Dave Powell

Learning from Young Adolescents: The Use of Structured Teacher Education Coursework to Help Beginning Teachers Investigate Middle School Students' Intellectual Capabilities.

In this article, the authors discuss a case study in which beginning teachers interviewed young adolescents as part of structured teacher education coursework designed to challenge teachers’ low expectations for young adolescents. Based on pre- and postsurveys, pre— and post—focus group interviews, classroom field notes, and teachers’ written analysis papers, the authors’ data suggest that the coursework helped to shape changes in beginning teachers’ views of young adolescents’ analytical capabilities and social studies knowledge. However, these shifts in teachers’ thinking about young adolescents’ capabilities did not translate into shifts in the teachers’ ideas about middle school social studies instruction. The authors argue that carefully structured coursework like this interview project holds promise for helping beginning teachers develop new understandings about learners, but attention to students’ abilities must also be accompanied by attention to teachers’ purposes and pedagogical understandings.

The Influence of a Collaborative Doctoral Seminar on Emerging Teacher Educator-Researchers.

Over a 7-year period, graduate teaching assistants participated in a teacher education doctoral seminar designed to develop emergent scholarship and practice in teacher education. Six former students in the seminar, all now assistant professors, joined Dinkelman in an open-ended, far-ranging, month-long conversation captured in a threaded, online discussion forum. The study unfolded as a collaborative self-study that made use of this forum and subsequent analyses to address two central research questions: (1) What influence might our seminar have had on your development as an emerging scholar? and (2) What influence might our seminar have had on your development as a teacher educator? In this article, we reflect on how participation in the seminar shaped the emergence of new scholars and teacher educators, as doctoral students and also as new faculty members. Findings suggested the seminar facilitated emergent scholarship by helping participants map the terrain of teacher education research, prompting actual research, and blurring the knower and known in studying teacher education. The seminar also helped develop emergent teacher educators practice through helping participants learn a language for teacher education, develop a sense of program, value collaboration, and define purpose and care for the practice of teacher education. The concluding discussion emphasizes the need for additional inquiry into the ways early-career teacher educators develop commitments to teacher education research and practice.

Join, or Die! A Pragmatic Case for Reflective Self-Study in Social Studies

It was once famously said of John Dewey that no major issue for a whole generation was clarified until he had spoken. These words, uttered by the historian Henry Steele Commager, reflect both the breadth of Dewey’s intellect and the wide scope of his social activism. Dewey remained an active conference speaker and column-writer right up to his death in 1952, just 7 years short of his 100th birthday, and it is now estimated that as many as 4000 books, papers, and articles have been written about Dewey’s life, his work, and his philosophy.

Brother, Can You Paradigm? Toward a Theory of Pedagogical Content Knowledge in Social Studies

Although research on pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) has accelerated in recent years, social studies educators have not generally been part of the conversation. This article explores why a theory of PCK for social studies has been so difficult to elaborate, focusing on the field’s inability to come to consensus on its aims and purposes and on a pervasive distrust of traditional academic disciplines and scholarship they produce. These factors have helped make the effective preparation of social studies teachers, something researchers studying PCK hope to improve, exceptionally difficult. This article proposes that if the field can resolve its relationship to the disciplines, a more coherent conceptualization of teacher education in social studies could come into focus. Such a reconceptualization could help position social studies teacher educators to contribute to the knowledge base on PCK, particularly with regard to the transformation of disciplinary content into school curriculum.

Moving Forward, Looking Back: Renewing the Struggle for an American Curriculum

Rationales for public school reform in the United States are often tied to historical perspectives on the birth and development of schools and are buffeted by the assumption that the history of public schooling says much about how reform efforts should proceed. This interpretive article explores 2 such perspectives on 21st-century schools: those of Diane Ravitch, distinguished educational historian and commentator; and those of Herbert Kliebard, considered one of the preeminent authorities on the development of the American curriculum. This investigation reveals that Ravitchs longstanding condemnation of progressivism and curricular differentiation as the source of what ails public schools fails to account for the demise of the schoolteacher as the central force in early 21st-century schools—a factor that Kliebard identifies as crucial to understanding the nature of 21st-century schools. It is then suggested that recommitment to teachers as the educational center of gravity in public schools may provide new insight into understanding how school reform on the 21st century might move forward.