Teachers Who Teach Teachers

Reflections On Teacher Education

Tom Russell, Fred Korthagen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135400057
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This is a reflection on the education of teachers, written by teacher educators who discuss features of their work and the challenges facing teacher education in the 1990s. The book invites the reader to attempt similar analyses of personal practice and development in their own teaching.; The book deals with the personal development of both new and experienced teacher educators, illustrating how strongly teacher educators are influenced by their visions and by the challenge to prove themselves in the university setting. In addition, the book examines the ways in which teacher educators have acted to promote their own professional development and study their own practices, including writing as a tool for reflection, a life-history approach to self-study, as well as a study of educative relationships with others, and the analysis of a personal return to the classroom. Finally, it takes a broader look at the professional development of teacher educators and offers a challenge to all teacher educators to consider the tension between rigour and relevance.

Part 1

Experienced Teacher Educators Reflect on their Development

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1 Reflections of a Teacher Educator Working for Social Change

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Kenneth M. Zeichner

Autobiographical introduction

I have been involved in teacher education since 1970 when, as a cooperating teacher, I first began working with student teachers in my grade 4–6 classroom in Syracuse, New York. Following that, I worked with the National Teacher Corps as a team leader and director of an Urban Teaching Center involving four elementary schools and Syracuse University. Since 1976, I have been a member of the faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, involved in an elementary teacher education program as one of the directors of student teaching.

Throughout my career, I have been focused on the issue of preparing teachers to teach everybody’s children, not just children like themselves, and particularly on the preparation of teachers for urban schools. I have been concerned with helping teachers examine the moral and ethical aspects of their practice and make teaching decisions with an awareness of their social and political consequences. I am also engaged in helping teachers see the relations between what happens in an elementary school or middle school classroom on a daily basis and the broader issues of equity and social justice (e.g., how students’ life chances are potentially affected by classroom decisions). My work in teacher education has also been linked in my mind to other aspects of my life in which I have attempted to connect the way I live to the struggle for greater social justice (e.g., in what I eat, where I shop, how I try to raise my three sons, and so on). Thus teacher education has always been for me part of a larger political project and not just an intellectual or academic endeavour. This does not mean that I have only been concerned with equity issues and the struggle for social justice in my personal and professional life. It does mean however, that this political project is an important part of my being.

Educators who work in societies that claim to be democratic have certain moral obligations to try to teach in a way that contributes to a situation where those with whom we work can potentially live more fully the values inherent in a democracy. For example, in a democratic society all children must be taught so they can participate intelligendy as adults in the political processes that shape their society (Gutmann, 1987). This is clearly not the case in North America, or in many other parts of the world in the 1990s. Although schools do not cause our social and economic problems, there is much that we can do as educators to contribute to the making of better societies. Regardless of our political commitments, we must recognize the reality that neither teaching nor teacher education can be neutral. We need to act with greater clarity about whose interests we are furthering in our work because, acknowledged or not, the everyday choices we make as teachers and teacher educators reveal our moral commitments with regard to social continuity and change.

I did not first come to the position about the need to connect my work in teacher education to the struggle for social justice by being enlightened in graduate school about the ways in which schools often contribute to the injustices in our society, although graduate school and my continuing academic studies since have gready helped me conceptualize and make sense of what was first experienced at an emotional level. I first became politicized by growing up in the city of Philadelphia, and by attending Philadelphia public schools. I had some difficulty in school as a student and was often discouraged by school counsellors from setting my sights too high with regard to my plans for higher education. During high school, in a school known more for its street gangs than its merit scholars, my mind was often more on the basketball courts and the streets than it was on my studies and selecting which university I would attend. Because of the encouragement of a few of my teachers who saw academic potential in me that I did not see myself, I finally decided to give college a try and began studying at Temple University in Philadelphia the following year. I was one of the few students in my high school graduating class who went on to a university education.

After a difficult struggle that included several remedial classes, tutoring to make up for some of what I had missed out on in high school, and almost flunking out, I finally became more serious about my academic studies and started to make some headway. I was aiming for a career as a public defender in Philadelphia until the strong possibility arose that I would be drafted and sent to Vietnam. As an alternative to going to Vietnam to kill and/or be killed, in a war I didn’t believe in, I decided that I would try to make a positive contribution with my life by becoming a teacher in the kind of urban school that I experienced in high school. There I could try to make a difference in the lives of city kids like myself who are often denied, in their education, things that are taken for granted in schools of the more privileged.

Immediately following my graduation from Temple University and some substitute teaching in the Philadelphia Public Schools, I enrolled in the Urban Teacher Preparation Program at Syracuse University, one of several graduate teacher education programs in the US then emphasizing the preparation of teachers to work in schools in poverty areas. Following a year-long internship in a Syracuse elementary school accompanied by graduate seminars on urban teaching, and despite drawing number 362 in the selective service lottery (a number that would have enabled me to go to law school as I had originally planned), I continued teaching in the inner city elementary school in which I completed my teaching internship and gradually drifted into teacher education as a result of the local Teacher Corps Project selecting our school and its community as a site for interns to work.

At the time I entered teaching, there was a great deal of social unrest throughout the US. Most of my peers in my teacher education program, and later my colleagues in my school, saw their work in education as I did, as part of a larger political project in which the social injustices of racism, sexism, poverty, violence, war, greed, and so on would be combated. Many of us were working to help build a new society, not just to help a lucky few in urban ghettos make it in the stratified and unjust society of the moment. We were concerned with helping our mostly African-American students from economically poor backgrounds gain the academic skills that would help them succeed in an imperfect society while at the same time working to reconstruct that society.

Throughout my years in the Syracuse School District, it was not hard for my colleagues and me to make problematic our practice or to focus our attention on the larger social and economic problems that were then erupting in violent riots in cities all over the US. Many of my students were several years behind grade level in reading and mathematics and were angry at a school they saw as having little relevance to their daily struggles for survival. The community had been extremely alienated from the school prior to my arrival, and during my first year there as a teaching intern, the school began a new status as a community school governed by a council composed of school staff and parents. An African-American principal was appointed who quickly sought to create a sense of ownership of the school in the community. Parents participated in the development of the school’s curriculum, in hiring and evaluating staff, and in public forums that raised difficult issues related to race, social class and education that they felt had been ignored under previous school regimes.

I was immersed for a number of years in this environment in which previously marginalized parents and community members felt empowered to speak out, exerting their power so that they might realize their dreams of seeing their children receive the decent education that had been denied to many of them. This was a school where an African liberation flag hung in many of our classrooms and where each day was begun with the singing of ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ instead of the Pledge of Allegiance. It was an environment where a critical perspective on schooling and society and a commitment to work hard for greater educational equity and a better society were the norm. This environment where I spent my entire public school teaching career and a part of my life explains a great deal about my current educational perspectives.

What I have learned through research on my practice

Throughout my career at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I have conducted or advised others on numerous formal research projects about various aspects of our elementary teacher education program, including the student teaching experience that I help direct. I have always sought to incorporate what we have learned in these studies direcdy into program changes, such as the evolution of our student teaching program into its current inquiry-oriented status (Liston and Zeichner, 1991). When I thought about writing this chapter, I considered describing the various research projects with which I have been involved and tracing how our teacher education program has evolved over time in response to the research of our faculty and graduate students. There is another aspect to my research, however, that I have chosen to focus on instead: the more informal research that I have conducted, over the years, on my own teaching and on how my teaching and the way I seek to organize a teacher education program have been influenced by my reflections on my practice. My public writing, with a few exceptions (Gore and Zeichner, 1991; Zeichner, 1994), has focused on my more formal research and its relationship to teacher education program development. In the last few years we have begun to hear more of the private voices of teacher educators as they have shared their reflections and their struggles related to their teaching of teachers (e.g., Hamilton, 1992; Peterman, 1992; Clandinin, Davies, Hogan and Kennard, 1993). We have also begun to hear more of the voices of classroom teachers (Schubert and Ayers, 1992). This chapter is a contribution to this literature about the stories of teacher educators. Because it is also about me and not only about others, and because it reveals aspects of my personal world that I have rarely shared with the educational research community, this has been a difficult chapter for me to write. Typically, when I approach the task of producing a scholarly paper, I write a lot and very easily. This is a different kind of writing than I am used to in academia, and although it has been difficult, it has been more rewarding than the more distanced academic perspective that I usually assume.

The setting

My action research on my own teaching has focused on several different dimensions of my work. One of my major responsibilities at the University of Wisconsin- Madison is to help co-ordinate an elementary student teaching program that enrols about 175 students a year. This program includes a 20-week full-time teaching experience in an elementary or middle school in which student teachers assume total responsibility for a classroom program, and a weekly student teaching seminar that carries two university credits. The focus of my comments about student teaching in this chapter will be on the student teaching seminar. Until this year I have been responsible for supervising cohorts of 6 to 12 graduate student supervisors who teach the student teaching seminars and supervise student teachers in their field placements. In 1992–93, for the first time, Bob Tabachnick and I also taught our own section of the seminar in addition to supervising the work of the graduate students, because of our involvement with a research project on action research and the teaching of biology funded by the National Science Foundation (Tabachnick and Zeichner, in press).

The second major dimension to my work involves the preparation of teacher educators, and includes the teaching of three graduate courses. These courses focus on supervision, pre-service teacher education, and staff development, and are taken by both cooperating teachers and full-time Ph.D. students who are involved with many different teacher education programs on our campus. What follows is a discussion of two of the major dilemmas and tensions that have surfaced in my teaching over the years and the ways I have attempted to alter my practice to manage them. The first story is about the tensions that I have experienced between my commitments to my students and the creation of a more democratic and supportive classroom environment for learning, and my commitment to educational equity and the building of a more decent and humane society. The second story is concerned with a specific contradiction that I became aware of between my espoused theory and my classroom practice in relation to the idea of teacher research.

Story one: The tension between my commitment to my students and my commitment to a better society

Because of the political lens through which I view the educational world, I have faced significant tensions over the years as I have sought to educate both student teachers and teacher educators in a way that will contribute to the struggle for greater social justice. One tension has revolved around the conflict that I have often experienced between my care and concern for my own students (student teachers and teacher educators) and my commitment to their students and to the idea of a more caring, democratic, and just society.

Once I entered the world of teacher education, I quickly discovered that not everyone shared my outrage at the state of our country and our world. Many teacher education students and their teacher educators would have liked to live their lives untouched by the poverty, pain, and suffering experienced daily by so many in our country. Many of our student teachers were white and monolingual with very litde direct intercultural experience, and they wanted to teach students who were just like themselves. At that time, several years before the conservative restoration of the Reagan and Bush years, there was a very active effort by many students in our program to avoid student teaching and practicum placements in schools attended by poor students of colour. Admission to the teacher education program was done mainly on the basis of academic test scores and grade point averages and ignored the level of development of students’ social consciousness and commitment to educate all children. Outside the National Teacher Corps and TTT programs of the 1960s and 1970s, which were temporary and marginal programs in colleges and universities, there was litde apparent concern in the US for educating teachers to teach students from economically poor families, especially poor students of colour. The state of US teacher education at the time I entered teaching in the late 1960s led Bunny Smith (1969) to characterize it as racist and discriminatory.

When I began to educate teachers, cultural deficit theories were popular in academic circles, and many educators blamed the problems that poor kids experienced in schools on the kids, their parents, pathological communities, and just about everything except the schools themselves (Deutsch, 1963). Unlike the situation described by my colleague Liz Ellsworth (1989), in which her students were disposed toward social and political critique and change, the world of teacher education is generally a very conservative one in which many students do not question the social and political conditions in which schooling occurs.

On the one hand, I wanted to create caring and democratic classroom environments in which my students felt empowered to speak out about issues that really mattered to them and where the perso...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction: Learning to Teach Teachers
• Part 1: Experienced Teacher Educators Reflect on their Development
• Part 2: Beginning Teacher Educators Reflect on their Development
• Part 3: Ways to Promote One's Development as a Teacher Educator
• Part 4: Ways to Study Practice in Teacher Education
• Part 5: Broader Perspectives on Teacher Educators' Work
• Part 6: Epilogue
• Notes on Contributors
• Author Index
• Subject Index