Nathan Brubaker

Negotiating authority through jointly constructing the course curriculum

Understanding how authority is negotiated in teacher education classrooms can inform efforts to foster democratic teacher education practices and prepare future teachers to teach democratically. We know very little, however, about how authority is negotiated in different classroom contexts, particularly in teacher education settings. This qualitative study examined how authority was negotiated in an undergraduate teacher education course in which I – as the teacher of the course – involved students in actively determining the content, method, and assessment of the course through jointly constructing the course curriculum. Using self-study methodology to understand more deeply the problems embedded in my practice as a beginning teacher-educator, I generated themes from the data using the constant comparative method. The findings suggest that deriving legitimacy from mutually recognized sources, working from shared purposes, and confronting students’ deeply rooted familiarity with authoritarian teaching practices present potential frameworks for negotiating authority in teacher education – while illuminating the challenges of teaching democratically in authoritarian contexts. Such insights are important for helping future teachers experience alternatives to conventional teaching while accounting for the complexity of learning to bring democratic values to life in classrooms at all levels.

Critical moments in negotiating authority: grading, accountability, and teacher education

Understanding teacher educators’ reasoning about critical moments in negotiating authority can inform efforts to foster democratic teacher education practices and prepare future teachers to teach democratically. We know very little, however, about critical moments in negotiating authority, particularly in teacher educators’ practices. The purpose of this study was to examine, using self-study methodology, a teacher educator’s assumptions and perspectives about purposefully and explicitly negotiating authority through grading and accountability processes in an undergraduate teacher education course. From a critical pedagogical lens – concerning the intersection of classroom power relations, democratic citizenship, and student growth – the findings suggest that seeking legitimacy through consensual acceptance, responding to students’ expressed interests, and constructing knowledge through continual questioning present potential frameworks for constructing purposeful pedagogical partnerships consistent with democratic aims in teacher education.

Multiple Layers of Self in an Evolving Pedagogy of Teacher Education: Conflict and Compromise in a Quest for Classroom Democracy.

This study examines how my practice changed over three semesters as a beginning teacher educator. Teaching the undergraduate course, Diversity in Elementary Education, I worked to uphold and maintain my democratic ideals while more fully accounting for the larger context of authoritarian teaching to which my students were accustomed. The findings suggest that seeking few solutions to the problems being negotiated, prescribing purposes regardless of mutually perceived relevance, and imposing predetermined experiences and outcomes helped to construct a class climate that was more directly aligned with what students were ready to experience while compromising with the larger educational context. By making less discernible the differences between my practice and those with which my students were familiar, I reframed my underlying focus from clashing tales of triumph and tragedy to a complex tapestry of interwoven layers of self informing my evolving pedagogy of teacher education. Doing so helped illuminate the personal, pedagogical, and philosophical challenges of cultivating classroom democracy in an era of increased emphasis on high-stakes testing, standardization, and transmission-based teaching. Such knowledge is important for expanding our understanding of democratic teacher education practices and informing efforts to cultivate democratic dispositions in teachers.

Working with a Critical Friend: A Self-study of Executive Coaching

This article examines the learning by a dean of education through the process of executive coaching. In adopting a self-study approach to explore the experience of executive coaching, we draw on the notion of critical friendship as a way of interrogating the experience and the response to that experience in terms of leadership development and professional growth. We used data from audio-recordings of individual coaching sessions to construct vignettes designed to capture the essence of particular themes and issues germane to the learning through the coaching experiences. The major findings pertain to the notion of default behaviours and show how recognition of ones own default behaviours is important in shifting personal practice. The study opens up for scrutiny important aspects of the nature of the personal side of leading a faculty of education and offers insights into what it means to be a learner as a leader and how productive self-study can be in facilitating that learning process.

Unpacking Multiple Realities of Rural School Politics

Helping youth understand and shape what happens in local life as a means of constructing attachment to place and prioritizing knowledge production over consumption is of increasing importance to educators interested in democracy. Promoting such aims in the face of competing pressures to conform to informal networks of power and control in schools can be challenging for any teacher, particularly novices. In this chapter, I examine how my past experiences as a beginning teacher in a rural elementary school in the Northeast USA, where I pioneered curricular and pedagogical innovations in a small rural community, helped inform my efforts to navigate political complexity as a teacher educator. Drawing from personal journals and documents from my years as a beginning teacher, alongside transcripts of recent conversations with former colleagues who helped shape the political climate of my rural context, I illuminate multiple realities of rural school politics. Fifteen years later, how do I un/knowingly re-experience the realities of marginalization, values, and place as a teacher educator? How have they influenced my pedagogical purposes, practices, and priorities? What is their broader relevance to rural teacher education, internationally, today?

On Becoming a Democratic Teacher Educator

Narratives of teacher educators fostering active participation in democratic life are of particular relevance to educators interested in teaching democratically and actualizing Dewey’s pedagogical vision. Specifically, fostering facilitative relationships between teachers and students, in which teacher educators interpret knowledge of teaching as an outgrowth of students’ interests and experiences, is necessary for constructing authority relationships from community life. Doing so is important for helping students more fully maximize their growth, fulfill their potential as future teachers, and humanize learners in ways authoritarian practices cannot—thereby expanding and enacting the pedagogical possibilities of democratic teacher education. In this chapter, I highlight my journey of becoming a democratic teacher educator. My quest, as a beginning teacher educator, to learn the skills and knowledge necessary for making students’ interests central to my teaching—transforming my pedagogical practice from transmission to dialogue—proved pivotal to my knowledge and identity as a teacher educator. Such a shift constituted the central defining transition of my professional career. From my successes and failures at responding to students’ expressed interests in my first semester of pedagogical transformation, I illuminate the challenges of acting on one’s pedagogical vision, balancing ideals with institutional and cultural constraints, and envisioning possible selves of relevance to expanding pedagogical possibilities in teacher education. In undergoing similar transitions—away from authoritarian practice and towards dialogue—teacher educators can courageously counter authoritarian assumptions in teaching and help future teachers construct pedagogical identities congruent with democratic aims.

Cultivating Democratically-Minded Teachers

In this chapter, I examine how my interactions with graduate-level pre-service teacher candidates in an elective course on teaching for critical thinking helped shape my pedagogy of teacher education concerning diversity and democratic citizenship.

Gendered Discourse in the Evangelical South

For five years I taught diversity courses to undergraduate and graduate elementary teacher education students in the middle of the Bible Belt (the hub of socially conservative evangelical Protestantism in the Southeastern United States).