Teacher Education Provoking Curriculum:
Curriculum Provoking Teacher Education
Darren
E. Lund, E. Lisa Panayotidis, Anne M. Phelan, Jo Towers,
Hans Smits
Faculty
of Education, University of Calgary
Calgary,
Alberta
Positioning
In
this collaborative presentation we undertake to provoke
and be provoked by new interpretive meanings around
curriculum, based on our experiences as teacher educators.
We provide a series of narrations about how each of
us has come to understand “provocation”
within/of/about curriculum and how it is enacted, subverted,
and mediated in the Master of Teaching (MT) Program,
an inquiry-based and field-oriented program, by us,
our students, administrative structures and the socio-cultural
world in which we are embedded. Collectively, we are
provoked to expand the notions of provocation, disillusionment,
nostalgia, despair and melancholia. As you read we ask you to consider how this telling
provokes you.
Working in
the Midst of Program Change in Teacher Education as
a Provocation
The narratives that
follow represent strands of experience and interpretation,
told against a common background. They intertwine and
echo each others’ motifs, not entirely coming
together to form a unified and complete picture, but
rather, suggesting ways that practice and experience
in teacher education may be understood as a provocation—as
a “call.” The narratives can perhaps best
be understood indeed as currere—that
constant struggle to understand both the educational
paths upon which we set to journey, and what that begins
to offer in terms of understanding self, responsibility,
and the work with which we have been entrusted as teacher
educators.
Thus there is an overall
picture here, framed by certain commonalities of background,
and yet resisting closure as a complete work. Understood
perhaps better as narrative possibilities, the five
parts that follow suggest in Paul Ricoeur’s terms
the difficult work of mimesis in narrative—the effort to give meaning and shape to our actions
(Ricoeur, 1983). The effort of mimesis is to link together,
in a sense, background, our present understandings,
and reconfigured hopes for understanding differently.
All three moments require interpretive moves. And thus,
although the background may be common to all of us,
it may also be understood differently in terms of how,
in Ricoeur’s terms, it pre-figures our current
practices and understandings. Likewise, with where we
find ourselves presently, and what we might hope happens
in future encounters. We can tell our stories together,
but the voices are not necessarily singular. Both separate
and together they illustrate how understanding lives
in the dialectic of difference and moments of congruence.
All five authors represented
here are responding to the provocation of a major change
in a teacher education program. Approximately eight
years ago, the Faculty of Education at the University
of Calgary, partly by economic necessity and partly
as a response to the question of what should constitute
good teacher education, underwent a dramatic change.
A “traditional” four year B.Ed. program,
with its array of recognizable courses, was transformed
into a two year after-degree program with a radically
different philosophy and structure. Premised on the
principles of being inquiry-based, learner-focused,
field oriented, the program itself served as provocation—as a call to learn
and teach differently.
Student teachers were
no longer to be seen as mere recipients of received
knowledge of teaching and professors as purveyors of
expert knowledge from their chosen fields of study.
With its core idea of teaching as practical judgement
or wisdom, the task of both learning about and teaching
about teaching became a challenge of how to link the
particulars of experience with broader knowledge of
education, teaching, and pedagogy, but not without the
detour through biographies and interpretive engagement.
Or, in Deborah Britzman’s terms, it was not without
the realization that pedagogic experience is also a
“psychic event” (Britzman, 1998).
As the narratives
show, even in the most ideal situation, to take up teacher
education in the terms
set out for the program would be a difficult undertaking.
Although the context for the work we do is likely never
“ideal,” certain practical, institutional
and cultural conditions, and the effects of power conspired to create a situation
in which teacher education practice, rather than being
assumed as a smooth function of the program, was
experienced in ways that were disruptive of certainties
and identities.
These narratives reflect
that disruption and uncertainty, showing as well how
background and context served as a provocation for each
of us in our own work, and reflect our own biographies
and orientations. Anne was one of the founders of the
MT Program, and in addition to guiding it administratively,
has provided much of the theoretical and philosophical
understandings that underpin the program. Her own work
in curriculum, feminist theory, and professional practice
has provided our group with a richer understanding of
the possibilities and limits of practical wisdom, a
theme of the narrative, melancholia.
Jo, Lisa, and Hans
became faculty members when the program was becoming
fully established in terms of numbers of students. Jo’s
narrative reflects a deep concern for her students’
experiences which is derived from her understandings
of enactivism and cognitive theory as a mathematics
educator, and from her responsibilities as a “house
leader,” an administrative position in our program
that requires her to deal with the immediacy of students’
experiences in the program. The difficulties such responsibilities
offer is the theme of the narrative, disillusionment.
Lisa brings to the
discussion the importance of historical perspective
and understanding along with post-structural analyses of how images of school and
practice play out in our everyday educational lives.
The perspective she brings to our overall narrative
helps to disrupt the taken-for-grantedness of educational
practices, but at the same time opens up possibilities
for re-imagining them. This tension is explored in the
narrative, nostalgia.
Hans’ work in
the program has, from the outset of his appointment,
carried responsibility for working with partners in
the field and in the last few years, coordinating the
MT Program as a whole. That experience has, as reflected
in the narrative, provocation, raised the question of what warrants our actions as teacher educators,
and how we respond to both difference and the weight
of history and traditions.
Darren’s appointment
to our faculty is the most recent and, as the narrative
despair relates, he feels
acutely the tension between the pull of the school and
the possibilities offered by the university. He embodies
that tension but is alert to the experiences of his
students in the program, who are also caught in many
ways between romanticized visions of teaching and the
real difficulties faced by teachers in classrooms, between
hope and what can become a kind of despair.
The discussions that
follow also illustrate the task of interpretation that
each of us took on individually and as a group. Responding
to the invitation to participate in the Provoking Curriculum
Conference, and writing our presentations and this paper,
also provided an opportunity to both revisit and attempt
to understand our experiences in different ways. Certain
texts became key for our deliberations. Among those
cited in the references, Stephen White’s Sustaining
Affirmation (White, 2000) was particularly helpful in thinking about how our own
practical judgements and lives could be sustained without,
on the one hand, appealing to certainty in terms of
foundations, but on the other, allowing a “stickier”
sense of commitment and understanding. In White’s
terms, practice has to rest on something. In rejecting
technical rationality as a firm foundation for teacher
education practice, there is, nonetheless, something
else that should harken our attention, something that
helps frame the ethical and practical impulses of our
work.
Thus, White’s discussion of a “weak ontology” as
a basis for action seemed to provide some hope and guidance
for our own attempts to understand practice and what
might constitute a curriculum of teacher education.
His elucidation of the “existential realities”
of language, natality, finitude, and sources, allowed
us to begin to explore our experiences, as reflected
in the narratives, in terms of how we speak and write
about the meaning of teaching and practice; what possibilities
exist for our “selves” and our students
in the background of things; the responsibilities inherent
in taking on the task of bringing new people into a
profession; and always with the knowledge of our limits—and
indeed the limits inherent in any program—however
well conceived.
The themes of provocation,
disillusionment, nostalgia, despair, and melancholia may provoke a sense of sadness, but that is not the intention (although
to provoke emotion certainly is!).
White’s discussion of melancholia is helpful in
understanding that the “melancholic turn”
is not simply sadness, but that it “refers specifically to the redirection
of attachment from the object to that which is constituted
by this redirected force of desire,” and that
its significance lies in the “ambivalent reaction
to loss” (White, 2000, p. 199).
That ambivalence may
be experienced as “mourning” but it also
opens up spaces for thought and possibly action, but
in ways that may redirect attention, and, in fact, deepen
the way that we live out our responsibilities as teacher
educators.
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