Session 1: Schooling and Teacher Education

Seth Agbo - A Learning Community Model for Professional Development & Transformative Teacher Education
Co-ordinator, Undergraduate Program, School of Education, Pacific University, Forest Grove, OR 97116 USA

Among the numerous recent attempts being made to improve teacher education and student success in the United States is the push for the establishment of professional development schools (PDSs). The emphasis on PDSs means taking teacher education away from a university classroom-centered and theory-based context to the real life situation in public schools. Although it seems that PDSs can significantly improve teacher education, there are numerous problems that can make such relationship tenuous. The most serious of the problems is the inherent disparity between universities and public schools. Traditionally, the university is an elite institution that places a lot of emphasis on theoretical knowledge and despises practical experience as a legitimate embodiment of knowledge and rationality. The university thrives on the empiricist tradition that emphasizes the detachment of the subject from the object as the key role in the progressive acquisition of knowledge. Like the university as a whole, teacher education is set against the backdrop of an academic culture that disregards practice in favor of theory and loves detachment from the outside community. As the university rejects practical experience in favor of the more cherished theoretical academic content knowledge, so also is teacher education skeptical towards practice and detaches itself from public schools. Traditional teacher education promotes a core of teaching ideals that focuses on theoretical academic preparation of pre-service teachers. Given the enormous disparities in the culture of universities and public schools, the attainment of effective university/public school interface suggests necessary structural changes in the way teacher education institutions operate. This paper looks more intimately at how to link teacher preparation with veteran teacher development and school improvement. The paper introduces a university/school partnership model that leads to transformational learning of teachers, students and university faculty. The model is basically an illustration of how to develop symbiotic relationships among pre-service teacher preparation, veteran teacher development and the improvement of academic standards of students.

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Norbert Pachler & Caroline Daly - A Scholarship of Teaching and the Idea of Education in Schools and Teacher Education
The Institute of Education, University of London, London, United Kingdom

In this paper we contribute to the continuing struggle over how to conceptualise the intellectual component of learning to teach. In doing so we also offer a progress report on a new type of higher education course at Masters level currently piloted at the Institute of Education, University of London.

The Master of Teaching (MTcg) award can be seen to break the mould in more ways than one and is the result of an initiative to reconsider the kinds of interventions and support higher education has to offer in the fields of teacher education and continuing professional development for teachers. The MTcg differs from more traditional Masters courses (including Master of Education courses) in its 'delivery' mode and locus of control, for it is based on the notion of shared knowledge construction at a distance through computer-mediated communication (CMC). More than this, participants can start the course upon completion of their initial teaching qualification. But also, and arguably most importantly, it focuses on the 'art' and 'science' of teaching, requiring participants to examine closely their own classrooms as places of learning. Participants are, therefore, not preoccupied with the acquisition and critical analysis of established orthodoxies and epistemologies in the field, but are concerned to understand more deeply their practice in the context of a learning culture.

The MTcg stresses the 'agentive' dimension of teacher development, i.e. the reciprocal, symbiotic relationship between practice and intellectual reflection - rather than more traditional notions of reflections on practice - fostered by the potential of CMC. The knowledge base of the course is not located in the Institute of Education, nor in the 'set' (digitised) readings, nor in the tutors but in the interactive environment of the electronic forums themselves. The pedagogy of the MTcg has emerged over time through the shared spaces of interdisciplinary, cross-curricular and cross-phase planning meetings focussing on common themes: how to facilitate better understanding of teaching amongst participants and how to ensure the pedagogy is congruent with the aims and ethos of the MTcg. One significant implication of this is how higher education tutors have redefined their own roles and pedagogies as teacher-educators.

At the heart of the MTcg, therefore, is 'scholarly teaching', i.e. the engagement of professional teachers at various levels with requisite knowledges, understanding and skills as well as a particular capacity and dispositions towards teaching, as well as the notion of teachers as professional learners. The paper concludes that, unless novel ways to teacher development such as the MTcg are conceived and unless higher education teacher education is prepared to re-conceptualise its role, purpose and nature, lifelong teacher learning will remain mere rhetoric.

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