The Schizophrenia of Contemporary Teaching and Its Implications for Teacher Education

• In Event: Demoralization and Schizophrenia: What Lives Should Teacher Education Prepare Candidates For?

Abstract

I answer the question of what lives to prepare teacher candidates for by first summarizing my analysis of what I have called “educational schizophrenia” (2012). This opening analysis is based upon Stocker’s classic critique “The schizophrenia of modern ethical theories,” (1976) which highlights such theories’ proclivity to reduce our complex moral lives to singular measures of goodness, and the problems of doing so. Analogizing the object of Stocker’s critique to the lives of teachers, I then address the implications of my analysis for teacher education. These implications are centered on the need to address not only the well-recognized complexity of teaching practice, but the less well-noted and often neglected complexity and personal meaning of what teachers believe, value, and experience in their professional lives, when preparing candidates for those lives.

Thus, my answer to the question posed by this symposium is to rest an approach to teacher education on three legs. The first is candidates’ own beliefs, values, identities, experiences and motives. The second is an honest depiction of the work of teaching. The third is the larger meaning and purpose of teaching and schooling in our society. The initial objective, based on both pedagogical and moral grounds, is to engage candidates in shared inquiries into all three of these legs to foster greater awareness, appreciation, and understanding of all three. This preparation in turn meets the further objective of preparing candidates to be able to respond to influences that might otherwise demoralize them, with what Jamy Stillman (2011) refers to as “productive tensions”.

Pedagogically, my perspective is broadly constructivist and substantively tied to a moral perspective grounded in complementary notions of both care and respect (see Sanger & Osguthorpe, 2011). My mode of inquiry for this presentation involves philosophical analysis of teaching and its value, but also draws upon my ongoing empirical work with teachers and teacher candidates. These data, taken from surveys, conversations, and classroom observations, have informed recent studies in this domain (Sanger & Osguthorpe, 2011, 2013; Osguthorpe and Sanger, 2013), and is used to understand the kinds of beliefs, values, and motivations candidates bring with them to teacher education programs, and how we might consider engaging them in preparation for their lives of teaching in America’s schools.

The significance of this work stems from the increasingly common demoralization of teachers in today’s classrooms (see Achinstein & Ogawa, 2006; Crocco & Costigan, 2007; Santoro, 2011). These conditions threaten not only the career longevity of those our teacher education programs invest in, but the prospects for recruiting skilled and successfully preparing candidates committed to the good of society and their students who seek careers that enable them to bring about those good ends.

Author

• Matthew N. Sanger, Idaho State University