Democratizing Teacher Education

Abstract

In this article, the authors argue that teacher education needs to make a fundamental shift in whose knowledge and expertise counts in the education of new teachers. Using tools afforded by cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) and deliberative democracy theory, they argue that by recasting who is considered an expert, and rethinking how teacher candidates and university faculty cross institutional boundaries to collaborate with communities and schools, teacher education programs can better interrogate their challenges and invent new solutions to prepare the teachers our students need. Drawing on examples from joint-work among universities, schools, and communities in a variety of teacher education programs, they highlight the possibilities and complexities in pursuing more democratic work in teacher education.

Keywords

education reform preservice teacher education social justice partnerships

Teacher Education in Turmoil

By almost any standard, many, if not most, of the nation’s 1,450 schools, colleges, and departments of education are doing a mediocre job of preparing teachers

—Duncan (2009)

America has a broken teacher preparation system

—Knowles (2013, p. 6)

This is a critical time for teacher education in the United States. The college and university system of teacher preparation that has prepared most U.S. teachers for over the last 50 years (Fraser, 2007) has been declared to be a failure by many policymakers, and the mainstream media. The federal government and most of the philanthropic community are pouring resources into supporting greater market competition and the entry of new non-university providers into the field (Zeichner & Pena-Sandoval, 2015). Colleges and universities now face jurisdictional challenges to their authority to offer teacher education programs (Grossman, 2008); we are on a course to dismantle the college and university system of teacher education and replace it with a host of entrepreneurial programs that we believe will worsen rather than ameliorate the opportunity and learning gaps that continue to plague our public schools.

There are three major positions on the current system of college and university teacher education. First, there is the position taken by some college and university teacher educators that the criticisms of teacher education from the outside are wrong and that what we need is greater investment by government and philanthropy in strengthening the current system. We call this position that of the defenders. The defenders do not see the need for significant changes in the ways in which things are done now and want more resources to do these things better.

Second, there are outsiders to the current system, and even some within, who have argued that education schools have failed and that the current system needs to be “blown up” or disrupted and replaced by an alternative based on deregulation, competition, and markets (Chubb, 2012; Schorr, 2013). These critics often refer to themselves as the reformers.

Finally, there are those inside and outside the system who see the need for substantive transformation in the current system of teacher education, but who do not support disrupting the current system by replacing it with a deregulated market economy. This position is that of the transformers.

A system of categorization such as this inevitably oversimplifies a much more complex situation. There is in reality much variation within these three “camps” (e.g., in terms of the intensity and substance of positions), as well as multiple points of overlap between positions (e.g., some transformers and reformers who support maintaining aspects of the current system). That said, the distinctions between groups offer a meaningful lens for considering different views on how to move forward in teacher education.

Currently, there are a variety of efforts underway to significantly transform aspects of college and university teacher education, including shifting teacher education more to schools and community-based settings and strengthening the clinical components of programs, as well as focusing preparation more on helping teacher candidates acquire the ability to enact specific teaching practices that are related to successful student learning (Grossman, 2011; Zeichner & Bier, 2013).

In this article, we discuss one aspect of the current efforts to transform college and university teacher education by addressing the issue of whose knowledge counts in the education of teachers. In this article, we call for a rethinking of the epistemology of teacher preparation in the United States and for the development of new forms of shared responsibility for preparing teachers among colleges and universities, schools, and local communities.

The Epistemology of Teacher Education

One of the central issues underlying current debates about teacher education and teacher quality is concerned with the knowledge and skills that teachers need to be successful in teaching all students to high academic standards. There has been extensive writing over the years about what beginning teachers need to know and be able to do (e.g., Darling-Hammond & Bransford, 2005), including the particular teaching practices that novices need to learn how to enact (Ball & Forzani, 2009), and this work has focused on analyzing what teachers need to know and be able to do to be well-started beginners. Similarly, over the years, a substantial literature has emerged in the United States and elsewhere on the question of who should be prepared as teachers to teach in democratic societies (e.g., Villegas & Irvine, 2010; Villegas & Lucas, 2004) and how this preparation should occur (e.g., Cochran-Smith, Davis, & Fries, 2004; Hollins & Guzman, 2005). Very little attention has been given, however, to the issue of whose knowledge should count in teacher education.

Currently, there are basically two general approaches to the preservice education of teachers in the United States despite all of the specific program variations: “early-entry” and “college recommending” (Grossman & Loeb, 2008). Even with the advent of “early-entry” programs in the 1980s, where much of preservice preparation is completed by individuals while they serve as teachers of record, college- and university-based teacher education programs that include significant coursework and fieldwork prior to a candidate becoming a teacher of record continue to be the major source of teachers for our public schools (National Research Council, 2010).

College-Recommending Programs

The traditional model of college-recommending teacher education emphasizes the translation of academic knowledge into practice.¹ Candidates are supposed to learn what and how to teach in their courses and then go out and apply what is learned in schools during their field experiences. Historically, very little success has been achieved in coordinating what is done in the course and field components of teacher education programs (Anderson & Stillman, 2011; Zeichner, 2010a). Even in the current era of school-university partnerships, partner and professional development schools, colleges, and universities continue to maintain hegemony over the construction and dissemination of knowledge for teaching in teacher education (Duffy, 1994; Zeichner, 2009) and schools remain in the position of “practice fields” where candidates are to try out the practices provided to them by the university (Barab & Duffy, 2000).

Although the reality of how and from whom teacher candidates learn to teach is much more complex than portrayed here (e.g., Valencia, Martin, Place, & Grossman, 2009), the way in which college- and university-based teacher education is usually structured is fundamentally undemocratic and largely fails to strategically access knowledge and expertise, which exists in schools and communities that could inform the preparation of teachers. Most prospective teachers spend a substantial amount of time in schools during their preparation; however, there is typically very little planning that is done (e.g., a practicum curriculum) as to how they can access practitioner and community-based knowledge to inform their preparation as teachers (Turney, Eltis, Towler, & Wright, 1985). We are neither suggesting that power differentials can be completely equalized nor that the goal should be to try to reach consensus on all issues. We are suggesting, though, that power hierarchies be lessened in teacher preparation programs, that more participants and more perspectives be brought into the decision-making process, and that different views be seriously considered despite important differences that will continue to exist about what constitutes good teaching and how teachers should learn (Apple, 2008).

Early-Entry Programs

The rapidly expanding “early-entry” programs place teacher candidates in schools with very little preservice preparation and emphasize, even sometimes uncritically glorify, practice and practitioner knowledge, while minimizing the importance of professional education coursework that is not seen as directly connected to daily teaching practice. They have often falsely framed the issue as one of choosing between theory and practice in a teacher education program and sometimes proudly proclaim that they have minimized or eliminated theory from teacher preparation. They also often uncritically glorify practice:

Gone are the courses on education theory and history with no practical bearing . . . Professors are not lofty academics, they are accomplished practitioners in the field . . . RELAY provost Brent Maddin said “the key is not to weed out theory, but rather than to distill it down to essential points for the busy teacher. (Caperton & Whitmire, 2012, pp. 77, 83)

This kind of thinking represented in such programs as RELAY Graduate School of Education and The New Teacher Project (TNTP; 2014; Schorr, 2013; Stitzlein & West, 2014; Zeichner & Pena-Sandoval, 2015) leads to such things as the definition of social foundations content as “non essential” (Walsh & Jacobs, 2007), and to the preparation of teachers who can implement teaching scripts, but who have not developed the professional vision, cultural competence, and adaptive expertise they need to meet the changing learning needs of their students or to continue to learn in and from their practice (Hammerness et al., 2005; Sherin, 2001; Zeichner, 2014b). Importantly, neither college-recommending nor early-entry programs often give much attention to the role of community-based knowledge in teacher preparation (e.g., Murrell, 2001).

Toward a More Democratic Epistemology for Teacher Education

Neither of these two stances toward the substance of teacher education (an emphasis on academic or practitioner knowledge alone) is sufficient for preparing teachers to be successful in the public schools today in the United States. Despite the social justice rhetoric and multicultural content that is common in college and university teacher education programs across the nation, the hidden curriculum of existing models of teacher education (Ginsburg & Clift, 1990) often sends a very clear message about the lack of respect for the knowledge of P-12 practitioners and non-professional educators in communities.

In our view, the preparation of teachers for a democratic society should be based on an epistemology that in itself is democratic and includes a respect for and interaction among practitioner, academic, and community-based knowledge. This vision reflects the concept of “leveling” that can occur in “third spaces” or contexts in which individuals surrender outward status and come together to engage more as equals (Oldenburg, 1999). Whether this can take place in newly created spaces within universities such as “Centers of Pedagogy” (Patterson, Michelli, & Pacheco, 1999) or whether new institutional spaces need to be created for teacher education with different knowledge histories (Gorodetsky & Barak, 2008; see also Friedrich, 2014) remains to be seen. What is involved in what we are proposing is the creation of new hybrid spaces where academic, practitioner, and community-based knowledge come together in new ways to support the development of innovative and hybrid solutions to the problem of preparing teachers. Although the current wave of interest in teacher residencies (Duncan, 2009) offers the potential for developing genuinely hybrid contexts for teacher education, thus far they have not realized this potential and have experienced some of the same problems (e.g., connecting coursework with clinical work) that have plagued traditional college and university recommending programs and early-entry programs (Gatti & Catalano, 2015; Zeichner, 2014a).

Conceptualizing Hybrid Spaces in Teacher Education

We advocate for the creation of new hybrid spaces in university teacher education where academic, school-based, and community-based knowledge come together in less hierarchical and haphazard ways to support teacher learning. To further theorize collaborations and “spaces” between university-, school-, and community-based sources of knowledge, we use some of the conceptual tools afforded by cultural historical activity theory (CHAT). We believe that these tools not only help us interrogate the democratic nature of current efforts of collaboration but also provide a framework for teacher education programs as they rethink their relationships with, and the roles that schools and communities ought to have in educating novice teachers. CHAT provides a way to think about bringing together sources of expertise that are valuable for learning to teach—particularly expertise that abounds in schools, colleges and universities, and communities. Two of the key ideas in cultural-historical theories are that expertise is distributed across systems and that individuals develop into the ways of thinking and acting that are afforded by the cultural practices and tools made available to them in the settings of their development (Ellis, Edwards, & Smagorinsky, 2010). From a CHAT perspective, teacher candidate learning takes place in “a changing mosaic of interconnected activity systems” (Engeström, 2001, p.147).

Engeström (2001), who expanded Leont’ev’s work on activity systems and Vygotsky’s (1978) zone of proximal development (ZPD),² emphasizes that human activity is simultaneously constrained by macro-structures and sociopolitical contexts as well as transformed by individuals’ actions, proclivities, and tendencies within their everyday activities. Specifically, activity theory acknowledges the community, distribution of work, and rules that affect both individual and collective activities. Thus, Engeström elaborated the ZPD from an individualistic account of learning and development toward a more expansive view of learning through participation with others within activity systems that are simultaneously enabling and constraining. In the case of educating teacher candidates, the novice teacher is participating in activity systems at the university, in their school field placement, and possibly within the community in which the school is situated. Each of these systems has varying constraints and affordances to support novice teacher learning; however, too often these systems are not in dialogue and leave the novice teacher as the sole mediator of multiple knowledge sources.

Engeström (1987, 2001) emphasizes the expansive aspects of learning that occur through engaging in the activity, particularly through the contradictions and tensions that are the “engines” of change and transformation in practices, tools, and activities. By centering the activity of teacher learning in the contradictory, conflictual spaces among the university, school, and community’s knowledge and practice, the possibility for collaborative efforts around these contradictions can lead to re-mediation of novice teachers’ learning. Furthermore, through these tensions in learning how to work with diverse learners, and toward the goal of accessing both school and community knowledge, activity theory allows us to look at novice teachers’ learning in and across multiple spaces to recognize how those spaces expand and constrain learning opportunities.

Our view of democratizing teacher education through the fostering of such spaces rests on tenets of deliberative democracy (e.g., Gutmann & Thompson, 2004). Deliberative democracy assumes the value of mutual respect among participants. Gutmann and Thompson (2004) summarize their view of deliberative democracy as

. . . A form of government in which free and equal citizens (and their representatives), justify decisions in a process in which they give one another reasons that are mutually acceptable and generally accessible, with the aim of reaching conclusions that are binding in the present on all citizens but open to challenge in the future. (p. 7)

Like governments, teacher education has a number of people with varying stakes in the structures, implementation, and outcomes (i.e., the novice teachers) of its programs. Similar to CHAT, deliberative democracy accounts for these varying systems that are bound by different rules, accountable to different communities, and operating under different distributions and means of work. Our approach to democratizing teacher education rests on a belief that deliberative democracy, with its basic principle of reciprocity, allows for the conflictual spaces necessary to promote change when working and learning across the university, school, and community. Together, CHAT and deliberative democratic theory allow us to examine current collaborative efforts among universities, schools, and communities, and have the potential to point us toward greater democratic possibilities in teacher education.

Assuming that the knowledge and expertise needed by teacher candidates is located in schools, colleges, and universities, and in and among communities, and that the key problem of teacher education is to figure out how to provide teacher candidates with access to and mediation of this needed expertise from these different systems, the concepts of “horizontal expertise,” “boundary-crossing/boundary-zones,” and “knotworking” have proved particularly useful in theorizing these hybrid relationships. For the sake of clarity, we present each conceptual tool separately here; however, we argue that these conceptual tools are bound together as an overarching approach toward democratizing teacher education.

Horizontal Expertise

In their examination of health care organizations, Kerosuo and Engeström (2003) developed useful concepts that can be applied to efforts that involve overlapping activity systems in teacher education. The impetus for the collaborative efforts among these health care providers was the tensions and contradictions that emerged for patients who navigated multiple types of health care providers (e.g., clinics, hospitals). Disruption in the communications within and across providers resulted in significant ruptures in the continuity of patient care. Moreover, multiple and different rules, tools, reporting systems, and patterns of interaction that guide these organizations made the establishment of common goals difficult to pursue concurrently.

To work collaboratively to articulate new goals, practices, and tools, participants had to cross the boundaries of their own organizations and work with others to create new solutions to their common problems. Through this process, horizontal expertise emerged as “professionals from different domains enriched and expanded their practices through working together to reorganize relations and coordinate their work” (Anagnostopoulos, Smith, & Basmadjian, 2007, p. 139). Horizontal expertise, in contrast to vertical notions of learning and expertise (i.e., “lower” and “higher” forms), recognizes the unique knowledge and understanding that each professional brought to the collective activity and treats the knowledge as equally valuable, relevant, and important. Each professional develops a range of expertise across work and organizational spaces but working collaboratively, these forms of expertise serve as resources in joint problem-solving activity and help individuals and groups find innovative solutions to the compelling dilemmas that characterize their everyday work life. In this way, horizontal expertise relies on the same give-and-take as of deliberative democracy. Creating these innovative tools, practices, and solutions not only addresses the joint-activity and dilemma but also expands individuals’ learning as they appropriate new tools and work languages that they could not have created on their own with access only to their particular languages, rules, and systems.

Although originally developed in studies of workplace learning in Finland, these conceptual tools are useful for thinking about the more democratic political economy of knowledge that we believe is necessary to educate teachers to be successful in the complex and underfunded public schools where many of them will teach (e.g., Edwards, 2010; Edwards, Daniels, Gallagher, Leadbetter, & Warmington, 2009; Ellis et al., 2010; Engeström, 2001, 2008). The task of bringing together expertise from the different activity systems of university, school, and community for the benefit of teacher candidate learning can be considered analogous to the problem of coordinating the work of health care professionals who work in different systems, but who all serve the same patients. (Engeström, 2008; see also, Edwards, 2010; Edwards et al., 2009).

Knotworking

Engeström (2008) defines knotworking as follows:

The notion of a knot refers to a rapidly pulsating, distributed, and partially improvised orchestration of collaborative performance between otherwise loosely connected actors and activity systems. Knotworking is characterized by a movement of tying, untying, and retying together seemingly separate threads of activity.” (p. 194)

The concept of “knotworking” offers a way to understand the learning of teacher candidates that occurs when there is collaboration across activity systems (university, school, and community). The different interests, values, and practices that exist in these different systems are mediated in the knots (Engeström, 2008; Engeström, Engeström, & Vahaaho, 1999). Knotworking emphasizes that there is no single locus of control, rather the locus changes time and again.

Boundary Zones

Max’s (2010) use of “boundary zone” as “as space where elements from two activity systems enter into contact” (p. 216) lessens the possibility of participants merely visiting a space; instead, the boundary zone creates the kind of fluctuating and flexible space in which continuing joint work can occur. We envision collaborative work among universities, schools, and communities toward novice teacher learning that has the flexibility to shift with time as each organization draws upon their knowledge of teaching and learning. Insights from international research on the pooling of expertise in these knots, or boundary settings between organizations (e.g., Edwards, 2010; Engeström, 2007), can benefit efforts in teacher education to build new hybrid or “inter-spaces” (Hartley, 2007) between schools, universities, and communities in ways that support teacher learning.

Third Space

Norton-Meier and Drake (2010) argue that a hybrid or “third space” in teacher education is more than moving university courses to schools or bringing P-12 teachers to the university campus. Merely bringing people together in the same physical space to plan, deliver, and renew teacher education programs will not necessarily alter the ways in which knowledge is utilized in the preparation of teachers and create the kind of leveling and greater social equality that is needed (Noel & Nelson, 2010; Popkewitz, 1975). There is substantial evidence that traditional knowledge hierarchies are maintained among universities, schools, and communities even in situations that have been characterized as genuinely collaborative (e.g., Zeichner, 1995).

As we indicated earlier, we are not suggesting that it is possible to create a situation of democratic deliberation free of power differentials, the kind of “ideal speech situation” that has been suggested by Habermas (1984) and Rawls (1971). There are real dangers involved in merely rhetorically romanticizing a model of teacher education based on deliberative democracy (Apple, 2008; see also, Sanders, 1997). There is no question that the negotiations that will need to take place in the hybrid spaces that we are suggesting (e.g., over different visions of what makes high-quality teachers and how to prepare them) will be difficult to navigate (e.g., Bartholomew & Sandholtz, 2009; Zeichner, 1991). There is some evidence in recent studies of collaborative efforts in inter-organizational spaces that achieving this inclusivity and reaching a situation where participants achieve “reasonable agreements” about certain elements of the situation at hand is generative of productive boundary work that results in new and creative solutions (e.g., Edwards, 2010). Furthermore, as Klein, Taylor, Onore, Strom, and Abrams (2013) have pointed out, a third space is a continual construction, a utopian prospect that is never fully achievable.

In the following sections, we examine how teacher education, and in particular preservice teacher education, can attempt to use some of the conceptual tools of CHAT and deliberative democracy to create more expansive learning opportunities for preservice teachers by creating spaces for the kind of horizontal expertise, knotworking, and boundary zones and boundary-crossing that will lead to more democratic teacher education. The examples below are intended to illustrate work in teacher education programs that is moving in the direction that we are advocating, and in some cases, they represent works in-progress.

Engaging Schools and Teachers in Teacher Education

There have been a number of inter-institutional teacher education efforts that have drawn upon horizontal expertise between teacher education programs and schools; this work exemplifies a range in recognition of horizontal expertise and creation of boundary zones for joint work. In the following section, we present a few examples that illustrate this range.

An example in which university- and school-based knowledge came together is the Cognitively Guided Instruction in Mathematics Project that was initiated in Madison Wisconsin. Academic researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison collaborated with local teachers to figure out how to develop strategies for teaching elementary mathematics (Carpenter, Fennema, Franke, Levi, & Empson, 2000). The utilization of expertise of both academics and teachers about how children learn about addition and subtraction produced new and creative solutions to problems that could not be solved by either alone.³

School-based methods instruction (e.g., Jeffery & Polleck, 2013; Klein et al., 2013; McDonald & Zeichner, 2011; Morgan-Fleming, Simpson, Curtis, & Hull, 2010; Shirley et al., 2006) represents another space with potential for the exchange of university- and school-based expertise. At the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle,⁴ some elementary methods courses are taught in local public schools where instructors strategically attempt to connect academic and school-based expertise. For example, in addition to the usual practice of professors providing teacher candidates with the theoretical basis for particular teaching strategies and showing them video examples of teachers using these practices, teacher candidates also have opportunities in these courses to observe a classroom teacher using a teaching strategy with students, to plan and rehearse lessons using these strategies that they then go and teach with students, and to debrief their teaching with their peers, and with the professor and teachers in the school (Lampert et al., 2013).

As we have suggested before, simply moving a methods course to a school and involving K-12 teachers in the instruction of teacher candidates does not necessarily mean that the teachers’ expertise is valued and utilized in the ways that we advocate; attention to the democratic qualities of collaboration is necessary. In particular, we emphasize deliberative democracy’s emphasis on finding solutions that are mutually acceptable and generally accessible. In the examples that best denote horizontal expertise, classroom teachers are active participants in the planning, instruction, and evaluation activities related to a course, thereby creating more authentic, acceptable, and accessible possibilities for inclusion of teachers’ expertise.

Other examples of democratizing preservice teacher education involve sustained efforts to involve expert teachers in all aspects of university-based teacher education, including program planning, instruction, and ongoing evaluation and renewal. Two examples are the Teachers in Residence Program at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and the Faculty Associate positions at Simon Fraser University in Canada (Beynon, Grout, & Wideen, 2004; Post, Pugach, Harris, & Hughes, 2006). In both of these cases, K-12 teachers’ voices and expertise were an important part of all aspects of program planning, instruction, and evaluation. Horizontal expertise was essential to the program’s structures and processes.

In the previous examples, most of the partnering schoolteachers were handpicked by teacher education programs because of their notable strengths and expertise and/or because their philosophies and practices reflected those advocated by teacher education faculty. Alternatively, Anagnostopoulos and colleagues (2007) at the Michigan State University (MSU) have shared an important case in which there was substantial contradiction between schoolteachers and university faculty’s ideas about quality teaching, thus making horizontal expertise a more complicated effort.

As the authors explain, during the student teaching term of the secondary-English teaching program at Michigan State, many teacher mentors felt that the university assignments disrupted their curricula and endorsed practices counter to their own, while the university professors felt that the mentors were promoting ineffective practices and limiting student teachers’ “learning-to-teach opportunities” (Anagnostopoulos et al., 2007, p. 140). In response to this contradiction and tension, university faculty and teacher mentors began a series of meetings to discuss English language arts pedagogy and research, with a particular focus on facilitating class discussion. Throughout the deliberative process, argumentation among participants allowed for competing views about purposes and practices related to classroom discussion practice to emerge and interact (Anagnostopoulos et al., 2007). By creating a space for multiple stakeholders to cross institutional boundaries and to engage in knotworking, the two groups eventually created a hybrid solution for their common problem of helping novice teachers effectively lead discussion in secondary-English classrooms. Bringing together diverse forms of expertise, they created a rubric, which was identified as a “boundary-crossing object” (Anagnostopoulos et al., 2007; Max, 2010) and served as a tool for all stakeholders to better communicate via shared language and to navigate multiple activity systems. The knotworking in this example required notable commitment from both groups and represents what is needed to support the type of innovation in teacher education programs that can lead to expansive learning for candidates as well as those preparing candidates. The authors explain,

Achieving common goals requires professionals to cross organizational boundaries and combine the resources, norms and values from their respective settings into new hybrid solutions. Horizontal expertise emerges from these boundary crossings as professionals from different domains enrich and expand their practices through working together to reorganize relations and coordinate their work. (Anagnostopoulos et al., 2007, p. 139)

Interestingly, the researchers found that the horizontal expertise that served as a resource in the co-creation of the rubric could not be easily appropriated by others who were not involved in the initial problem-solving practice (Anagnostopoulos et al., 2007); this indicates the importance of fostering spaces for continual knotworking opportunities among stakeholders if increasingly democratic models are to be sustained.

Anagnostopoulos and colleagues demonstrated how utilizing horizontal expertise as a conceptual tool can help university teacher educators actively analyze partnerships and joint work with school-based partners and ultimately work to overcome the notorious “two-worlds pitfall” (Feiman-Nemser & Buchmann, 1985) that has characterized the loose and sometimes conflicting relationship between traditional university-based teacher education and schools. The MSU example is particularly educative for teacher education faculty who have struggled to create meaningful school partnerships because of what they see as troubling curriculum and instruction policies and trends in schools (i.e., the narrowing of curricular opportunities as a way to raise test scores). Realistically, just as there is a wide range in quality in teacher education courses, not all K-12 classrooms and schools are the richest of contexts for candidates to learn about engaging instruction. This case and the recommended conceptual tools encourage teacher educators to not quickly “opt out” of collaboration solely because of differing visions or approaches. If we in teacher education regularly and readily use these tools to identify phenomena and processes such as contradiction, pooling expertise, boundary-crossing, and knotworking, while concurrently approaching situations from a deliberative democratic stance based in mutual respect, we will arguably be more likely to recognize these phenomena when they present, consider them in program evaluation and systemic planning, and ultimately, we are more likely to come to think of them as part of our work—that is, part of the practice of teacher education.

Engaging Community-Based Educators and Contexts in Teacher Preparation

While the role of schools is essential in the enterprise of preparing effective teachers, the role of communities and the knowledge that exists among various groups and in various neighborhoods is also critical in teacher education (see, Philip, Way, Garcia, Schuler-Brown, & Navarro, 2013, for an astute caution against the essentialization of “communities”). Engaging voices and eliciting involvement from historically non-dominant communities in teacher education efforts has not been a mainstream practice in college-recommending nor early-entry programs; this includes programs that specifically aim to prepare educators to work with students and families from these very communities. This trend persists despite the fact that our education system has had limited success in effectively and justly educating youth from non-dominant racial, linguistic, and economic groups (e.g., National Assessment of Educational Progress [NAEP], 2013). Its implications are particularly troublesome given rapid growth in numbers of students from these groups in the U.S. public school population.

When teacher candidates have opportunities to participate in boundary zones outside of schools, they can encounter and engage with different perspectives and forms of knowledge than those they typically accessed in school- and university-based spaces (e.g., Gonzales, Moll, & Amanti, 2005). These opportunities potentially increase the likelihood that each teacher candidate can eventually become a “community teacher” (Murrell, 2001), which Murrell defines as “one who possesses contextualized knowledge of the culture, community, and identity of the children and families he or she serves and draws on this knowledge to create the core teaching practices necessary for effectiveness in diverse settings” (p. 52). Key to Murrell’s definition and the argument we make here is that the knowledge is contextualized, and thus cannot be learned in a university classroom away from the communities with which and in which teachers will work. Furthermore, community-based collaborations should aim to grow teacher candidates’ efficacy in leveraging such contextual knowledge and understandings in their teaching practice.

Multicultural Apprenticeships at the Ohio State University

Cross-cultural community-based field experiences represent one way in which teacher candidates can interact with social and geographical communities that were previously unfamiliar to them (Onore & Gildin, 2010; Sleeter, 2001; Sleeter & Boyle-Baise, 2000; Zeichner & Melnick, 1996). These experiences span a broad range, and often differ in their purpose and how they are situated in teacher preparation programs. They can be short-term visiting experiences in a single out-of-school setting, or they can be longer and more intensive immersion experiences. Some opportunities are elective and others are required.

One of the best-known examples of this type of community-based field experience is the Ohio State University’s (OSU) partnership with Mt. Olivet, an African American church community located in Columbus (Seidl & Friend, 2002a, 2002b). Conceptualized as a multicultural apprenticeship, university- and community-based partners adamantly framed the placement as an equal-status, cross-cultural experience. The adults at Mt. Olivet were positioned as experts holding knowledge that was critical for learning to teach. Seidl and Friend, an OSU professor and Mt. Olivet community leader, jointly mediated candidates’ fieldwork (e.g., they co-designed and co-evaluated candidates’ narrative self-study assignments). They found in their collaborative research that the experience afforded valuable opportunities for candidates to practice relationship building with youth as well as adult community members and to question hegemonic beliefs (Seidl & Friend, 2002a). This partnership illustrates how cultivating horizontal expertise and mediated opportunities for knotworking across multiple spaces can create more robust learning opportunities for novice teachers. This example also makes clear the level of commitment and intentionality that is required. Without a doubt, sustaining this hybrid space in a way that systemically reaches beyond the individuals who initially established the relationship (Seidl and Friend) is difficult and complex work, but is essential for such spaces to survive.

Institutional Learning: Iterations of Engaging Community Expertise at UW

In recent years, UW’s Elementary Teacher Education Program (ELTEP) has made a concerted effort to design opportunities for candidates to learn in and from communities as a way to better prepare them to work with youth and families in diverse, urban schools. This had led to changes in the elementary (ELTEP) and secondary (STEP) program activity systems, including developments in several of the CHAT system components such as the “community” (who is part of the system), the “rules” (i.e., norms in teacher education), the “division of labor” (who does what), and “tools” that are used to mediate candidate learning. We describe these developments here in the ELTEP, including the contradictions that prompted them, to provide an example of one program’s continuing effort to be more horizontal, and thus, more democratic.

Field placements in community-based organizations

McDonald and colleagues’ work at UW examined the implementation and integration of community-based field experiences across the ELTEP. For one quarter early in a graduate certification program, preservice teachers were placed in community-based organizations (CBOs). These organizations ranged from neighborhood community centers to culturally focused programs (e.g., one program specifically served Vietnamese Americans, another served Latino families). The community-based field experience was connected to and mediated by concurrent ELTEP coursework and projects throughout the quarter.

Analyses of a three-year longitudinal data set showed that the expansion of ELTEP’s activity system to include CBOs led to expanded learning opportunities for teacher candidates. The placements facilitated opportunities to learn key principles and practices related to seeing children—which McDonald and colleagues view as core to one’s capacity to teach students (McDonald, Bowman, & Brayko, 2013; McDonald et al., 2011). Specifically, they found that CBO placements afforded candidates opportunities to develop deeper understandings of students and communities; develop more nuanced understandings of diversity, including intra-group diversity; examine schools from an out-of-school perspective; attend to the role of context in learning; and learn and enact important relational aspects of teaching (McDonald et al., 2013). Brayko (2013) found that the CBO placements also facilitated opportunities for candidates to learn about literacy practices and literacy pedagogy, and to enact critical teaching practices that fostered engagement, oral language development, and reading comprehension for language-minority youth.

A close look at factors that contributed to the quality and salience of the learning opportunities revealed that CBO educators’ expertise was a crucial component. They were particularly skilled at building and sustaining relationships with children and families, and crossing boundaries to mediate and advocate for students within and across multiple contexts (i.e., home, schools, CBOs; McDonald et al., 2013). Notably, this skill set was distinct from those of other teacher educators to which candidates had access in ELTEP. CBO educators’ deep and contextualized knowledge of children and families, and nuanced ecological perspectives of the children in their care reflect key aspects of Murrell’s vision of community teachers. The recognition of how influential CBO educators’ role was for preservice teacher learning prompted ELTEP’s increased interest in understanding and engaging the expertise that thrives in community-based contexts, particularly among adults in those contexts.

As can be expected with work that involves the expansion of activity systems, there were several dilemmas that surfaced with the CBO placements and partnerships. One dilemma involved the “uneven” experiences teacher candidates had at different CBOs, which mirrored the well-documented issue of uneven opportunities in school-based placements (National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education [NCATE], 2010). Also, new hybrid spaces require new forms of activity, and some CBO educators were more skilled than others in their new roles as teacher educators (McDonald et al., 2013). For example, there was a range in their ability to articulate their knowledge and relational practices, invite teacher candidates into these practices, and support and guide candidates as they “tried out” the practices (McDonald et al., 2013). ELTEP leaders struggled to know how to best support the CBO educators in their new role.

Another tension involved the question of how horizontal and “level” the partnership and joint-work actually was. While there were instances of democratic activity around the CBO work, such as meetings that brought faculty and CBO educators together to discuss goals and assignments, and an increased focus in UW coursework on positioning CBO educators as experts in key practices, these were sometimes incidental and isolated; candidates bore much of the boundary-crossing burden. One institutional response to improve “knotworking” was a heightened effort to strengthen mediation by sending university supervisors to CBO placements to observe and coach. With more faculty and staff boundary-crossing and engaging more regularly in these new teacher education spaces, there were more opportunities for deliberation with CBO personnel about ELTEP expectations and assignments.

After 4 years, a number of programmatic changes and competing demands for candidates led ELTEP faculty and leadership to rethink the CBO placements and the overall strategy of engaging with and learning from and with community-based partners.

Renewed Emphasis on Engaging Community Members as Teacher Educators

Reflecting on 4 years of research findings and teaching experiences related to the CBO placements, leaders in UW’s ELTEP moved to leverage the emphasis on the expertise of highly knowledgeable and skilled community-based educators. Subsequently, there was a shift from CBO placements per se to a focus on engaging people, particularly parents, community leaders and organizers, and CBO educators as mentors of teacher candidates. A community–family–politics (CFP) strand was born. Preparing “community teachers” continues to be the organizing concept of the strand. The CFP strand facilitates more opportunities for candidates to engage directly with community expertise across all four quarters of the program.

In 2013-2014, two community-based educators served as co-planners of field seminars with university instructors, and shared knowledge and insights about working with, in their words, “our kids” and their families. These two community-based teacher educators also worked directly with teacher candidates in the seminars and involved many parents, community educators, and leaders in various types of planned instructional encounters with teacher candidates in schools, community settings, and in university classes where community members served as mentors of teacher candidates. The family and community members who were involved in these seminar sessions are multicultural and multigenerational. Class sessions included topical conversations about race and privilege, positive communication and working relationships with families, the school- to-prison pipeline, contemporary civil rights movements and organizations, and teaching against the grain. Teacher candidates also learned about classroom management tools and practices in their university courses, in their school placements, and they also got to hear from parents and family members whose Black and Brown children had been targeted in management and discipline policies and practices in local schools.

Thus, many opportunities existed for candidates to encounter and engage in deliberative democratic activity in contexts where CBO educators, parents, and university faculty were all present. This structure allowed space for a range of knowledge sets to interact, which facilitates the potential for expansive learning. For example, candidates have the opportunity to learn about institutionalized racism from expert professors of multicultural education as well as from expert parents of current public school students who share experiences and contextualized knowledge of their own children in local schools.

As part of the CFP strand and the field seminar, teams of candidates who are placed in the same school were required in 2013-2014 to complete at least five activities from an “Action Menu.” The 25 suggested actions are organized by focus on community, family, and politics⁵ respectively, and include activities such as creating lists of organizations where their students (from their school practicum) spend time before and after school, participating in family visits, introducing themselves to parents at pick-up time, and attending school board meetings. To guide candidates to relate their CFP activities to teaching practice, these actions were explicitly linked to the Interstate Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC) and state teaching standards as well as the performances, essential knowledge, and critical dispositions of community teachers. Research is underway to examine the connections between what teacher candidates learn through the CFP work and how it impacts their teaching practice with a particular focus on the impact of the community mentors on teacher learning and practice.

The CFP strand is in its infancy, but already a number of tensions have surfaced as part of this work. Inviting educators with very different sets of perspectives, experiences, and communication and pedagogical styles than university faculty can contribute to the richness of the learning experience for candidates; yet, in some cases, these differences can cause notable disruption and tension among students and faculty, making collaboration a fragile, contentious, and difficult endeavor (Zeichner, 1991).

Fostering Sustainability: From “Isolated Project” to “The Way We Do Things”

The examples of OSU and UW’s networking with community-based educators and parents highlight powerful learning opportunities, but also indicate the complexities of creating and maintaining authentic models of engaging communities in the enterprise of teacher education. As we argue for increased attention to incorporating hybrid spaces and the inclusion of often-excluded voices and expertise, we also call on the field to examine issues of sustainability, and to explore and share ideas around utilizing resources in ways that ensure a long-term commitment to this difficult but essential work. At a time of budget constraints, heavy demands, and accountability pressures on teacher education programs, many of the existing examples of community partnerships are fragile.

The OSU–Mt. Olivet collaboration has relied heavily on the investment and participation of two individuals; now that both individuals are not able to direct the work, it is unlikely that the partnership will survive (Seidl, personal communication, October, 2011.). Similarly, UW’s community-focused work in its elementary, secondary, and teacher residency programs currently runs primarily on the energy, interest, and funding of a small number of individuals in the teacher education programs. Unless there is a broader investment of will, and resources, the work could easily discontinue with the depletion of temporary funding sources and retirements or role changes of key faculty. Using CHAT as a framework for constructing, analyzing, and reforming our teacher education partnerships with schools and communities carries the possibility of supporting this work at a systemic level. A CHAT perspective helps us recognize that the “who” (community) in these teacher education activity systems is too limited for systemic change; without a larger number of key participants, democratic activity is compromised. CHAT can also highlight the ways in which—and the extent to which—the norms or “rules” of engagement for various participants allow for authentic exchange, as well as the extent to which particular tools (from co-planning protocols to fiscal resources) are facilitating authentic and lasting exchange. Furthermore, CHAT can challenge us to view contradictions and disruptions that surface as potential opportunities for expansive learning rather than reasons to stop engaging. In this way, we recommend the use of CHAT and related conceptual tools to build and evaluate quality as well as sustainability in teacher education models that aim to engage expertise from communities and schools.

Implications: The Future of Teacher Education

In our view, teacher education needs a fundamental shift in whose expertise counts in the education of new teachers and in the work of college and university teacher educators. It is no longer enough to implement special projects here and there that are funded on temporary money. It is no longer enough to have university academics alone framing the discourse and inviting school-based educators and people from the broader community to “participate” in a university-owned teacher education program. It should no longer be acceptable for teacher educators in both schools and universities to marginalize or shut out the perspectives of those who send their children to public schools and live in the communities that schools are supposed to serve.

Given the labor-intensive nature of building inter-institutional collaborations in teacher education, the habits of those from schools and universities, and the low status of teacher education in many research universities, it is going to be difficult to achieve this cultural shift in teacher education. Figuring out how to achieve this shift is also complicated by the defunding of public schools and the continual decline of the percentage of state support for public universities, which continue to prepare most teachers (Newfield, 2008).

The analysis that we have offered in this article suggests a number of implications for policy and practice. First, we propose that policy incentives be provided to encourage both early-entry and college-recommending programs to create the kind of genuinely shared responsibility for teacher education that we advocate. This can be done either within existing teacher education institutions as in our examples or in newly created hybrid settings like some of the urban teacher residencies and community-based programs. The important factors are the quality of the knowledge and power relationships that exist, not the structure of the program. The National Teacher Corps, which existed from 1965-1981 (Eckert, 2011), is an example of a national-scale effort to more centrally engage schools and local communities in teacher preparation. Although this program achieved mixed success, there are lessons that can be learned from it to inform current efforts to democratize teacher education (e.g., Weiner, 1993).

At the program level, teacher educators and administrators in both early-entry and college-recommending programs should make efforts to establish more opportunities for members of local communities, schools, or universities to be more centrally engaged in conceptualizing, planning, implementing, and evaluating all aspects of the program on an ongoing basis. There is a big difference between bringing “others” from different institutional cultures into a setting for a guest contribution now and then within already established frameworks, and working to create a more inclusive setting where the expertise of everyone is fully valued and accessed. We are proposing the latter form of inclusion that will change the nature of the culture into which the “others” come and lead to more shared responsibility and joint ownership of the program. In this article, we have presented a few examples of efforts of others and ourselves to move in this direction. Doing the kind of work that we are calling for is not easy, but we think that it is necessary for the survival of the role of universities in teacher education.

Conclusion

Almost every week, a new report is released in the United States criticizing the quality of the contribution of colleges and universities to initial teacher education or praising one of the newly emerging alternative providers of teacher education programs (e.g., Chubb, 2012; Duncan, 2011; Keller, 2013; National Council on Teacher Quality, 2013). In 2010, the Obama administration’s education department distributed US$263 million on a competitive basis to promote innovation in various sectors of education. The only teacher education projects that were funded in this competition were those from two of the major alternative certification providers, “Teach for America” which received US$50 million and “The New Teacher Project” (now TNTP) which received US$20 million. None of the proposals for innovation in teacher education submitted by college and university teacher educators were funded.⁶

Although there continues to be some federal investment in recruiting talented individuals to teaching through various scholarship and loan programs, university teacher education is generally not seen today as worthy of investment by the federal government or many foundations even though it still prepares most of the nation’s teachers (see, for example, Suggs & deMarrais, 2011). A situation has been framed in the United States where colleges and universities are seen as obstacles to reform, and efforts are being made at the highest levels of government to figure out how to shut down university programs and to support the spread of non-university teacher education providers (Zeichner, 2010b; Zeichner & Pena-Sandoval, 2015).

This is both a very exciting and dangerous time for university-based teacher education. There is a real opportunity to establish forms of democratic professionalism in teaching and teacher education (Apple, 1996; Sachs, 2003) where colleges and universities, schools and communities come together in new ways to prepare professional teachers who provide everyone’s children with the same high quality of education. There is also a real danger, however, that teacher education will be transformed into a pure market economy divorced from universities where a constant supply of underprepared and temporary teachers will be sent into schools to teach students living in poverty. In the United States, Hess (2009) has articulated a view shared by many others when he proposed decoupling the preparation of teachers from institutions of higher education rather than calling for an investment in the improvement of college and university programs. Hess and others want to create a system where teacher preparation is controlled by local school districts and where university faculty and staff are brought into the picture when the schools want to do so and on their terms. University teacher educators must pay attention to what is happening around them in the larger policy context, to take it seriously and not to act defensively to only try to protect their own position. Attempts to defend college- and university-based teacher education that is isolated from the struggles for greater social justice in other sectors of societies will be seen as largely self-serving and will fail.

In this article, we have suggested that what is required for university teacher education is a political response and a paradigm shift⁷ in how we think about whose expertise should contribute to and who should be responsible for the education of professional teachers for public schools. We believe that without the shift in power relationships and the formation of the kind of political alliances that we have suggested, the future of teaching as a profession and the university’s role in teacher education are in serious danger and the future for teacher preparation that is outlined by Hess (2009) above will become the norm.

We have argued in this article that neither schools nor universities can educate our nation’s teachers alone and that even together, schools and universities cannot educate teachers well without accessing the expertise that exists in the communities that are supposed to be served by schools. Unless a college or university education school is willing to make a serious commitment to offering high-quality teacher education programs in which faculty invest their intellectual talent, then it should get out of the business of preparing teachers. Making a commitment to high-quality teacher education programs in research universities does not mean an abandonment of the responsibility for conducting research, including research on teacher education. On the contrary, a serious commitment to teacher education in research universities would involve utilizing their teacher education programs as laboratories for the study of teacher learning and development and effective practices in preparing teachers. We argue that by recasting who is an expert and rethinking how universities can cross institutional boundaries to collaborate with communities and schools, teacher education programs can more thoroughly interrogate their challenges and can collaboratively innovate with new solutions to prepare the teachers our students need.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biographies

Ken Zeichner is Boeing Professor of Teacher Education, University of Washington, Seattle. His current research focuses on the role of private forces (e.g., venture philanthropy) in shaping public policy in teacher education, the misrepresentation of research in teacher education to serve particular reform agendas, and on the impact of engaging community members as mentors to teacher candidates on teacher learning and practice.

Katherina A. Payne is assistant professor in curriculum and instruction, University of Texas at Austin. Her research examines democratic education, as a process, a production, and a structural influence in elementary classrooms and in teacher education settings.

Kate Brayko is assistant professor of education at the University of Montana in Missoula. A central goal of her research and teaching is to improve language and literacy learning opportunities for students who live in poverty. Her recent scholarship has focused on partnerships in teacher education and instructional paradigms that foreground the resources that flourish in and among children’s own communities.

References

Anagnostopoulos

Smith

E. R.

Basmadjian

(2007). Bridging the university-school divide. Journal of Teacher Education, 58(2), 138-152.

Anderson

Stillman

(2011). Student teaching for a specialized view of professional practice? Opportunities to learn in and for urban, high-needs schools. Journal of Teacher Education, 62(5), 446-464.

Apple

(1996). Cultural politics and education. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Apple

(2008). Is deliberative democracy enough in teacher education? In Cochran-Smith

Feiman-Nemser

McIntyre

D. J.

(Eds.), Handbook of research on teacher education: Third edition (pp. 105-110). New York, NY: Routledge.

Ball

Forzani

(2009). The work of teaching and the challenge for teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 60, 497-510.

Barab

Duffy

(2000). From practice fields to communities of practice. In Jonassen

Land

(Eds.), Theoretical foundations of learning environments (pp. 25-56). New York, NY: Routledge.

Bartholomew

S. S.

Sandholtz

J. H.

(2009). Competing views of teaching in a school-university partnership. Teaching and Teacher Education, 25(1), 155-165.

Beynon

Grout

Wideen

(2004). From teacher to teacher educator. Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada: Pacific Education Press.

Brayko

(2013). Community-based placements as contexts for disciplinary learning: A study of literacy teacher education outside of school. Journal of Teacher Education, 64(1), 47-59.

10.

Caperton

Whitmire

R. R.

(2012). The achievable dream. New York, NY: The College Board.

11.

Carpenter

Fennema

Franke

M. L.

Levi

Empson

(2000, September). Cognitively guided instruction: A research-based teacher professional development program for elementary school mathematics (Research Report No. 003). Madison: Wisconsin Center for Education Research.

12.

Chubb

(2012). The best teachers in the world: Why we don’t have them and how we could. Palo Alto, CA: Hoover Institute Press.

13.

Clandinin

(1995). Still learning to teach. In Russell

Korthagen

(Eds.), Teachers who teach teachers (pp. 25-31). London, England: Falmer Press.

14.

Cochran-Smith

Davis

Fries

(2004). Multicultural teacher education: Research, practice, and policy. In Banks

Banks

(Eds.), Handbook of research on multicultural education (2nd ed., pp. 931-975). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

15.

Darling-Hammond

Bransford

(Eds.). (2005). Preparing teachers for a changing world. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

16.

Duffy

(1994). Professional development schools and the disempowerment of teachers and professors. Phi Delta Kappan, 75(8), 596-600.

17.

Duncan

(2009, October). Teacher preparation: Reforming the uncertain profession. Address given by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan at Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, NY.

18.

Duncan

(2011, September). Our future, our teachers: The Obama administration’s plan for teacher education reform and improvement. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education.

19.

Eckert

S. A.

(2011). The National Teacher Corps: A study of shifting goals and changing assumptions. Urban Education, 46(5), 932-952.

20.

Edwards

(2010). Being and expert professional practitioner: The relational turn in expertise. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer.

21.

Edwards

Daniels

Gallagher

Leadbetter

Warmington

(2009). Improving professional collaboration: Multi-agency work for children’s well-being. London, England: Routledge.

22.

Ellis

Edwards

Smagorinsky

(Eds.). (2010). Cultural-historical perspectives on teacher education and development. London, England: Routledge.

23.

Engeström

(1987). Learning by expanding: An activity theoretical approach to developmental research. Helsinki, Finland: Orienta-Konsultit.

24.

Engeström

(2001). Expansive learning at work: Toward an activity theoretical reconceptualization. Journal of Education and Work, 14(1), 133-156.

25.

Engeström

(2007). Enriching the theory of expansive learning: Lessons from journeys toward co-configuration. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 14(1-2), 23-39.

26.

Engeström

(2008). From teams to knots: Activity-theoretical studies of collaboration and learning at work. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

27.

Engeström

Vahaaho

(1999). When the center does not hold: The importance of knotworking. In Chaiklin

Hedegaard

Jensen

O. J.

(Eds.), Activity theory and social practice: Cultural historical approaches (pp. 345-374). Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press.

28.

Feiman-Nemser

Buchmann

(1985). Pitfalls of experience in teacher preparation. Teachers College Record, 87(1), 53-65.

29.

Fraser

(2007). Preparing America’s teachers: A history. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

30.

Friedrich

(2014). We brought it upon ourselves: University-based teacher education and the emergence of boot-camp-style routes to teacher certification. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 22(2). Retrieved from https://dx-doi-org.web.bisu.edu.cn/10.14507/epaa.v22n2.2014

31.

Gatti

Catalano

(2015). The business of learning to teach. Teaching and Teacher Education,45,149-160.

32.

Ginsburg

Clift

(1990). The hidden curriculum of preservice teacher education. In Houston

W. R.

(Ed.), Handbook of research on teacher education (pp. 450-468). New York, NY: Macmillan.

33.

Gonzales

Moll

Amanti

(Eds.). (2005). Funds of knowledge: Theorizing practices in households, communities, and classrooms. New York, NY: Routledge.

34.

Gorodetsky

Barak

(2008). The educational-cultural edge: A participative learning environment for co-emergence of personal and institutional growth. Teaching and Teacher Education, 24, 1907-1918.

35.

Gottesman

Bowman

(2013). Why practice-centered teacher education programs need social foundations. Teachers College Record. Retrieved from http://www.tcrecord.org/search.asp?kw=gottesman&;x=0&y=0

36.

Grossman

(2008). Responding to our critics: From crisis to opportunity in research on teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 59(1), 10-23.

37.

Grossman

(2011). A framework for teaching practice: A brief history of an idea. Teachers College Record, 113(12), 2836-2843.

38.

Grossman

Loeb

(Eds.). (2008). Alternative routes to teaching. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

39.

Gutmann

Thompson

(2004). Why deliberative democracy? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

40.

Habermas

(1984). The theory of communicative action. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

41.

Hammerness

Darling-Hammond

Bransford

Berliner

Cochran-Smith

McDonald

Zeichner

(2005). How teachers learn and develop. In Darling-Hammond

Bransford

(Eds.), Preparing teachers for a changing world (pp. 358-389). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

42.

Hartley

(2007). Education policy and the “inter-regnum.” Journal of Education Policy, 22(6), 695-708.

43.

Hess

(2009). Revitalizing teacher education by revisiting our assumptions about teaching. Journal of Teacher Education, 60(5), 450-457.

44.

Hollins

Guzman

M. T.

(2005). Research on preparing teachers for diverse populations. In Cochran-Smith

Zeichner

(Eds.), Studying teacher education (pp. 477-588). New York, NY: Routledge.

45.

Jeffery

J. V.

Polleck

(2013). Transformations in site-based teacher preparation courses: The benefits and challenges. In Noel

(Ed.), Moving teacher education into urban schools and communities (pp. 105-119). New York, NY: Routledge.

46.

Keller

(2013, October 20). An industry of mediocrity. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/21/opinion/keller-an-industry-of-mediocrity.html?pagewanted=all&;_r=0

47.

Kerosuo

Engeström

(2003). Boundary crossing and learning in creation of new work practice. Journal of Workplace Learning, 15(8), 345-351.

48.

Klein

Taylor

Onore

Strom

Abrams

(2013). Finding a third space in teacher education: Creating an urban teacher residency. Teaching Education, 24(1), 27-57.

49.

Knowles

(2013, January). New pathways for teachers, new promises for students: A vision for developing excellent teachers (Special Report 3). Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute.

50.

Lampert

Franke

Kazemi

Ghousseini

Turrou

Beasley

Crowe

(2013). Keeping it complex: Using rehearsals to support novice teacher learning of ambitious teaching. Journal of Teacher Education, 64, 226-243.

51.

Max

(2010). Learning for teaching across knowledge boundaries: An activity theoretical analysis of collaborative internship projects in initial teacher education. In Ellis

Edwards

Smagorinsky

(Eds.), Cultural-historical perspectives on teacher education and development. (pp. 212-240). London: Routledge.

52.

McDonald

Bowman

Brayko

(2013). Learning to see students: Opportunities to develop relational practices of teaching through community-based placements in teacher education. Teachers College Record,115,(4). Retrieved from http://www.tcrecord.org

53.

McDonald

Kazemi

Kavanagh

(2013). Core practices and pedagogies of teacher education: A call for common language and collective activity. Journal of Teacher Education, 64(5), 378-386.

54.

McDonald

Tyson

Brayko

Bowman

Delport

Shimomura

(2011). Innovation and impact in teacher education: Community based organizations as field placements for preservice teachers. Teachers College Record, 113(8), 1668-1700.

55.

Morgan-Fleming

Simpson

Curtis

Hull

(2010). Learning through partnership. Teacher Education Quarterly, 37(3), 63-80.

56.

Murrell

(2001). The community teacher. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

57.

National Assessment of Educational Progress (2013). Retrieved December 1, 2013 from http://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading_math_2013/#/achievement-gaps.

58.

National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education. (2010, November). Transforming teacher education through clinical practice: A national strategy to prepare effective teachers. Washington, DC: Author.

59.

National Council on Teacher Quality. (2013, June). Teacher prep review: A review of the nation’s teacher prep programs. Washington, DC: Author.

60.

National Research Council. (2010, April). Preparing teachers: Building evidence for sound policy. Washington, DC: National Academies Press.

61.

Newfield

(2008). Unmaking the public university. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

62.

The New Teacher Project. (2014, March). Fast start: Training better teachers faster, with focus, practice and feedback. New York, NY: Author. Retrieved from http://tntp.org/assets/documents/TNTP_FastStart_2014.pdf

63.

Noel

Nelson

(2010). Moving teacher education into schools and communities. Teacher Education Quarterly, 37(3), 3-8.

64.

Norton-Meier

Drake

(2010). When third space is more than the library: The complexities of theorizing ad learning to use family and community resources to teach elementary literacy and mathematics. In Ellis

Edwards

Smagorinsky

(Eds.), Cultural-historical perspectives on teacher education and development (pp. 196-211). London, England: Routledge.

65.

Oldenburg

(1999). The great good place: Cafes, coffee shops, bookstores, bars, hair salons, and other hangouts in the heart of a community (2nd ed.). Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press.

66.

Onore

Gildin

(2013). A community-university partnership to develop urban teachers as public professionals. In Noel

(Ed.), Moving teacher education into urban schools and communities (pp. 152-168). New York, NY: Routledge.

67.

Patterson

Michelli

Pacheco

(1999). Centers of pedagogy: New structures for educational renewal. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

68.

Philip

Way

Garcia

Schuler-Brown

Navarro

(2013). When educators attempt to make “community” a part of classroom learning: The dangers of (mis)appropriating students’ communities into schools. Teaching and Teacher Education, 34, 174-183.

69.

Popkewitz

(1975). Reform as a political discourse: A case study. School Review, 84, 311-336.

70.

Post

Pugach

Harris

Hughes

(2006). The teachers-in-residence program: Veteran urban teachers as teacher leaders in boundary-spanning roles. In Howey

Zimpher

(Eds.), Boundary spanners: A key to success in urban P-16 university-school partnerships (pp. 211-236). Washington, DC: American Association of State Colleges and Universities and Land Grant Colleges.

71.

Rawls

(1971). A theory of justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

72.

Sachs

(2003). The activist teaching profession. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press.

73.

Sanders

(1997). Against deliberation. Political Theory, 25(2), 347-376.

74.

Schorr

(2013). A revolution begins in teacher prep. Stanford Social Innovation Review, 11(1). Available from http://www.ssireview.org/

75.

Seidl

Friend

(2002a). The unification of church and state: Working together to prepare teachers for diverse classrooms. Journal of Teacher Education, 53(3), 142-152.

76.

Seidl

Friend

(2002b). Leaving authority at the door: Equal-status community-based experiences and the preparation of teachers for diverse classrooms. Teaching and Teacher Education, 18, 421-433.

77.

Sherin

(2001). Developing a professional vision of classroom events. In Wood

Nelson

B. S.

Warfield

(Eds.), Beyond classical pedagogy: Teaching elementary school mathematics (pp. 75-93). New York, NY: Routledge.

78.

Shirley

Hersi

MacDonald

Sanchez

M. T.

Scandone

Skidmore

Tutwiler

(2006). Bringing the community back in: Change, accommodation, and contestation in a school and university partnership. Equity & Excellence in Education, 39, 27-36.

79.

Sleeter

(2001). Preparing teachers for culturally diverse schools: Research and the overwhelming presence of whiteness. Journal of Teacher Education, 52(2), 94-106.

80.

Sleeter

(2008). Preparing white teachers for diverse students. In Cochran-Smith

Feiman-Nemser

McIntyre

D. J.

(Eds.), Handbook of research on teacher education (3rd ed., pp. 559-582). New York, NY: Routledge.

81.

Sleeter

Boyle-Baise

(2000). Community service learning for multicultural teacher education. Educational Foundations, 14(2), 33-50.

82.

Stitzlein

West

(2014). New forms of teacher education: Connections to charter schools and their approaches. Democracy & Education, 22(2), 1-10.

83.

Suggs

deMarrais

(2011, July). Critical contributions: Philanthropic investment in teachers and teaching. Atlanta, GA: Kronley.

84.

Turney

Eltis

Towler

Wright

(1985). A new basis for teacher education: The practicum curriculum. Sydney, Australia: University of Sydney Press.

85.

Valencia

Martin

Place

Grossman

(2009). Complex interactions in student teaching: Lost opportunities for learning. Journal of Teacher Education, 60(3), 304-322.

86.

Villegas

A. M.

Irvine

J. J.

(2010). Diversifying the teaching force: An examination of major arguments. The Urban Review, 42(3), 175-192.

87.

Villegas

A. M.

Lucas

(2004). Diversifying the teacher workforce: A retrospective and prospective analysis. In Smylie

Miretzky

(Eds.), Developing the teacher workforce (pp. 70-104). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

88.

Vygotsky

L.S.

(1978). Mind in society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

89.

Walsh

Jacobs

(2007, September). Alternative certification isn’t alternative. Washington, DC: National Council on Teacher Quality.

90.

Weiner

(1993). Preparing teachers for urban schools: Lessons from thirty years of school reform. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

91.

Zeichner

(1991). Contradictions and tensions in the professionalization of teaching and the democratization of schooling. Teachers College Record, 92(3), 363-379.

92.

Zeichner

(1995). Beyond the divide of teacher research and academic research. Teachers and Teaching, 1(2), 153-172.

93.

Zeichner

(2009). Teacher education and the struggle for social justice. New York, NY: Routledge.

94.

Zeichner

(2010a). Rethinking the connections between campus courses and field experiences in college and university-based teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 89(11), 89-99.

95.

Zeichner

(2010b). Competition, increased surveillance and attacks on multiculturalism: Neo-liberalism and the transformation of teacher education in the U.S. Teaching and Teacher Education, 26, 1544-1552.

96.

Zeichner

(2014a). Political dimensions of learning to reach from experience. In Ellis

Orchard

(Eds.), Learning to teach from experience: Multiple perspectives (pp. 257-268). London, England: Bloomsbury.

97.

Zeichner

(2014b). The struggle for the soul of teaching and teacher education. Journal of Education for Teaching. Retrieved from https://www-tandfonline-com.web.bisu.edu.cn/doi/full/10.1080/02607476.2014.956544

98.

Zeichner

Bier

(2013). The turn toward practice and clinical experiences in U.S. teacher education. Beitrage Zur Lehrerbildung/Swiss Journal of Teacher Education, 30(2), 153-170.

99.

Zeichner

McDonald

(2011). Practice-based teaching and community field experiences for prospective teachers. In Cohan

Honigsfeld

(Eds.), Breaking the mold of preservice and inservice teacher education: Innovative and successful practices for the 21st century. Lanham, MD: Roman & Littlefield.

100.

Zeichner

Melnick

(1996). The role of community field experiences in preparing teachers for cultural diversity. In Zeichner

Melnick

Gomez

M. L.

(Eds.), Currents of reform in preservice teacher education (pp. 176-198). New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

101.

Zeichner

Pena-Sandoval

(2015). Venture philanthropy and teacher education policy in the U.S: The role of the New Schools Venture Fund. Teachers College Record, 117(6). Available from http://www.tcrecord.org