Cultural-Historical Perspectives on Teacher Education and Development
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Cultural-Historical Perspectives on Teacher Education and Development

Learning Teaching

Viv Ellis, Anne Edwards, Peter Smagorinsky, Viv Ellis, Anne Edwards, Peter Smagorinsky

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Cultural-Historical Perspectives on Teacher Education and Development

Learning Teaching

Viv Ellis, Anne Edwards, Peter Smagorinsky, Viv Ellis, Anne Edwards, Peter Smagorinsky

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About This Book

Teachers, both in and beyond teacher education programmes, are continual learners. As society itself evolves, new settings and the challenges they provide require new learning. Teachers must continually adapt to new developments that affect their work, including alterations to qualification systems, new relationships with welfare professionals, and new technologies which are reconfiguring relationships with pupils.

Cultural-Historical Perspectives on Teacher Education and Development is an international volume which clarifies the purpose of initial (pre-service) teacher education and continuing professional development, and the role of universities and higher education personnel in these processes. An edited collection of chapters by leading researchers from the UK, the US and Europe, it gains coherence from its theoretical orientation and substantive focus on teacher learning. This book:

  • demonstrates the contribution of sociocultural and cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) towards our understandings of teacher learning
  • offers a strong exemplification of a research focus on teachers as learners in specific sociocultural settings
  • shows what teachers learn, how they learn and where they learn, using specific research examples, in the context of broader interests in the development of professional practice and professional education.

As the only volume now available that applies CHAT principles to teacher education and learning, Cultural-Historical Perspectives on Teacher Education and Development will be highly useful for teachers and teacher educators undertaking postgraduate and doctoral studies, particularly in the area of professional learning and development. It will also be of relevance to the continuing development of teachers and other school-based professionals.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2010
ISBN
9781135281557
Edition
1

Chapter 1
Introduction

Viv Ellis, Anne Edwards and Peter Smagorinsky
Teacher education has been constructed as a problem for almost as long as it has formally existed (Cochran-Smith and Fries 2005; Labaree 2004). The American Educational Research Association (AERA) Panel on Research and Teacher Education noted that, as a mode of professional formation and as a set of institutional practices, teacher education has been shaped in response to fundamental societal questions such as the nature of childhood and adolescence, the challenges of globalization, the rise of a professional class and the role of the state, as well as specifically educational concerns such as school effectiveness and teachers’ impact on educational attainment (Cochran-Smith and Zeichner 2005; see also, for example, Furlong et al. 2000; Zeichner 2009).
The ‘peculiar problem of preparing teachers’ (Labaree 2004: 39) has played out rather differently around the world, but it is possible to discern a constellation of concerns that have achieved greater relative importance at different times and places. One of these might be posed as the question of the ‘contribution’ of higher education to the initial (pre-service) education of teachers. This concern speaks to the status of both teachers and teacher educators as professionals or academics as well as the kind of learning that is privileged. A related concern has been the nature of the association between the universities and the schools in teachers’ learning processes. From this concern arise questions of ‘partnership’ and ‘internship’ or ‘learning on the job’. Another has been an interest in teachers’ uniquely ‘professional’ knowledge and, following on from this, questions about what, where and how teachers learn – and how their expertise and the development of their expertise might be conceptualized. Often, it seems, the capacity of individual teachers for reflection has been preeminent in answers to these questions.
Until relatively recently, much of the thinking about teacher education and development has been informed by dualistic understandings of the relationship between thought and action which seeks proof of the transfer of learning through the evident application of knowledge. From this perspective, teachers’ minds become storage devices; university curricula and mentor (supervisory) teacher feedback are inputs; classroom teaching and learning is the output. Highly valued outputs can then become codified into competence statements or professional ‘Standards’ either imposed by the state or developed from inside the profession by researchers. ‘Standards’ can then be employed to measure both teachers’ effectiveness and the quality of the teacher-education programmes they have followed.
We are less confident about the coherence and integrity of this way of thinking about teacher education than many policy-makers, and want to suggest a shift in perspective. The argument of this book is that a culturalhistorical perspective on teacher education and development offers a powerful theoretical and methodological lens through which both to analyse the problem of teacher education and to design new curricula and programmes. The chapters come from a range of international authors who have been using cultural-historical theories to understand teacher learning and professional development, analyse relationships between universities and schools, interrogate the nature of teacher knowledge and expertise and seek to understand the potential of formative interventions into teacher education in developing a theory of practice. They do so across a range of different national contexts in Europe, the United States and China. Our book doesn’t claim to offer representative coverage of education systems worldwide; rather, the chapters raise interesting questions about teacher education and teacher learning, show how these questions play out in local settings and why a cultural-historical perspective helped each contributor to analyse the issues and act on them.
We next define what we mean by a cultural-historical perspective, outline how this perspective differs from vaguely ‘social’ theories of learning and suggest what some of the possible distinctions within the perspective might be.

A shift in perspective: Vygotsky and the culturalhistorical line

Cultural-historical theory and cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) provide the perspectives on teacher education and development that inform each of the chapters in this volume. Sometimes, the authors use the term ‘sociocultural’ and it might be helpful to distinguish between uses at this point. Sociocultural, cultural-historical and CHAT all arise from the work of Vygotsky and his methodological interest in the mediation of human activity by physical or psychological tools. A sociocultural line has been taken up by educationalists, anthropologists, sociolinguists and others, and one of its distinguishing characteristics is the insight that social practices are situated and that people learn by engaging in these practices, working with the resources that are ‘stretched over’ (Lave 1988) specific settings for practice, settings that are in a dialectical relationship with the cultural arena within which certain forms of identity are motivating.
Cultural-historical theory draws on key Vygotskian ideas about cultural development by placing a slightly different emphasis on mediation. Under a cultural-historical analysis there is an interest in the relationship between human consciousness and practical activity, an explicitly Marxist tenet: ‘Consciousness does not determine life: life determines consciousness’ (Marx and Engels 1845–6/1964: 37). Cultural-historical theory proposes that physical and psychological mediational tools are used to build cultures. Tool-use has a strongly historical dimension in that the tools have been imbued with meaning by past use and because new meanings can be embedded in them through present activity under evolving cultural conditions. Cultural tools therefore have a shaping function in terms of human activity but also can be re-shaped and cultures re-tooled. The historical development of human consciousness can therefore be traced through an analysis of cultural tools and the ways in which they function in a mediating capacity. This focus may concern both cultures and the settings that they provide for human action and individuals as they appropriate cultural tools through which to navigate their environments.
CHAT, like the cultural-historical line, takes on Vygotsky’s interest in social and semiotic mediation but shifts the emphasis from individual to collective subjects. This shift is informed by the work of one of Vygotsky’s students, A.N. Leont’ev, and his development of activity theory. Leont’ev distinguished between the individual subject’s operations, the individual or group’s goal-oriented actions and the level of collective activity given meaning by a shared object-motive.1 CHAT might be distinguished from the broader cultural-historical line by both its collectivist perspective and its ‘emphasis on action or intervention in order to develop practice and the sites of practice’ (Edwards and Daniels 2004: 108). A major contribution to CHAT has been made by Yrjö Engeström, and it is Engeström’s triangular representation of the activity system associated with his ‘third generation’ of activity theory that has often become associated with a CHAT perspective. However, key CHAT concepts can still be traced to Vygotsky’s Marxist, developmental project, to Vygotsky’s students and to Soviet philosophers such as Il’enkov (1977), who proposed that internal contradictions within activity systems might act as generators of change and the evolution of the system.
Presenting such ‘potted’ distinctions between members of the same family is risky in at least two respects: first, gross over-simplification; second, reifying the distinctions in unhelpful ways, especially when our concern in this book is with how a theoretical line that can be traced to Vygotsky is useful in thinking about the education, training and development of teachers. Rather, we see the differences as offering a rich ‘conceptual tool box’ (Edwards and Daniels 2004: 108) with which to answer some of the vexing questions about how teachers learn and how they might learn better. For consistency’s sake, we have adopted ‘cultural-historical’ as the framework that best reflects the perspectives of the book as a whole and hence its place in our title. Across the various chapters, however, the different emphases are apparent; a few chapters are more sociocultural and others are written from a much more explicitly CHAT perspective. Regardless of which aspect of a Vygotskian approach they foreground, each author bases her or his research on the notion that human development relies on the appropriation of pre-existing cultural tools, that this appropriation occurs through social interchange, and that as a consequence of these dynamics, people grow into the frameworks for thinking afforded by the cultural practices and tools made available to them in the social settings of their development.

Key ideas in the cultural-historical line and their relevance to studying teacher education and development

The authors in this collection argue that the cultural-historical line provides the intellectual resources to develop a coherent view of how teachers at different stages in the professional life-course conceptualize their praxis. Some of these key ideas are:
‱ an understanding of historical processes as dialectical relationships between continuity and change and the reproduction and transformation of social structures and relationships, underpinned by a complex chronology of development;
‱ a recognition that expertise is distributed across systems and that learning involves being able to perceive, access and contribute to that expertise;
‱ a conceptualization of learning to teach as a continual, mutually mediating process of appropriation and social action, where practitioners take on the cultural practices that are valued in the social situations of their development - whether these settings are schools or universities - and employ them in turn to shape that social situation;
‱ an analytic interest in cultural and historical practices and mediational tools, and the values that underlie them, and how they inform particular notions of practice in each of the settings of learning to teach;
‱ a recognition of transitions between settings in teachers’ learning as important foci of analysis;
‱ an understanding of the relationship between theory and method when taking a cultural-historical approach to studying learning and how this can help us formulate key questions about fundamental problems of design in teacher education programmes as currently conceptualized.
We hope that, in exemplifying and interrogating these key ideas in the chapters that follow, the book both complements and extends the work of other researchers who study teacher education and development using an approach emerging from the insights of Vygotsky (e.g. Johnson 2009; Tsui and Law 2006; van Huizen et al. 2005; Putnam and Borko 2000; Grossman et al. 1999).

The organization of the book

The book is organized thematically into sections that represent core concerns for researchers taking a cultural-historical perspective. Each chapter arises from the author’s research in a culturally and historically distinctive setting. In part, the chapters’ exemplifications of the key ideas we have elaborated above emerge from their analysis of the distinctively different material conditions of teacher education work around the world, whether in a relatively small, sparsely populated country like Iceland, a multilingual, politically complex city state like Luxembourg, a tightly prescribed, centralized bureaucracy such as the education system in England or locally controlled, conceptually ambiguous settings in the United States.

Part 1: The social situation of teacher development(Chapters 2–6)

The social situation of development is, in Vygotskian terms, a learner’s experience of the opportunities for action in an activity in a specific setting. The social situations of development in initial teacher education may be complex sites where the practices of school and the university intersect, or they may be discrete settings which reflect only the practices in which they are currently situated. However, they will certainly be experienced differently by each participant in them.
The chapters in this section examine the social situation of teachers’ development from three starting points: teachers as learners (Douglas, Edwards, Smagorinsky); the school as an activity setting or arena which offers different learning opportunities though mentoring (Douglas) and through the pedagogical discourses available when the curriculum or children are discussed (McNicholl and Childs; and Hjörne, Larsson and SĂ€ljö); and teacher education as a product of societal expectations which have shaped educational practices (Edwards, Smagorinsky).
In the opening chapter Smagorinsky reminds readers of the distinctions to be made between the individual orientation of Vygotsky and the collective focuses of Leont’ev and Engeström. He turns to La...

Table of contents