Inquiry in Teacher Education: Competing Agendas

Teacher Education Quarterly, Summer 2005 by Donnell, Kelly, Harper, Kelly

I think this class had more to do with helping me as a researcher, as opposed to preparing me to be a teacher. The seminar helpedme learn how to do research in the classroom in order to determine my students ' needs and helped me change my practice to address those needs. The break-out sessions helped when I had a problem and other students and teacher educators provided suggestions and strategies. (Student teacher survey response, May 2001, emphasis added)

Criticisms of the course seemed paradoxical in that the very things they wanted were the things that inquiry could support them to address.

Tension #3: Various Meanings of and Commitments to Social justice

Learning to teach for social justice was an important and explicit theme in the inquiry course as well as in the School of Education (SOE) in general. The SOE mission statement refers to teaching as a political activity and all educators must work toward challenging social inequities and working with others for social justice. Students were required to read, discuss, and write about the relationship of social justice to their teaching practice throughout the course. They were encouraged to engage in inquiry as a means of critiquing the status quo and challenge the inequities they saw in their schools and their own practice (Cochran-Smith, 2001 b). It was not surprising, therefore, that both student teachers and teacher educators often had different interpretations of both the meaning and the importance of teaching for social justice in their own practice. For example, many students identified overt social injustices such as racism and sexism. However, social justice issues embedded in the epistemological and pedagogical underpinnings of their own practice escaped their notice. Some beginning teachers, for example, remained committed to tracking practices or insensitive parent communication policies and were unable or unwilling to further examine the social justice issues inherent in these practices. Yet for others, looking at teaching through this lens was a new experience that prompted new actions, as this reflection indicates:

When I decided to go back to school to become a teacher, I had not thought about the role I would have as an activist for social justice. I had not considered the political aspect of teaching. 1 now see that I have a responsibility as an educator to teach, not just so that my students will know how to read, write, and compute, but also so that my students will recognize social injustice in the world and feel empowered to change it. I need to teach them by example how to meet the challenges of injustice in society and work to change it, starting in the classroom. Realizing how to do that will be, in my opinion, an ongoing process throughout my career. (Student teacher journal entry, January 2001)

However, some student teachers missed the implications of how their perceptions of students related to social justice issues in the classroom. While they could identify overt or glaring instances of racism, prejudice, or inequitable practices, they had difficulty taking responsibility for teaching all children. One teacher seemed unaware of her reliance on a deficit model view of her students, as reflected in this journal entry: