Marilyn Cochran-Smith

The Teacher Research Movement: A Decade Later:

In this article, we discuss the latest renewal of interest in the U.S. in teacher research and other forms of practitioner inquiry, a movement that is now a little more than a decade old. We argue that part of what makes the current wave of interest a movement and not just the latest educational fad is that teacher research stems from several different, but in some ways compatible, intellectual traditions and educational projects. We identify five major trends that characterize the current U.S. movement: (a) the prominence of teacher research in teacher education, professional development, and school reform; (b) the development of conceptual frameworks and theories of teacher research; (c) the dissemination of teacher research beyond the local level; (d) the emergence of critique of teacher research and the teacher research movement; and (e) the transformative potential of teacher research on some aspects of university culture. Based on our own teacher research experiences and understandings of teacher research, we conclude with thoughts about the future of the movement in the face of the standards movement and other current reforms that create an educational climate quite different from that of a decade ago.

Color Blindness and Basket Making Are Not the Answers: Confronting the Dilemmas of Race, Culture, and Language Diversity in Teacher Education

Although the American educational system is dysfunctional for large numbers of children who are not part of the racial and language mainstream, there are no universal strategies for teaching children who are culturally and linguistically different from one another, from their teachers, or from students whose interests are already well served by the system. Drawing on the inquiries of student teachers working in urban elementary schools, I argue that we need to go beyond color blindness and basket making as responses to cultural diversity. Instead, I propose that we need generative ways for student teachers and teacher educators to reconsider their assumptions, understand the values and practices of families and cultures different from their own, and construct pedagogy that not only takes these into account in locally appropriate ways but also makes issues of diversity an explicit part of the curriculum.

Learning and Unlearning: The Education of Teacher Educators.

Abstract Despite the many expectations that US and other teacher educators around the world are striving to meet, there has been little attention to development of a curriculum for educating teacher educators, or to local and larger policies that might support the development of what teacher educators need to know and do in order to meet the complex demands of preparing teachers for the 21st century. In this article, Cochran-Smith analyzes four teacher educator communities in different contexts and entry points across the career lifespan. She makes the case that the education of teacher educators is substantially enriched when inquiry is a stance on the overall enterprise of teaching, schooling, and teacher education.

Sticks, Stones, and Ideology: The Discourse of Reform in Teacher Education

Many highly politicized debates about reforming teacher education are embedded within two larger national agendas: the agenda to professionalize teaching and teacher education, which is linked to the K–12 standards movement, and the movement to deregulate teacher preparation, which aims to dismantle teacher education institutions and break up the monopoly of the profession. In this article, the authors analyze how these two agendas are publicly constructed, critiqued, and debated, drawing on public documents from each side and using the language and arguments of the advocates themselves. The authors argue that, despite very different agendas, the discourse of both deregulation and professionalization revolves rhetorically around the establishment of three interrelated warrants, which legitimize certain policies and undermine others. Taken together, what Cochran-Smith and Fries label “the evidentiary warrant,” “the political warrant,” and “the accountability warrant,” are intended by advocates of competing agendas to add up to “common sense” about how to improve the quality of the nation’s teachers. The authors conclude that in order to understand the politics of teacher education and the complexities of competing reform agendas, their underlying ideals, ideologies, and values must be debated along with and in relation to “the evidence” about teacher quality.

The New Teacher Education: For Better or for Worse?

This article offers a reading of the current state of the field of teacher education, identifying current reforms, emerging trends, and new underlying premises. The author argues that a “new teacher education” has been emerging with three closely coupled pieces: It is constructed as a public policy problem, based on research and evidence, and driven by outcomes. Illustrating and critiquing each of these pieces, the article makes the case that the new teacher education is both for the better and for the worse. The article concludes that education scholars who care about public education must challenge the narrowest aspects of the emerging new teacher education, building on its most promising aspects and working with others to change the terms of the debate.

Teaching and Teacher Education: Absence and Presence in AERA Presidential Addresses

This essay considers the absence, presence, and shifting treatment of the topic of research on teaching and teacher education in AERA presidential addresses. To capture the arc of this topic, the essay is structured chronologically according to three time periods beginning with AERA’s birth in 1916 and continuing to the current years. At a general level, treatment of teaching and teacher education as a topic mirrored the contours of the emergence and historical development of the field of research on teaching and teacher education. However, the essay also acknowledges that presidential addresses are a partial lens on the field, which leaves out many significant developments, including issues and perspectives that have existed on the margins of the field.

Reinventing Student Teaching

Innovative student teaching programs have proliferated during the last decade. The author distinguishes among reinvented student teaching programs by examining their underlying as sumptions about knowledge, power, and language in teaching and the various ways these are played out in school-university relationships and explores three contrasting school-university relationships—consonance, critical dissonance, and collaborative resonance—identifying the underlying assumptions of each and examining how problems are defined, goals established, and social and organizational structures for student teaching created. It is argued that collaborative resonance has unique potential to provide students with rich opportunities to learn to teach. This argument is illustrated with a description of the structures and effects of one innovative pro gram, Project START, based on resonance and designed to foster intellectual growth and com mitment to reform in both students and cooperating teachers.

Communities for Teacher Research: Fringe or Forefront?

There are many obstacles to teacher research in schools, teacher groups, school-university partnerships, and regional and national forums. This article argues that overcoming these obstacles requires the building and sustaining of intellectual communities of teacher-researchers, or networks of individuals who enter with other teachers into a collaborative search for definition and satisfaction in their work lives as teachers and who regard research as part of larger efforts to transform teaching, learning, and schooling. Drawing on examples from various teacher and student teacher groups, the article presents an analytic framework for interpreting and evaluating the work of communities for teacher research according to the ways they organize time, use talk, construct texts, and interpret the tasks of teaching and schooling.

Good and Just Teaching: The Case for Social Justice in Teacher Education.

A particularly controversial aspect of teacher preparation is the increasing number of teacher preparation programs that emphasize “social justice” as part of the curriculum. This article examines how students in a program with a social justice agenda understood the concept and how their understandings played out in practice. Using interviews and observations, we show that teacher candidates focused on ensuring pupils’ learning rather than merely boosting their self‐esteem or spreading political ideologies, as critics of the social justice agenda suggest. In classrooms, candidates concentrated on teaching content and skills but also had a critical perspective, built on pupils’ cultural resources, and attempted to reach every pupil. We argue that teaching for social justice, or what we title “good and just teaching,” reflects an essential purpose of teaching in a democratic society in which the teacher is an advocate for students whose work supports larger efforts for social change.

The outcomes question in teacher education

Abstract This article begins with the premise that it is possible to trace teacher education development and reform in terms of the major questions that have driven the field and the sometimes competing ways these questions have been constructed, debated, and enacted in research, policy, and practice. The author argues that currently “the outcomes question” is driving teacher education. Generally, the outcomes question includes debates about what impacts teacher education should be expected to have on teacher learning, professional practice, and student learning as well as debates about how, by whom, and for what purposes outcomes should be documented, demonstrated, and/or measured. The article identifies three major ways that the outcomes question in teacher education is being constructed in the research literature, the policy arena, and the media: outcomes as long term impact, outcomes as teacher test scores, and outcomes as professional performance. Each of these is analyzed in some detail, drawing on related analyses from policy and teacher education practice. Finally the article suggests several concerns about how the outcomes question is being constructed in teacher education, questioning some of the viewpoints that are being legitimized or undermined and drawing particular attention to the impact of these for a just and democratic society.