Critical Studies in Teacher Education

Its Folklore, Theory and Practice

Thomas S. Popkewitz

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138325883
• eBook ISBN: 9780429832826
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Originally published in 1987, this was the only available book to offer a critical interpretation of the current reform efforts in teacher education at the time. The focus is issues of professionalization, the role of the university and schools in the socialization of teachers, and the ideological and social assumptions that underlie educational theory. The book draws upon the sociology of knowledge, Marxist theory and political sociology.

1 Ideology and Social Formation in Teacher Education¹

Thomas S. Popkewitz

The language, rituals and behaviors of teacher education are realized in an institutional context. Conduct is structured by codes of culture which govern the ways in which people think, feel, ‘see’ and act toward the practices of schooling. Two important dynamics of American life shape and fashion these codes of culture. First, the professionalization of knowledge gives certain occupations cultural and social authority in controlling institutional realms of meaning and definitions of reality. Second, the codes of teacher education respond to the social predicament of schooling. We live in a society in which there are differences in social class, gender, race, ethnicity and religion. In significant ways, methods of teaching, theories of instruction and practices of student teaching are part of a discourse that responds to tensions and power arrangements underlying these two dynamics of our social conditions.

The issues of professionalization and cultural/social formation are often obscured in the discourse of teacher education. This process is especially the case when the discourse is concerned with efficiency, management or effectiveness. Not understanding administrative problems as existing with contexts of power and authority removes from scrutiny the social assumptions and implications of professional actions. Teacher education becomes a legitimating mechanism. The categories of curriculum, learning and research are made to seem objective and unrelated to political agendas.

Institutional Qualities of Schooling

To consider the problem of teacher education, let me state what might seem an obvious ‘fact’ about occupational preparation. Teacher education exists and is historically related to the institutional development of schooling. As schooling evolved as a social form to prepare children for adulthood, there also developed a specialized occupational group with control and authority to work out the charter of its everyday life. The occupational group developed certain specialized bodies of images, allegories and rituals which explain the ‘nature’ of schooling and its division of labor. The conduct of teacher education can be understood, in part, as a mechanism for legitimating occupational patterns of labor to new recruits.

The potency of the social patterns of teacher education can be understood more adequately when we consider the difference between the surface and underlying layers of meaning in institutional life. The surface layer of meaning is provided by publicly-accepted criteria or standards by which people judge success or failure. Writing a lesson objective, doing microteaching or working in a team teaching situation might provide such criteria. The underlying layer of meaning directs attention to the assumptions, presuppositions and ‘rules of the game’ that give plausibility and legitimacy to the ongoing actions. Student-teachers learn not only the academic subject-matter but also the appropriate forms in which to cast their professional knowledge.²

The underlying layer of meaning is illustrated by focusing on a lesson in mathematics observed in an American inner city school.³ The students were black, from families of the industrial poor and unemployed. The public purpose of the lesson was to help students learn subtraction. The teacher approached the instruction as a management problem. She wrote a lesson plan, constructed materials, and evaluated according to the set objectives. The lesson was justified for different reasons: subtraction is an important ingredient of a mathematics curriculum and future lessons depend upon acquiring the presented knowledge. During the lesson, the teacher explained elements of subtraction and students worked with textbooks and ditto sheets.

These surface meanings of the lesson developed in a context of institutional patterns which constitute the underlying meanings. That teachers do not follow ‘rational’ procedures in teaching is well documented.⁴ Only partially studied are the relationship of teacher practices to institutional rules and values.⁵ In this particular lesson, mathematics was defined as having a fixed and unyielding definition with which teachers are to ‘fill’ the minds of students, reflecting what Friere refers to as a banking conception of education. The subject-matter of the lesson, however, was only a part of the content. The lesson carried social messages that were as important as the cognitive considerations. The introduction to the lesson involved a discussion that focused upon the children’s academic failures. The discourse reflected the teacher’s feeling that the welfare status of the children made it likely that they possessed undesirable ‘traits’ which needed to be overcome before any achievement could be obtained. Much of the classroom interaction was related to the teacher’s belief in the cultural and personal pathology of the children.

We can begin to understand from this lesson that the form and content of schooling are interrelated; they are not only channels of thought and action but reinforce and legitimate social values about authority and control. The achievement of schooling is giving direction to social thought and the formation of intelligence for both those who succeed and those who fail. The banking concept posits knowledge as external to individuals and controlled by those who have power to define and categorize social reality. The social interactions reinforce that notion of power by suggesting that failure to learn is a personal, not institutional, failure.

While the example focuses upon classroom teaching, certain issues about teacher education are raised. It is clear that the focal point of teacher education is schooling. Yet there is not one common school but different types of schooling that respond to the social location and cultural circumstances of the children.⁶ In the light of this diversity, we need to ask: How do methods courses, theories of childhood and cognition, histories of education and clinical experiences give definition and rules to our reasoning about diversity? How do the patterns of discourse in teacher education legitimate or make problematic the content and form of schooling? What codes govern institutional discourse and make reasonable the language, behaviors and patterns found in schools?

Codes and Power Relations

How can we think about the institutional codes that underlie teacher education? One approach is offered by Michel Foucault, a French social philosopher and historian.⁷ Foucault suggests that there are fundamental codes of a culture that underlie a society at any one time. These codes govern the society’s discourse, its exchanges, its techniques, its values and the hierarchy of its practices. The codes become a ‘regime of truth’. They shape and fashion what can be said and what must be left unsaid, the types of discourse accepted as true and the mechanisms that make it possible to distinguish between truth and error.

Codes of culture are illuminated by an examination of discourse. In the realm of discourse, Foucault is interested in more than the rules and structure of grammar. Our signs, gestures, routines and behaviors carry rules about what is to be considered normal, reasonable, and legitimate. Discourse sets conditions by which events are interpreted and one’s self as an individual is located in a dynamic world. Embedded in codes of culture, Foucault continues, are power relations. The notion of power relates not to ownership but to the understanding of changing social relations and innumerable vantage-points from which power is exercised.

To focus upon the method of analysis, Foucault gives attention to a shift in codes between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Foucault argues that a break-up occurs in the specific epistemological configuration of the classical era. There was a decline in the belief that things and beings had a manifest identity through their representation. Prior to the seventeenth century, for example, art was considered a replica of reality. It was incomprehensible to the ‘mind’ of the Greeks or the medieval European to consider objects as expressions of the artist’s personality or as a medium of personal communication.⁸ The new epistemology enabled people to become conscious of themselves, providing a transformation of consciousness in which human beings could be considered ontologically, as objects of knowledge. Foucault traced the relation of knowledge to power in the changing configurations of the penal systems, sexual relations and clinical medicine. New methods of observation, classification and organization increased the authority and legitimacy of certain power relations.⁹

The idea of cultural codes provides a more appropriate way of considering the problem of socialization than is found in much contemporary research. Socialization has been considered in a functional and technical manner. It is equated with the adoption of certain rules of the game, usually related to identified beliefs, attitudes and information. The implicit question is whether individuals in an occupation have met the predefined expectations and demands of a work place; or how they compare to an ideal type of professional. Where the rules are not incorporated, much of the research in teacher education suggests there is incomplete or ineffective socialization.¹⁰ The work of Foucault suggests that the prevailing conceptual view is inadequate. The problem of socialization lies with how the social production of meaning takes place. Rather than incomplete socialization, there are various possibilities for socialization as the intentions and implicit philosophies of our discourse are mediated by our institutional contexts. As people participate in the world, they continually react to the structures of language and practice, adopting a stance to social affairs that can glorify existing institutions or seek alternative or oppositional structures.

If we use Foucault’s method for the study of teacher education, two dynamics of social life seem influential. One is the pro-fessionalization of knowledge. The second is the set of social and cultural tensions that create a predicament for schooling. These two dimensions interact in a way that produces the codes of the ‘culture’ of teaching.

Professionalization of Knowledge

The codes of teacher education are part of a larger social dynamic associated with the professionalization of knowledge. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Ideology and Social Formation in Teacher Education
• Part I: Teacher Education, Class Relations And Gender: Historical Perspectives
• Part II: Professional Education: Forms of Labor and Ideology
• Part III: Myths and Rituals of Control
• Part IV: Alternative Perspectives to Professional Education
• Notes on Contributors
• Index