Cautions for Core Practices From the Ground Level of Social Studies Teacher Education

• In Event: Core Practices in Social Studies Teacher Education: Promises and Pitfalls

Abstract

Purpose
Educational reformers have long lamented the “great divide” separating educational research and practice to characterize the minimal influence educational research appears to have on what happens in the much larger world of life in schools (Lagemann, 2000). Of course, this same critique extends to teacher education research. This conceptual paper picks up on these questions with respect to core practices. In keeping with the theme of this symposium, I address several considerations about core practices as an evolving research endeavor framed by the ground-level work of preparing social studies teachers. Read together, these considerations coalesce to provide a cautionary narrative that speaks to the challenges research on core practices might face in a move to “get real” in the ways social studies teacher educators structure their programs, make pedagogical choices, and engage with both pre- and in-service teachers in the practical work of teaching about teaching.

Three Challenges for Core Practices
One such challenge depends not only on conceptual and definitional issues facing core practices more generally, but also on the ways core practices settle into the existing landscape of social studies teacher education, a landscape that features considerable diversity of ideas about the purposes, modes of inquiry, and important questions that center social studies. Questions about “good teaching” in the practice spaces of social studies teacher education likely look very different than they do in subject-area and disciplinary communities that enjoy more consensus about aims and practices.

Another set of challenges are less tied to social studies specifically, but still prove very real in the translation of core practices research into the work of social studies teacher educators. One such challenge concerns teasing apart what counts as teaching core practices from the broad array of approaches already in play. To what extent do current teacher education practices promote core practices when they do not follow the “represent, decompose, approximate” model often promoted in the core practices literature?

A second challenge poses an opportunity cost problem. Core practices research will have little influence on what social studies teacher educators do unless and until a convincing argument can be made that they are more effective than the practices they will replace. In a similar vein, a third concern explores the difficulty core practices advocates face in providing an evidentiary warrant for the effectiveness of core practices more generally.

A final challenge rests in an argument that core practices are unlikely to significantly reform teacher education without explicit and careful attention to the practical theories animating the pedagogical decision-making of teacher educators. These sets of beliefs and commitments bring together perspectives on good teacher education and good social studies and filter the implementation of research on core practices in the practice of social studies teacher education.

Significance
Taken together, the issues raised in this work are offered to promote consideration and discussion of a set of reality checks with respect to a growing and robust line of inquiry in social studies teacher education research.

Author

• Todd Dinkelman, University of Georgia
  Presenting Author