Humanizing Teacher Education for the Last Quarter of the Twentieth Century

Abstract

professional teacher education: the vision of providing enlightened and liberating service to American society. In the past, we have done this by targeting our energies on the schools where we have tried to meet so many public and personal needs. We maintain, however, that the last quarter of the twentieth century finds us with a vastly expanded arena in which human needs are emerging.What we propose is both a restoration and an extension of that humanistic vision of serving the broader society that has always characterized professional teacher education at its best.There are many current attempts to change professional teacher education. Among the emphases are the quality preparation of smaller numbers of professionals; targeted specializations such as special education, early childhood, career education, and the like; change of direction toward inservice; and development of specific competencies. Each of these may be individually laudable. However, we question their validity in 1975, a time for imaginative development rather than defensive and retrogressive retrenchment. This era is one of expanding human and social needs, of structural change in the institutions that serve people, and of declining resources.The society as a whole is moving towards-in fact, is already well into-what some writers call the Human Service Society.The Human Service Society Social scientists like Gartner, Riessman, and Bell have shown that we are in the midst of a dramatic change in how people earn their livings. Bell, for example, believes that we are witnessing the growth of a professional class which works in the &dquo;non-profit&dquo; sector, including educators, medical health specialists, social scientists, mental health workers, clergymen, government employees, and media personnel. He predicts a substantial increase in non-profit human services during the '70s, and in the six to ten million professionals presently active in the field. He maintains that in the development of industry there is a necessary expansion of consumer services, and a related expansion of a &dquo;human rights&dquo; consciousness: people expect a higher standard of living, and then, growing weary of material products, they begin to pursue an im-proved quality of life-as measured by the services and amenities in health, education, recreation, and the arts (I).Gartner and Riessman carry the analysis one step further. They believe that, over time, people start to demand the following kinds of services: satisfying work, a higher quality lifestyle, a cleaner environment, the heightening of political consciousness, the reduction of hierarchy and bureaucracy, and self-development. The authors conclude that as the United States moves more and more into a mixed economy, with a greater role for human service work and consumption of those services, new forms of educational organizations, delivery systems, and teaching procedures will be necessary. One implication of this is that professionals will have to be trained to be more experimental in their helping approache...

The Human Service Educator: A Collaborative Model for Counselors and Teachers

“…A second force driving educators to a consideration of human service education is the changing nature of our society, a society that is becoming more service oriented and that is demanding new helping professionals to meet new human and social needs. According to Ducharme and Nash (1975):…”

Evaluating and Grading Preservice Counseling Students

“…Published expectations of professionals in general (Houle, 1980;Mayhew & Ford, 1974;McGrath, 1962;Menges, 1975;Pellegrino, 1977;Schein, 1972) and of helping professionals in particular (Bernstein & LeCompte, 1976;Burke & Stone, 1975;Durcharme and Nash, 1975;McCully, 1966) suggest the following categories of goals for preservice education:…”