“Stepping Out of the Box” and Removing “Weights”: Confining Teachers With Fidelity

• In Event: The Relevance of Humanities-Based Approaches to Teacher Education

Abstract

As a literacy professor, there is much I find alarming in the popular coverage of the science of reading and much that I teach from in the science itself. Yet, what troubles me the most are teachers’ accounts that they had been teaching children wrong for years despite their own misgivings. In this paper, I argue that ethical and effective teaching demands practical wisdom: a daily-enacted knowing in which a person considers the right thing to do, the right way to do it, in a manner that is responsive to context. Based on interviews with new teachers, I showcase how practical wisdom lived in their small decisions and how acting in accordance with their ethos demanded they resist pressures to conform with “fidelity” In doing so, the teachers drew from their ethos to apply technique in context. I conclude by calling for a teacher education that focuses on practical wisdom in order that a teacher might respond in context according to their ethics and a teaching context that empowers teachers to do this. This, I conclude is the best resolution to the “reading wars.”

Author

• Cara Elizabeth Furman, Hunter College - CUNY