ArticleResearchers in many fields and in many parts of the world are now interested in studying the ways teachers are recruited, prepared and certified. They work from different, sometimes competing, perspectives regarding the goals of research and the purposes of education. This is the second of a two-part article intended to offer teacher educators a cohesive overview of the sprawling and uneven field of research on teacher preparation by identifying, analyzing, and critiquing its major programs. It is based on our massive review of research on teacher education and certification (Cochran-Smith et al., in press). Part 1, which appeared in the previous issue of Journal of Teacher Education (JTE), provided information about how the review was conducted, described the theoretical/analytic framework we developed to guide the review, and analyzed the research on teacher preparation accountability, effectiveness and policies-the first of three broadly construed programs of research we identified. This second part of the article discusses the second and third programs of research: research on teacher preparation for the knowledge society and research on teacher preparation for diversity and equity. Guided by our "Research on Teacher Preparation as Historically Situated Social Practice" theoretical/analytic framework, we identified the multiple subcategories or clusters of studies comprising each of these programs of research and examined the social practices in which researchers engaged within a selected cluster for each program. This article also suggests new directions for research on teacher education based on lacunae in the literature and on our analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the existing field. Research Program B: Teacher Preparation for the Knowledge SocietyIt is generally agreed that knowledge societies demand workers who can think critically, pose and solve problems, and work collaboratively-abilities not readily developed in classrooms where teaching entails transmitting factual information to learners. According to reformers, preparing students for future knowledge work requires new ways of teaching that are grounded in constructivist views of learning. The studies in Research Program B focus on preparing teacher candidates to teach in ways that are consistent with new understandings of how people learn, a trend we discussed in more detail in Part 1 of this two-part article. We identified six clusters of studies within this program of research: preparing teachers to teach subject matter, particularly science (Cluster B-1); the influence of coursework on learning to teach (Cluster B-2); the influence of fieldwork on learning to teach (Cluster B-3); teacher education program content, structures, and pedagogies (Cluster B-4); teacher educators as learners (Cluster B-5); and learning to teach 558268J TEXXX10.1177/0022487114558268Journal of Teacher EducationCochran-Smith et al. AbstractThis is the second of a two-part article intended to offer teacher educators a cohesive overview of the sprawling a...
U.S. teacher education has largely overlooked a sociopolitical-historical context that affects both immigrants and nonimmigrants: American empire. To address the pressing need for teacher education to acknowledge U.S. imperialism, the author stages an argument in three parts. First, she argues that the field should account for empire and its impact on immigrants, and suggests conceptualizing immigrants within a nuanced framework of white supremacy. Next, she relates her own immigrant counternarrative to expose masternarratives that operate against immigrants. By sharing her journey toward understanding imperialism and her own positionality, she also contributes an immigrant perspective to the field. Third, the author introduces the concept of imperial privilege, inviting the field to recognize and challenge masternarratives. The author concludes by inviting readers to historicize U.S. imperialism in their research and practice, and thus embrace more humanizing narratives. While the argument focuses on the United States, it also applies broadly to other high-income imperialist countries.
This critical race ethnography examines a secondary-level dual-language (DL) program, a bilingual-education model thought to provide Latinxs educational equity. Drawing from a three-stage recursive analytic approach, I present evidence that a DL program’s policies and practices valued offering Latinx youth biliterate schooling only so long as DL was available and advantageous to Whites—which ultimately excluded some Latinx students from bilingual education and/or accessing its benefits. I theorize DL functions as white property when DL perpetuates racial hierarchies and preserves the value of a white racial identity, thereby maintaining Whites’ inequitable material accumulation. I problematize the logic of DL—highlighting that DL has the elitist tendencies of world-language education—and assess DL’s potential to deliver educational justice to Latinxs.
Racial literacy has contributed powerful advances in multiple disciplines about how race and racism are understood. Many education scholars use the concept to refer to antiracist practices and ideologies, a definition that casts some people as either racially literate or illiterate. In this essay the author draws on examples from education literature to argue that this interdisciplinary conceptual norm hinders scholars’ attempts to reveal the dominance of race-evasiveness, however unintentionally, for two reasons. First, describing people as racially literate or illiterate implies that those who adopt race-evasive or racist ideologies are not interpreting racial ideas, which overlooks that all people who live in a racist society engage in literacy practices that make meaning of race. Second, construing racial literacy strictly as antiracist obscures that making meaning of race can be done through hegemonic ideologies. This accepted conceptualization may stymie useful analyses of hegemonic ideologies that predominate in U.S. society and schools. The author presents a continuum of racial literacies to differentiate between hegemonic and counterhegemonic racial literacies. The continuum’s exposure of hegemonic racial literacies encourages scholars to capture the hidden ideologies in literacy practices that may not exhibit an explicit racial focus but nevertheless perpetuate racism. Furthermore, the author suggests eschewing the labels “racially illiterate” and “racially literate” and instead affirms that people become racially literate through both racist and antiracist literacy practices. Instead of racially illiterate or literate, the author submits consciousness as a more apt term and connects the continuum’s counterhegemonic end to developing critical-racial consciousness, an antiracist lens.
Many schools attempt to address the needs of “English-language learners,” who usually are Spanish-dominant Latinxs, by offering dual-language (DL) bilingual education. While undertaking a larger ethnographic study of one such secondary-level dual-language program, I examined how dual-language teachers understood the program as equitable for Latinxs. I found that teachers believed DL met Latinxs’ needs by providing Spanish-language/biliteracy schooling, which deemphasized the need for explicitly enhancing youths’ critical consciousness. This teacher ideology of assuming DL is “inherently culturally relevant” led to significant issues. For example, teachers believed DL would improve Latinxs’ academic achievement, but when teachers perceived Latinx achievement was not on par with White dual-language students’ outcomes, teachers made sense of Latinxs’ underperformance in DL through racist explanations and did not interrogate the program’s cultural relevance. Specifically, teachers pointed to the program not providing Latinxs the needed Spanish input even though the Latinx students self-identified as bilingual and were the “Spanish-dominant” students, and teachers pointed to Latinxs’ cultural and familial deficits. I argue teachers overlooked critical-racial consciousness as an important component of an equitable education. Implications include for teachers to cultivate their critical-racial consciousness, interrogate raciolinguistic ideologies, and define an equitable DL as centering critical-racial consciousness.
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