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On Staying Too Close to Home:
Editorial Notes on the Theme “Educating Educators”
Anne M. Phelan
University of British Columbia
For all the
discerning talk, it’s the close at hand, the visible
that exerts the overpowering force. And what you don’t see… That’s why in gentle Marylebone the
world seems so entirely at peace (McEwan,
2005, 127).
St. Mary’s
National School was legendary among ‘teachers-in-training.’ An
all-boys school with massive discipline problems, St. Mary’s
had a reputation for failing students and student teachers.
A practicum at St. Mary’s was the death knell to
even the most conscientious of lesson planners! Friends,
unable to hide their relief at not being placed at the
school, tried to comfort me but to no avail.
Mr. Heaney,
my supervising teacher, seemed as fearful as myself in
front of the sixth standard (Grade 6) boys. His voice quivered
as he taught; the uneasiness of his body evident as he
stood before ‘the lads.’ There was a slight
twitch in his left eye as he surveyed them. They smirked
at him in return, a few attending to the lesson but most
defying his tutorial skills. When a discipline problem
broke out he would disappear momentarily, returning with
Ms. Brown who was physically large enough to restrain most
of the ‘difficult’ boys. Once I witnessed her
isolate Johnny. I can still see him dagger in hand, glaring
at her defiantly. Silently, she waved the teachers, student
teachers and students out the classroom door into the schoolyard.
Suddenly our eyes were directed upwards to a figure on
the tiled rooftop. Johnny had escaped the maternal clutches
of Ms. Brown and was navigating himself towards freedom.
The boys below cheered their support.
The following morning we arrived to find
the school vandalized—posters torn into pieces, students’ work
overturned and stepped on, spray paint on blackboards,
windows broken and doors bereft of hinges. Teachers’ demoralized
eyes brimful with tears. Bewildered student teachers looked
on in amazement. Was this what teaching was like ‘in
the real world’? Did children like Johnny really
seek revenge? Was this how former students really felt
about St. Mary’s? We tidied up the best we could
and continued on with the day as if….
Later that day, my university mentor,
Dr. Ryan, arrived to supervise me and the other handful
of student teachers. I remember catching sight of him out
the classroom window alighting from his car in the parking
lot, tweed cap, elegant Crombie coat, shiny leather shoes—a
striking contrast to our surroundings—a dilapidated
inner-city school full of hunger faces and frozen futures.
He observed me trying to engage the boys in Gaelic (Irish)
poetry, in a language that had become foreign. I failed
horribly. Professor Ryan sympathized and offered some strategies
that I might utilize next time. I trembled at the thought…but
there would be no next time.
Professor Ryan never returned to St. Mary’s
but sent instead a young, tentative Professor Cuddihy who
was intent on helping myself and my peers succeed. Perhaps
the answer to the challenges at St. Mary’s might
be found, he mused, in sound questioning—literal,
interpretive, analytic and evaluative—and we carried
on as if….
I stayed
close to home during that practicum in April 1979. The
palpability of success and the visibility of the impending
grade exerted an overpowering influence on the nineteen-year
old student teacher. The more difficult and urgent questions
about poverty, systemic discrimination, and the politics
of the so-called national (public) school in the Free State
of Ireland remained in the background.
“For
all the discerning talk, it’s the close at hand,
the visible that exerts the overpowering force. And what
you don’t see….”
My
experience of student teaching is endemic of a “process” reality
wherein larger questions of “what” and “why” are
usurped by “how.” The student teacher wonders
“how” she will cope with the monstrous boys of St. Mary’s.
In an instant, and under the influence of modern psychology, pedagogy was posed
as “a science of teaching in general” (Arendt, 1993, 182). I learned
to ask “good” questions, manage unruly bodies, and appear competent
to my supervisors. I did not engage in public dialogue about education and
educational ends; I did not wonder about authority in teaching or the manner
in which schools shape and are shaped by social inequities (Phelan & Sumsion,
In Press). In St. Mary’s there was no allusion to the larger responsibility
of teachers and teacher educators towards the life and development of children
and for the continuance of the world; an enchantment with “small things”—with
the logic of means/how—persisted (Arendt, 1993).
The
reader may well insist that my lament is more appropriate
to the seventies era where courses in social issues in
education were largely absent from teacher education programs.
I would argue, however, that our engagement with such issues
is still relegated to general discussion in the university
classroom with minimum engagement with the particulars
of field experience. Practicum persists in being a place
where student teachers’ are required to perform ‘teacher’ in
recognizable ways, ways that have changed little in the
past thirty years. Management of unruly bodies, coverage
of mandated curriculum and use of effective teaching strategies
continue to be the order of day.
Education, as Pinar (2005b) reminds us,
is so very reluctant to abandon social engineering. If
only we can find the right technique, the right modification
of classroom organization (small groups, collaborative
learning, dialogue), if only we teach according to ‘best
practices,’ if only we have students self-reflect
or if only we develop
“standards” or conduct the right research, then students will learn
what we teach them. If only the student teacher could ask the right questions
of the boys….There continues to be little sense of a public sphere
in teacher education.
For Hannah
Arendt, the term
“public” signifies the world itself, in so far as it is common
to all of us and distinguished from our privately owned place in it….
To live together in the world
means essentially that a world of things is between those
who have it in common, as a table is located between those
who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates
and separates men at the same time….The public realm,
as the common world, gathers us together and yet prevents
our falling over each other, so to speak. (Villa,
1997, 200)
Arendt
believed that the defining moment of the modern age was “the
end of the common world” and as such, she held out
little hope for the prospects of “an authentic, comprehensive,
and relatively permanent public sphere” (Villa, 1997,
200). We are witnessing the encroachment of the private
sphere into the public realm whereby
our understanding of what is (our metaphysics) is reduced
to what the human subject experiences, expresses, or can
represent (Villa, 1997, 184). Positing the human subject
as the relational center of all that is and reducing all
realms of being to the generic category of experience make
possible our anthropomorphic projects of calculation, strategy,
and human mastery of the world.
“For
all the discerning talk, it’s the close at hand,
the visible that exerts the overpowering force. And what
you don’t see….”
What role does education play in every
civilization? What is the obligation that the existence
of children entails for every human society? Stepping back
from my experience at St. Mary’s, three sets of conditions seem to hinder reflection on larger questions in relation
to the particulars of life in schools—teacher education’s
abiding relationship to the project of mass schooling,
discourses of quality, and finally the isolationist politics
of universities.
Closely tied to the project of mass schooling,
teacher education developed as part of the production of
the nation state. This is nationalism as a culture of belonging,
rather than nationalism as a civilization of culture (Ralston
Saul, 2005). Thus the democratic and humanist ideas of
civilization, society, and community, which are all dependent
on our ability to imagine the other—the one who is
not close—are expelled to the margins. Nostalgia
for a nation state wherein nationalism becomes conflated
with belief and a synonym for ethnicity or religion entails
an intentional forgetfulness of the entanglements of place,
history, class struggle, and colonialism.
Historical amnesia coupled with a disillusionment
with the quality of public education undermines a condition
of plurality of educational ideals that underpins the education
of teachers. The standardization and control of teacher
education as a site of cultural production follows. In
North America, Britain, and elsewhere, there have been
increasing attempts to tighten control over and reduce
the autonomy of fields of cultural production such as teacher
education. When public confidence in education is systematically
eroded, we become nostalgic for a time when teachers were
competent and children received quality education. Like
travelers returning to a previously visited place, true
memories seem like phantoms to us, while false memories
or excellence, rigour, and high standards are so convincing
that they replace reality (Phelan, 1997). We quickly conclude
that teachers are key because they are directly responsible
for students’ learning. “Quality teaching means
quality education for all students” (Alberta Education,
1995, 2). This kind of logic leads directly to a push for
standardization of teaching in the form of skills, knowledge,
and attributes.
And so the pilgrimage begins towards the
shrine of teacher competencies and emphasis on accountability
via testing and outcomes-based curricula, fiscal reduction.
The teaching profession is thus constituted within a culture
of sameness in which practitioners are thought to share
the common task of teaching according to a common standard.
The operation of power, the inculcation of the same, by
experienced professionals on the beginner is thus legitimated
within.
A narrow professionalism results and this
has been exacerbated by the isolationist politics of the
universities.
A politics that, at crucial periods
during the 1930’s and 1950’s, and again today,
has sought to isolate the university bases of the intelligentsia
from local and regional connections, from linkages with
the working class and the activism of the trade union movement,
and from organization identified with oppressed and marginalized
groups (Smith, 1998, 15).
Such politics have been institutionalized
within discourses of theory-practice and remain invisible
as a set of ruling relations (e.g., the location of faculties
of education in the institutional hierarchy; the standing
of teacher education in faculties of education) until they
are challenged (Twomey, 2005). As such, teacher education
plays largely a maintenance role functioning as a large
source of institutional income but rarely playing a radicalizing
role in cultural/political life of the institution. Graduates
leave fully prepared to fit into existing patterns and
structures of teaching, schooling, and society (Phelan,
2001).
How do
we take teacher education from its institutionalized, provincial,
and national enclosure, and make it open to new conjectures
and ethical inquiries (Brennan and Zipin, in press)? The
challenge facing the sub-field of teacher education may
not be dissimilar to that facing the education of educators
more broadly in the context of doctoral studies, site-based
professional development, continuing adult education, and
on-the-job socialization. The challenge may be one of proximity.
Referring to curriculum theorists in the academy, Pinar
(2005a) writes
Americans seem unable to attend
to the world around them. We suffer the problem of proximity.
We require distance. Not all of us enjoy the opportunity
of exile, but we can cultivate a state of estrangement.
(30)
‘Leaving
home’
becomes a metaphor for a limit attitude that presses against
the normalizing constraints of institutions, religion,
and media (Pinar, 2005a). With opportunities for dialogue
across differences with others and with the world, we render
our familiar preoccupations strange; we begin to understand
the ways in which our thought can be subsumed in local
patterns of prejudice (Pinar, 2005a).
“For
all the discerning talk, it’s the close at hand,
the visible that exerts the overpowering force. And what
you don’t see….”
If
educating educators is a matter of cultivating estrangement,
then the essays in this volume both embody and enact that
project variously. Some contributions act as counterpoints
to prevailing, educational ideologies. Others display and
interrogate experiences of estrangement. Many upset a conception
of knowledge as settling things, setting out definitions,
securing understanding once and for all (Williams, 2005).
Each invites hospitality to new questions, ideas, and practices
in the attempt to educate and be educated.
In
fact, we might read the essays that follow as tragedies
and their authors as fools. To defamiliarize prevailing
ideologies is in a sense to act the fool. Fools make public
what is private and unspeakable. They see the underside
and falseness of every situation. The fool’s criticism
reflects a naiveté expressed as the inability to
understand stupid conventions, taken-for-granted norms,
thus exposing that which is hypocritical and falsely unifying
in culture. Fools parody the truth (economic hardship)
with which ideology (market driven economy) is masked.
Playing the fool gives us the right to confuse, to tease,
to hyperbolize life, the right to strip off masks, the
right to rage at others, the right to betray to the public
a personal life…secrets (Bauer, 1988).
In
this collection, Lorna Ramsay’s essay constitutes
a testimony, if you will, to the complex activity of teaching,
an activity that can defy logic and invite the intuitive.
Following suit, David Coulter and colleagues critique the
popular convention of standards. Avraham Cohen and Heesoon
Bai search for an educational good without positing yet
another foundationalist philosophy. Shauna Butterwick,
Jane Dawson, and Jane Munro portray the underside of academic
life and how one becomes shaped as a university professor.
Not unlike Butterwick and her colleagues, Anita Skinner
and Alison Pryer make public what is often viewed as private
and unspeakable—the emotional lives of educators
and those undergoing an education.
Valerie
Triggs and Jane Baskill reveal the scripts underlying the
masks of educational renewal and educational leadership,
respectively. Anthony Clarke exposes taken-for-granted
norms in the preparation of school-teachers. Doug Sadao
Aoki and Mark Jackson, exemplifying teacher self-study,
expose their efforts to engage sociology students in critical
thought. Diane Nicholson’s, Leyton Schnellert’s,
Betty Rideout’s, Karen Meyer’s, and Brent Cameron’s
experience of living and learning in a community of inquiry
confronts authoritative discourses about knowledge and
knowing.
Juyum
Kim, Lorna Williams, and Michelle Tanaka remind the reader
that education is forever a translational event in which,
both fortunately and unfortunately, many can get lost.
Pamela Chu demonstrates what happens to students when educators
abandon the young. Elaine Decker, the centre of ironic
power in this collection, advocates the use of humour to
find the courage to risk a more productive form of abandonment—that
of taken-for-granted beliefs.
It is the power to laugh at oneself,
one’s fears, one’s beliefs that liberates and
keeps the flux in play, keeps us in movement with the flux,
and keeps the openness to the mystery from becoming nostalgic, malingering and moping. (Caputo, 1996: 202-3)
In Education,
as in St. Mary’s National School, there is much to
mope about. But difficulties, even crises, only become
disasters when we respond to them with preformed judgements,
that is, with prejudices (Arendt, 1993). In doing so, we
forfeit the opportunity for reflection that every crisis
provides. Following Arendt, the authors in this collection,
are at home in the world in ways that inscribe a certain
modality of alienation at the heart of existence; each
attempts to value this alienation positively (Villa, 1997).
These writers help us see ‘the close at hand’ at
a distance.
References
Alberta Education (1995). Quality Teaching:
Quality Education for Alberta Students. A Discussion
Paper for consultations on Embracing the Quality of Teaching.
Edmonton, AB: Alberta Education.
Arendt, H. (1993). The crisis in education.
In H. Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises
in Political Thought (173-196). New York: Penquin.
Arendt, H. (2006). What is freedom? In H.
Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political
Thought (142-169). New York: Penquin.
Bauer, D. (1988). Feminist
Dialogics: A Theory of Failed Community.
New York, NY: State University of New York Press.
Brennan, M. & Zipin, L. (In press).
Neo-colonization of Cultural Struggles for Justice in Australian
Education and Teacher Education. In Phelan, A. & Sumsion,
J. (In Press). Critical Readings in Teacher Education:
Provoking Absences.
Caputo, J. D. (1987). Radical Hermeneutics:
Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project. Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press.
McEwan, I. (2005). Saturday. Toronto, ON: Alfred A. Knopf Canada.
Phelan, A. (1996). Strange pilgrims:
Nostalgia and disillusionment in teacher education reform. Interchange, 27(3-4), 331-348.
Phelan, A. (2001). Power and place
in teaching and teacher education. Journal of Teaching
and Teacher Education: An International Journal of Research
and Studies, 17(5), 583-597
Phelan,
A & Sumsion, J. (In Press).
Introduction: Lines of articulation and lines of flight
in teacher education. In Phelan, A &
Sumsion, J. (Eds.) Critical Readings in Teacher Education:
Provoking Absences. The Netherlands: SENSE Publishers.
Pinar, W. (2005a). Exile and Estrangement
in the Internationalization of Curriculum Studies. Paper
presented at the Department of Curriculum Studies Seminar
Series. Vancouver, B.C.: Faculty of Education, University
of British Columbia.
Pinar, W. (2005b). Curriculum and study,
NOT curriculum and teaching. Unpublished manuscript.
Villa, D. (1997). Hannah Arendt: Modernity,
alienation and critique. In C. Calhoun & J. McGowen
(Eds.), Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics (179-206).
Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press.
Williams, J. (2005). Understanding
Poststructuralism. Chesham, Bucks, UK: Acumen.
Ralston Saul, R. (2005). The Collapse
of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World. Toronto,
ON: Viking Canada.
Smith, D. (1998). Writing the Social:
Critique, Theory and Investigations.
Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press.
Twomey, S. (2005). Disappearing acts:
resuscitative reflections on the academy. Gender and
Education, Vol. 17, No. 3, August, 333-341.
About the Issue Editor
Anne M. Phelan is
an associate professor in the Department of Curriculum
Studies, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada;
e-mail: anne.phelan@ubc.ca.
She conducts research in teacher education and curriculum
studies. She has published in journals such as Teaching
and Teacher Education, Curriculum Inquiry, and Studies
in Philosophy and Education.
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