Working Group I:  

Purpose of and in Teacher Education

Group members: Ann Chinnery (SFU), Riel Dion (Manitoba Ministry of Education, Citizenship and Youth), John Ippolito (York), Don Kerr (Lakehead), Anne Phelan (UBC), Hans Smits (Calgary), Valerie Triggs (UBC), Janice Wallace (Alberta)

 

The following is the report that Hans Smits presented on behalf of the working group to all conference participants at the end of the conference.

 

“What is the Project of Teacher Education?”

Thank you for the privilege of participating in a great conversation while we were at the Kingston conference.  As promised, a bit later than sooner, here is my attempt at elaborating somewhat the summary we presented on the last day.  I hope I have captured at least the intent of our conversation if not its rich detail.  If we want to keep this alive, please don’t hesitate to send me some suggestions for this summary.

In his Radical Hope, Jonathan Lear writes about a hope that arguably can speak to our struggles to define the purposes of teacher education research, and in Arendtian terms, address the questions about what may foster renewal, responsibility and richer public life in the contexts of our work as teacher educators.  The question of hope, Lear writes, has to do with questions such as, “for what may we hope?” and “what ought I to do?”  These questions define a “radical hope” Lear argues, because “[they] are directed to future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is.”

Part of Lear’s discussion has to do with severe “breaks in narrative” that happen historically, either to us individually or as a culture, and when such breaks happen, the concepts with which we are used to defining—for  example purpose—seem inadequate to the task, and yet concepts and narratives are critical in defining our wanting and doing.  Noting that we are born into the world “longingly”, Lear writes,

Part of the sustenance our parenting figures will give us is the concepts with which we can at least begin to understand what we are longing for.  This is crucial for acquiring a natural language: inheriting a culture’s set of concepts through which we can understand ourselves as desiring, wishing, and hoping for certain things.

In attempting to capture at least some of the very thoughtful discussion in our group in Kingston, Lear’s ideas about radical hope and re-thinking our concepts, seemed for me, to capture the tone and texture of our group’s talk.  As a group, we very quickly came to some agreement about, or at least question, the adequacy of the concept of “purpose.”  Stressing questions about “what matters”, we expressed concerns that purpose is often already determined by a pre-determined plan or program.  This is not to deny the importance of having purpose in our work, or having a purpose for research, but that in practice, much research is already foreclosed by its assumed ends, which are often instrumental in nature.  Our group noted that teacher education research is often on the one hand about failure in practice, but change and reform are always promised in the call for further research.  What gets missed then, is indeed the historic mission, if you like, of teacher education, and what ought to be its deep connection to what Hannah Arendt identifies as the “human condition” and what may contribute to its project of freedom.

Implicit in the foregoing discussion is a kind of enduring challenge: how ought we to address the questions of how to live well in the difficulty that is always present?  This question, rather than pointing to already fixed ends asks instead about the sources for our responsibility.  How should we come at this responsibility and what would that work look like?  What is the work, then of teacher education, including research?

We agreed, then that the question of purposes perhaps contained a different question, but one more aligned with the notion of questions of condition and responsibility:  "What is the project of teacher education?"

It is often interesting to ask the question of language and what may help in defining our intentions.  Definitions of the word “project” takes up considerable space in the Oxford English Dictionary. As a noun, project is familiarly know as a “plan or design, action, scheme, etc.” and interestingly, more rare, something “to do.”  More substantively, project may be defined as “an individual or collaborative enterprise…having a social purpose.”

Project may also be used as a verb; hence, “throw out, expel”; or, “throw or cast (a substance) in, on, or upon something.”  A further definition is proposed as to “imagine (oneself, an image, situation, etc. removed in space or time, especially into the future.”

There are possibly, then, interesting connotations for using “project” as part of the question.  One is certainly the “project” to which we committed (see further below).  But I think our deliberations also pointed to the idea of throwing something out or forward in the sense of imagining possibilities for reconceptualizing the purposes of work.

Part of our discussion at the Kingston weekend was not of course about defining ends or purposes, but to struggle with the question of how we might understand the project of teacher education, and particularly—and I would put this in Lear’s terms—“for what may we hope?”, and “what ought we to do?”, questions that speak to the condition of how we should live well with each other in the difficult work of renewing the world.  In his Sustaining Affirmation, we can extrapolate from Stephen White’s discussion of providing a “weak ontology” for understanding citizenship and responsibility, a way also to think about the work of teacher education.  White suggests that there can be an ontology for practice in a sense, albeit one that is not necessarily forever finite and fixed.  He speaks of the necessity to attend to the existential realities of language, finitude, sources and natality as a basis for imagining possibilities and responsibilities.   These are concepts, which may help us to re-imagine possible ways to think about the project of teacher education.

Hence, with the notion of “sources” for our thinking, as a concrete project, we are suggesting a contribution of a set of essays/articles/research pieces that as collection may contribute to Thomas Falkenberg’s brilliant idea of a “polygraph” series, and possibly a book.  In other words, each member of the group will undertake the task to interpret the project of teacher education form an important tradition of thought (for example, Arendt, Gadamer, Levinas, etc.) and how a reading of that tradition/writer may allow us to interpret and say something about teacher education, and help us think through our ways of life and practices.  As an example, I am currently interested in what is being written about the “capability” approach to understanding human flourishing (coming out of the work of Nussbaum, Sen, Ricoeur and others) and how that may help us re-imaging a richer conceptualization of the work of teaching and becoming a teacher.

I hope the foregoing comments don’t do too much violence to the thoughtful contributions of each of the members of our group, and the quality of conversation in which we engaged while at the conference.  Thank you indeed, and I look forward to continuing the work!

Sincerely,

Hans Smits
Faculty of Education
University of Calgary