Preparation of a Teacher Educator: Opportunities and Issues

• In Event: Becoming a Teacher Educator: International Perspectives

Abstract

Purpose: To examine teacher educator preparation, I trace my career trajectory to my upbringing in rural Canada, to my 15-year career as a Canadian teacher (coupled with a 14-year career of teaching university methods courses), and finally to my work as an urban teacher educator/researcher in the US.

Perspective: My perspective is a personal one mediated by the shaping effects of local/national contexts and time. I foreground narrative truth (Spence, 1982), but am not oblivious to historical truth.

Method/Data Sources: Narrative inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) is used as both a research method/representational form (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990). The work follows stories lived-told and relived-retold. Data sources include archival documents, research journals, and a memory box. A narrative exemplar (Lyons & LaBoskey, 2001; Mishler, 1990; Schön, 1983) communicates my findings.

Results: To my parents, I attribute my life-encompassing belief in social justice, but also my initial experience of the theory-practice divide when they enrolled me in piano lessons with one instructor and theory lessons with another. To my elementary teachers, I connect my yearning to become a teacher. To a high school American draft-dodger teacher, I credit my love of research and my minded decision to enter a B.A. program, which served as my prerequisite for an education degree. But I discovered less educative experiences (Dewey, 1938) along the way: the fact that I almost lost my university scholarship due to a calculation error and the fact that I could not enter a music degree program due to my atypical preparation. The latter was my introduction to the theory-practice-policy split, a problem I frequently discuss in my research (Author, 2009a). In my teacher education program, I studied Dewey (1938) for a year, alongside my subject matter/pedagogy courses. I even believed American schools were more Deweyan than Canadian schools! It was not until Eisner told me “different parts of the U.S. = different educational traditions” that I understood how fractured/regional/parochial US education is. I recently read about Dewey’s theories being “Yankee theories,” which further explains why his philosophy was never embraced in the American South. Also, I studied Joseph Schwab’s “practical” (1969, 1971, 1973, 1983) in my Master’s/Ph.D./Post-Doc degree programs, the latter two with Clandinin and Connelly. I did not fully fathom its value, however, until I experienced corporate decision makers using top-down models to set the agenda for teacher education in the U.S. Observing desperate educational situations and feeling less agentive than I consider my “educator self” (Author, 2009b) to be caused me to throw myself more fully into Schwab’s scholarship and to find threads that further explained Clandinin’s/Connelly’s work (past/ present) and reinforced my own stance/ practices (Author, 2008). This further helped me to write my most recent articles on why a beginning teacher quit after 6 years of teaching (Author, 2013a, 2013b).

Contribution: The research provides an insider view of a teacher educator’s preparation. It illuminates familial/cultural/national influences and reveals perennial problems associated with teachers and teacher educator historically being “at the short end of the stick.”

Author

• Cheryl J. Craig, University of Houston