Reformers and Normalites: Intersecting Visions of and Hopes for Teaching at America's First Normal School

• In Event: Historical Perspectives on Transformation in Teacher Education

Abstract

Teacher preparation is a nexus of desires and interests from various stakeholders, its existence as a point of intersection between interested parties extending back through the early 19th century to the reformers and teacher preparation advocates who willed normal schools into being in the United States (Fraser, 2007). However, the “many voices calling for far-reaching reform in the preparation of [America’s] teachers” (p. 1) that Fraser (2007) referred to most likely did not include the voices of those who emerge from the nexus, charged with the continuation, and possibly the rejuvenation, of public schooling: prospective teachers. For prospective teachers, teacher preparation, with its various voices and perspectives, has been described as adversarial (e.g., Knapp, 2012), with tension immediately, and often intentionally, instigated between the conceptions of teaching of prospective teachers and teacher educators. Despite the fact that tension and adversity, or at the very least differences in beliefs, hopes, or desires for teaching, have long been characteristics of teacher preparation (e.g., Holt-Reynolds, 1992), this tension has rarely been surfaced in histories of teacher preparation, despite its fundamental role in the endeavor. Using document review and analysis to contrast the writings of reformers and school administrators like Horace Mann and Cyrus Peirce with the journals of Framingham normalites who attended the school between 1839 and 1861, this study aims to explicate points of tension, adversity, and difference between the stated, and often discussed, aims for teacher preparation of America’s first normal school with the dreams, possibilities, and purposes prospective teachers saw in their teacher preparation and public schooling, in part to demonstrate how the reconciling of different reformers’ and teachers’ visions of teaching has been an institutionalized component of, and ongoing challenge for, teacher preparation.

Authors

• William Jeffrey Davis, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Alyssa Getzel, Teachers College, Columbia University