Disrupting Dichotomies: Coordinating Critical Aims of Teacher Preparation to Serve Children and to Advance Justice

• In Event: Elevating the Dialogue About Equity and Teacher Education: An Intergenerational Structured Dialogue

Abstract

We focus on the systemic problem of teacher preparation that is seen in the decades-long persistent splintering of the multiple entailments of becoming a responsible and caring first year teacher. Instead of focusing on the demands of the work of teaching that centers the development of young people and disrupts the persistent whiteness of the enterprise, the profession tends toward distracting debates. These debates are about territory, control, and political-theoretical conceptualizations of practice. These arguments do not advance the pressing imperative to prepare beginning teachers who are able to use teaching to disrupt patterns of whiteness and injustice.

Debates persist over the relative roles in teacher preparation of beliefs and commitments versus practices, relationships versus academic rigor, or the centrality of social justice versus content, a focus on community and society versus the classroom. These dichotomies misrepresent teaching and what it takes to learn to teach. Teaching is first and foremost human work. Teaching that centers the interests of children requires seeing them as whole humans who bring knowledge, experience, desires, and interests. This requires a fundamental reorientation to seeing and hearing children who are different from oneself. Powerful teacher preparation is not a matter of choosing among crucial beliefs or knowledge, commitments to equity or knowledge of content, understanding of systemic racism or close engagement with children’s thinking. In fact, deliberate practice requires measures of all of these, tightly intertwined and connected.

Having been immersed in the curriculum of white supremacy throughout their lives, teacher candidates carry normative assumptions into their development as teachers (Ball, 2018). Arguments that pit a focus on content against an emphasis on systemic racism leave beginning teachers with a language of social justice and a practice of teaching content rooted in normative whiteness. When they are shown ways to build instruction based on students’ community experiences, they often are not able to build deep learning and may also reflect superficial interpretations of what makes something culturally relevant or culturally sustaining (Ladson-Billings, 2021). And when beginning teachers return to the regular curriculum, they naturally fall back on what they know and have experienced (Lortie, 1975). They may have an affinity for building relationships with young people, but interact with them and with their families in ways that are unattuned to difference. They are often unconscious of how their own identities shape their ways of being, the assumptions they make about warmth, care, relationships, and trust, and how verbal and body language are variously experienced and interpreted by their students. These patterns infiltrate not only casual interactions but the tone and structure of their content instruction.

This is a systemic problem of teacher preparation. Teacher preparation reproduces whiteness in its curriculum, in whom it recruits to teaching, and in who the faculty are who teach future teachers (Haddix, 2017). Dismantling this system requires putting down the academic debates, and working to coordinate purposes and aims to focus on the challenging work teaching for justice, and it requires a diverse education profession that can shape collective knowledge.

Authors

• Deborah Loewenberg Ball, University of Michigan
  Presenting Author

• Jungsoo Ahn, University of Michigan
  Presenting Author