Abstract
Introduction
In the May 2006 issue of the Journal of Teacher Education, Linda Darling-Hammond tenders an illuminating appraisal of three intersecting categories of knowledge that teachers need in the 21st century: knowledge of learners, knowledge of subject matter, and knowledge of teaching. By no means does this editorial attempt to punch holes into the evidence or rationality of her proposed arguments. We avoid such futility here as the three-grouping framework of teacher knowledge, which was conceived by Shulman (1981, 1986), expounded upon by the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future (2003), and problematized by Darling-Hammond (2006), unveils an operational clarity for those who appreciate the realms or the “what” of teacher knowledge specifically, and the implications for teacher education more broadly. In advancing this conversation, we extend Darling-Hammond’s discourse on the three areas of teacher knowledge to gain a renewed perspective—considering the burgeoning theories, practices, and research taking place in the field. Darling-Hammond captures the potential of teacher knowledge when she proposes that . . . programs need not only to provide teachers access to more knowledge, considered more deeply, but also to help teachers learn how to continually access knowledge and inquire into their work. The skills of classroom inquiry include careful observation and reasoned analysis, as well as dispositions toward an open and searching mind and a sense of responsibility and commitment to children’s learning. Preparing teachers as classroom researchers and expert collaborators who can learn from one another is essential when the range of knowledge for teaching has grown so expansive that it cannot be mastered by any individual and when students’ infinitely diverse ways of learning are recognized as requiring continual adaptations in teaching. (p. 305)
To that end, three quests are used to provide a context for our endorsement of Darling-Hammond’s call to action on teacher knowledge. The three lines of inquiry are called quests because they represent enduring pursuits that also have their taxonomic roots both in the domains of teacher education (knowledge, skills, and dispositions) and the categories of teacher knowledge (learner, subject matter, and teaching). Two chief implications for teacher education reform are explored herein.
Old Quests for New Reform on Teacher Knowledge
This section of our editorial unpacks the three recognizable and ongoing quests on teacher knowledge while conceding they are not an exhaustive or exclusive list. The first quest explores the importance of attending to the disparate needs of all P12 learners in our increasingly diverse world community. The second quest reimagines how teachers acquire subject matter expertise so they can become producers of knowledge, in terms of their curriculum goals, and not just consumers of knowledge. The third quest proposes a new pursuit that tethers the domain of teacher knowledge to the domain of dispositions and reflects the fluid nature and democratic principles of education.
Quest 1: Knowledge About Diverse P12 Learners in a Changing Society
It is well established that knowledge of the learner is a fundamental category of teacher knowledge considerations. Today’s learners are defined by linguistic, geographic, educational adeptness, socioeconomic, religious, and ethnic markers in a rapidly changing and interconnected world. Among each of these types of learners needs vary, and multifaceted ways of learning in society vary. Learners are part of society—an everchanging milieu in which all learners are socialized. Dewey (1897) warned of the damage of separating the child and society when he wrote, “If we eliminate the social factor from the child we are left only with an abstraction; if we eliminate the individual factor from society, we are left only with an inert and lifeless mass” (p. 78).
Schools of yesterday had no appreciation of diverse learners and their social environments. In the early 19th century in the U.S., there were no racially diverse children in classrooms (Howard, 2019). It was not difficult for teachers from the colonial period through the mid-1950s to teach to the homogenous middle and be somewhat effective. A nearly 100-year apartheid educational system separated learners in schools by ethnic differences and protected educators from any accountability to teach those not in the mainstream (Hill-Jackson, 2017). With the appearance of the Civil Rights movement and new immigration laws in the mid-20th century, the diversity among P12 learners in the U.S. would significantly increase. “In previous decades, teachers were expected to prepare only a small minority for ambitious intellectual work, whereas they are now expected to prepare virtually all students for higher order thinking and performance skills once reserved to only a few” (Darling-Hammond, 2006, p. 300). Today 9.2% of P12 learners speak English as a second language and nearly 70% of are students of color (National Center for Educational Statistics [NCES], 2022). The educator’s quips of “I don’t see color” or “I don’t see difference” provide a convenient cover for those disinterested or unprepared to address the various ways that cultural differences can be used as an opportunity, and not framed as an obstacle, for student well-being and achievement. Before we can adequately serve learners, we must be able to see and affirm them.
Darling-Hammond (2006) also assists us in understanding that knowledge of the learner’s uniqueness, process for learning, and personal development help foster insight into their needs. In doing so, we might truly attend to their emotions and expression of the self—relative to their cultural experiences in society. Socio-emotional development constitutes a robust, integrative approach to how children acquire the capacity to understand, experience, express, and manage emotions and develop meaningful relationships with others (Thompson, 1993) in a fast-paced world driven by increased personal stress, technology demands, and interconnectedness among youth. In turn, socio-emotional learning (SEL) theory is a widely accepted concept that speaks to the development of the whole child—cognitively and affectively. Amid critics’ false connection of SEL to the culture wars of critical race theory (Hambacher & Ginn, 2021), strategies that center SEL emerge as credible ways that honor student voice (Espelage et al., 2018; Heineke & Vera, 2022), counter bullying (Heineke & Vera, 2022), buttress self-esteem (Hadar et al., 2020), and improve student achievement (Brown & Weber, 2016). Widespread agreement exists about the positive impact of SEL or similar approaches to teach vulnerable and diverse students, but such theories about learner development have failed to gain traction in making a significant impact on student academic and social needs or the content that teachers learn to support them.
Quest 2: Subject-Matter Knowledge Tied to Understanding Learning Differences
Teachers’ subject matter knowledge connects to the second quest. We support Darling-Hammond’s (2006) proposal for advanced study by teachers about how curriculum works. In an attempt for teacher preparation coursework to cover a wide range of content and field-based needs, there is still the problem of comprehension of curriculum development as a teaching tool. Most teachers are taught to create singular lessons or units of instruction, and quickly learn as teachers of record that pre-packed and scripted curricula are the expectation of their school organizations. The muting of teachers’ voices in all matters of curricula may have the unintended consequence of robbing pre- and in-service teachers of opportunities to hone their subject matter expertise.
Darling-Hammond assessed that “deep understanding of learning and learning differences as the basis of constructing curriculum has not historically been a central part of teacher education” (2006, p. 303). While some countries like Finland have figured out that teachers need to understand and prepare curricula and have adjusted subject matter courses (see, for example, Mikkilä-Erdmann et. al, 2019), most teacher preparation programs still reserve such activities for specialized nonprofit groups or school curriculum committees. Under the weight of high stakes testing and value-added teaching incentives, teachers are “barreling from one lesson to the next without understanding how to construct a purposeful curriculum” (Darling-Hammond, 2006, p. 303). Simply put, circumstances are precluding teachers from taking up their rightful roles as curriculum-makers (Clandinin & Connelly, 1992; Craig, 2020).
Given these conditions, the case for the teacher as a curriculum worker to enhance subject matter expertise is worth further consideration. The discerning teacher, for example, upon understanding that her grade four learners are suffering from the lingering effects of isolation during a two-year pandemic and learning losses, will be able to pivot from school-driven lessons and reimagine new ways of learning to meet the needs of her learners. To prepare teachers for these types of revisions in their work, improvement of teachers’ subject matter knowledge is met by occasions for teachers to review curriculum materials (e.g., Taylor, 2013), wrestle with the of theoretical aspects of curriculum and offer guidance on how to share their voice and narratives (Craig, 1999), understand and participate in curriculum change processes (Tronsmo, 2019). A turn to the image of teacher as curriculum maker entails teachers’ understanding of their own propensities and desires as teaching professionals. This work “requires incorporating subject matter goals, knowledge of learning, and an appreciation for children’s development and needs” (Darling-Hammond, 2006, p. 303).
Quest 3: Knowledge of Teaching, Linking Theory to Practice
The third and final quest refers to teachers’ personal practical knowledge or pedagogical content knowledge, both of which blend teacher’s subject matter expertise and the process of teaching as a part of the teacher’s capacity. The central focus in this category of teacher knowledge is preoccupied with how the teacher connects theory with practice: One of the perennial dilemmas of teacher education is how to integrate theoretically based knowledge that has traditionally been taught in university classrooms with the experience-based knowledge that has traditionally been located in the practice of teachers and the realities of classrooms and schools. (Darling-Hammond, 2006, p. 307)
While the domains of teacher knowledge and skills are generally understood, the third domain of dispositions is undervalued and under researched. Dispositions are habits of professional action and moral commitments that play a key role for how preservice and inservice teachers act in practice. What is missing most from the discussion on the domain of teacher knowledge is how it intersects with the domain of dispositions which speaks to the personal or moral dimensions of the educator’s character and shapes teacher practices. As a human endeavor and as a profession, teaching is an inherently moral enterprise and requires dynamic, liberative, and value-laden work. The primary reason for a more spirited debate about the knowledge of teaching is for teachers’ know-how to attend to the uniqueness of the learner that is undergirded by a moral commitment, or “propositional knowledge” (Shulman, 1987, p. 11). Knowledge of teaching, therefore, must begin with a teacher’s psychological insight into his or her own habits of mind, or dispositions, which are mediated at every point in practice by the conscientious delivery of democratic teaching.
Hill-Jackson et al. (2019) identify the following seven dispositions that are under-girded by moral practices of the effective teacher: (1) persistence to keep trying new approaches to teach every learner, (2) positive values about student learning, (3) the ability to adapt general theories into pedagogical practices, (4) an encouraging approach to students placed at risk, (5) a professional versus a personal orientation, (6) the ability to avoid burnout, and (7) the ability to be vulnerable and admit one’s shortcomings. These additional understandings of teacher knowledge, along with contextual knowledge which we leave for another time, prepare the teacher to be able to share content matter in a way that helps him or her to be in relation to learners.
One might ask, for example: How does an English language arts teacher explain the breath and relevance of William Shakespeare or Maya Angelou to high school learners? For the astute teacher, this might mean that one equates the rhythmic pentameters of Angelou’s poetry to the prose of hip-hop music culture to help secondary students make connections to the content in a way that is relevant to their everyday lives. Cochran-Smith and Lytle (2015) and Connelly and Clandinin (1990), for example, argue for the use of metaphors and examples as demonstrations of teachers’ prowess and command of their practices. Darling-Hammond (2006) proposes that this “means that teachers need highly refined knowledge and skills for assessing pupil learning, and they need a wide repertoire of practice—along with the knowledge to know when to use different strategies for different purposes” (p. x).
Implications: Reconstructing Teacher Knowledge
Our continued quests for reform in teacher knowledge underscore two major implications. First, more attention is needed on the role of practical teacher knowledge. Olson and Craig (2001) focus attention on the importance of teachers’ narrative authority and knowledge kinships by making the case that . . . teachers filter all experience (including professional development experiences designed by others at both pre-service and in-service levels) through their personal practical knowledge and express their knowledge of teaching in practice through their own narratives . . . teachers authentically share their stories of practice in safe places, that is, knowledge communities, in order to make their personal practical knowledge explicit to themselves and to others. (pp. 667–668)
Teacher education still requires a progressive vision for reform that is defined by teacher agency and liberation. Ascendant empirical investigations (this volume) offer insight for advancing pedagogical content knowledge, specifically on: leveraging lesson plans to assess teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge (Kaya et al.); surveying co-teaching pairs to improve clinical learning experiences (Guide et al.); studying the association between student learning environments and performance assessment (Bastian); and examining how beginning teachers articulate their views about sources of teaching knowledge in relation to between theory and practice (Ferguson et al.). Further studies (this volume) probe program coherence through the lens of core practices (Levine et al.), investigate teachers’ beliefs about knowledge sources and motivation to learn from theory and practice (Hosseini & Bahrami) and the challenges for non-traditional students in managing coursework and personal obligations (Andzik et al.). These rising theories on teacher knowledge provide hope for the field as they acknowledge “. . . the agency of teachers or to the nature of how their knowledge is shaped by personal, interpersonal, contextual, and situational factors that shift over time” (Olson & Craig, 2001, p. 667) and add clarification for the expanding taxonomy on teacher knowledge.
Second, to discuss reform in teacher knowledge two decades into the 21st century is to discuss democracy, which must always exist at the very heart of the teacher education enterprise. Teacher knowledge, therefore, must prepare the teacher (and by extension, their learners) to be fully engaged and conscious participants in a democratic society. If democracy is placed at the nucleus of reform for teacher knowledge, then it becomes so much more than an ideal. Teacher knowledge steeped in a democratic mission operates beyond the aspirational and builds a new and quite different approach for the education of teachers. Ultimately, teacher education must be committed to reconstructing new programs that are unrecognizable from what we currently have. We imagine democratic spaces of fairness, respect, magnificence, honesty, compassion, and justice that prepare teachers to have new kinds of teacher knowledge that is reflexive, adaptive, evolving, and empowering.
Conclusion
Beginning with Darling-Hammond’s (2006) discussion of three categories of teacher knowledge (learner, content, and teaching), we, as editors, have unpacked three complementary quests. These quests represent persistent issues in teacher education, and as reminders for us to be relentless in our search of policy, practice, and research that (re)construct timehonored principles of teacher knowledge in ways that further systemic reform. In our first quest, we reestablished that today’s P12 classroom teacher must have an ecological knowledge of learner’s unique development and place in society in ways that are attuned to learners’ socio-emotional needs. For Quest 2, we support advanced study of teachers’ curriculum making. We also support the inclusion of novice and mature teachers to engage in curriculum activities that will help deepen subject matter knowledge through a profound understanding of learners and learning. The third quest is knowledge of teaching and admonishes us to recommit to the moral purpose of teaching as a humanistic and public service discipline and as a key site of student learning. In aggregate, the three quests encourage us to move the mounting research on teacher knowledge forward, and reaffirm a commitment to teacher education entrenched in democratic ideals, as a means to “. . . consider what those of us in the field of teacher education might do to support the kinds of learning teachers require to undertake this complex job with some hope of success” (p. 300).