Resisting Myopia: Why Practice-Centered Programs Must See and Engage the Places Teachers "Practice"

• In Event: 75.039 - Social Foundations for Teaching Practice

Abstract

Objective
Like the other papers in this symposium, we acknowledge the ways in which practice-based scholarship and pedagogy attempts to counter what Shulman (1996) identified twenty years ago as the “unbearably generic” tendencies in teacher education. While we have written elsewhere about the need for scholars in social foundations to engage the move towards practice (Authors, 2013), in this paper we urge a cautious engagement. We do so in two ways. First, we offer a conceptual argument that social foundations should not be completely reduced to a series or set of instructional practices because doing so risks the obfuscation of the political and contextual nature of teaching as well as the integrity and intention of social foundations as a field of inquiry. Second, we offer a reflective analysis of the curriculum in our own classroom to illuminate how social foundations can expand our collective understanding of the ideas, structures, and processes that influence the practice– or profession– of teaching (Lampert, 2010).

Framework
We are historians of education who have several years experience teaching general social foundations courses in teacher education. Our approach to learning is grounded in sociocultural theories that see learning as situative. Our approach to curriculum in both our own classes and teacher education more broadly is grounded in left politics that recognizes the institution of school and broader social contexts as mutually constitutive and embedded within a social order that seethes with social injustice (Apple, 2012).

Mode of Inquiry
This paper makes a conceptual claim about ‘place consciousness’ as a purpose of social foundations in practice-centered teacher education and also offers reflective inquiry of our own classroom instruction, with a particular focus on curriculum development. We ask questions of our own course design, such as: What readings, activities, and engagements have attempted to draw explicit connections between histories of social and educational stratifications and the contemporary work of teaching? How do foundational themes in our courses intersect with other teacher education coursework and with teacher candidates’ experiences ‘in the field’?

Source of Evidence
In order to support our claims we draw on conceptual and empirical work in the field as well as our own experiences working in teacher preparation programs. Data sources include syllabi, assignments, and classroom activities.

Findings
We find that social foundations scholars and practitioners must be careful not to completely reduce social foundations to a repertoire of high leverage foundations practices. We must stay attuned to the broader social contexts of education.

Significance
Our work contributes a social foundations voice supportive of the turn to practice in teacher education that is also mindful of a tendency within this turn towards a hyper-focus on classroom practices at the expense of a broader engagement with the contexts in which classroom practice occurs. This push towards context has significant implications for the conceptual framing of teacher preparation programs, especially the ability of programs to help pre-service teachers develop ways of seeing and engaging context that supports working with communities towards more just social relations.

Authors

• Michael Bowman, Iowa State University

• Isaac Gottesman, Iowa State University