As the work of teacher education becomes increasingly focused on the challenges of helping mostly white, monolingual, middle-class prospective teachers become compassionate,successful teachers of racially, culturally, linguistically, economically, and academically diverse students, some teacher educators struggle to find compassion for the prospective teachers they teach. Motivated by this concern and drawing on feminist and Buddhist theories, Hilary Conklin argues that many teacher educators would benefit from a renewed consideration of modeling the pedagogy they hope prospective teachers will employ. In this article, she analyzes and brings together the work on critical, justice-oriented approaches to teacher education, relationships in teaching, modeling as pedagogy, and the Buddhist notion of compassion to articulate a pedagogy of modeling in critical, justice-oriented teacher education. Conklin proposes that such a pedagogy has the potential to move us closer to transformative teacher education.
In this cross-institutional, qualitative case study, two teacher educators in urban teacher education programs identify and analyze the components of our teacher education practice in relation to a vision of compassionate, critical, justice-oriented teacher education. Using Grossman et al.’s concepts of preparation for professional practice as an analytic tool, we illuminate some of our teacher education practices that (a) facilitated the development of relationships and community within our classes, (b) honored preservice teachers’ lived experiences and existing attitudes, (c) introduced preservice teachers to multiple perspectives of viewing the world, and (d) provided a vision of equitable, intellectually challenging teaching and learning. Drawing on our data, we offer a pedagogical framework that identifies key features of compassionate, critical, justice-oriented teacher education to inform research and practice. We highlight the contributions of this framework for justice-oriented teacher education and the inherent complexity of attempts to parse such fundamentally messy relational practice.
The majority of middle school teachers are prepared in either generalist elementary programs or subjectspecific secondary programs, yet researchers and teacher educators have little understanding of the ways in which these divergent pathways prepare teachers for working at the middle school level. In this study, preservice teachers from an elementary and a secondary preparation program were interviewed about their conceptions of teaching social studies at the middle school level. The results indicated that the social studies methods course in each pathway strongly influenced the preservice teachers' ideas about pedagogical strategies for teaching social studies, but did little to facilitate the preservice teachers' understanding of teaching young adolescents. These findings draw attention to the need for more research and teacher education focused on teaching at the middle school level.
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