A Wild Patience Is Called For: Developing the Transformative Potential of Core Practices

• In Event: 63.041 - Collaborative and Interdisciplinary Work by Teacher Educators as Researchers: A Response to Difficult Times

Abstract

Objectives: Lesbian-feminist-poet-activist Adrienne Rich counseled “wild patience,” and a goal of this presentation is to retrieve Rich’s vision for our troubled time. Wild patience harkens to mind the radical and hopeful nature of educational thought. It takes time to nurture transformative possibilities and taking this time demands courage. Every new tweet from the President can provoke, every instance of cable news post-truth can feel like a shove, each new injustice perpetuated in the name of our government screams: Do something! Like Rich, we don’t advocate inaction. Rather, we aspire to demonstrate that tenacious, wild patience remains efficacious.

Theoretical Framework: We propose to bear witness, in the full ethical sense of that term, to the lived reality of teacher education in our time. In particular, educational researchers and practitioners have broken important ground around the theme of demoralization, and we aspire to keep this line of work going. Though it can feel selfish (or worse) to assert one’s own need for support when we know that others face far greater challenges, it is important that we teacher educators give ourselves permission to reflect on the work we are called to do: educating teachers so that they are prepared to nurture the gifts and talents of every student, especially students marginalized and stigmatized by the rhetoric, politics, and policies of our time. This presentation explores demoralization and further examines how the development of “core practices” approaches to teaching can offer ways of re-moralizing the lives of teachers and teacher educators.

Modes of Inquiry, Evidence and Results: We bring a philosophical perspective to the literatures of demoralization and core practices, where philosophy is characterized as something like the wild patience called for by Rich. Instead of jumping directly into existing literatures and the ways problems are framed, we take a step back and suggest that core practices, though they can be taken to instrumentalize the complex arts of teaching, in fact can prove otherwise. Core practices don’t mindlessly standardize the patient work of teaching. Rather, they harbor often under-explored opportunities to empower teachers. For example, a “high-leverage [core] practice” (Michigan, 2018) such as “specifying and reinforcing productive student behavior” may sound wooden and even coercive. Approached with wild patience, however, it actually invites the teacher to engage students – and her- or himself – in reflection on what it means to conduct oneself as an empowered member of a supportive community. Rather than smothering pedagogical thinking, the core practice calls for it.

Significance: It takes time to educate teachers, and it takes time for those teachers to educate their own students. However frustrated and appalled we teacher educators may feel, we must not be thrown off this work. Developing the potentials nascent in core practices offers a way of re-moralizing teachers to do the work that is needed now, possibly more than ever. Core practices offer opportunities to harness our distributed strengths in order to support future teachers and their students, and the necessity of this ‘core hope’ resides at the heart of our presentation.

Authors

• Jeffery M. Frank, St. Lawrence University

• Joe McDonough, Canton Central School