WHAT IS THIS WORK CALLED TEACHING (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Role of the Teacher, Real and Imagined
School movies provide preservice teachers with a means of entry into a field and a line of work that grows more complex, contested and politicized with every passing year (Cochran-Smith, 2006; Debray, 2006; Giroux, 1983; MacArthur, 2012; Sandholtz, 2011; Tikly, 2004). Teachers in the 21st century enter their profession in an era in which there is little agreement about the dispositions and knowledge a teacher should possess, in part because there is little agreement about the purposes of education. It is difficult for anyone—but especially for beginners in the field—to distinguish between what is real and what is imaginary in education, what information is reliable and what constitutes misinformation about teaching. Society has a particularly unstable valuation of teachers in addition to incomplete and contradictory understandings of the kinds of work they do, in part because there is no single concept of what effective teaching practice should look like. By unpacking the theoretical and cultural constructs behind a wide range of teacher movies, however, preservice teachers have the opportunity to examine these complex issues from the varied presentations of the individuals who show up to do the work of teaching in schools.
In this article, the authors argue for making practice the core of teachers' professional preparation. They set the argument for teaching practice against the contemporary backdrop of a teacher education curriculum that is often centered not on the tasks and activities of teaching but on beliefs and knowledge, on orientations and commitments, and a policy environment preoccupied with recruitment and retention. The authors caution that the bias against detailed professional training that often pervades common views of teaching as idiosyncratic and independently creative impedes the improvement of teachers' preparation for the work of teaching. They offer examples of what might be involved in teaching practice and conclude with a discussion of challenges of and resources for the enterprise.
The Work of Teaching and the Challenge for Teacher Education
Journal of Teacher Education, 2009
In this article, the authors argue for making practice the core of teachers’ professional preparation. They set the argument for teaching practice against the contemporary backdrop of a teacher education curriculum that is often centered not on the tasks and activities of teaching but on beliefs and knowledge, on orientations and commitments, and a policy environment preoccupied with recruitment and retention. The authors caution that the bias against detailed professional training that often pervades common views of teaching as idiosyncratic and independently creative impedes the improvement of teachers’ preparation for the work of teaching. They offer examples of what might be involved in teaching practice and conclude with a discussion of challenges of and resources for the enterprise.
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.
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.
All We Are Saying: Teachers' Narratives of Lived Classroom Experience
ProQuest LLC eBooks, 2011
INTRODUCTIONS I can hear the throbbing of my blood in my ears. My heart is pounding. My stomach is a giant knot as bile rises in my throat. My fingers tremble over the keyboard poised to pound a retort. "Stop!" I tell myself. "Breathe deep. Let it pass. They just don't know." Time after time this sequence plays out as I read news articles about education on the Internet. I see an article on some kind of educational issue. It doesn't really matter what the issue is. The article could be on a current school reform measure, budget allocations, or even a particular school's success story. At some point in the article teachers will be "blamed" for the "failure of public education" in the United States. Even if the blame doesn't happen in the article, read down a little further into the reader responses. Everyone who's ever been in school knows exactly what schools are like today….or so they think! As you read through the comments about teachers "only working until 3 o'clock," "having summers off," "grading papers," and "babysitting" you begin to realize that misconceptions abound. These misconceptions, often held by policy makers, educational researchers, school administrators, and much of the general public greatly hinder the debates on education. While I can't purport to know what happens everyday on a daily basis in every classroom, one set of voices have been pushed aside if not completely silenced. Those are the voices of the classroom teachers themselves. This project privileges those voices as they describe what in their work with children brings them joy, what in that work challenges them, and how policy affects their daily classroom experiences. What do these teachers do to meet the needs of the children and families while also meeting the demands of policy so as not to be deemed "failing"? It privileges the voices of nine kindergarten through third grade public school teachers at five different elementary schools. To better understand their classroom experiences and to appreciate their willingness to invite us into their lives, it's important that we have some insight into who they are and where they teach. The following paragraphs introduce the teachers, utilizing pseudonyms that they created (all other names for persons and places within this dissertation are pseudonyms created by me to protect the anonymity of the actual persona and places mentioned in narratives). Wrigleymama and Kinderpal both teach at an affluent suburban school that has declared itself to be a "leadership academy" implementing a leadership curriculum based on the book The 7 Habits of Happy Kids (Covey, 2008). Wrigleymama has been teaching first grade for seven years and, despite some recent health concerns, professes to "love every day" of the "something new and different" working with children. Wrigleymama is a slender young woman who has that quiet grace and serenity about her that immediately has you breathing deeply and calmly in her presence. Her classroom feels more like a living room that happens to have small tables and chairs as well as an overstuffed large sofa Tools-Producing Activity Subject-Producing Activity Rule-Producing Activity Culturally More Advanced Central Activity Object Activity
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
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.