Maybe Someday the Twain Shall Meet: Exploring Disconnections between Methods Instruction and "Life in the Classroom"
any teacher educators are likely accustomed to and unsettled by the implications of Evan’s comments. Teacher education and practice do not have to be at odds with each other, but they are. Teachers should not have to choose between fulfilling their curricular and classroom management responsibilities and purposeful, innovative teaching, but they do. Not only does Evan protest a perceived disconnect between teacher education and the realities of schooling, but also he seems to convey an expectation that, as a future classroom teacher, he eventually will yield to the routines of life in the classroom, despite his wishes for more provocative teaching. His comments capture one of the major quandaries of teacher education: How do we combat that seemingly inevitable resignation and promote teachers’ academic freedom from the time of their entry into the field and throughout their careers? How can teacher educators be persuasive in the face of stifling school climates, working as “agents of professional countersocialization,” in the words of Ball and Cohen (1999, 6), while concurrently attending to prospective teachers’ knowledge of instruction, learning, the institution of schooling, and their academic domains? Evan’s remarks came less than a month before the end of a secondary social studies methods course in which he and five other students were enrolled. At the time, Evan and his classmates, all participants in a full-time, one-year master’s degree and teacher certification program, spent one day each week in a middle school or high school, observing classroom practice, acclimating to the school environment, speaking with mentor teachers, and in some cases, assisting with lesson planning and implementation. With two class sessions remaining and almost three months of observational field experience behind him, Evan’s assertion seemed to me, his methods instructor, to be a diplomatic indictment of the course’s shortcomings in preparing him and his colleagues for the sometimes jarring realities of schooling. In other words, despite twelve weeks of intensive coursework in social studies education, he remained ill-equipped to bear the obligations of the classroom, from keeping up with the curriculum to managing his students. Without those twelve weeks of methods classes, might Evan have thought about the way things ought to be in social studies teaching? Perhaps his lament was less a condemnation of the methods course’s impracticality and more a realization that his images of teaching, learning, and the social studies had changed because of the course. Maybe, when compared to his methods course, Evan found the field experience dispiriting because it illustrated the strength of the barriers to his developing vision for teaching. For instance, we had spent several weeks attending to the complex, interpretive nature of the history domain, reading the works of Holt (1990) and Wineburg (2001), and establishing criteria by which to evaluate secondary students’ capacities to assess and draw reasoned conclusions about historical texts. In the classes, we had assessed numerous standards, curricula, and assessment documents, and we argued extensively about their uses, their consequences, and the ways in which teachMaybe Someday the Twain Shall Meet