Anne M. Phelan

Power and place in teaching and teacher education

Abstract This paper explores the thesis that teacher education prepares teachers to fit into existing patterns and structures of teaching, schooling and society. The key questions explored are: (1) How have some discourses emerged as privileged, as others have been eclipsed? (2) What do these processes reveal about the relationship of power and place in teacher education? The case examined is Northern Ireland. The author concludes that if teacher education is to be one of the means by which educators learn new ways of seeing within a deep sense of tradition, then teacher education itself needs to become a discursive project.

Collaboration in student teaching: Learning to teach in the context of changing curriculum practice

Abstract The paper represents a study of a project designed to rethink the student teaching practicum. The “collaborative model” encourages teaming between teachers and student-teachers and creates opportunities for them to create new curriculum and explore new methods of instruction. The major portion of the paper describes the research project that we devised to study and evaluate our collaborative model and also offers two case studies that describe the processes at work in two of the teams. One study describes a team who established a collaborative relationship; the other, illustrates some of the difficulties with this approach. Finally, we offer conclusions and recommendations based on our findings.

The Death of a Child and the Birth of Practical Wisdom

This paper explores the notion of practical wisdom asan alternative to current formulations of criticalthinking. The practical realm is that ofill-structured problems that emerge from life aslived; it is a realm of legitimate uncertainty andambiguity that requires an ethical responsiveness orpractical wisdom. The death of a child is a case inpoint. The author identifies and examines threeaspects of practical wisdom – the ethical claims ofpartiality, a yielding responsiveness and the play ofthought – and juxtaposes them with aspects of criticalthinking. The work of Martha Nussbaum and RichardPaul are interwoven throughout the discussion. Theauthor concludes that the discourse of criticalthinking is in danger of lapsing into a form of moralescapism wherein all we are rationally responsible foris thinking correctly. Practical wisdom, on theother hand, recognizes that thinking is not simply anintellectual cognitive act of an individual but adance between the life of a child and the love of anelder, a conversation between what is and what couldbe, an openness to passionate sorrow and surprise, aplay between understanding and perception. As such,practical wisdom provides a more likely account ofliving in good faith with oneself and others.

“Strange pilgrims” disillusionment and nostalgia in teacher education reform

The first task on our pilgrimage is to make a distinction between questions of governance which administrators ask and pedagogical questions which are the teachers. To date policy initiatives have been directed by the governance questions such as: Under what regime will students learn more? Predictably, this has led to the answer “better teachers” which has led us to describe what teachers do so that we can make them accountable. Accountability of public servants is not the sin; rather it is the description of teaching that has been problematic because it has been construed as an unproblematic and relatively straightforward affair. Certainly, teachers plan, instruct, and assess but each of those visible behaviours is embedded in a kind of moral evaluative deliberation that is not easily discernible. Teachers ask pedagogical questions such as “What ought I do to help students learn?” “What experiences are most worthwhile?” “What might be the long-term social consequences of a particular mode of instruction?” The questions are not procedurally resolvable; these are the normative questions of teaching ignored in the governance mode.

An Examination of Teaching as a Practical Political Activity

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the notion of teacher as an agent of social change. The study participants were feminist university teachers. The study is important because it explored schools as political sites where teaching and learning are understood in terms of democratic citizenship and social justice. The theoretical base for the research was neo-Marxist theory drawing specifically on the concept of teacher as “transformative intellectual.”The findings of the study suggest that the notion of transformative intellectual may rely too heavily on abstract, and highly rationalistic, constructions of “empowerment” and “dialogue” as transformative strategies. Moreover, the study underscores a need to attend to the transformative intellectual as complicit in the production, and legitimation, of certain kinds of knowledges, in the context of pedagogy as an “interactive productivity.” Additionally, “transformative may not refer to a state, or characteristic, of an individual teacher but rather to a relationship ...