Edward R. Ducharme

The Education Professoriate: A Research Based Perspective

Introduction and Background As professors of education, we have a professional and personal interest in the education professoriate, its educational and social background, training and preparation, workload, and professional contributions. Over the years, we have read various comments, many unfavorable, about faculty in schools, colleges, and departments of education (SCDEs). There is little that describes the complexity of SCDE faculty, their collective and individual professional and personal backgrounds, their roles in higher education. There are occasional studies of faculty in educational admin-

The RATE Study: The Faculty.

For 3 years, teacher education faculty from 80 institutions have been surveyed by the Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. Results indicate that faculty responding to the questionnaire were predominantly White males, around 50 years old, who were likely to remain in their current positions. Nearly all teacher education faculty had prior experience in the lower schools, and the majority reported ongoing work in schools. Publication rates were comparable to faculty in higher education generally.

Educating for democracy : case-method teaching and learning

Contents: Preface. Part I: Using Case Methods in Teacher Education. R.F. McNergney, E.R. Ducharme, M.K. Ducharme, Teaching Democracy Through Cases. M.R. Sudzina, Organizing Instruction for Case-Based Teaching. T.W. Kent, Making Connections: The Democratic Classroom and the Internet. V.J. Risko, C.K. Kinzer, The Power of Multimedia Cases to Invite Democratic Teaching and Learning. A. McAninch, More and Less Acceptable Case Analyses: A Pragmatist Approach. Part II: Cases. E.R. Ducharme, M.K. Ducharme, Leslie Turner: A Teacher Under Stress. B. Hallenbeck, A Case of Cruel and All-Too-Usual Punishment. E. Potter, A Delicate Dilemma: Religion in the Classroom. D.S. Libby, Stripped of Dignity. J.M. Herbert, M.E. Hrabe, The Unwritten Amendment: Freedom of Curriculum. T.D. Peacock, C.E. Keller, H. Rallis, A Case of Freedom to Learn: Balancing the Needs and Rights of All Children. C.A. Grant, Full Democracy by Students of Color: A Case From Two Urban Classrooms.

Preparing New Educational Professionals for Non-public School Settings

Despite recent gloomy predictions that teacher education will grow increasingly conservative, reactive, isolationist, and mediocre in the next five years, some colleges of education are in the initial stages of restructuring the goals, practices, and curricula of their programs to prepare a new kind of professional-the educational specialist who can function effectively in a variety of non-public school settings. These colleges are not content to retrench around narrowly defined competency programs serving more and more specialized clientele. Neither are they predisposed to work only with inservice teachers, counselors, and administrators in teacher centers or on-site workshops. They are sensitive to the rapid growth of alternative educational programs and many of them have been acutely attentive to needs of undergraduate students who want a more eclectic major than can be found in the academic disciplines. Such students usually comprise two categories : Those who want to enter the human service field as educators in some creative and flexible way without having to serve an apprenticeship in public school classrooms or in rigid social work

The Paucity of the Investment Metaphor and Other Misunderstandings.

The issue of salary benefits for advanced degrees and graduate course work has long needed to be reexamined; however, to make the investment metaphor the dominant focus in reevaluating the worth of university-based inservice education is extremely limiting. The metaphor overextends itself, thus reducing the whole inservice enterprise to a simple profit-loss venture. The metaphor also recalls the accountability debate of the early seventies and the shrillness of its polarized positions. On the surface, inservice training comparisons to busi-

Responding to Goodlad: The Primacy of Teacher Education in SCDEs.

In his article in this issue, John Goodlad comments that a school of education not preparing teachers is an anomaly that provokes mischief (p. 334). We believe that as well as provoking mischief, it promotes disbelief. We strongly believe that the primary mission of schools, colleges, and departments of education (SCDEs) is the preparation of teachers. Many SCDEs have, in the last several decades, occasionally lost sight of this primary mission as they have urged faculty and administrators to pursue grants leading them away from teacher preparation; developed graduate programs promoting research often having little or nothing to do with teacher education; sought faculty with a reputation for publishing in areas peripheral to teacher education; publicly blazoned the work of their doctoral graduates, rarely that of their teacher education undergraduates whose tuition fueled the enterprise; and silently acquiesced in disproportionately higher funding for advanced degree programs at the expense of initial and advanced teacher preparation programs. We do not counsel that SCDEs abandon these many directions that bring them both esteem and resources, but we believe that in the avid pursuit of these directions, many SCDEs have nearly totally shifted their emphasis away from teacher education. We assert the necessity of focus on teacher education. The nations needs for teachers are extraordinarily large and demanding. SCDEs have a moral obligation to respond, a moral obligation to provide major support to the preparation of teachers. At root in each of Goodlads seven suggestions is concern for better teachers, for their improved education. Teaching Is Easy, So They Say We live in an age that sometimes disparages the idea that there is anything special about the education of teachers. Hardly a week goes by without the description of an anecdote or an OpEd piece about how a school district could not hire a scientist who knows everything about nuclear physics because of bureaucratic rules about what teachers must have studied prior to teaching, how they must meet unnecessarily stringent and bureaucratic stipulation in terms of courses and experiences. The comments usually contain a series of muddleheaded remarks about how all one needs to teach is subject matter mastery. Sheehan and Fullan (1995) note, Despite the rhetoric about teacher education in todays society, there does not seem to be a real belief or confidence that investing in teacher education will yield results. Perhaps deep down many leaders believe that teaching is not all that difficult. After all, most leaders have spent thousands of hours in the classroom and are at least armchair experts. And they know that scores of unqualified teachers are placed in classrooms every year and required to learn on the job (p. 89). Although gifted teachers do appear to make teaching look easy, prospective teachers have much to learn prior to teaching that goes beyond, for example, elementary school teachers knowing the best of childrens literature and secondary English teachers knowing their Shakespeare. Teacher education faculty in SCDEs must demonstrate the necessity and relevancy of pedagogical knowledge and skill, the aptness of child and adolescent studies, the pointedness of knowledge of the history of education. Development of Moral Purpose Teachers require understanding of diversity, ability to work with varied groups, ability to make careful judgments, ease in varied cultural groups, good self-concepts, eagerness to grow in pedagogy, willingness to accept and learn about others different from oneself. But most of all, they must have a sense of moral purpose; they must have had the opportunity to learn and grow in the processes of developing this sense of moral purpose and understanding the necessity of having a goal and vision of what teaching and learning are. It ill becomes a nation to have a cadre of teachers versed in pedagogical tricks and ruses but lacking a sense of why they do what they do. …

The Summer of Our Discontent

Inevitably, reading is one of the requirements to be undergone. To improve the performance and quality, someone needs to have something new every day. It will suggest you to have more inspirations, then. However, the needs of inspirations will make you searching for some sources. Even from the other people experience, internet, and many books. Books and internet are the recommended media to help you improving your quality and performance.

Human service education‐teacher education comes out of the closet

Teacher education has been preparing human service professionals for generations, albeit in furtive and often unacknowledged ways. For decades, statistics emanating from national offices reported on the number and percent of candidates actually teaching upon completion of their programs. The rest were thought of as the lost, the people who had made less worthy choices. Inevitably we felt a level of professional guilt about those choosing other careers. Yet all know that many of these graduates assumed roles in social service agencies as dedicated to the public good as schools are. Sadly, we, as a profession, never acknowledged them. It is now time to come out of the closet. Teacher education must recognize the past it has tended to ignore and must create a future which broadens an understanding of what teaching means in a human service society. One fact frequently becomes obscured whenever we discuss entry level criteria in teacher education: most teachers-to-be enter the profession with a high sense of idealism, moral commitment, and a genuine desire to improve the quality of life for others. No matter that many teachers enter professional careers with naive social missions and inadequate skills to realize those ideals; what does matter is that a sense of idealism and moral vision remain present and that worthwhile outlets for these qualities exist. In the mid-70s, the old classroom arenas for teaching and learning are stretching to include a wider range of place and activity. Many educators now begin to realize they no longer can expect a lifetime of uninterrupted public school service in a specific role. Many persons will have teaching experiences in a variety of human service areas before they retire. Some will move horizontally as teachers within many human service careers-from classrooms, to counseling sites, to storefront action agencies, to nursing homes. Others will teach in industry, business, government, and the military. Still others will serve as teaching-learning trainers of such professional helpers as dental hygienists, social workers, and corrections personnel-all of whom are starting to define their tasks as primarily educational. Thus, as increasing numbers of students with social vision enter our programs to prepare for various human service teaching careers, certain fundamental structural and philosophical changes in training pro-

Teacher Centers: What Place in Education? Sharon Feiman (Ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago, 1978.

Mackie claims that education is not social engineering, but never defines what education is. She uses the terms education and schooling interchangeably, but doesn’t realize that from an American perspective they are not synonymous. Again, we are never told what educational system the author is describing. We suggest that if Mackie is referring to the American educational system, it involves processes of social engineering and of selection and assortment. Further, we suggest that she examine literature on the topic (Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Carnoy, 1975, 1974; Christoffel, Finkelhor, & Gilbarg, 1970). Throughout, Mackie suggests that having a philosophy is not simply a matter of adopting a statement of aims, because philosophy is a process as well

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Dan C. Lortie, sociologist-educator at the University of Chicago, has written an extremely important book, one which will be referred to by policy makers for years to come as the definitive sociological study on teaching as an occupation. Lortie’s work is different, first, in the methodology he employs to examine teaching as an occupation, and second, in his search for what he calls the &dquo;ethos&dquo; of the profession-&dquo;the pattern of orientations and sentiments which is peculiar to teachers and which distinguishes them from members of other occupations.&dquo; (p. viii) By drawing on such data as historical reviews, national and local surveys, and comparative findings from observational studies by other researchers, Lortie, in the first half of the book, explores the structure of teaching as an occupation. He focuses on three specific processes of occupational induction: teacher recruitment, socialization, and the system of work rewards. He shows how the structure of the profession, vis a vis these