Nudging the Opportunity Structure: A Modest and Grand Aim for Educational Foundations Courses

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

Abstract

Objectives: Teacher candidates are being educated in a political and economic context that calls the value of their professional preparation into question. What is more, many teacher candidates have only experienced education during the Era of Corporate School Reform, meaning that the democratic aims of public education were neglected during their upbringing due to an intensive focus on high-stakes competitions, consumer preferences, and privatized management (Ravitch 2013, Labaree 2012). With diminished agency, motivation and experience, how should teacher candidates be prepared to meet the urgent need for political resistance and social transformation within the classroom?
Stressing the indispensable role that educational foundations courses play in teacher education, we argue that teacher candidates should learn in such courses to nudge students towards a more liberal and humane opportunity structure. Such an opportunity structure, we contend, is marked by what political philosopher Joseph Fishkin (2014) has termed “opportunity pluralism,” i.e., a structure of opportunity comprised of many less harshly competitive and therefore more accessible paths to diverse forms of flourishing and economic opportunity. Opportunity pluralism can be contrasted with today’s monolithic opportunity structure (i.e., one path to success) – premised on a race to get ahead in labor-market competitions, an unsustainable quest to secure more marketable higher education credentials, and bottlenecks in the opportunity structure that systematically privilege society’s most advantaged members.

Perspectives or Theoretical Frameworks: Our work seeks to reconcile the social ambitions of early progressive educators (Counts 1978) with a framework for making ethical judgments about politics in the classroom that is attentive to evidence, aims, and context (Hess & McAvoy 2014).

Mode of Inquiry: We proceed by forging a conceptual relationship between teacher candidates’ critiques of their own academic success and recent scholarship on the opportunity structure. We do so using a case study method and recent work in political philosophy. Our cases are drawn from the reflections of three academically successful teacher candidates (average college GPA 3.7). Each candidate, for distinct reasons, critiques the limited and reductive conception of academic success they were habituated to value during their P-12 schooling, and each urges their peers to teach differently.

Data sources: Our primary data source is the written reflections of teacher candidates and the scholarship referenced below.

Results: The critiques of academic success offered in the cases we examine are only advanced at an interpersonal level. Confined to the classroom, they lack a conception of how the social order would change if many teachers taught differently. To understand how these critiques might become socially transformative, we turn to recent work in political philosophy, and argue that these critiques can be developed into a transformative social vision using Fishkin’s theory of opportunity pluralism.

Significance: Appreciating teacher candidates’ critiques of their own academic success, and then using recent work in philosophy to articulate the structural correlate of these critiques, allows us to reconcile the aspirations of early work in progressive education with a novel framework in educational ethics to support the aim we propose.

Authors

• John Peter Fantuzzo, Valparaiso University

• Mark Dixon, Montgomery School