Social Contexts of Teacher Education in the United States: Policy and Practice

• In Event: Social Contexts of Teacher Education Policy in England and the United States

Abstract

1. Objectives

This paper contains the results of the analysis of the social and historical trajectory of current teacher education policy in the US, using as a case study one institution with a year-long school internship to illustrate the effects of recent policy mandates on theory and practice.

2. Perspective(s) or theoretical framework

Scholars have explained the tension around US teacher education as a struggle between progressive ideas which have tended to dominate the teacher education curriculum and general ethos on the one hand; and efficiency concerns which have tended to dominate school governance including the curriculum, and the lives of teachers and students on the other. Such a situation has created a long-time mismatch between what teachers are expected to do in schools (e.g., teach academic subjects according to standards and toward a preparation for the world of work), and what schools of education are preparing them to do (e.g., child centered pedagogies intended to teach children how to learn). Increasingly macro-level policies in the form of accountability demands have permeated all levels of the education system exacerbating the tensions between the different systems. The case study explores beginning teachers' development within the social situations in which learning to teach occurs drawing on the work of the sociologist Bernstein (1990) on knowledge structures, and Hedegaard's (2004) planes of analysis.

3. Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry

The paper uses a sociocultural framework to explore the social, cultural and historical factors that have shaped teacher education in the US. For the case study this paper presents an analysis of the social situation of development for the teacher education program and for their interns’ as they negotiate the constant paradoxes posed by program to school transitions (or from theory to practice).

4. Data sources

The policy data comes from document analysis. The case study data comes from program documents which were analyzed to develop a profile of the teacher education program, and from documents describing the schools where prospective teachers do their internship. A survey was sent to all graduating interns (about 165 interns) and a sample was selected for videotaped observation, and pre and post-observation interviews.

5. Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view

Over the last 10 years educational policy in the US has shifted to follow a neoliberal framework, and a “technical rationalist vision of schooling and of teacher professionalism” dominates. Within this context prospective teachers’ learning is a careful balance between the larger accountability demands as interpreted by their school, their teacher education program requirements, the social context of their subject department, and their own values and beliefs.

6. Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work

The history of the evolution of teacher education policy in the US has important implications for the lives of prospective teachers and the environments in which they develop. This paper highlights in detail how prospective teachers interact with those different environments and shows in detail the complexities and paradoxes in learning to teach across different subjects.

Author

• Maria Teresa Tatto, Michigan State University