum and instructional specialists in school subjects, researchers from such diverse disciplines as educational psychology, anthropology, sociology, history, economics, and philosophy cooperate in conducting IRT research. By focusing on how teachers respond to enduring problems of practice and by collaborating with practitioners, IRT researchers strive to produce new understandings to improve teaching and teacher education.

Research That Illuminates Enduring Dilemmas in Teacher Education

Journal of Teacher Education

This issue contains a collection of six papers which, while they address quite distinct issues in teacher education, are connected by important historical and conceptual "glue." It is this glue that we highlight in this editorial. Three of the six papers were selected from manuscripts submitted in response to a call for scholarly papers on "historical and contemporary issues in teacher education," that is, papers that describe connections between past and present issues in the field. Although not submitted in response to this call, each of the remaining three papers also address issues aligned with one of the dilemmas in teacher education identified by Schneider (2018), in his paper, "Marching forward, marching in circles: A history of problems and dilemmas in teacher preparation." In particular, each of the papers addresses some aspect of the dilemma that teacher preparation programs face in their efforts to prepare all teacher candidates to teach all students across all contexts in a short and relatively inexpensive way. Together, the papers in this issue can help us consider strategies for making progress on this dilemma in defensible, reproducible, and generative ways.